You could corrolate this to other studies which have shown that by far, more people attend church regularly in the U.S. than they do in Europe. It logically follows IMO that anyone who is devoutly religious in a religion with a creation story would doubt evolution. Even though this has been falling in the U.S., it's still a lot lower in Europe. In some places churches struggle to survive financially because nobody comes to services.
As for politicizing science, yes that definitely goes on, but it's not just on the right. It happens on the left, too. I am troubled by it. What I am even more troubled about is how the very disciplines that are politicized try to deny it. In some cases if people point it out, scientists, of all people, will go on a smear campaign against those who do so. Have we forgotten what science is about? I fear that in some quarters the scientific discipline has been thrown out the window, but its practitioners still call it science, if only because it confers legitimacy to a pet theory.
I am sure that from the time the U.S. government started funding scientific projects there were those who feared that one day it would come to this. Once government gets involved in funding something it's inevitable that politics will enter it into it because government is a "political animal". Yes it has lots of money to fund projects, but there are strings attached. There's no getting away from that.
In terms of Office, I remember this being the subject of the Apple lawsuit, and I looked at the Mac interface and the Windows interface in an article that was published about this. I can't remember which applications they were comparing (I vaguely remember the Windows screen looked like Microsoft Publisher looks now), but it definitely looked like there was some direct copying going on.
As I thought about this more I wasn't so sure this was a lawsuit with Apple. It may have been a lawsuit between IBM and Microsoft over Windows and Presentation Manager. It was a long time ago.
COM is basically a CORBA knockoff...From that alone, you'd start to question if Microsoft's real intention is to "bring powerful infrastructure down to the user level at an affordable price." If it were, why not go along with the rest of the industry players? Obviously, they have their own agenda.
It may seem now that COM was a knock-off, but COM was based on work that had already been done in OLE. And OLE was more similar to OpenDoc in concept. It was primarily designed as a component architecture for document-oriented applications, though it could be used for other non-document purposes. The first version of OLE was released with Windows 3.0 in 1990. If anything, OLE at a superficial level was copying the Mac's ability (since the first version released in 1984) to embed document elements inside each other. For example you could paste a bitmap inside a word processor document, and then by double-clicking on the bitmap you could edit it inside a paint program and save changes back to the pasted image. In reality OLE was a component architecture for GUI components (rather like ActiveX controls) that could be embedded inside an application of any sort, or provide access in one application to a GUI component in a different app. OLE was at home in applications like Office.
According to Wikipedia OpenDoc had its first implementation release in Mac OS 7.5, which was about 1996. It made its first appearance in OS/2 in OS/2 Warp 4, which was also released in 1996.
OLE and COM initially had more in common with Microsoft's Dynamic Load Library structure than CORBA's. Years ago I went to a seminar on CORBA and it seemed to me that its activation sequence was based on loosely coupled messaging. It was designed to be a central server which would manage component activation and lifetime. OLE and COM did not work like this when they first came out. The COM infrastructure managed activation and lifetime through direct API calls and they were synchronous. An application using a COM component had to tell the system when it was done with it. The system used a simple reference counting scheme to keep track of when it was okay to kill a component off. Sometimes memory leaks occurred due to circular references between components. The system was not sophisticated enough to shut down components in such a situation. COM also suffered from "DLL Hell", because only one version of a component could be stored in the system at a time.
A COM component could also be set up as its own sort of background process, called an "out-of-process server". The system would only manage connections to it. It did not manage the component's lifetime. It seems to me all of these things were done to cut down on CPU and memory requirements for the technology. As the Wikipedia article on OpenDoc notes: "OpenDoc components were invariably extremely large and very slow, a side effect of all the layering. For instance, opening a simple text editor part would often require 2 megabytes of RAM or more, whereas the same editor written as a standalone application could be as small as 32K." In Windows 3.0 these sort of memory requirements would've been intolerable. Most Windows machines of that time came with at most 2-4 MB of physical RAM. Among microcomputer users the fact that a Windows machine needed that much memory was considered bloated. Gives you an idea of why Microsoft did not use OpenDoc, not to mention it wasn't ready in 1990.
From looking at the OS/2 article I agree that COM and DCOM were similar conceptually to SOM and DSOM. I contend they operated differently, but I can believe they were working off the same concepts. I'd also contend it takes longer than a year to come out with something like this. I don't think that Microsoft took one look at OS/2 v.2 and said "Oh look, we should implement this" and then a year later they had their own version.
I've read some of the comments on here and they all center around what users can see. As a developer I've focused on what users can't see, and adds to the usefulness of what they can do with a microcomputer.
Apple's emphasis has long been bringing good design and ease-of-use to computer users. Microsoft's emphasis has been on bringing powerful infrastructure down to the user level at an affordable price. There is a difference. It's true that Microsoft has copied a lot of GUI features. I can only guess, but I think if you were to ask people at Microsoft what the most important part of the platform is, they'd tell you it's the integration of technologies, making it easy to develop powerful applications that allow people to integrate disparate forms of information in a manageable way. The GUI is just a means of accessing that information. It's not the be all and end all of the platform.
Here are some examples of what I think are Microsoft innovations, though user's can't see any of it. I'll accept corrections as I don't know everything. It's been years since I've used a Mac. I've used PCs since 1994. I've had to read up on some of this. That gives you an idea of my background. Keep in mind that I'm talking about these things from the perspective that they were implemented on the PC platform, which for years had limited CPU power and memory as compared to minicomputers and mainframes. I'm sure somebody implemented many of these technologies before Microsoft did. The question you should ask yourself is who else besides Microsoft implemented this before they did on the microcomputer form factor:
Self-clipping windows. I've talked to a developer who worked on the Mac platform in the 1980s. He said that applications had to clip their own windows, since the GUI did not do it for them. I'm not sure when this was introduced in Windows (perhaps it was there at the start), but Windows developers didn't have to worry about this. The GUI did window clipping automatically and efficiently. Come to think of it, other PC GUIs that were out around the time of Windows 3.0 might've implemented this as well. I wouldn't count OS/2, because Microsoft wrote the first version of it.
COM, a generic component-based architecture. It was based on earlier work done in Windows 3.0 in OLE, which was solely GUI-oriented. Granted a lot of developers have complained about it being overly complicated. A lot of early efforts at creating a new technology are. The point of it was to create infrastructure so that developers could create loosely coupled, re-usable code in multiple programming languages. The multi-lingual goal was achieved, but each language had its own idiosyncracies WRT COM. COM was incorporated into Windows NT and Windows 95. It was initially used for building GUI applications, but when the web became more prominent, Microsoft extended it to the web server with MTS, and later COM+, as a way to build up components for business logic. COM+ introduced enterprise services for microcomputers, particularly transaction rollback. This means that an application could not only rollback a database transaction, but the whole transaction, bringing the web application back to a prior state. The form of COM that most people are familiar with is ActiveX, COM components that run inside a web page. In hindsight it's been recognized that this was not a good idea for consumer-oriented web applications, because it lacked security infrastructure, and is turned off by default in Vista. COM caused headaches on the server end, because it was never really redesigned for it. It still had some traits that were hold-overs of a client GUI architecture. COM+ and.Net alleviated this shortcoming, at least on the server end. COM+ came out in 2000 and came built-in to Windows 2000..Net came out in 2002.
Office COM: Creating an office suite on microcomputers is nothing new, neither is customizing them. Microsoft took it a step further. They enabled other non-Office applications to inter
January 19 2038 isn't fake either, you have any idea how much old metal is running?
