Fun games after school are generally in mixed-age groups. Even organized sports generally are mixed-age and based on ability -- e.g., a very good 12 year old soccer player may be playing on the "14 and under" team rather than on the "12 and under" team.
I have a certificate to teach Mathematics in the state of Louisiana, but even without that, if it came down to a choice of home schooling and sending my kid to the schools as they exist today, I know which choice I would make. Today's schools are utterly strapped by misplaced priorities, high turnover, and lack of ability to properly discipline children due to all the lawsuits that have been filed against schools that effectively discipline their students. Unfortunately, for most people home schooling is not a viable choice -- it requires altogether too much labor on the part of parents required to be in the labor force in order to make ends meet.
I took the test as part of a college course and came out as INTP. Quite interesting, and explains a lot of things too (like why I am so good at design work -- and why I get bored with the actual implementation work).
I am surprised that you got a lot of ESTJ's. I haven't met too many extroverts in the computer field, though my office is just down the hall from one (to be fair, his major was EE in college, not CS).
Indeed. Most people get fired not because they're incompetent, but, rather, because they're incompetent jerks. If the guy in the cubicle next to me is a nice guy, I'll give him more slack than I'll give a jerk, in hopes that he'll learn and become a better programmer. If he's a jerk, on the other hand... he better be good, or else he's going to be the guy that everybody else bitches about around the water cooler.
But there's a danger to this. Many managers want people who fit a particular stereotype. They feel that anybody who doesn't fit their particular stereotype won't fit in at the office. As a rather non-stereotypical person, I'm at a disadvantage with such managers -- prior to hiring, that is. After hiring, well, I seem to always end up in charge of the most important projects in the business after the first couple of months of routine stuff... I suspect that a lot of people who are really good at what they do have the same problem, at least until they build a reputation in the industry.
Oh -- being able to communicate technical ideas clearly helps too. Volunteer to be the keeper of the design document, and you end up being the lead project designer by default (grin).
Startups or small business can't afford deadweight. Deadweight goes. Period.
It is only in big companies that deadweight gets promoted to management.
Finally, regarding communication skills -- I have noticed that the ability to communicate technical concepts in a clear, concise, easy-to-understand manner is quite helpful for advancing one's career. For example, it usually gets you placed in charge of the design document for the project -- meaning that you often get to do more of the design work than the "formal" project designer does, meaning you get promoted to project lead on your own project quite rapidly. The ability to get along with other people is also helpful -- there's some people who are brilliant but they are, frankly, total jerks, they don't listen, they're always negative, they have no communications skills, etc. But it's all a matter of knowing how to use these people, alas.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with conditions in most of the South. I grew up in Louisiana surrounded by the paraphenalia of Reconstruction revisionism. Our history was handed down to us by Southern ladies from groups such as the Daughters of the Confederacy and did not resemble the history books at all. Or, for that matter, reality (for example, they were quite convinced that black people really had preferred slavery).
Later, in college, I got a chance to take a class from the foremost scholar of Louisiana history (the guy who, literally, wrote the book). The contrast was... interesting. There were things he could not put in the books (which were intended as high school texts). Anyhow, you are correct that the South was put under martial law immediately after the Civil War. In most of the South, the parts that had a black majority, elections were held shortly afterwards with the black majority electing primarily white Republicans and a few free Blacks to the legislatures. This was at least true in Louisiana. This is what started the partisan sniping... those who had been in power were shut out. The resulting governments could be held in place only by force of Federal troops, and even so, the "riots" often drove local Republican politicians out of office outside of the major cities. For example, in the town of Coushatta, a cotton trading town on the Red River, there were no federal troops and thus the Republican administration did not last long. They were driven out of office by the "riots" and then "elections" were held (elections where armed partisans prevented Blacks and known federal sympathisers from voting). The "Coushatta Riots" are commemorated by a historical plaque near the Coushatta waterfront to this very day.
In New Orleans, the pro-Federal forces stayed in power longer, but once the countryside had been taken over by the partisans, they moved in on the government of New Orleans. A pitched battle was fought near Jackson Square between the police forces and armed partisans. The armed partisans won. The Federal troops stayed in their barracks (which were on one side of Jackson Square) during this time, mostly due to being seriously outnumbered, but also due to fears that the situation would escalate into all-out guerilla warfare again if they intervened. The government of New Orleans was run out of town on a rail, and new elections were held shortly afterward, with partisan forces making sure that black voters were turned away at the polls.
In 1877, a fiercely contested presidential election was held. At the same time, a governor's election was being held in Louisiana. Actually, two parallel elections were being held -- the "official" election, and an election held by the partisan government-in-hiding so to speak. There was quite a bit of overlap between the two. In the end, nobody knew who won the governor's race. Each side said that their candidate had won and that the other side had cheated, basically by counting "their" polling places as the official ones and discarding "fraudulent votes". By coincidence, Rutherford P. Hayes needed Louisiana's vote in the electoral college in order to become President (as well as the vote in Florida and South Carolina, which were in similar straits). The Hayes Compromise was struck: Rutherford P. Hayes would recognize the Democratic governor as the winner of the election (and remove the troops), and in exchange the Democratic governor would cast the state's electoral ballots for Rutherford P. Hayes. Rutherford P. Hayes became president, winning by one (1) single electoral vote. The troops were withdrawn from Louisiana (and from South Carolina too). The partisans had won the Civil War, after 12 years of federal troops propping up Republican governments. They promptly disenfranchised the majority of voters, and passed apartheid laws which forced blacks into virtual slavery. The resulting social climate and artificial agricultural labor surplus caused the Southern economy to be a basket case for the next 70 years.
