While I don't like IE and use firefox exclusively, stop being a troll - and a dangerously closed minded one at that. Just because it's a custom solution for a specific platform doesn't make it not a great idea. I'd welcome anyone that can speed up my browsing with the ample hardware acceleration I have in my pc. I'd love to see what innovative people do with such new graphics/hardware acceleration on the web. I think there's some clever folks out there that could come up with some very cool and new web browser features and plugins/applications. Perhaps ones that would finally allow remote desktopping or even replacing the very OS. THAT is not a dead end by any means.
Please don't knee-gerk start kicking against proprietary software. You sound like a closed-minded zealot and don't do OSS movement any good.
Alas - your assumption that the world will come crashing down in China is very ill-founded. Not much will happen to the search market because more than 50% of that market is already controlled by baidu. Google is a distant second. And espionage/pilfering/cracking/copying is not limited by borders. If they get behind - they'll simply launch remote raiding just as successful as local ones - it's the internet after all.
Google's caught in a catch-22. If they stay - they might be able to influence the market towards more freedom and become a dominant enough player to turn the culture - but at the cost of their own security/image. If they leave - they give free reign to the Chinese government to do whatever it want, they'll lose out on the biggest new market in the world, and could potentially be the ones on the defense when baidu makes a killing as a monopoly in the chinese market.
This is likely not over; I predict it'll awaken again in 5 years when Baidu or other engine is as big as Google and starts moving into OUR market.
People yelled about this before - but nobody seemed to listen then either - myspacing was too cool for school.
See, the problem isn't always with the fact that someone won't protect your data now - they may do a great job of it now. But you never know what will happen when the company slides to 'junk' status and then turns into a data brokerage after being bought/sold several times to less and less scrupulous people as we see myspace sliding towards now.
My CS professor reminded me that this works for governments too. Just because the government that's collecting your data today is trustworthy doesn't mean that the next one, or one in your lifetime, will be. Even if there are uber-secret repositories for voting records or even innoculous stuff like census info - if the next administration comes in and decides to do away with everyone of a certain belief, voting record, ethnic group, etc - they'll have full access to do so.
Data security includes everything up to and including end of life for the data - and should automatically delete unless specified otherwise. And I don't know of any service that can claim they've actually deleted all your data from backups, copies, mirrors, caches, etc. It's near impossible.
Don't kid yourself - there is a lot of really great engineering going on in China; and they're right on our heals if not ahead.
A coworker had 3 test prototype electronics parts on his desk - and they were made by 3 different foundries. One was European , the other US, and the final China. When asked which was which - he said it was easy to tell - the one from China would be the only one that worked the first time.
I've personally worked with their software engineers. They're amazing at copying and getting things working and to market faster than anyone else. Yeah, it's sometimes only works 'one way', and they're not as innovative, but I only give that lag about 5 more years and they'll be running with the big boys.
Remember if you're a 1 in a million engineer here, that's something; but over there, there's at least 100 of you...
Point 2:
The statement that "...the internet will continue to develop in China with or without Google". The Chinese know they're the fastest growing market in the world. They know they're the new big thing and will be, and they're telling Google to play by their rules or get out. They're effectively dangling this huge carrot up for Google to see, and saying if they want a piece of it, you need to jump for it, cause there's others that will play by our rules and make a killing doing it.
So I don't believe Google has any real leverage against the government there. None. The only person that can (and will likely) lose in a staring contest is Google. For once, Google can't use it's weight on the marketplace as a tool - and it's not much fun for them. No arguments about being an 'essential service' or whatnot - there's a bigger competitor.
As for a staring contest - what could Google do? Leave? Then Baidu wins out the remaining bit of the worlds largest market and Google goes home. Chinese don't get any free search access and censorship continues. Nobody in China loses an essential internet search engine. Google is cut out of the largest market and maybe finds itself on the ropes later when Baidu or other engine pushes over into the US market with scads of money, resources, and years of development advances.
If push comes to shove, Google will get sanctioned or maybe even kicked out - but I doubt they'll let it go to getting kicked out. What makes more sense is for them to take the 'hit for the team'. The stare down until the Chinese sanction them somehow then work out a deal quietly. That way they both can claim a 'victory' and go about making scads of money.