I think I know what you're talking about here. In a project I was on developing Unix server software, pre-2000, we implemented Y2K-compliant code so there would be no problems. A customer did ask if there was a possibility of running into problems later. I investigated the issue, and answered "yes", because many of the time values we were using within the software were based on a 32-bit time code which represented all of the seconds since 1970. The problem with it that I saw is 'round about 2030 (it might've been 2038--it was a long time ago when I did this), this 32-bit value overflows. I'm not sure what it would do then, go back to zero (1970)?
I discussed this with our VP. of Engineering and he wasn't alarmed about it. He figured that by then everyone would be using wider bus architectures (64 bit, 128 bit, etc.), and that the values from the time functions we were using would expand accordingly. As a policy we released the source code for each project to each of our clients. He said that because of this, they could just recompile the software when they upgraded their hardware architecture, thereby fixing the problem, since the memory allocated for integers would expand to the new bus size (the hope being that it would be 64- or 128-bit by then instead of 32-bit).
It sounds like you're dealing with embedded systems, which I imagine don't get upgraded as often as PCs and servers.
you'd be amazed at how many 3.8+ gpa cs students i've interviewed that can't answer basic questions about oo and data structures.
I've been curious about this. Are data structures really that relevant anymore as a skill in the workplace? The last time I created a data structure was in the 1990s when I was programming in C. Since then, programming in C++ and C# (.Net) I've implemented some design patterns and just used container classes. The container classes encapsulate the data structures for me.
I learned data structures in school but nowadays I don't see that knowledge as very relevant, except perhaps as background knowledge for judging the effectiveness of using one container class over another.
OOP skills? Still relevant.
It's been rare that I've had a job interview where they ask me about my CS knowledge. I always appreciate it when they do. I can remember the very first job interview where I landed a job at a small software company 12 years ago. They asked me to convert an integer to a string in C without using any library functions to do the conversion (like itoa() or printf("%d")). I did it, even exceeding their expectations. They told me that they had interviewed several candidates. None of them could do it. That surprised me. I was taught how to do that my first year in college. After I did it, it was like the rest of the interview was just a formality. It almost didn't matter what I said. They wanted to hire me. The last time I got a job where they asked me such questions was several years ago.
Tasks that involve digging into the code and knowing it at an intimate level can only be given to new graduates and new hires. The employees that have been around for longer, if they're worth anything, are busy doing the "other" stuff (see previous point.)
Developers who know a system inside and out "have little value" to the company.
From what I've read, IBM basically considers software to be worth nothing. They can get away with that because they sell open source software. For the most part they let other people write the software, whether they work for another company doing it, or decide to volunteer their time. It's all about services to them. I suppose they want entry level developers working with some code so they can get an idea of how the software they consult others to use works and what it's useful for. Other than that, it's all about business process consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO).
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Gotta disagree with you there that it was "total BS". It was not. Now, maybe there were some places where people used the Y2K issue to get funding for projects that had nothing to do with it. But I know of software that used to use 2-digit years. What mattered was how software handled the "overflow" to the year "00". If it thought of it as the year "2000", then everything was peachy. There may come a day when that software needs to be updated, because of the year 2100, because some places just elected to keep their dates as two digits, where "00" was "2000".
There were some companies that were in the clear years ago. Banks are an example. They had to start using 4-digit years decades ago, because they had to deal with 30-year mortgages and the like.
I agree that Y2K was overhyped, but there was some truth to the notion that it was a crisis. It just depended on which company/institution had the most legacy software that was still critical to their operation. The fact that nothing happened (though famously Blockbuster Video had some MASSIVE overdue charges show up;) ), IS attributable to the fact that something was done. I heard a computer expert who's been in the business for decades (can't remember the name. As I recall he's the guy who came up with the CTRL-ALT-Delete sequence for rebooting the PC) describe Y2K as one of the few times in history when we had a totally preventable crisis, because it was associated with a date that we all knew was coming. He said that after the year 2000 passes, some software engineers would get calls from people, and the media asking them if, since nothing happened, whether it was all just a hoax. He said, "Perish the thought!" He also described how Y2K software engineers were being overworked, and he predicted that in 1999/2000 that a lot of them would burn out and change jobs, or leave the profession altogether.
I think Crighton had something salient to say about "consensus":
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy...the list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Huh. So what about the killer heat wave in France a couple years ago?
Incidentally, I saw a Discovery Channel show on the Little Ice Age. They attributed the regional cooling to a series of factors. One of which was massive volcanic eruptions, which supposedly put enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to block out some solar radiation. Anyhow, I don't recall them saying that the gulf stream had anything to do with it. You could be right, I just haven't heard that.
And before he was a novelist he was a medical doctor, ie. someone with a scientific background. Granted he's sticking his nose into an area that's not his expertise. Really all I've heard from him is skepticism of the claims (he asks: "Where's the data?"), and criticism of the process by which the conclusions are derived. I think he can talk about that, because no matter what science someone is a part of, the scientific method is universal.
There's a saying in science: "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". I think that's applicable in this situation.
As best I can tell, the climate scientists who claim that human-caused global warming is real are drawing inductive conclusions from disparate sets of data. In order for me to believe it, I need to see the causal linkages. All that would take is a deductive presentation of the scientific data: X (industrial CO2) has led to Y, has led to Z (global temperature increase). The best that I've seen to date is "CO2 in the atmosphere has increased to X amount, and the global mean temperature has increased 1 degree", and then they assume that this is being created artificially, because the increase in CO2 and temperature seem to corrolate historically with the Industrial Revolution. Their attitude seems to be, asking rhetorically, is "Well what else could cause this?" That's not good enough. Science demands that the data must lead to the conclusion. Part of that process in this case would be to prove that other plausible factors are not contributing to the phenomenon, and that only industrial CO2 is responsible or a major contributing factor.
The best way I can imagine to do this, not being a climate scientist myself, is to look at the industrial inputs, and estimate the CO2 output from that, based on technology available along the timeline they are talking about. Then look at CO2 produced by nature: animal life, decaying matter, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, etc. Develop an analysis based on this data that shows the percentage of the CO2 makeup in the atmosphere emitted from each source. Corrolate that to known data that shows the relationship of X% CO2 in volumes of air to temperature increases in various forms of material like air, water, and earth. Finally, corrolate that to the temperature increase in the global mean temperature. In other words, doing a detailed analysis of what's causing it.
I'm not saying you don't believe this too. Just giving my shpiel on the matter.
He can be called a shill now for where he works, but he basically had the same opinions before coming to Microsoft. He worked for at least a few years as an independent developer, using.Net, Java, and some open source technologies. I know because I've read what he's written since about 2002. He got hired at Microsoft this past May.
As for ZDNet having someone write for them who works for someone else, they've done this several times before. Just recently they published:
They have David Berlind and Dana Blankenhorn who advocate for open source every day of the week. Just recently Berlind created quite a buzz on ZDNet by writing favorably about the State of Massachussetts's decision to require all of their office applications use the ODF format, a format Microsoft Office doesn't support, and is unlikely to.
John Carrol and another writer, George Ou, are the only two out of the 16 ZDNet has who are regularly accused of being "shills" for Microsoft.
"He doesn't spend every show every day beating the snot out of his guests, so the argument that people are just watching for entertainment I think is moot."
...and more, and you come back with this:
Given your appreciation of O'Reilly as entertainment, though not factual enough to be news, would you send him to the White House?
I guess you don't care for having intelligent conversation. I've basically already answered this question in prior posts. Read them more carefully, alright?
His fictional childhood is just the issue you chose to discuss, when I called him a "delusional hack".