It was only World War II which revived the Southern economy, due to the need for the South's docks and shipyards to build the Liberty Ships that saved England, and the mass exodus of the majority of the black population to places like Detroit and Los Angeles where they worked in the war industries (thus removing the near-slave-labor that held up the plantation system, thus opening the door for other industries and thus genuine economic growth). Government-enforced apartheid itself was not finally and totally dismantled until 1964, when LBJ got the Civil Rights Act passed by virtue of JFK's dead body (JFK had tried to pass similar legislation and failed, but with JFK dead, LBJ basically stood on JFK's grave and dared the Congress to not pass the Civil Rights Act -- Congress, afraid of being accused of desecrating the memory of JFK, caved). Today a socially-enforced version of apartheid exists in many areas of the United States -- housing segregation, for example, is more rampant today than it was prior to the passing of the Civil Rights Act -- but this is far less evil than having formal government sanctioning of the practice.
In any event -- Reconstruction is still taught in the war colleges as an example of how NOT to use troops. Trying to hold entire states against armed resistance was basically futile due to the fact that they had to post every major town in the state while the resistance could pick off governments one at a time, and without governments, the only resort is pure martial law -- something that the military really isn't well equipped to do. The military heirarchy is a huge supporter of the Posse Cometatis laws that prohibit federal troops from being used for internal policing. This also is why the military has in recent years been quite reluctant to send troops into places like Bosnia and why the military stopped rather than continue on into Iraq -- being in a situation where the military is responsible for law enforcement and propping up governments is NOT a situation that they want to be in again, especially after Vietnam proved yet again just how difficult that was. (Although South Vietnam, in the end, was conquered by North Vietnamese troops rather than by partisans... Jerry Pournelle complains to this day that people forget the fact that South Vietnam fell because the AVN ran out of ammunition, rather than because the Viet Cong overthrew it).
Anyhow, I've wasted enough time wandering through history. Time to get back to work on my latest hack (grin).
I know a little bit about government workers. I were one for three years, after all.
Most people go to work for government out of idealism. Then reality kicks in -- poor pay, poor working conditions, being treated like shit by the system, incompetent supervisors who got their jobs via office politics rather than merit, constant stress of dealing with aweful people and aweful problems all the time, etc. The decent human beings last at most three years. The jerks who get off on abusing their clientel are the ones who stick with it.
There are exceptions, of course. But as a general rule, government work is like telemarketing or collections -- the pressures of the job drives the nice people out of the field, leaving the kind of jerks who call you during dinner.
Our CEO was somewhat freaked over the Y2K thing, but the technical staff basically said "We run Linux, we have no problem" and that was that. If there HAD been riots, our office is in the wrong part of town (South Phoenix), and I wanted to be nowhere near.
I spent a quiet evening at home. I went to bed at 11:30pm, in fact.
Waco was not a military operation. The military loaned the ATF and FBI some equipment, but the military generally runs screaming from domestic law enforcement concerns. They don't even like being required to patrol the border lands for drug runners -- every time some Republican makes the suggestion to use the Army to patrol the border, the Army respectfully submits that they're trained to kill people, not to do police work. They were forced into providing "observational personnel", but even that was forced by politicians against the Army's own best judgement, with predictable results (i.e., that 18 year old kid killed by soldiers when he pointed their gun in their direction while they lurked in hiding).
If you've been following the treatment of amateur radio operators by the Feds lately, you'll see that the Feds wish that amateur radio operators would just go away (except in the case of disasters). Open exchange of information is NOT something that the Feds particularly like. It makes their job of squashing threats to big businesses harder. That's why the Internet is their worst nightmare.
The U.S. military is very reluctant to engage in a police action on American soil because the last time they did so, in the 1860's and 1870's, was a complete and utter disaster.
After the fall of the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, U.S. military officials were terrified that there would be guerilla warfare in the occupied territories. For the most part there wasn't -- people went home, went back to work, went about the task of trying to make a living in a world that had turned upside down for them.
But eventually, guerilla warfare DID arise. Not against federal troops -- nobody was that stupid. But, rather, against the instruments of government installed by those troops. Mayors of cities who were seen as pro-Federal were tarred and feathered and shipped out of town. Anti-Federal politicians were installed in their place in rigged "elections" that saw blacks and known pro-Federal whites turned away from polling places by armed partisans. In areas where pro-Federal politicians amassed a power structure, such as in New Orleans, armed partisans had to first defeat the local police forces in pitched battle before they could tar and feather the pro-Federal politicians. They did so with ease in most cases (amazing, how possession of large amounts of military weapons make it easy to defeat policemen armed with batons and handguns!). These "riots" are commemorated on plaques and statues all over the South.
In many of these "riots", the local postings of the federal troops were paralyzed by the fact that they were outnumbered. The partisans had gathered forces and concentrated them (this prior to the ability of forces to move rapidly via motorized convoy and airlift, of course), while the federal troops had to be spread out throughout the state in order to maintain federal control. In addition, there was the fear that if they opened fire on the "rioters" there WOULD be widespread guerilla warfare against federal troops, and they could see the casualty figures mounting if that ever happened. So an uneasy truce arose between the commanders of the federal troops and the partisans -- if the federal troops did not open fire upon the partisans, then the partisans would not open fire upon the federal troops.
Eventually, the North gave up. They withdrew the federal troops (which didn't seem to be doing much good anyhow). Armed partisans installed anti-Federal governments, the South installed a system of apartheid which lasted for almost a hundred years, and the U.S. military has ever since had a blinding fear of ever being put into that situation again (that is, the situation of enforcing a military government over large areas containing armed civilians). These lessons are still taught in the military academies today, and form a major cornerstone of military philosophy in this country.