I'm just not sure that Google, or we at/., should be the ones deciding that some of the Chinese people should start dying for this. I'm pretty sure that it should be their decision.
Your kidding yourself. Even when our OWN government invades our privacy and rights - nobody here bothers to die for those either. \. and most of the rest of us here are couch and side-line talkers anyway. I accuse myself with this statement too.
"...known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced 'Sagittarius A-Hole')...."
Made a lot more sense when they talked about the accretion disk around the black-hole...
The driver support was half Microsoft's problem because they ram-rodded a new driver model down and didn't check to see if the independent devs were getting adequate drivers out. The other half lied SOLIDLY with the HW manufacturers themselves. Take Creative Labs - worst driver support in the world when vista came out. They simply just stopped supporting products they didn't want to write drivers for, banned folks from their message boards that complained, or just wrote crappy half-finished ones and then stopped. Yes, MS is to blame for not waiting/supporting for better driver support - they should have seen the snafu coming and done something about it - like give cash for folks to develop drivers all over again; but the other half didn't much do their job either.
However, most hardware companies are commodity deals now and run on shoe-string budgets and any cash spent on writing a driver is just 'lost' money to the management of most of them. They probably did the math - and if it didn't look like it was worth the money to re-write a driver when the new verison of the hardware was coming out (and it would create demand for the new product) - they did it. It's sh*tty and I won't ever buy creative again, but I see why it happened.
Has it occurred to you that we're just as sick of you? No matter how many times someone explains how stupid religion is there's another of you, claiming that this type of stupid is special and we need to respect it. As if Flat-Earthers got uppity.
I don't think my email claimed you needed any kind of special consideration for me or my ideas. I was simply pointing out when you lump hundreds of millions of people together and simply call them 'idiots' - that you might come off as being a bit biased in your judgement. You're entitled to your opinion - but you're not very convincing.
Which ones don't involve faith? Those are the ones that aren't harmful. Every other religion is worthless, even if new-agers like it.
You honestly don't think you take anything on faith yourself? Everything you believe you have tested yourself? Quantum mechanics, astrophysics, mathematics, whether the bank really has the money you put in it? All of those are things you were told and you're taking on 'faith' if I'm not mistaken... Unless you've gone and verified it yourself.
But even science makes just as many mistakes.
Here's where you go far off the deep end. Science itself can't make mistakes. Sure, people do often believe untested hypotheses but that's not science making them do that, that's whatever makes you believe in a god.
I agree - I wasn't being clear. You're right in saying that science itself is simply a process of deducing truth. I should have said that things pursued by science do not always result in the correct answer. The history of physics alone has seen a great evolution from Greek causation to Newtonian to Einsteinian/quantum mechanics. There's like to be many more.
It learns from them and goes on. Just as many religions have too.
So much for the word of god. Turns out he thought the sun rotated around the Earth. Revise, revise, re-invent.
You should be very careful about your facts and the context in which they came from. It was long thought the sun rotated around the earth long before religion picked it up. Religion (at least the Catholic faith) has learned that the realm of scientific discovery is left best to science. It's come out against intelligent design, has supported evolution as a valid theory, and that life on other planets isn't any issue.
This is what I was getting too. It doesn't seem you're very informed on what some of these 'idiots' have been saying. Instead, you seem more than happy to call up something from the early 100's AD and blanket-discount anything they might have to say.
I was trying to make the point that when you do that, you sound as foolish as those you're trying to discount. Anyone can look at our pasts and see our mistakes. Do you want to keep holding on to the ones of the past as a weapon against people in the now that DON'T believe those things anymore?
Oh no! If Einstein was wrong about something else, maybe he was wrong about everything!? Maybe we shouldn't have just taken his word. Oh, wait, we didn't.
I wasn't advocating throwing the baby out with the bath-water. But you were. Religion=idiots= throw anything they have to say about the value of life and human existance because they made a common mistake 1600 years ago about how the cosmos was laid out.