I chose to discuss it because you called his story an "imaginary childhood". Whether he's a "delusional hack" is another matter.
He promotes rightwing propaganda about "free trade", and its benefits to American workers....O'Reilly has been with Bush every step of the way, running cover for his policies and perpetual reelection strategies, and he's got lots of people believing them.
You know, there are prominent Democrats who believe strongly in free trade as well, like fmr. president Clinton, fmr. president Carter, fmr. president Kennedy (the Maquilladoras in Mexico were set up under his administration), Sen. Lieberman, Sen. Baucus, I could go on. This argument doesn't really work.
As for him siding with Bush all the time, I'd say that's mostly true. I've watched O'Reilly enough to see that he's been critical of the war in Iraq on occasion. There was a time early in the summer when he was calling for the withdrawal of our troops there in the near future. He said it was due to what he had heard from those in the field, that the Iraqis were not willing to fight for their freedom, and that it was a similar phenomenon as what happened in Vietnam. I was rather surprised to hear him say this, but he did. I haven't heard him say it since, but I believe he's been critical on other fronts as well, like talking about how the provisional government in Iraq doesn't have control of 3 major cities, where the insurgents have set up strongholds.
He's often pointed out, when people have challenged him about not being critical of the administration, that he's often been critical of John Ashcroft. He's also pointed out that more often than not, when Bush or administration officials have wanted to "sit and talk" on TV they go to Larry King Live, not his show. The only recent exception I've seen is when Condoleeza Rice came on for an interview.
As for his "right wing views", he's against capital punishment, he's for gay adoption, and he's for ending the war on drugs (though some might label him "libertarian" for this). These are not all of his views, but you want to call that conservative? Fine. I doubt you'll find many who agree with you.
I don't watch O'Reilly for objective journalism. He calls himself a "news analyst", and he feels free to bring his opinions to the discussion. I've gotten particularly interested in his show sometimes because he'll focus on stories that no one else will, some of them turning out to be very important. It's a mixed bag with him. Sometimes he goes over the top, like he'll talk about a few cases in a state where public officials seem to be acting in unethical ways, and then he'll end his talk with a correspondent by saying, "It's chaos and mayhem down there," or something like that, and meanwhile the area in back of the person he's talking to (in the state in question) looks quite tranquil. When I see that I just brush it off and say to myself, "Boy, that was a doozy." It's almost laughable, but I think it shows how much of a bubble he lives in. In another case he was talking to my state's governor, Gov. Owens, and he made the comment that our state's economy was "booming". Well from the jobs statistics of the time...we may have been doing better than some other states, but we certainly were not "booming". I know that much. If he had said that about a state like Nevada, it would've had more credibility.
So no, I don't see O'Reilly as a reliable source of news all the time, but I find his show to be valuable because of the stories he covers that no one else picks up on. Another thing is that he confronts the views of his guests, and challenges them to back up what they say. I also find that valuable. It's especially interesting when he gets a strong guest on, who has strong opinions, but can back them up well. It's a bit like watching verbal combat, but sometimes he meets his match, and those are the best int
Hey, you know, this isn't unprecedented. In the first part of the 20th century this sort of thing was common in this country. Even married couples used to live in one of their parents' households. In fact, I remember hearing in the 1990s that according to a survey, 1/3rd of all men aged 30 and under were living with their parents. I assume they were single, but who knows. I couldn't believe it. I was living on my own then, in my 20s, and enjoying it. But that was back in a time when I could afford it...
Instead of giving massive amounts of money to wasteful defense contractors & other government cronies (or having it lost in the rats-mazes of bureaucracy), use all that money to hire LOTS of front-line workers. E.g., teachers, firemen, policemen, social workers, forest rangers, etc. (Note: front-line != bureaucrats.)
I did an analysis recently on the corrolation between job losses and big events that occurred at the time.
From the start of the job losses in March, 2001 to 9/11 we had lost about 1 million jobs. This is attributable to the recession. From September, 2001 to December, 2001, we lost more than 1 million jobs, most of these attributable to the 9/11 attacks. The Enron scandal broke in this time period as well, though just from what I could see of the timing of the Worldcom scandal, at the end of June, 2002, corporate scandals "sting" in the job market, but the bad effects don't last long. My best guess is we lost 111,000 jobs in July, 2002 due to the Worldcom bust. And several hundred thousand jobs were lost in the leadup to the Iraq war.
At the "bottom" of the job market in August, 2003, we had lost 2.7 million jobs. We are now down to a net "deficit" in the payroll survey of around 1 million jobs. 1.7 million net new ones have been created in the last year, and I hear that about 900,000 of the new jobs are in the public sector (ie. government).
If 9/11 had not happened, we would probably be "breaking even" today. The Iraq war might not have happened at the time that it did either (though this is pure speculation), so one can only guess where we'd be now without that.
So even though you may think all the jobs created in the defense sector are useless, national security is very important to the economy. The Iraq war cost us jobs, but in relative terms the job losses due to 9/11 were worse. Yes, there's waste in the defense structure, but where in the government is there not waste??? The budget is always in effect formed by committee, and you know what they say about committee-based efforts.
The most jobs that the economy created in the 90s was around 300,000 per month. That's what we were getting in the first quarter of this year. Granted the job creation rate slowed to a trickle during the summer, barely worth writing home about, but it's picking up again. I heard somewhere that one reason for the slowdown in the growth of the economy during the summer had something to do with Europeans taking their summer vacations, sometimes lasting as long as 6 weeks. I dunno.:)
I remember a couple years ago listening to an interview with a big technology company's CEO (I think it was Intel), who said that in the past the tech sector led the economic recovery. He said that this time it was going to trail the recovery. Other parts of the economy would recover first, and then the tech recovery would come later. Perhaps that is the pattern we are seeing. It's too soon to tell, IMO.
Not to mention the constant "I have a plan for the economy and Iraq but I can't tell you until after I am elected" comments.
I think this is a risky tactic, but a tactic nonetheless. Kerry's betting that most of the people who will support him will do so because he's the only viable alternative to Bush, and since so many people supposedly hate Bush's guts, they'll vote for him on that basis alone. This way he doesn't have to divulge much of his plans. I mean, why get into a debate about your own policies when you don't have to? (that's a rhetorical question) Another thing it allows him to do is launch spitballs (no pun intended) at Bush all day long about all the "screw ups" that angry voters are upset about without much of it coming back to bite him, because he hasn't put forward solid positions of his own.
The problem is if the voters go ahead and elect him without him divulging what he plans to do, we may end up being surprisingly pleased with what he does, or terribly disappointed, and feel bilked in the end, because many will ask, "Why didn't you tell us you were going to do this??" The answer may be embarrassing: "Because you were too pissed off to notice."
Beyond all of this my company has been looking to hire an entry level developer. I've interviewed countless people. All of which have resumes filled with the best sounding buzz words. However, the interviews usually go something like this:
I used to hear similar interview stories at one place I used to work, and this was in the 90s. I remember one story that went like this. The interviewer was looking for someone who knew PL/SQL pretty well. He asked one guy:
Int: How would you rate your PL/SQL skills between 1 and 10?
Guy: I would rate myself a 10.
Int: What effect does an onerror statement (I forget the exact naming of the statement, but it was something like this) have on an opened cursor?
Guy: I don't know.