Sheesh. What an idealist you are, thinking that the "Constitution" means anything. Police officers regularly seize property without any criminal charges being filed or any compensation. It's even legal for them to do so, under the RICO act, and unless you can PROVE in a civil court that the property involved was not purchased with the proceeds of criminal acts and has never been used for criminal acts, you're SOL. Your property is gone. Period.
There was a parish (county) in South Louisiana that regularly did this and got a national expose'. But you know what? I have a relative who lives there, and he says that they *STILL* do it -- need a pickup truck? Stop somebody driving by on the Interstate, seize their truck as "drug trafficking related", and make them prove they didn't buy it with drug money! It keeps the local police departments in unmarked cars, so the locals don't care (the sheriff's department doesn't do that to locals, unless it's somebody that they want to run out of town).
But hey, we live in a free country, here in these United States of Self Delusion. Why, my legislators even tell me so!
Naw, that would interfere with their ability to be total assholes. We couldn't hire government employees for dirt-cheap salaries if we didn't give them the right to be total assholes and persecute people. Let's face it, people don't go to work for the government for the salary (which sucks). They go to work for the government so that they can lord it over other people, so that they can arbitrarily deny disability benefits to autistic children, stage bullshit raids on people who have "unauthorized" technology, stop people for the crime of driving black (or Hispanic, here in the Southwest).
The idea that government exists to protect people from other people has become a total laugh. Government's job today is to protect big business at the expense of small business or individuals. And government is one of the big businesses that government protects.
Judges bear some blame too. Judicial "loose interpretationism" has put so many little whorls and loops into how law is interpreted and enforced that even if we had a reasonable, coherent set of laws to enforce, there would still be problems.
And common law itself has nothing to do with laws as passed by legislators. It isn't lawyers who have caused common law to become so convulated today. Rather, it is the weight of judicial decisions coming into play.
For better or worse, a lot of the most creative Linux users came from the Amiga world. And to tell you the truth, some of us are a bit disappointed by what Linux has become and is becoming. Red Hat 6.1 ("Cartman") is a case in point: if this thing was any fatter, it'd explode from its own internal pressure.
For better or worse the Amiga is dead. I have no delusions on that matter. Even if it wasn't dead, the Amiga design makes tradeoffs that don't make as much sense today as they did in 1985.
For example, the Amiga has one single address space within which all Amiga programs run. This makes interprocess communications basically a matter of plunking a pointer into another process's address space. Meaning that they could create an extremely light-weight multi-tasking message passing operating system in 1985 with hardware that would be viewed as laughably crude today. But the price... the price was high. The price was stability and portability. Stability was a problem because your program could overwrite anybody else's data. Portability was a problem because this memory model resembles nothing else under the sun... I ported several Unix programs to the Amiga, and the difference in the stack model alone caused me to make many patches to, e.g., allocate buffers on the heap rather than on the stack (programs were started in the Amiga model with a fixed-size stack segment, and that stack segment was NOT allowed to grow).
So the Amiga is dead, and the tradeoffs made to get adequate performance with 1985 technology means that most people wouldn't want to revive it today. But there are still important lessons to learn from the Amiga, the most important lesson being this: Simplicity. The Amiga was a very sophisticated machine for its time, with pre-emptive multitasking, near-real-time message-passing, dynamic libraries, dynamically loaded device drivers with full plug-and-play capability, dynamically loaded file systems, etc. etc. etc... but despite this, it was SIMPLE. You could take the documentation released by Commodore, read it, and you could understand exactly how each piece of the system fit with the rest. Other than the BCPL code hacked in from TRIPOS, the whole system had a simple elegance to it that, for better or worse, is totally lacking in today's Linux distributions. If you don't believe me, load Red Hat 6.1 onto your computer. I don't think anybody will ever describe Red Hat 6.1 as "simple" -- or even as a coherent operating system (it isn't... it's like, three layers of cruft, all sitting atop the Linux kernel, all resulting in enormous bloat).
Don't get me wrong. I'm running Red Hat 6.1 today to post this. But the simple elegance of the Amiga is nowhere to be seen, and that simple elegance is something that needs to be remembered.
Read Woz's site. Apple paid Xerox for use of their GUI concepts with a hefty chunk of Apple stock.
As far as Open Source goes -- the Amiga as a separate general-purpose hardware platform is dead. Nobody in their right mind today would bring out a computer based upon proprietary components and expect it to be cost effective in today's market. The only possible commercial use for the AmigaOS is as a webtop OS, where it's lighter-weight than other operating systems like BeOS (for example) -- an AmigaOS webtop could operate in 4mb of ROM and 4mb of RAM quite nicely, thank you. But as a general purpose OS? Get real!
Open Sourcing the thing could create some excitement. AmigaOS is a much simpler and easier to understand OS than Linux is (thanks to having only one address space, thus no flutzing about with page tables and call gateways). It is emmenently hackable, or would be if the source was available (even without source it can be hacked pretty niftily, thank you!). This in turn could bring some ports of software, though the Amiga memory model can be somewhat problematic for many Unix programs (especially the limits on stack space -- Unix programs, for example, are accustomed to allocating whopping buffers on the stack so that they'll get automatically de-allocated upon the 'return', and this is somewhat incompatible with the way the Amiga's stacks work). I don't think it'd ever get past the hobby stage to being a commercially viable platform again... but it'd be FUN, and it certainly wouldn't cost Amino any lost sales to Open Source it -- assuming that Amino intends to actually sell Amiga hardware. More software == more hardware sold. Even if Amino only came out with a video card for the PC platform that did the amazing tricks that the Amiga could do in 1985, that alone could finance their operations for quite some time...