And lest you believe I'm advocating mindlessness - I love science. Heck, I got my degree in Computer Science. I love watching the latest shows on Discovery, Nova, and so forth. I don't see faith and reason as at all in conflict with each other. They go hand in hand informing us all along the way. Science without an understanding of human value is just as deadly as faith without reason.
I wasn't arguing about social power - I was making a point that the scientific method doesn't always produce the correct results every time either. It is a *process* - and one that has made mistakes (just as all human institutions) and learned from them.
I studied in a seminary for several years, and it was NEVER implied that they 'got together' and arranged anything. The thing I was taught was to definitely question and use critical thinking at all times in your faith life. That's the beauty of universal truth - that it is true whether you believe it or not. Our actions have imperical reactions with others - and there are better and worse ways of doing things. Faith is that one trusts that there is this wisdom in the actions promoted by their church - but one must be smart about their application. I was taught that anyone that 'blindly' follows is NOT genuinely participating in their faith. And this was a Catholic seminary. And lest you think I'm some 'moron' I have a degree in Computer Science, and was a core developer on several apps that I am quite sure you have installed on your machine right now.
"The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of bullshit detection -- mostly because doing so would challenge mainstream religions"
Or Phrenology, or blood-letting, or using Radium as a cure-all, or Kellog's wacko health camps,etc. Religion is far from having the 'corner' on bad ideas and what you call 'bullshit'. I am getting very tired of this kind of blanket Slashdot condemnation of 'religion' (which one by the way? There's thousands including Judaism, Hinduism, Sekes and other favorites of 'progressives') as being for only the brain-dead. Yes, the scientific method has brought us everything from modern medicine to inventions that make our lives more rich to a greater understanding of the cosmos. I personally am a computer scientist and love the field of research/discovery. But even science makes just as many mistakes. It learns from them and goes on. Just as many religions have too. The have a wealth of human knowledge stored in them if you'd get beyond your own biggotry and hang-ups to read about it. Or perhaps I should keep bringing up the mistakes of science every time you want to make a point and then blanketly call all scientists idiots and those that follow what they've done as mindless drones spewing the results of studies they didn't even do themselves.
Dont' forget that Mendel who first documented and tried to understand genetic traits, Georges Lemaître who finally proved the big bang - were both clergy of the Catholic Church. Not to mention education for the masses and health care for those who couldn't pay for it among others.
You sound just as ignorant/closed minded as those 'religious idiots' when you say what you did - and I for one didn't even finished reading the rest of your obviously well balanced and informed comment after that sentence.
Agree with the approach, but be VERY mindeful of what your about to do when doing such an audit. Every good geek in us says yes, it SHOULD be done and problem fixed. But the second you put pen to paper, or if there was word you did such an audit, you best be prepared to testify in court against your employer - even if the DO come into compliance later. You're basically leaving/creating THE paper trail on the wrongdoing, and you better believe if it at some future point gets caught - and the lawyers might look for a 'history of abuse' at the company - they'll find that you were the guy that carefully documented it for them. How nice. Subpeona and summons for you. You might even get served for discovery long after you've left the company.
Just know what you're getting into first and make sure you're ready for that. Getting calls from lawyers from your previous job on your current job usually doesn't earn you cool points with bosses no matter how right you were...
Remember, the 'jury of your peers' will be the same people who have every appliance in their house blinking 12:00 and weren't able to get out of jury duty. The LAWYERS will be telling them what criteria they're supposed to be convicting you on.
Best advice I ever heard from a lawyer was this:
Remember, they'll storm your place on probable cause. They'll take your PC and all your electronic gizmos and ANYTHING that might look like evidence (CD collection, phone bills, etc), they'll break things (inadvertently or not) and generally trash your place collecting evidence. They'll handcuff you in front of all your neighbors and throw you in the back of a car - then make a general spectacle over the entire day in front of your house. You'll get to go downtown, be handcuffed, finger-printed, photo taken (which is now and forever public record) and generally humiliated and treated like a common crook. you'll be thrown into a jail cel with common crooks, drug addicts, tweakers and other fun folks to 'sleep' with. After a few days or even weeks of that, you'll (hopefully) get a chance to put your house or car up for your bail. Meanwhile you'll have to explain to your boss why you're not coming into to work for a few days/weeks. If he doesn't fire you right then and there, you'll be using up all your vacation time for that year - and all your good graces with all your coworkers too. Then, you'll spend every waking hour working, or preparing for the case with your lawyer - whom you'll be paying thousands of dollars over the next few days/weeks to get ready for the case. Oh, and remember all your computer stuff got confiscated - so good luck surfing the web for help or writing up those docs for your lawyer.