He came back from the interview asking me the same question, and I answered it correctly. He told me with a laugh (as a compliment), "If that guy's a 10, then you're a...13!" I personally rated myself a 7 or 8, but I was being more honest.:)
I can sympathize with your position. I'm in the same boat. During the 90s I wasn't even helping the "Internet Revolution" along. I got my CS degree, and wrote client/server apps. for enterprises. I can write a mean GUI-based or command-line-based database app. in C or C++, but no one wants to hire me for that. I've learned some HTML, and I've even delved quite a ways into C#, Windows Forms, ASP.Net, and ADO.Net, but I guess that disqualifies me because "I learned it on my own". I can't say that I've created an n-tier application, or an enterprise app. that uses SQL Server. Maybe that does disqualify me at this time. I've been to.Net user group meetings though with people who are actually using it for their work, and I know more about.Net than they do sometimes. Only thing is it's awfully difficult to convince an employer that I'm even minimally competent in these skills, because I can't point to a paid job where I've used them.
Before any one starts trolling about how great Bush is here is a pre-emptive rebuttal.
Yeah you sure are getting out in front. I haven't seen any "look how great Bush is" messages on here yet. I sense that you are a troll yourself...
The economy wen't down on Bush's watch.
I personally don't give presidents credit or scorn for the economy. It seems no matter what a president's policies are the economy just tends to create a lot of jobs, or take them away, all by itself. For ex., Reagan cut top marginal rates on taxes, the economy created 22 million jobs during his tenure. Clinton raised taxes, the economy created 22 million jobs during his tenure. They were both free traders. "Same difference"!
Terrorists struck on Bush's watch.
Erm, terrorists struck on Clinton's watch too. The first bombing of the WTC occurred in February, 1993. Later we learned it was Al Qaida's first strike against the U.S. There was hardly time for him to do anything about it, but hey, as long as we're "keeping score"... Actually, a more factual analysis shows that the terrorists seem to successfully strike within the U.S. whenever there's a transition to a new administration, no matter what party comes to power.
Outsourcing increased due to tax incentives on Bush's watch.
Oh please! That tax exemption for foreign investment has been on the books for decades. There have been at least 3 attempts to repeal or modify this exemption in congress over the past few years. None of the attempts has succeeded. I believe the most recent attempt this year was sponsored by a Republican (yeah, imagine that), but it still didn't pass, and John Kerry hasn't lifted a finger in congress to help it pass either.
By being the commander and chief one has a exacting duty to this country and responsibility to do every thing possible to maintain balance, peace and prosperity.
I encourage you to read "The Good Life and Its Discontents", by Robert J. Samuelson sometime. He shows where such uninformed opinions like yours are wrong, and gives a realistic view of the limits of government's ability to solve such problems.
O'Reilly's "proof" that he grew up in Levittown was claimed to be a deed to a house there, but it's really a mortgage certificate. So he's obviously lying, in strict terms.
Alright. Thanks for clarifying what the document was. I guess he put it on his site for closer inspection, which to me diminishes the charge that he's lying about it. You see, lying connotes intent to deceive. If he truly meant to lie about it, he would've shown it on his program, but not put it anywhere where anyone could confirm what he was talking about. This reminds me of the whole frackas over his claim that "Hard Copy" won a Peabody award. It turns out it won a Polk award, admittedly after he left the show. What this, and your clarification of the document in question shows me is that while he may be "in the ballpark" on these sorts of things, he tends to be lax on the details, almost as if he doesn't care about such things, or he has trouble remembering them.
But such a certificate is not conclusive - mortgages in 1950s Long Island for prefab houses were routinely issued while the actual house was being built, before the specific unit was even chosen; such documents can include the address of the office or a model home in the development, a prior residence, or even a nearby existing address where the post office can deliver mail. It's pretty flimsy evidence of an entire childhood, which would produce pictures, yearbooks, letters, neighbors, a whole life of references.
Okay. This is interesting historical information, but I don't see how this discredits the idea that he lived in Levittown as a child. From my read of the document (I followed your link), it says that the "mortgagor" is in Levittown, and the "mortgagee" is a bank in some other part of New York. You say that it could have been a mere mailing address where mail could be delivered, but I don't see how this contributes to your argument at all. There are only two addresses on the document, so I don't see how that creates any ambiguity. Secondly, in order to believe that it's just a false front, you would have to believe that O'Reilly knew about this document when he first started talking about Levittown, and only brought it up later when some critic challenged his story. He claims that he did not know of the document's existence before finally finding it earlier this year.
On your second point that it's "pretty flimsy evidence of an entire childhood", do you really expect him to produce pictures and such? I certainly don't. To me it doesn't matter so much that I know exactly where he grew up and exactly how he lived. I mean, heck, President Clinton claimed he grew up in Hope, Arkansas, when in fact he only spent a few years there as a baby, and then the family moved to Hot Springs, where he spent the rest of his childhood and teen years. The only reason I even cared to hear about this story is it provided a window into the man's character and view of the world, due to the different flavor of Hot Springs. Otherwise I could've cared less. To make more out of it is just an attempt at character assassination, IMO.
His homey origin story is invoked in statements like "I started out with nothing" and "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale" (to the New York Observer). Even if his imagined childhood in Levittown were real, we're talking about a suburb of New York City, in prosperous and booming Long Island, where his father was an accountant.
I see your point that O'Reilly probably was better off than he claims, but, just to add some perspective, you have to look at his environs, New York City, a very expensive place all around. I'm just putting this out there as a supposition, but perhaps in his mind, while he was growing up, he was pretty low on the economic scale when compared to the other economic echelons that existed in his immediate surroundings of the time. So his father was an accountant. Does that mean his family could afford to live high on the hog? I don't kno
Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure
Actually it does support infrastructure to some extent, since foreign profits often come back, one way or another, as support for our government debt, which can then be used to finance infrastructural improvements, if our government chooses to use it for that purpose. A significant portion, though I don't think the majority, of our federal government's debt is financed by foreigners. In fact, China and India both have significant holdings in U.S. government bonds, as did Japan more than 10 years ago.
Bottom line: Will complain about outsourcing, how unAmerican it is, etc.. But when you actually ask them to vote with their wallets, they are no better than corporations!
I agree. Even Lou Dobbs is this way, to a certain extent. He was on Bill Moyer's show, "Now", recently, and he went on and on about the evils of corporations outsourcing jobs. Then Moyers asked him if when he gives financial advice to his clients, whether he recommends people invest in companies that outsource or not. Dobbs said he doesn't discriminate on that basis. He wants to find the best deals for his clients. Makes sense to me, but I find it hypocritical of him to be railing against the outsourcers day in and day out, and to keep referring to his list of "the companies that are outsourcing America". I'm just a bit amazed he doesn't think for a moment about the possibility that perhaps the reason some of the companies he recommends to his clients are good buys is because they are outsourcing jobs! And if they weren't, perhaps their financial performance would be so bad he would look at them as if they were complete junk and not recommend them at all. Does he think that if a company can't perform well without outsourcing that then, well, that company just shouldn't perform well? It should just accept its lot in life and continue losing customers, and suffer under low valuations indefinitely, perhaps even go out of business? Gee, that would help. Put more people out of work. Doesn't make sense to me.
Americans want their own jobs protected, but then turn around and buy the imported item that's cheaper. And that *IS* a free market - Americans are deciding that saving a few bucks is better than employing other americans, and THAT is why jobs are outsourced.
I agree. I think this same mentality is the reason why we have federal budget deficits just about every year. We want the government to provide us with all these programs so that we as a society can pretend that this will solve significant problems (sometimes they do, usually they don't), but then when the bill comes due, well, we don't like paying for a lot of it. And so the deficit eats up the government's credit line.