I agree on the documentation problem. In Windows the online documentation browser blows badly, and the Linux distribution vendors, as you mention, boldly disclaim any responsibility for providing a coherent help system. But I think you overlook one more factor: paper documentation has disappeared.
When I was 10 years younger, if you bought a printer, it came with complete documentation that included the full command set of the printer and how to program it. Now you get a three page color splash sheet telling you how to plug it in. But the deal with computer programs is even more scary. When I bought WordPerfect 4 back in 1986 or so, it came with a thick binder full of documentation. That documentation include a) a reference guide, b) an introduction, and c) a "howto" guide. I scanned the binder prior to installing WordPerfect for the first time, and had no problems.
Meanwhile, Office 2000 is undeniably more complex than WordPerfect ever was. Office 2000 comes with no (zero) printed documentation. RTFM? *WHAT* FM?!
What happened was this: Software vendors said "well, it's costing a lot of money to print dead tree copies of our documentation and revise and update them regularly." Software vendors said "and oh, BTW, we don't have any tools that'll produce documentation both in hyperlinked form and in dead tree form." And thus software vendors said "thus we'll only provide documentation in hyperlinked form." Generally in a format that only their own proprietary browser will read, with no real search capability or ability to go straight to a section without going through a bunch of hokum...
The problem is that consumers don't care! They didn't read the manual anyhow, and still don't read the manual (because they can no longer find it), so why should they care?
When I was doing tech support for a vendor of BBS systems, I had a well-thumbed manual sitting by my desk. I would regularly tell people "That question is answered on page 37, please read that section and call back if you have any other questions." This was especially true of questions about the security system, which was complicated and rather involved but which I had spent a LOT of time documenting in a clear, concise, and understandable manner, complete with examples and pull-out charts. I was not about to tell somebody how to do something that already had an example in the manual.
Many people did NOT appreciate that, but at the time I was in a position where I didn't have to care. (And I had written that manual myself, so I darned well knew what was answered and what was not answered there!).
The point, the point -- there's too many people out there who think that the concept of reading is something that applies to other people, not to them. This attitude starts early in their school days, when they learn that they don't have to read the assignment because they can demand that the teacher spoon-feed it to them verbally, and it continues through their adult life.
Believe me, plumbers make fun of people who make stupid mistakes like trying to flush disposable diapers down the toilet. Especially if they do it over and over again.
Unfortunately, many of the problems that tech support people encounter are the computer equivalent of the user trying to flush a disposable diaper down the toilet -- i.e., sheer stupidity. And the sad part is that it's the same people over and over again, finding new ways to clog the plumbing.
I once disagreed with the concept that some people were too stupid to be allowed to breed. Then I worked tech support (grin).
Folks, there's a difference between ignorance and stupidity, and that's the difference that User Friendly etc. make fun of.
Obligatory story: I've worked my share of tech support in the past. In this particular case, I was working tech support for a school administrative system. I got a call from a school technology coordinator. "My middle school can't get their data to me via modem", so I said "okay, have them make a floppy". Shortly thereafter, I got a call from a school counsellor. "My disk drive is spitting out my hard drive," she said. So I spent five minutes verifying that a) she was trying to make a disk at the middle school to give to the high school with her graduating students for next year, because her school's modem was on the fritz and the central office told her to make a disk instead, b) she was talking about a 3 1/2" floppy disk, and c) her computer actually had a 3 1/2" disk drive (don't laugh, many of the school administrative computers dated back to the early 90's and had Xenix on them, and not all of them had 3 1/2" drives). Finally, I verified that d) she was not putting the disk into the tape slot. I said "There's two slots on your computer, one for the disk and one for the tape. The one for the tape is the big one, the one for the disk is the little one. Are you sure you're putting the disk into the right slot?" She said "Of course I am! I'm not stupid, y'know!".
So I sat there holding a 3 1/2" disk in my hands (I'm 100 miles away from the lady in a call center, of course), trying to figure out what she was doing wrong.
"There's a little wheely-looking thing on the disk. Are you putting it in with that facing DOWN?"
"Of course!" she replied.
I stared at the disk a bit more, turned it backwards, and pushed it into my floppy drive. Voila, it popped back out!
"There's a little slidey thing on one end. Do you see that little slidey thing?"
"Yes."
"Are you putting that end in FIRST?"
A slight pause. "Oh! Nobody ever TOLD me that that end goes in first!". A little more pause. "Don't tell anybody about this, okay?".
Of course I told the technology coordinator, when she called me back and asked what the counsellor's problem had been! And of course the technology coordinator repeated the story at the next user group meeting. And thus I got my revenge for putting up with stupidity for forty-five long excrutiating minutes.
That's right. Stupidity.
When I encountered my first 3 1/2" drive, I didn't know which way it went in either. I tried it sideways. Didn't work. I tried it upside down. Didn't work. I tried it backwards. Didn't work. FINALLY I tried it the way that DID work. No problemo, I was ignorant. I wasn't embarrassed or anything. I learned.
But the point is that I was *NOT* stupid. And the lady with the backwards 3 1/2" disk was, for not trying some other way to put the disk in when her first way didn't work.
I always treated people with respect if they made calls that occurred because of ignorance. I was always supportive of intelligent people who called me with questions that made them feel stupid, saying that's okay, you'll get the hang of this, etc. Sometimes they did some pretty stupid-sounding things, but I'd look at the documentation (typical sucky documentation), shake my head, and note that I'd make the same mistake myself if I didn't know about computers and was trying to go by the documentation.