I don't care how 'right' you think you are. What's the 'cost' of putting yourself through all that - and then 90% likely not even getting to prove your point anyway since no good lawyer in his right mind would put you on the stand as a 'copyright expert'.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between being right on slashdot - and being right in the real world.
I sure hope I don't have to work with the workers you hired then.
I agree with sentiment that one must measure potential, ability, or intelligence - but disagree strongly that you can't come up with at least reasonable metrics to give you a ballpark idea that the person is at all qualified. For example:
1. Potential - see what the person has done in the past with their resources/intelligence. Even if they are really limited - if they did something interesting and show a desire to explore and create unique things using those talents/resources - then they would be likely to do so in the future. This is favored over someone what shrugs and goes 'meh'.
2. Ability - ask them to demonstrate ability at any other task of their choosing. If they have or can do so, this shows the qualities of building new abilities - namely - that they can practice, put in the hours required to become able, stay focused for a period of time, can set goals, and have a mental picture of what that looks like. Again preferred to someone that just walked in with no history in this
3. Intelligence - there are many ways to measure this - from SAT's, to sit them down with a box of parts and see if they can put together a lego set or wire a light socket. Depends on the skill you're looking for.
Yes, none of these are foolproof - but your alternative is to throw a dart at a dartboard and choose randomly. I bet I'd do better than random.
The 'save the environment' excuse is a red herring - and DON'T fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
Why? You'll notice on almost any paperless billing (credit cards, utilities, etc) that you ALSO must sign up for automatically withdrawal from your bank account. THIS is the real thing they're trying to get you to do. Because if you also look at the stipulations of their charge dispute terms, if you pay a bill - then you waive all rights to dispute it.
In other words, some fraudulent, or just mistaken charge is made on your bill. You may miss it, or forget to check, etc. At any rate, the money will be automatically deducted from your bank account. This could be thousands of extra dollars if someone stole your card/account or just made a big billing error. Unfortunately, when you call them to dispute, they now can say - sorry - you agreed to the charges when you paid. And then be completely SOL. Often times you must submit a request in writing - which might be past the time when you saw it. Again - too late.
This happens a lot with credit cards - you can find your bank account completely emptied, or overdrafted with no recourse other then to throw yourself on their mercy. Want to be at the mercy of a credit card companies 'good will' to reduce a charge?
So that $1.50 extra is really just you paying for their 'insurance' on fraudulent charges. Don't believe me - go look at almost all paperless billing fine print.
I have worked in groups and looked at a few companies that do Scrum and agile development. My experience has been this:
1. If a job constantly touts they are a house that focuses on agile development - this doesn't necessarily mean they do or don't focus on agile development. What I found it usually means is they are probably going to work your *ss off and they're going to expect long hours from you every week to meet your task lists. Beware, and ask lots of questions about how many hours the average person works and how long they stay with the company.
2. Until you get really good at estimating your project times AND the ability to accept/deny your tasks, you'll likely be overcommitted for sprint work. This is the number one problem I've seen in most of the agile/scrumm groups I've seen. Sure you can push a little harder for some sprints, but make sure you can get 'easy' sprints too. Life isn't all about work.
As for the original poster - I would say what other have said. The scrumm master should be a good project manager. It's ultimately a more management position than a developer position. Lead devs might not be good at this because they like being devs, and this role is about managine people, productivity, and output.
That said, it shouldn't be an intern either. They lack the necessary experience of working on projects and the foils that come up. The project manager needs to have the strength and wisdom to push back on new requirements during the middle of development. They need to be able to go to bat for their team to protect them from unreasonable external requests, while at the same time pushing internally to see those that are floundering and those that need a boot in the rear. This requires tact and experience with people. So maybe it shouldn't be an engineer at all.:)
No - but it makes people feel better about saving the environment. Which is how most things are marketed nowadays anyway - especially the greenwashed stuff.