The economy, however, doesn't work on this basis, except on the individual level (credit cards, for ex.). You want a high quality product at a low price? Fine, but there's going to be a cost you're going to have to pay somewhere else, and you can't avoid it. If our federal government worked consistently on this zero-sum basis, some might like it, but I think it would make most people gasp in horror.
You're recommending we send a delusional hack, who aspires to an imaginary childhood in Levittown, NY, to the White House?
O'Reilly did grow up in Levittown, despite what Al Franken says. O'Reilly managed to dig up the old title to the house where he grew up, and displayed it a few times on his show (guess you weren't watching). Yep, he grew up there. Sorry you were misled.
If you hate what's happening to the American workforce, go to a union, and ask them how to help organize your fellow info workers. That's the only politics that's ever protected American labor. It's no accident that such a successful movement would send O'Reilly into a spasmatic fury.
And this will help the American IT workforce how? Just because a company is unionized doesn't prevent that company from outsourcing work and putting the unionized staff out of work. IMO, unions work best when they have a "captive audience". In other words, the business has limited mobility. Retail is a perfect example. There's little chance that most of the work in a store is going to be outsourced. It can't realistically be done. Though with RFID coming down the pike, we'll probably see retail stores that need fewer workers one day.
I have a liberal friend who votes consistently Democrat and he doesn't like unions. He's told me why in the past. He's seen how they set up rules to stifle creativity and productivity in the workplace, just so more union employees will be ensured they have (pointless) jobs. But hey, it's a paycheck, right? Since he likes a work environment that encourages creativity and productivity, he doesn't like the environment that unions create. I tend to agree with him.
Slashdot Mirror
You could corrolate this to other studies which have shown that by far, more people attend church regularly in the U.S. than they do in Europe. It logically follows IMO that anyone who is devoutly religious in a religion with a creation story would doubt evolution. Even though this has been falling in the U.S., it's still a lot lower in Europe. In some places churches struggle to survive financially because nobody comes to services.
As for politicizing science, yes that definitely goes on, but it's not just on the right. It happens on the left, too. I am troubled by it. What I am even more troubled about is how the very disciplines that are politicized try to deny it. In some cases if people point it out, scientists, of all people, will go on a smear campaign against those who do so. Have we forgotten what science is about? I fear that in some quarters the scientific discipline has been thrown out the window, but its practitioners still call it science, if only because it confers legitimacy to a pet theory.
I am sure that from the time the U.S. government started funding scientific projects there were those who feared that one day it would come to this. Once government gets involved in funding something it's inevitable that politics will enter it into it because government is a "political animal". Yes it has lots of money to fund projects, but there are strings attached. There's no getting away from that.
In terms of Office, I remember this being the subject of the Apple lawsuit, and I looked at the Mac interface and the Windows interface in an article that was published about this. I can't remember which applications they were comparing (I vaguely remember the Windows screen looked like Microsoft Publisher looks now), but it definitely looked like there was some direct copying going on.
As I thought about this more I wasn't so sure this was a lawsuit with Apple. It may have been a lawsuit between IBM and Microsoft over Windows and Presentation Manager. It was a long time ago.
COM is basically a CORBA knockoff...From that alone, you'd start to question if Microsoft's real intention is to "bring powerful infrastructure down to the user level at an affordable price." If it were, why not go along with the rest of the industry players? Obviously, they have their own agenda.
It may seem now that COM was a knock-off, but COM was based on work that had already been done in OLE. And OLE was more similar to OpenDoc in concept. It was primarily designed as a component architecture for document-oriented applications, though it could be used for other non-document purposes. The first version of OLE was released with Windows 3.0 in 1990. If anything, OLE at a superficial level was copying the Mac's ability (since the first version released in 1984) to embed document elements inside each other. For example you could paste a bitmap inside a word processor document, and then by double-clicking on the bitmap you could edit it inside a paint program and save changes back to the pasted image. In reality OLE was a component architecture for GUI components (rather like ActiveX controls) that could be embedded inside an application of any sort, or provide access in one application to a GUI component in a different app. OLE was at home in applications like Office.
According to Wikipedia OpenDoc had its first implementation release in Mac OS 7.5, which was about 1996. It made its first appearance in OS/2 in OS/2 Warp 4, which was also released in 1996.
OLE and COM initially had more in common with Microsoft's Dynamic Load Library structure than CORBA's. Years ago I went to a seminar on CORBA and it seemed to me that its activation sequence was based on loosely coupled messaging. It was designed to be a central server which would manage component activation and lifetime. OLE and COM did not work like this when they first came out. The COM infrastructure managed activation and lifetime through direct API calls and they were synchronous. An application using a COM component had to tell the system when it was done with it. The system used a simple reference counting scheme to keep track of when it was okay to kill a component off. Sometimes memory leaks occurred due to circular references between components. The system was not sophisticated enough to shut down components in such a situation. COM also suffered from "DLL Hell", because only one version of a component could be stored in the system at a time.
A COM component could also be set up as its own sort of background process, called an "out-of-process server". The system would only manage connections to it. It did not manage the component's lifetime. It seems to me all of these things were done to cut down on CPU and memory requirements for the technology. As the Wikipedia article on OpenDoc notes: "OpenDoc components were invariably extremely large and very slow, a side effect of all the layering. For instance, opening a simple text editor part would often require 2 megabytes of RAM or more, whereas the same editor written as a standalone application could be as small as 32K." In Windows 3.0 these sort of memory requirements would've been intolerable. Most Windows machines of that time came with at most 2-4 MB of physical RAM. Among microcomputer users the fact that a Windows machine needed that much memory was considered bloated. Gives you an idea of why Microsoft did not use OpenDoc, not to mention it wasn't ready in 1990.
From looking at the OS/2 article I agree that COM and DCOM were similar conceptually to SOM and DSOM. I contend they operated differently, but I can believe they were working off the same concepts. I'd also contend it takes longer than a year to come out with something like this. I don't think that Microsoft took one look at OS/2 v.2 and said "Oh look, we should implement this" and then a year later they had their own version.
I've read some of the comments on here and they all center around what users can see. As a developer I've focused on what users can't see, and adds to the usefulness of what they can do with a microcomputer.
Apple's emphasis has long been bringing good design and ease-of-use to computer users. Microsoft's emphasis has been on bringing powerful infrastructure down to the user level at an affordable price. There is a difference. It's true that Microsoft has copied a lot of GUI features. I can only guess, but I think if you were to ask people at Microsoft what the most important part of the platform is, they'd tell you it's the integration of technologies, making it easy to develop powerful applications that allow people to integrate disparate forms of information in a manageable way. The GUI is just a means of accessing that information. It's not the be all and end all of the platform.
Here are some examples of what I think are Microsoft innovations, though user's can't see any of it. I'll accept corrections as I don't know everything. It's been years since I've used a Mac. I've used PCs since 1994. I've had to read up on some of this. That gives you an idea of my background. Keep in mind that I'm talking about these things from the perspective that they were implemented on the PC platform, which for years had limited CPU power and memory as compared to minicomputers and mainframes. I'm sure somebody implemented many of these technologies before Microsoft did. The question you should ask yourself is who else besides Microsoft implemented this before they did on the microcomputer form factor:
January 19 2038 isn't fake either, you have any idea how much old metal is running?
I think I know what you're talking about here. In a project I was on developing Unix server software, pre-2000, we implemented Y2K-compliant code so there would be no problems. A customer did ask if there was a possibility of running into problems later. I investigated the issue, and answered "yes", because many of the time values we were using within the software were based on a 32-bit time code which represented all of the seconds since 1970. The problem with it that I saw is 'round about 2030 (it might've been 2038--it was a long time ago when I did this), this 32-bit value overflows. I'm not sure what it would do then, go back to zero (1970)?