But occasionally I got someone online who was a real candidate for the Darwin Awards (i.e., the world would be better off if they were removed from the gene pool). Isn't it better to make fun of them instead of going postal and seeking them out with an assault rifle and forcing the Darwin Award For Person Who Should Not Breed upon them?
And finally: I nominate for the Darwin Awards *ANYBODY* who says that working tech support is something that can be done with little training and no prior knowledge. Yeah, you can do tech support that way if you think that customer service is what a stallion does to a mare. But such a "tech support" person would a) not had a clue, and b) never been able to diagnose the problem through that big long decision tree that I went through to figure out what she was doing wrong. The idea that "anybody can do tech support" is why the only answer you ever get when you call Microsoft tech support is "reformat your drive and re-install Windows".
Right now, the problem is that so many older Unix programs think that sizeof(time_t)==sizeof(int). But that's an assumption that can be easily changed as y2037 approaches, in order to change sizeof(time_t) to be 64 bits. Yah, it'll be a nuisance re-compiling all Unix programs to be Y2037 compliant, and there's probably some Unix database programs that have 32-bit time_t values embedded in their databases, but the major SQL databases certainly don't have that problem.
In other words, 2037 is going to be a LOT easier than the Y2K bug was...
-E
3rd world uses hand labor, not computers
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Most 3rd world countries keep their records by hand, not via computer. Of COURSE a shopkeeper who uses a mechanical cash register to account for his sales had no problem! Of COURSE a government that still has girls cranking calculators by hand to figure out paychecks had no problem!
The large corporates in those countries did do Y2K remediation, if only to have manual backups when needed.
Naw, I scanned a few survivalist type sites, and they're all saying "Just wait 'till the end of this month, everything will collapse then."
SOme people don't need a reasonable reason to be paranoid, alas.
-E
Small businesses can do it by hand
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One thing to remember: Small businesses may type all their invoices into their (single) computer, but they're also small enough so that they can put all of their sales and info stuff on paper. I know that my own employer, at least, puts a paper copy of each sales order, invoice, and cashed check into that customer's (paper) folder so that if the possibility of a computer error ever arose, the data is right there at the bookkeeper's fingertips.
No, my big worry isn't about small businesses, most of whom genuinely want to serve their customers. My worry would be about big businesses, most of whom have "customer service" reps who believe that service is what a stallion does to a mare. When you reach "customer service", you reach an ill-trained know-nothing who is being paid $17,000 per year to answer phone calls about things she knows nothing about. Unlike a small businessman, she doesn't know you personally, and really doesn't give a damn. She makes the same amount of money whether you go away happy or sad, after all -- unlike a small business owner, who sees your happiness in his bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a certificate to teach Mathematics in the state of Louisiana, but even without that, if it came down to a choice of home schooling and sending my kid to the schools as they exist today, I know which choice I would make. Today's schools are utterly strapped by misplaced priorities, high turnover, and lack of ability to properly discipline children due to all the lawsuits that have been filed against schools that effectively discipline their students. Unfortunately, for most people home schooling is not a viable choice -- it requires altogether too much labor on the part of parents required to be in the labor force in order to make ends meet.
-E
I am surprised that you got a lot of ESTJ's. I haven't met too many extroverts in the computer field, though my office is just down the hall from one (to be fair, his major was EE in college, not CS).
_E
But there's a danger to this. Many managers want people who fit a particular stereotype. They feel that anybody who doesn't fit their particular stereotype won't fit in at the office. As a rather non-stereotypical person, I'm at a disadvantage with such managers -- prior to hiring, that is. After hiring, well, I seem to always end up in charge of the most important projects in the business after the first couple of months of routine stuff... I suspect that a lot of people who are really good at what they do have the same problem, at least until they build a reputation in the industry.
Oh -- being able to communicate technical ideas clearly helps too. Volunteer to be the keeper of the design document, and you end up being the lead project designer by default (grin).
_E
It is only in big companies that deadweight gets promoted to management.
Finally, regarding communication skills -- I have noticed that the ability to communicate technical concepts in a clear, concise, easy-to-understand manner is quite helpful for advancing one's career. For example, it usually gets you placed in charge of the design document for the project -- meaning that you often get to do more of the design work than the "formal" project designer does, meaning you get promoted to project lead on your own project quite rapidly. The ability to get along with other people is also helpful -- there's some people who are brilliant but they are, frankly, total jerks, they don't listen, they're always negative, they have no communications skills, etc. But it's all a matter of knowing how to use these people, alas.
-E
Later, in college, I got a chance to take a class from the foremost scholar of Louisiana history (the guy who, literally, wrote the book). The contrast was... interesting. There were things he could not put in the books (which were intended as high school texts). Anyhow, you are correct that the South was put under martial law immediately after the Civil War. In most of the South, the parts that had a black majority, elections were held shortly afterwards with the black majority electing primarily white Republicans and a few free Blacks to the legislatures. This was at least true in Louisiana. This is what started the partisan sniping... those who had been in power were shut out. The resulting governments could be held in place only by force of Federal troops, and even so, the "riots" often drove local Republican politicians out of office outside of the major cities. For example, in the town of Coushatta, a cotton trading town on the Red River, there were no federal troops and thus the Republican administration did not last long. They were driven out of office by the "riots" and then "elections" were held (elections where armed partisans prevented Blacks and known federal sympathisers from voting). The "Coushatta Riots" are commemorated by a historical plaque near the Coushatta waterfront to this very day.