Still, if this is true - it just blew the prius and insight out of the water. A buddy of mine just sold his insight because after he factored in the total cost of ownership - and the fact he had the pick-up power of a lawn-mower - he gave up on it. He did say it came with a nice cloud of smug with each purchase he enjoyed for several years.
Slashdot Mirror
They modded you (rightly in my book) flamebait in my book - see my above comment why. If I had mod points, I'd have modded it flame as well.
While I don't like IE and use firefox exclusively, stop being a troll - and a dangerously closed minded one at that. Just because it's a custom solution for a specific platform doesn't make it not a great idea. I'd welcome anyone that can speed up my browsing with the ample hardware acceleration I have in my pc. I'd love to see what innovative people do with such new graphics/hardware acceleration on the web. I think there's some clever folks out there that could come up with some very cool and new web browser features and plugins/applications. Perhaps ones that would finally allow remote desktopping or even replacing the very OS. THAT is not a dead end by any means.
Please don't knee-gerk start kicking against proprietary software. You sound like a closed-minded zealot and don't do OSS movement any good.
That's the news article *I* want to see.
Hope you're all out there shopping for your now GOVERNMENT MANDATED health insurance - that or you can pay 2% of your annual income as a penalty.
Land of the Free indeed - land of the free lunch
Google's caught in a catch-22. If they stay - they might be able to influence the market towards more freedom and become a dominant enough player to turn the culture - but at the cost of their own security/image. If they leave - they give free reign to the Chinese government to do whatever it want, they'll lose out on the biggest new market in the world, and could potentially be the ones on the defense when baidu makes a killing as a monopoly in the chinese market.
This is likely not over; I predict it'll awaken again in 5 years when Baidu or other engine is as big as Google and starts moving into OUR market.
See, the problem isn't always with the fact that someone won't protect your data now - they may do a great job of it now. But you never know what will happen when the company slides to 'junk' status and then turns into a data brokerage after being bought/sold several times to less and less scrupulous people as we see myspace sliding towards now.
My CS professor reminded me that this works for governments too. Just because the government that's collecting your data today is trustworthy doesn't mean that the next one, or one in your lifetime, will be. Even if there are uber-secret repositories for voting records or even innoculous stuff like census info - if the next administration comes in and decides to do away with everyone of a certain belief, voting record, ethnic group, etc - they'll have full access to do so.
Data security includes everything up to and including end of life for the data - and should automatically delete unless specified otherwise. And I don't know of any service that can claim they've actually deleted all your data from backups, copies, mirrors, caches, etc. It's near impossible.
A coworker had 3 test prototype electronics parts on his desk - and they were made by 3 different foundries. One was European , the other US, and the final China. When asked which was which - he said it was easy to tell - the one from China would be the only one that worked the first time.
I've personally worked with their software engineers. They're amazing at copying and getting things working and to market faster than anyone else. Yeah, it's sometimes only works 'one way', and they're not as innovative, but I only give that lag about 5 more years and they'll be running with the big boys.
Remember if you're a 1 in a million engineer here, that's something; but over there, there's at least 100 of you...
Point 1:
Google isn't the top search engine there anyway - it's a very low #2 after Baidu - which by some estimates is 3x the penetration of Google. http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/261/china-search-engine-market-report-2009/
Point 2:
The statement that "...the internet will continue to develop in China with or without Google". The Chinese know they're the fastest growing market in the world. They know they're the new big thing and will be, and they're telling Google to play by their rules or get out. They're effectively dangling this huge carrot up for Google to see, and saying if they want a piece of it, you need to jump for it, cause there's others that will play by our rules and make a killing doing it.
So I don't believe Google has any real leverage against the government there. None. The only person that can (and will likely) lose in a staring contest is Google. For once, Google can't use it's weight on the marketplace as a tool - and it's not much fun for them. No arguments about being an 'essential service' or whatnot - there's a bigger competitor.