I discussed this with our VP. of Engineering and he wasn't alarmed about it. He figured that by then everyone would be using wider bus architectures (64 bit, 128 bit, etc.), and that the values from the time functions we were using would expand accordingly. As a policy we released the source code for each project to each of our clients. He said that because of this, they could just recompile the software when they upgraded their hardware architecture, thereby fixing the problem, since the memory allocated for integers would expand to the new bus size (the hope being that it would be 64- or 128-bit by then instead of 32-bit).
It sounds like you're dealing with embedded systems, which I imagine don't get upgraded as often as PCs and servers.
you'd be amazed at how many 3.8+ gpa cs students i've interviewed that can't answer basic questions about oo and data structures.
I've been curious about this. Are data structures really that relevant anymore as a skill in the workplace? The last time I created a data structure was in the 1990s when I was programming in C. Since then, programming in C++ and C# (.Net) I've implemented some design patterns and just used container classes. The container classes encapsulate the data structures for me.
I learned data structures in school but nowadays I don't see that knowledge as very relevant, except perhaps as background knowledge for judging the effectiveness of using one container class over another.
OOP skills? Still relevant.
It's been rare that I've had a job interview where they ask me about my CS knowledge. I always appreciate it when they do. I can remember the very first job interview where I landed a job at a small software company 12 years ago. They asked me to convert an integer to a string in C without using any library functions to do the conversion (like itoa() or printf("%d")). I did it, even exceeding their expectations. They told me that they had interviewed several candidates. None of them could do it. That surprised me. I was taught how to do that my first year in college. After I did it, it was like the rest of the interview was just a formality. It almost didn't matter what I said. They wanted to hire me. The last time I got a job where they asked me such questions was several years ago.
Tasks that involve digging into the code and knowing it at an intimate level can only be given to new graduates and new hires. The employees that have been around for longer, if they're worth anything, are busy doing the "other" stuff (see previous point.)
Developers who know a system inside and out "have little value" to the company.
From what I've read, IBM basically considers software to be worth nothing. They can get away with that because they sell open source software. For the most part they let other people write the software, whether they work for another company doing it, or decide to volunteer their time. It's all about services to them. I suppose they want entry level developers working with some code so they can get an idea of how the software they consult others to use works and what it's useful for. Other than that, it's all about business process consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO).
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Gotta disagree with you there that it was "total BS". It was not. Now, maybe there were some places where people used the Y2K issue to get funding for projects that had nothing to do with it. But I know of software that used to use 2-digit years. What mattered was how software handled the "overflow" to the year "00". If it thought of it as the year "2000", then everything was peachy. There may come a day when that software needs to be updated, because of the year 2100, because some places just elected to keep their dates as two digits, where "00" was "2000".
There were some companies that were in the clear years ago. Banks are an example. They had to start using 4-digit years decades ago, because they had to deal with 30-year mortgages and the like.
I agree that Y2K was overhyped, but there was some truth to the notion that it was a crisis. It just depended on which company/institution had the most legacy software that was still critical to their operation. The fact that nothing happened (though famously Blockbuster Video had some MASSIVE overdue charges show up ;) ), IS attributable to the fact that something was done. I heard a computer expert who's been in the business for decades (can't remember the name. As I recall he's the guy who came up with the CTRL-ALT-Delete sequence for rebooting the PC) describe Y2K as one of the few times in history when we had a totally preventable crisis, because it was associated with a date that we all knew was coming. He said that after the year 2000 passes, some software engineers would get calls from people, and the media asking them if, since nothing happened, whether it was all just a hoax. He said, "Perish the thought!" He also described how Y2K software engineers were being overworked, and he predicted that in 1999/2000 that a lot of them would burn out and change jobs, or leave the profession altogether.
I think Crighton had something salient to say about "consensus":
I'
Huh. So what about the killer heat wave in France a couple years ago?
Incidentally, I saw a Discovery Channel show on the Little Ice Age. They attributed the regional cooling to a series of factors. One of which was massive volcanic eruptions, which supposedly put enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to block out some solar radiation. Anyhow, I don't recall them saying that the gulf stream had anything to do with it. You could be right, I just haven't heard that.
And before he was a novelist he was a medical doctor, ie. someone with a scientific background. Granted he's sticking his nose into an area that's not his expertise. Really all I've heard from him is skepticism of the claims (he asks: "Where's the data?"), and criticism of the process by which the conclusions are derived. I think he can talk about that, because no matter what science someone is a part of, the scientific method is universal.
There's a saying in science: "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof". I think that's applicable in this situation.
As best I can tell, the climate scientists who claim that human-caused global warming is real are drawing inductive conclusions from disparate sets of data. In order for me to believe it, I need to see the causal linkages. All that would take is a deductive presentation of the scientific data: X (industrial CO2) has led to Y, has led to Z (global temperature increase). The best that I've seen to date is "CO2 in the atmosphere has increased to X amount, and the global mean temperature has increased 1 degree", and then they assume that this is being created artificially, because the increase in CO2 and temperature seem to corrolate historically with the Industrial Revolution. Their attitude seems to be, asking rhetorically, is "Well what else could cause this?" That's not good enough. Science demands that the data must lead to the conclusion. Part of that process in this case would be to prove that other plausible factors are not contributing to the phenomenon, and that only industrial CO2 is responsible or a major contributing factor.
The best way I can imagine to do this, not being a climate scientist myself, is to look at the industrial inputs, and estimate the CO2 output from that, based on technology available along the timeline they are talking about. Then look at CO2 produced by nature: animal life, decaying matter, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, etc. Develop an analysis based on this data that shows the percentage of the CO2 makeup in the atmosphere emitted from each source. Corrolate that to known data that shows the relationship of X% CO2 in volumes of air to temperature increases in various forms of material like air, water, and earth. Finally, corrolate that to the temperature increase in the global mean temperature. In other words, doing a detailed analysis of what's causing it.
I'm not saying you don't believe this too. Just giving my shpiel on the matter.
He can be called a shill now for where he works, but he basically had the same opinions before coming to Microsoft. He worked for at least a few years as an independent developer, using .Net, Java, and some open source technologies. I know because I've read what he's written since about 2002. He got hired at Microsoft this past May.
As for ZDNet having someone write for them who works for someone else, they've done this several times before. Just recently they published:
"Software Lemmings head for the platform cliff", by Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow Technologies, which wasn't pro-Microsoft.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5886735.html
They have David Berlind and Dana Blankenhorn who advocate for open source every day of the week. Just recently Berlind created quite a buzz on ZDNet by writing favorably about the State of Massachussetts's decision to require all of their office applications use the ODF format, a format Microsoft Office doesn't support, and is unlikely to.
John Carrol and another writer, George Ou, are the only two out of the 16 ZDNet has who are regularly accused of being "shills" for Microsoft.
Gee, I just got done saying this:
"He doesn't spend every show every day beating the snot out of his guests, so the argument that people are just watching for entertainment I think is moot."
...and more, and you come back with this:
Given your appreciation of O'Reilly as entertainment, though not factual enough to be news, would you send him to the White House?
I guess you don't care for having intelligent conversation. I've basically already answered this question in prior posts. Read them more carefully, alright?
His fictional childhood is just the issue you chose to discuss, when I called him a "delusional hack".
I chose to discuss it because you called his story an "imaginary childhood". Whether he's a "delusional hack" is another matter.