In New Orleans, the pro-Federal forces stayed in power longer, but once the countryside had been taken over by the partisans, they moved in on the government of New Orleans. A pitched battle was fought near Jackson Square between the police forces and armed partisans. The armed partisans won. The Federal troops stayed in their barracks (which were on one side of Jackson Square) during this time, mostly due to being seriously outnumbered, but also due to fears that the situation would escalate into all-out guerilla warfare again if they intervened. The government of New Orleans was run out of town on a rail, and new elections were held shortly afterward, with partisan forces making sure that black voters were turned away at the polls.
In 1877, a fiercely contested presidential election was held. At the same time, a governor's election was being held in Louisiana. Actually, two parallel elections were being held -- the "official" election, and an election held by the partisan government-in-hiding so to speak. There was quite a bit of overlap between the two. In the end, nobody knew who won the governor's race. Each side said that their candidate had won and that the other side had cheated, basically by counting "their" polling places as the official ones and discarding "fraudulent votes". By coincidence, Rutherford P. Hayes needed Louisiana's vote in the electoral college in order to become President (as well as the vote in Florida and South Carolina, which were in similar straits). The Hayes Compromise was struck: Rutherford P. Hayes would recognize the Democratic governor as the winner of the election (and remove the troops), and in exchange the Democratic governor would cast the state's electoral ballots for Rutherford P. Hayes. Rutherford P. Hayes became president, winning by one (1) single electoral vote. The troops were withdrawn from Louisiana (and from South Carolina too). The partisans had won the Civil War, after 12 years of federal troops propping up Republican governments. They promptly disenfranchised the majority of voters, and passed apartheid laws which forced blacks into virtual slavery. The resulting social climate and artificial agricultural labor surplus caused the Southern economy to be a basket case for the next 70 years.
It was only World War II which revived the Southern economy, due to the need for the South's docks and shipyards to build the Liberty Ships that saved England, and the mass exodus of the majority of the black population to places like Detroit and Los Angeles where they worked in the war industries (thus removing the near-slave-labor that held up the plantation system, thus opening the door for other industries and thus genuine economic growth). Government-enforced apartheid itself was not finally and totally dismantled until 1964, when LBJ got the Civil Rights Act passed by virtue of JFK's dead body (JFK had tried to pass similar legislation and failed, but with JFK dead, LBJ basically stood on JFK's grave and dared the Congress to not pass the Civil Rights Act -- Congress, afraid of being accused of desecrating the memory of JFK, caved). Today a socially-enforced version of apartheid exists in many areas of the United States -- housing segregation, for example, is more rampant today than it was prior to the passing of the Civil Rights Act -- but this is far less evil than having formal government sanctioning of the practice.
In any event -- Reconstruction is still taught in the war colleges as an example of how NOT to use troops. Trying to hold entire states against armed resistance was basically futile due to the fact that they had to post every major town in the state while the resistance could pick off governments one at a time, and without governments, the only resort is pure martial law -- something that the military really isn't well equipped to do. The military heirarchy is a huge supporter of the Posse Cometatis laws that prohibit federal troops from being used for internal policing. This also is why the military has in recent years been quite reluctant to send troops into places like Bosnia and why the military stopped rather than continue on into Iraq -- being in a situation where the military is responsible for law enforcement and propping up governments is NOT a situation that they want to be in again, especially after Vietnam proved yet again just how difficult that was. (Although South Vietnam, in the end, was conquered by North Vietnamese troops rather than by partisans... Jerry Pournelle complains to this day that people forget the fact that South Vietnam fell because the AVN ran out of ammunition, rather than because the Viet Cong overthrew it).
Anyhow, I've wasted enough time wandering through history. Time to get back to work on my latest hack (grin).
-E
Most people go to work for government out of idealism. Then reality kicks in -- poor pay, poor working conditions, being treated like shit by the system, incompetent supervisors who got their jobs via office politics rather than merit, constant stress of dealing with aweful people and aweful problems all the time, etc. The decent human beings last at most three years. The jerks who get off on abusing their clientel are the ones who stick with it.
There are exceptions, of course. But as a general rule, government work is like telemarketing or collections -- the pressures of the job drives the nice people out of the field, leaving the kind of jerks who call you during dinner.
-E
I spent a quiet evening at home. I went to bed at 11:30pm, in fact.
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Gosh, you mean you believe the law should protect small business owners and individuals too? How naive could you be!
-E
After the fall of the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, U.S. military officials were terrified that there would be guerilla warfare in the occupied territories. For the most part there wasn't -- people went home, went back to work, went about the task of trying to make a living in a world that had turned upside down for them.
But eventually, guerilla warfare DID arise. Not against federal troops -- nobody was that stupid. But, rather, against the instruments of government installed by those troops. Mayors of cities who were seen as pro-Federal were tarred and feathered and shipped out of town. Anti-Federal politicians were installed in their place in rigged "elections" that saw blacks and known pro-Federal whites turned away from polling places by armed partisans. In areas where pro-Federal politicians amassed a power structure, such as in New Orleans, armed partisans had to first defeat the local police forces in pitched battle before they could tar and feather the pro-Federal politicians. They did so with ease in most cases (amazing, how possession of large amounts of military weapons make it easy to defeat policemen armed with batons and handguns!). These "riots" are commemorated on plaques and statues all over the South.
In many of these "riots", the local postings of the federal troops were paralyzed by the fact that they were outnumbered. The partisans had gathered forces and concentrated them (this prior to the ability of forces to move rapidly via motorized convoy and airlift, of course), while the federal troops had to be spread out throughout the state in order to maintain federal control. In addition, there was the fear that if they opened fire on the "rioters" there WOULD be widespread guerilla warfare against federal troops, and they could see the casualty figures mounting if that ever happened. So an uneasy truce arose between the commanders of the federal troops and the partisans -- if the federal troops did not open fire upon the partisans, then the partisans would not open fire upon the federal troops.