As for a staring contest - what could Google do? Leave? Then Baidu wins out the remaining bit of the worlds largest market and Google goes home. Chinese don't get any free search access and censorship continues. Nobody in China loses an essential internet search engine. Google is cut out of the largest market and maybe finds itself on the ropes later when Baidu or other engine pushes over into the US market with scads of money, resources, and years of development advances.
If push comes to shove, Google will get sanctioned or maybe even kicked out - but I doubt they'll let it go to getting kicked out. What makes more sense is for them to take the 'hit for the team'. The stare down until the Chinese sanction them somehow then work out a deal quietly. That way they both can claim a 'victory' and go about making scads of money.
That's my bet anyway.
I'm just not sure that Google, or we at /., should be the ones deciding that some of the Chinese people should start dying for this. I'm pretty sure that it should be their decision.
Your kidding yourself. Even when our OWN government invades our privacy and rights - nobody here bothers to die for those either. \. and most of the rest of us here are couch and side-line talkers anyway. I accuse myself with this statement too.
According to Slashdot - AMD has been the leader for year and YEARS now.
The Formula that Destroyed Wallstreet
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant
"...known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced 'Sagittarius A-Hole')...." Made a lot more sense when they talked about the accretion disk around the black-hole...
However, most hardware companies are commodity deals now and run on shoe-string budgets and any cash spent on writing a driver is just 'lost' money to the management of most of them. They probably did the math - and if it didn't look like it was worth the money to re-write a driver when the new verison of the hardware was coming out (and it would create demand for the new product) - they did it. It's sh*tty and I won't ever buy creative again, but I see why it happened.
Has it occurred to you that we're just as sick of you? No matter how many times someone explains how stupid religion is there's another of you, claiming that this type of stupid is special and we need to respect it. As if Flat-Earthers got uppity.
I don't think my email claimed you needed any kind of special consideration for me or my ideas. I was simply pointing out when you lump hundreds of millions of people together and simply call them 'idiots' - that you might come off as being a bit biased in your judgement. You're entitled to your opinion - but you're not very convincing.
Which ones don't involve faith? Those are the ones that aren't harmful. Every other religion is worthless, even if new-agers like it.
You honestly don't think you take anything on faith yourself? Everything you believe you have tested yourself? Quantum mechanics, astrophysics, mathematics, whether the bank really has the money you put in it? All of those are things you were told and you're taking on 'faith' if I'm not mistaken... Unless you've gone and verified it yourself.
But even science makes just as many mistakes.
Here's where you go far off the deep end. Science itself can't make mistakes. Sure, people do often believe untested hypotheses but that's not science making them do that, that's whatever makes you believe in a god.
I agree - I wasn't being clear. You're right in saying that science itself is simply a process of deducing truth. I should have said that things pursued by science do not always result in the correct answer. The history of physics alone has seen a great evolution from Greek causation to Newtonian to Einsteinian/quantum mechanics. There's like to be many more.
It learns from them and goes on. Just as many religions have too.
So much for the word of god. Turns out he thought the sun rotated around the Earth. Revise, revise, re-invent.
You should be very careful about your facts and the context in which they came from. It was long thought the sun rotated around the earth long before religion picked it up. Religion (at least the Catholic faith) has learned that the realm of scientific discovery is left best to science. It's come out against intelligent design, has supported evolution as a valid theory, and that life on other planets isn't any issue.
This is what I was getting too. It doesn't seem you're very informed on what some of these 'idiots' have been saying. Instead, you seem more than happy to call up something from the early 100's AD and blanket-discount anything they might have to say.
I was trying to make the point that when you do that, you sound as foolish as those you're trying to discount. Anyone can look at our pasts and see our mistakes. Do you want to keep holding on to the ones of the past as a weapon against people in the now that DON'T believe those things anymore?
Oh no! If Einstein was wrong about something else, maybe he was wrong about everything!? Maybe we shouldn't have just taken his word. Oh, wait, we didn't.