He promotes rightwing propaganda about "free trade", and its benefits to American workers....O'Reilly has been with Bush every step of the way, running cover for his policies and perpetual reelection strategies, and he's got lots of people believing them.
You know, there are prominent Democrats who believe strongly in free trade as well, like fmr. president Clinton, fmr. president Carter, fmr. president Kennedy (the Maquilladoras in Mexico were set up under his administration), Sen. Lieberman, Sen. Baucus, I could go on. This argument doesn't really work.
As for him siding with Bush all the time, I'd say that's mostly true. I've watched O'Reilly enough to see that he's been critical of the war in Iraq on occasion. There was a time early in the summer when he was calling for the withdrawal of our troops there in the near future. He said it was due to what he had heard from those in the field, that the Iraqis were not willing to fight for their freedom, and that it was a similar phenomenon as what happened in Vietnam. I was rather surprised to hear him say this, but he did. I haven't heard him say it since, but I believe he's been critical on other fronts as well, like talking about how the provisional government in Iraq doesn't have control of 3 major cities, where the insurgents have set up strongholds.
He's often pointed out, when people have challenged him about not being critical of the administration, that he's often been critical of John Ashcroft. He's also pointed out that more often than not, when Bush or administration officials have wanted to "sit and talk" on TV they go to Larry King Live, not his show. The only recent exception I've seen is when Condoleeza Rice came on for an interview.
As for his "right wing views", he's against capital punishment, he's for gay adoption, and he's for ending the war on drugs (though some might label him "libertarian" for this). These are not all of his views, but you want to call that conservative? Fine. I doubt you'll find many who agree with you.
I don't watch O'Reilly for objective journalism. He calls himself a "news analyst", and he feels free to bring his opinions to the discussion. I've gotten particularly interested in his show sometimes because he'll focus on stories that no one else will, some of them turning out to be very important. It's a mixed bag with him. Sometimes he goes over the top, like he'll talk about a few cases in a state where public officials seem to be acting in unethical ways, and then he'll end his talk with a correspondent by saying, "It's chaos and mayhem down there," or something like that, and meanwhile the area in back of the person he's talking to (in the state in question) looks quite tranquil. When I see that I just brush it off and say to myself, "Boy, that was a doozy." It's almost laughable, but I think it shows how much of a bubble he lives in. In another case he was talking to my state's governor, Gov. Owens, and he made the comment that our state's economy was "booming". Well from the jobs statistics of the time...we may have been doing better than some other states, but we certainly were not "booming". I know that much. If he had said that about a state like Nevada, it would've had more credibility.
So no, I don't see O'Reilly as a reliable source of news all the time, but I find his show to be valuable because of the stories he covers that no one else picks up on. Another thing is that he confronts the views of his guests, and challenges them to back up what they say. I also find that valuable. It's especially interesting when he gets a strong guest on, who has strong opinions, but can back them up well. It's a bit like watching verbal combat, but sometimes he meets his match, and those are the best int
You too?? :)
Hey, you know, this isn't unprecedented. In the first part of the 20th century this sort of thing was common in this country. Even married couples used to live in one of their parents' households. In fact, I remember hearing in the 1990s that according to a survey, 1/3rd of all men aged 30 and under were living with their parents. I assume they were single, but who knows. I couldn't believe it. I was living on my own then, in my 20s, and enjoying it. But that was back in a time when I could afford it...
Instead of giving massive amounts of money to wasteful defense contractors & other government cronies (or having it lost in the rats-mazes of bureaucracy), use all that money to hire LOTS of front-line workers. E.g., teachers, firemen, policemen, social workers, forest rangers, etc. (Note: front-line != bureaucrats.)
I did an analysis recently on the corrolation between job losses and big events that occurred at the time.
From the start of the job losses in March, 2001 to 9/11 we had lost about 1 million jobs. This is attributable to the recession. From September, 2001 to December, 2001, we lost more than 1 million jobs, most of these attributable to the 9/11 attacks. The Enron scandal broke in this time period as well, though just from what I could see of the timing of the Worldcom scandal, at the end of June, 2002, corporate scandals "sting" in the job market, but the bad effects don't last long. My best guess is we lost 111,000 jobs in July, 2002 due to the Worldcom bust. And several hundred thousand jobs were lost in the leadup to the Iraq war.
At the "bottom" of the job market in August, 2003, we had lost 2.7 million jobs. We are now down to a net "deficit" in the payroll survey of around 1 million jobs. 1.7 million net new ones have been created in the last year, and I hear that about 900,000 of the new jobs are in the public sector (ie. government).
If 9/11 had not happened, we would probably be "breaking even" today. The Iraq war might not have happened at the time that it did either (though this is pure speculation), so one can only guess where we'd be now without that.
So even though you may think all the jobs created in the defense sector are useless, national security is very important to the economy. The Iraq war cost us jobs, but in relative terms the job losses due to 9/11 were worse. Yes, there's waste in the defense structure, but where in the government is there not waste??? The budget is always in effect formed by committee, and you know what they say about committee-based efforts.
The most jobs that the economy created in the 90s was around 300,000 per month. That's what we were getting in the first quarter of this year. Granted the job creation rate slowed to a trickle during the summer, barely worth writing home about, but it's picking up again. I heard somewhere that one reason for the slowdown in the growth of the economy during the summer had something to do with Europeans taking their summer vacations, sometimes lasting as long as 6 weeks. I dunno. :)
I remember a couple years ago listening to an interview with a big technology company's CEO (I think it was Intel), who said that in the past the tech sector led the economic recovery. He said that this time it was going to trail the recovery. Other parts of the economy would recover first, and then the tech recovery would come later. Perhaps that is the pattern we are seeing. It's too soon to tell, IMO.
Not to mention the constant "I have a plan for the economy and Iraq but I can't tell you until after I am elected" comments.
I think this is a risky tactic, but a tactic nonetheless. Kerry's betting that most of the people who will support him will do so because he's the only viable alternative to Bush, and since so many people supposedly hate Bush's guts, they'll vote for him on that basis alone. This way he doesn't have to divulge much of his plans. I mean, why get into a debate about your own policies when you don't have to? (that's a rhetorical question) Another thing it allows him to do is launch spitballs (no pun intended) at Bush all day long about all the "screw ups" that angry voters are upset about without much of it coming back to bite him, because he hasn't put forward solid positions of his own.
The problem is if the voters go ahead and elect him without him divulging what he plans to do, we may end up being surprisingly pleased with what he does, or terribly disappointed, and feel bilked in the end, because many will ask, "Why didn't you tell us you were going to do this??" The answer may be embarrassing: "Because you were too pissed off to notice."
Beyond all of this my company has been looking to hire an entry level developer. I've interviewed countless people. All of which have resumes filled with the best sounding buzz words. However, the interviews usually go something like this:
I used to hear similar interview stories at one place I used to work, and this was in the 90s. I remember one story that went like this. The interviewer was looking for someone who knew PL/SQL pretty well. He asked one guy:
Int: How would you rate your PL/SQL skills between 1 and 10?
Guy: I would rate myself a 10.
Int: What effect does an onerror statement (I forget the exact naming of the statement, but it was something like this) have on an opened cursor?
Guy: I don't know.