Eventually, the North gave up. They withdrew the federal troops (which didn't seem to be doing much good anyhow). Armed partisans installed anti-Federal governments, the South installed a system of apartheid which lasted for almost a hundred years, and the U.S. military has ever since had a blinding fear of ever being put into that situation again (that is, the situation of enforcing a military government over large areas containing armed civilians). These lessons are still taught in the military academies today, and form a major cornerstone of military philosophy in this country.
-E
There was a parish (county) in South Louisiana that regularly did this and got a national expose'. But you know what? I have a relative who lives there, and he says that they *STILL* do it -- need a pickup truck? Stop somebody driving by on the Interstate, seize their truck as "drug trafficking related", and make them prove they didn't buy it with drug money! It keeps the local police departments in unmarked cars, so the locals don't care (the sheriff's department doesn't do that to locals, unless it's somebody that they want to run out of town).
But hey, we live in a free country, here in these United States of Self Delusion. Why, my legislators even tell me so!
-E
The idea that government exists to protect people from other people has become a total laugh. Government's job today is to protect big business at the expense of small business or individuals. And government is one of the big businesses that government protects.
_E
And common law itself has nothing to do with laws as passed by legislators. It isn't lawyers who have caused common law to become so convulated today. Rather, it is the weight of judicial decisions coming into play.
-E
For better or worse the Amiga is dead. I have no delusions on that matter. Even if it wasn't dead, the Amiga design makes tradeoffs that don't make as much sense today as they did in 1985.
For example, the Amiga has one single address space within which all Amiga programs run. This makes interprocess communications basically a matter of plunking a pointer into another process's address space. Meaning that they could create an extremely light-weight multi-tasking message passing operating system in 1985 with hardware that would be viewed as laughably crude today. But the price... the price was high. The price was stability and portability. Stability was a problem because your program could overwrite anybody else's data. Portability was a problem because this memory model resembles nothing else under the sun... I ported several Unix programs to the Amiga, and the difference in the stack model alone caused me to make many patches to, e.g., allocate buffers on the heap rather than on the stack (programs were started in the Amiga model with a fixed-size stack segment, and that stack segment was NOT allowed to grow).
So the Amiga is dead, and the tradeoffs made to get adequate performance with 1985 technology means that most people wouldn't want to revive it today. But there are still important lessons to learn from the Amiga, the most important lesson being this: Simplicity. The Amiga was a very sophisticated machine for its time, with pre-emptive multitasking, near-real-time message-passing, dynamic libraries, dynamically loaded device drivers with full plug-and-play capability, dynamically loaded file systems, etc. etc. etc... but despite this, it was SIMPLE. You could take the documentation released by Commodore, read it, and you could understand exactly how each piece of the system fit with the rest. Other than the BCPL code hacked in from TRIPOS, the whole system had a simple elegance to it that, for better or worse, is totally lacking in today's Linux distributions. If you don't believe me, load Red Hat 6.1 onto your computer. I don't think anybody will ever describe Red Hat 6.1 as "simple" -- or even as a coherent operating system (it isn't... it's like, three layers of cruft, all sitting atop the Linux kernel, all resulting in enormous bloat).
Don't get me wrong. I'm running Red Hat 6.1 today to post this. But the simple elegance of the Amiga is nowhere to be seen, and that simple elegance is something that needs to be remembered.
-E
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As far as Open Source goes -- the Amiga as a separate general-purpose hardware platform is dead. Nobody in their right mind today would bring out a computer based upon proprietary components and expect it to be cost effective in today's market. The only possible commercial use for the AmigaOS is as a webtop OS, where it's lighter-weight than other operating systems like BeOS (for example) -- an AmigaOS webtop could operate in 4mb of ROM and 4mb of RAM quite nicely, thank you. But as a general purpose OS? Get real!
Open Sourcing the thing could create some excitement. AmigaOS is a much simpler and easier to understand OS than Linux is (thanks to having only one address space, thus no flutzing about with page tables and call gateways). It is emmenently hackable, or would be if the source was available (even without source it can be hacked pretty niftily, thank you!). This in turn could bring some ports of software, though the Amiga memory model can be somewhat problematic for many Unix programs (especially the limits on stack space -- Unix programs, for example, are accustomed to allocating whopping buffers on the stack so that they'll get automatically de-allocated upon the 'return', and this is somewhat incompatible with the way the Amiga's stacks work). I don't think it'd ever get past the hobby stage to being a commercially viable platform again... but it'd be FUN, and it certainly wouldn't cost Amino any lost sales to Open Source it -- assuming that Amino intends to actually sell Amiga hardware. More software == more hardware sold. Even if Amino only came out with a video card for the PC platform that did the amazing tricks that the Amiga could do in 1985, that alone could finance their operations for quite some time...
-E
When I was 10 years younger, if you bought a printer, it came with complete documentation that included the full command set of the printer and how to program it. Now you get a three page color splash sheet telling you how to plug it in. But the deal with computer programs is even more scary. When I bought WordPerfect 4 back in 1986 or so, it came with a thick binder full of documentation. That documentation include a) a reference guide, b) an introduction, and c) a "howto" guide. I scanned the binder prior to installing WordPerfect for the first time, and had no problems.
Meanwhile, Office 2000 is undeniably more complex than WordPerfect ever was. Office 2000 comes with no (zero) printed documentation. RTFM? *WHAT* FM?!