I wasn't advocating throwing the baby out with the bath-water. But you were. Religion=idiots= throw anything they have to say about the value of life and human existance because they made a common mistake 1600 years ago about how the cosmos was laid out. And lest you believe I'm advocating mindlessness - I love science. Heck, I got my degree in Computer Science. I love watching the latest shows on Discovery, Nova, and so forth. I don't see faith and reason as at all in conflict with each other. They go hand in hand informing us all along the way. Science without an understanding of human value is just as deadly as faith without reason.
I wasn't arguing about social power - I was making a point that the scientific method doesn't always produce the correct results every time either. It is a *process* - and one that has made mistakes (just as all human institutions) and learned from them. I studied in a seminary for several years, and it was NEVER implied that they 'got together' and arranged anything. The thing I was taught was to definitely question and use critical thinking at all times in your faith life. That's the beauty of universal truth - that it is true whether you believe it or not. Our actions have imperical reactions with others - and there are better and worse ways of doing things. Faith is that one trusts that there is this wisdom in the actions promoted by their church - but one must be smart about their application. I was taught that anyone that 'blindly' follows is NOT genuinely participating in their faith. And this was a Catholic seminary. And lest you think I'm some 'moron' I have a degree in Computer Science, and was a core developer on several apps that I am quite sure you have installed on your machine right now.
Or Phrenology, or blood-letting, or using Radium as a cure-all, or Kellog's wacko health camps,etc. Religion is far from having the 'corner' on bad ideas and what you call 'bullshit'. I am getting very tired of this kind of blanket Slashdot condemnation of 'religion' (which one by the way? There's thousands including Judaism, Hinduism, Sekes and other favorites of 'progressives') as being for only the brain-dead. Yes, the scientific method has brought us everything from modern medicine to inventions that make our lives more rich to a greater understanding of the cosmos. I personally am a computer scientist and love the field of research/discovery. But even science makes just as many mistakes. It learns from them and goes on. Just as many religions have too. The have a wealth of human knowledge stored in them if you'd get beyond your own biggotry and hang-ups to read about it. Or perhaps I should keep bringing up the mistakes of science every time you want to make a point and then blanketly call all scientists idiots and those that follow what they've done as mindless drones spewing the results of studies they didn't even do themselves.
Dont' forget that Mendel who first documented and tried to understand genetic traits, Georges Lemaître who finally proved the big bang - were both clergy of the Catholic Church. Not to mention education for the masses and health care for those who couldn't pay for it among others.
You sound just as ignorant/closed minded as those 'religious idiots' when you say what you did - and I for one didn't even finished reading the rest of your obviously well balanced and informed comment after that sentence.
This, my friends, is evolution removing 'dead ends' in the gene pool.
Just know what you're getting into first and make sure you're ready for that. Getting calls from lawyers from your previous job on your current job usually doesn't earn you cool points with bosses no matter how right you were...
And don't forget Transmeta!!! With their code morphing technology - they could compete with IBM, Intel, and AMD!!!!
Remember, the 'jury of your peers' will be the same people who have every appliance in their house blinking 12:00 and weren't able to get out of jury duty. The LAWYERS will be telling them what criteria they're supposed to be convicting you on.
Best advice I ever heard from a lawyer was this:
Remember, they'll storm your place on probable cause. They'll take your PC and all your electronic gizmos and ANYTHING that might look like evidence (CD collection, phone bills, etc), they'll break things (inadvertently or not) and generally trash your place collecting evidence. They'll handcuff you in front of all your neighbors and throw you in the back of a car - then make a general spectacle over the entire day in front of your house. You'll get to go downtown, be handcuffed, finger-printed, photo taken (which is now and forever public record) and generally humiliated and treated like a common crook. you'll be thrown into a jail cel with common crooks, drug addicts, tweakers and other fun folks to 'sleep' with. After a few days or even weeks of that, you'll (hopefully) get a chance to put your house or car up for your bail. Meanwhile you'll have to explain to your boss why you're not coming into to work for a few days/weeks. If he doesn't fire you right then and there, you'll be using up all your vacation time for that year - and all your good graces with all your coworkers too. Then, you'll spend every waking hour working, or preparing for the case with your lawyer - whom you'll be paying thousands of dollars over the next few days/weeks to get ready for the case. Oh, and remember all your computer stuff got confiscated - so good luck surfing the web for help or writing up those docs for your lawyer.
I don't care how 'right' you think you are. What's the 'cost' of putting yourself through all that - and then 90% likely not even getting to prove your point anyway since no good lawyer in his right mind would put you on the stand as a 'copyright expert'.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between being right on slashdot - and being right in the real world.
I agree with sentiment that one must measure potential, ability, or intelligence - but disagree strongly that you can't come up with at least reasonable metrics to give you a ballpark idea that the person is at all qualified. For example:
1. Potential - see what the person has done in the past with their resources/intelligence. Even if they are really limited - if they did something interesting and show a desire to explore and create unique things using those talents/resources - then they would be likely to do so in the future. This is favored over someone what shrugs and goes 'meh'.
2. Ability - ask them to demonstrate ability at any other task of their choosing. If they have or can do so, this shows the qualities of building new abilities - namely - that they can practice, put in the hours required to become able, stay focused for a period of time, can set goals, and have a mental picture of what that looks like. Again preferred to someone that just walked in with no history in this
3. Intelligence - there are many ways to measure this - from SAT's, to sit them down with a box of parts and see if they can put together a lego set or wire a light socket. Depends on the skill you're looking for.
Yes, none of these are foolproof - but your alternative is to throw a dart at a dartboard and choose randomly. I bet I'd do better than random.
But why does God need a spaceship?
The 'save the environment' excuse is a red herring - and DON'T fool yourself into thinking otherwise. Why? You'll notice on almost any paperless billing (credit cards, utilities, etc) that you ALSO must sign up for automatically withdrawal from your bank account. THIS is the real thing they're trying to get you to do. Because if you also look at the stipulations of their charge dispute terms, if you pay a bill - then you waive all rights to dispute it. In other words, some fraudulent, or just mistaken charge is made on your bill. You may miss it, or forget to check, etc. At any rate, the money will be automatically deducted from your bank account. This could be thousands of extra dollars if someone stole your card/account or just made a big billing error. Unfortunately, when you call them to dispute, they now can say - sorry - you agreed to the charges when you paid. And then be completely SOL. Often times you must submit a request in writing - which might be past the time when you saw it. Again - too late. This happens a lot with credit cards - you can find your bank account completely emptied, or overdrafted with no recourse other then to throw yourself on their mercy. Want to be at the mercy of a credit card companies 'good will' to reduce a charge? So that $1.50 extra is really just you paying for their 'insurance' on fraudulent charges. Don't believe me - go look at almost all paperless billing fine print.
1. If a job constantly touts they are a house that focuses on agile development - this doesn't necessarily mean they do or don't focus on agile development. What I found it usually means is they are probably going to work your *ss off and they're going to expect long hours from you every week to meet your task lists. Beware, and ask lots of questions about how many hours the average person works and how long they stay with the company.
2. Until you get really good at estimating your project times AND the ability to accept/deny your tasks, you'll likely be overcommitted for sprint work. This is the number one problem I've seen in most of the agile/scrumm groups I've seen. Sure you can push a little harder for some sprints, but make sure you can get 'easy' sprints too. Life isn't all about work.
As for the original poster - I would say what other have said. The scrumm master should be a good project manager. It's ultimately a more management position than a developer position. Lead devs might not be good at this because they like being devs, and this role is about managine people, productivity, and output. That said, it shouldn't be an intern either. They lack the necessary experience of working on projects and the foils that come up. The project manager needs to have the strength and wisdom to push back on new requirements during the middle of development. They need to be able to go to bat for their team to protect them from unreasonable external requests, while at the same time pushing internally to see those that are floundering and those that need a boot in the rear. This requires tact and experience with people. So maybe it shouldn't be an engineer at all. :)
No - but it makes people feel better about saving the environment. Which is how most things are marketed nowadays anyway - especially the greenwashed stuff. Still, if this is true - it just blew the prius and insight out of the water. A buddy of mine just sold his insight because after he factored in the total cost of ownership - and the fact he had the pick-up power of a lawn-mower - he gave up on it. He did say it came with a nice cloud of smug with each purchase he enjoyed for several years.