What happened was this: Software vendors said "well, it's costing a lot of money to print dead tree copies of our documentation and revise and update them regularly." Software vendors said "and oh, BTW, we don't have any tools that'll produce documentation both in hyperlinked form and in dead tree form." And thus software vendors said "thus we'll only provide documentation in hyperlinked form." Generally in a format that only their own proprietary browser will read, with no real search capability or ability to go straight to a section without going through a bunch of hokum...
The problem is that consumers don't care! They didn't read the manual anyhow, and still don't read the manual (because they can no longer find it), so why should they care?
Sigh.
-E
Many people did NOT appreciate that, but at the time I was in a position where I didn't have to care. (And I had written that manual myself, so I darned well knew what was answered and what was not answered there!).
The point, the point -- there's too many people out there who think that the concept of reading is something that applies to other people, not to them. This attitude starts early in their school days, when they learn that they don't have to read the assignment because they can demand that the teacher spoon-feed it to them verbally, and it continues through their adult life.
-E
Unfortunately, many of the problems that tech support people encounter are the computer equivalent of the user trying to flush a disposable diaper down the toilet -- i.e., sheer stupidity. And the sad part is that it's the same people over and over again, finding new ways to clog the plumbing.
I once disagreed with the concept that some people were too stupid to be allowed to breed. Then I worked tech support (grin).
-E
Obligatory story: I've worked my share of tech support in the past. In this particular case, I was working tech support for a school administrative system. I got a call from a school technology coordinator. "My middle school can't get their data to me via modem", so I said "okay, have them make a floppy". Shortly thereafter, I got a call from a school counsellor. "My disk drive is spitting out my hard drive," she said. So I spent five minutes verifying that a) she was trying to make a disk at the middle school to give to the high school with her graduating students for next year, because her school's modem was on the fritz and the central office told her to make a disk instead, b) she was talking about a 3 1/2" floppy disk, and c) her computer actually had a 3 1/2" disk drive (don't laugh, many of the school administrative computers dated back to the early 90's and had Xenix on them, and not all of them had 3 1/2" drives). Finally, I verified that d) she was not putting the disk into the tape slot. I said "There's two slots on your computer, one for the disk and one for the tape. The one for the tape is the big one, the one for the disk is the little one. Are you sure you're putting the disk into the right slot?" She said "Of course I am! I'm not stupid, y'know!".
So I sat there holding a 3 1/2" disk in my hands (I'm 100 miles away from the lady in a call center, of course), trying to figure out what she was doing wrong.
"There's a little wheely-looking thing on the disk. Are you putting it in with that facing DOWN?"
"Of course!" she replied.
I stared at the disk a bit more, turned it backwards, and pushed it into my floppy drive. Voila, it popped back out!
"There's a little slidey thing on one end. Do you see that little slidey thing?"
"Yes."
"Are you putting that end in FIRST?"
A slight pause. "Oh! Nobody ever TOLD me that that end goes in first!". A little more pause. "Don't tell anybody about this, okay?".
Of course I told the technology coordinator, when she called me back and asked what the counsellor's problem had been! And of course the technology coordinator repeated the story at the next user group meeting. And thus I got my revenge for putting up with stupidity for forty-five long excrutiating minutes.
That's right. Stupidity.
When I encountered my first 3 1/2" drive, I didn't know which way it went in either. I tried it sideways. Didn't work. I tried it upside down. Didn't work. I tried it backwards. Didn't work. FINALLY I tried it the way that DID work. No problemo, I was ignorant. I wasn't embarrassed or anything. I learned.
But the point is that I was *NOT* stupid. And the lady with the backwards 3 1/2" disk was, for not trying some other way to put the disk in when her first way didn't work.
I always treated people with respect if they made calls that occurred because of ignorance. I was always supportive of intelligent people who called me with questions that made them feel stupid, saying that's okay, you'll get the hang of this, etc. Sometimes they did some pretty stupid-sounding things, but I'd look at the documentation (typical sucky documentation), shake my head, and note that I'd make the same mistake myself if I didn't know about computers and was trying to go by the documentation.
But occasionally I got someone online who was a real candidate for the Darwin Awards (i.e., the world would be better off if they were removed from the gene pool). Isn't it better to make fun of them instead of going postal and seeking them out with an assault rifle and forcing the Darwin Award For Person Who Should Not Breed upon them?
And finally: I nominate for the Darwin Awards *ANYBODY* who says that working tech support is something that can be done with little training and no prior knowledge. Yeah, you can do tech support that way if you think that customer service is what a stallion does to a mare. But such a "tech support" person would a) not had a clue, and b) never been able to diagnose the problem through that big long decision tree that I went through to figure out what she was doing wrong. The idea that "anybody can do tech support" is why the only answer you ever get when you call Microsoft tech support is "reformat your drive and re-install Windows".
-E
In other words, 2037 is going to be a LOT easier than the Y2K bug was...
-E
The large corporates in those countries did do Y2K remediation, if only to have manual backups when needed.
SOme people don't need a reasonable reason to be paranoid, alas.
-E
No, my big worry isn't about small businesses, most of whom genuinely want to serve their customers. My worry would be about big businesses, most of whom have "customer service" reps who believe that service is what a stallion does to a mare. When you reach "customer service", you reach an ill-trained know-nothing who is being paid $17,000 per year to answer phone calls about things she knows nothing about. Unlike a small businessman, she doesn't know you personally, and really doesn't give a damn. She makes the same amount of money whether you go away happy or sad, after all -- unlike a small business owner, who sees your happiness in his bottom line.
-E