He came back from the interview asking me the same question, and I answered it correctly. He told me with a laugh (as a compliment), "If that guy's a 10, then you're a...13!" I personally rated myself a 7 or 8, but I was being more honest. :)
I can sympathize with your position. I'm in the same boat. During the 90s I wasn't even helping the "Internet Revolution" along. I got my CS degree, and wrote client/server apps. for enterprises. I can write a mean GUI-based or command-line-based database app. in C or C++, but no one wants to hire me for that. I've learned some HTML, and I've even delved quite a ways into C#, Windows Forms, ASP.Net, and ADO.Net, but I guess that disqualifies me because "I learned it on my own". I can't say that I've created an n-tier application, or an enterprise app. that uses SQL Server. Maybe that does disqualify me at this time. I've been to .Net user group meetings though with people who are actually using it for their work, and I know more about .Net than they do sometimes. Only thing is it's awfully difficult to convince an employer that I'm even minimally competent in these skills, because I can't point to a paid job where I've used them.
Before any one starts trolling about how great Bush is here is a pre-emptive rebuttal.
Yeah you sure are getting out in front. I haven't seen any "look how great Bush is" messages on here yet. I sense that you are a troll yourself...
The economy wen't down on Bush's watch.
I personally don't give presidents credit or scorn for the economy. It seems no matter what a president's policies are the economy just tends to create a lot of jobs, or take them away, all by itself. For ex., Reagan cut top marginal rates on taxes, the economy created 22 million jobs during his tenure. Clinton raised taxes, the economy created 22 million jobs during his tenure. They were both free traders. "Same difference"!
Terrorists struck on Bush's watch.
Erm, terrorists struck on Clinton's watch too. The first bombing of the WTC occurred in February, 1993. Later we learned it was Al Qaida's first strike against the U.S. There was hardly time for him to do anything about it, but hey, as long as we're "keeping score"... Actually, a more factual analysis shows that the terrorists seem to successfully strike within the U.S. whenever there's a transition to a new administration, no matter what party comes to power.
Outsourcing increased due to tax incentives on Bush's watch.
Oh please! That tax exemption for foreign investment has been on the books for decades. There have been at least 3 attempts to repeal or modify this exemption in congress over the past few years. None of the attempts has succeeded. I believe the most recent attempt this year was sponsored by a Republican (yeah, imagine that), but it still didn't pass, and John Kerry hasn't lifted a finger in congress to help it pass either.
By being the commander and chief one has a exacting duty to this country and responsibility to do every thing possible to maintain balance, peace and prosperity.
I encourage you to read "The Good Life and Its Discontents", by Robert J. Samuelson sometime. He shows where such uninformed opinions like yours are wrong, and gives a realistic view of the limits of government's ability to solve such problems.
O'Reilly's "proof" that he grew up in Levittown was claimed to be a deed to a house there, but it's really a mortgage certificate. So he's obviously lying, in strict terms.
Alright. Thanks for clarifying what the document was. I guess he put it on his site for closer inspection, which to me diminishes the charge that he's lying about it. You see, lying connotes intent to deceive. If he truly meant to lie about it, he would've shown it on his program, but not put it anywhere where anyone could confirm what he was talking about. This reminds me of the whole frackas over his claim that "Hard Copy" won a Peabody award. It turns out it won a Polk award, admittedly after he left the show. What this, and your clarification of the document in question shows me is that while he may be "in the ballpark" on these sorts of things, he tends to be lax on the details, almost as if he doesn't care about such things, or he has trouble remembering them.
But such a certificate is not conclusive - mortgages in 1950s Long Island for prefab houses were routinely issued while the actual house was being built, before the specific unit was even chosen; such documents can include the address of the office or a model home in the development, a prior residence, or even a nearby existing address where the post office can deliver mail. It's pretty flimsy evidence of an entire childhood, which would produce pictures, yearbooks, letters, neighbors, a whole life of references.
Okay. This is interesting historical information, but I don't see how this discredits the idea that he lived in Levittown as a child. From my read of the document (I followed your link), it says that the "mortgagor" is in Levittown, and the "mortgagee" is a bank in some other part of New York. You say that it could have been a mere mailing address where mail could be delivered, but I don't see how this contributes to your argument at all. There are only two addresses on the document, so I don't see how that creates any ambiguity. Secondly, in order to believe that it's just a false front, you would have to believe that O'Reilly knew about this document when he first started talking about Levittown, and only brought it up later when some critic challenged his story. He claims that he did not know of the document's existence before finally finding it earlier this year.
On your second point that it's "pretty flimsy evidence of an entire childhood", do you really expect him to produce pictures and such? I certainly don't. To me it doesn't matter so much that I know exactly where he grew up and exactly how he lived. I mean, heck, President Clinton claimed he grew up in Hope, Arkansas, when in fact he only spent a few years there as a baby, and then the family moved to Hot Springs, where he spent the rest of his childhood and teen years. The only reason I even cared to hear about this story is it provided a window into the man's character and view of the world, due to the different flavor of Hot Springs. Otherwise I could've cared less. To make more out of it is just an attempt at character assassination, IMO.
His homey origin story is invoked in statements like "I started out with nothing" and "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale" (to the New York Observer). Even if his imagined childhood in Levittown were real, we're talking about a suburb of New York City, in prosperous and booming Long Island, where his father was an accountant.
I see your point that O'Reilly probably was better off than he claims, but, just to add some perspective, you have to look at his environs, New York City, a very expensive place all around. I'm just putting this out there as a supposition, but perhaps in his mind, while he was growing up, he was pretty low on the economic scale when compared to the other economic echelons that existed in his immediate surroundings of the time. So his father was an accountant. Does that mean his family could afford to live high on the hog? I don't kno
Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure
Actually it does support infrastructure to some extent, since foreign profits often come back, one way or another, as support for our government debt, which can then be used to finance infrastructural improvements, if our government chooses to use it for that purpose. A significant portion, though I don't think the majority, of our federal government's debt is financed by foreigners. In fact, China and India both have significant holdings in U.S. government bonds, as did Japan more than 10 years ago.
Bottom line: Will complain about outsourcing, how unAmerican it is, etc.. But when you actually ask them to vote with their wallets, they are no better than corporations!
I agree. Even Lou Dobbs is this way, to a certain extent. He was on Bill Moyer's show, "Now", recently, and he went on and on about the evils of corporations outsourcing jobs. Then Moyers asked him if when he gives financial advice to his clients, whether he recommends people invest in companies that outsource or not. Dobbs said he doesn't discriminate on that basis. He wants to find the best deals for his clients. Makes sense to me, but I find it hypocritical of him to be railing against the outsourcers day in and day out, and to keep referring to his list of "the companies that are outsourcing America". I'm just a bit amazed he doesn't think for a moment about the possibility that perhaps the reason some of the companies he recommends to his clients are good buys is because they are outsourcing jobs! And if they weren't, perhaps their financial performance would be so bad he would look at them as if they were complete junk and not recommend them at all. Does he think that if a company can't perform well without outsourcing that then, well, that company just shouldn't perform well? It should just accept its lot in life and continue losing customers, and suffer under low valuations indefinitely, perhaps even go out of business? Gee, that would help. Put more people out of work. Doesn't make sense to me.
Americans want their own jobs protected, but then turn around and buy the imported item that's cheaper. And that *IS* a free market - Americans are deciding that saving a few bucks is better than employing other americans, and THAT is why jobs are outsourced.
I agree. I think this same mentality is the reason why we have federal budget deficits just about every year. We want the government to provide us with all these programs so that we as a society can pretend that this will solve significant problems (sometimes they do, usually they don't), but then when the bill comes due, well, we don't like paying for a lot of it. And so the deficit eats up the government's credit line.
The economy, however, doesn't work on this basis, except on the individual level (credit cards, for ex.). You want a high quality product at a low price? Fine, but there's going to be a cost you're going to have to pay somewhere else, and you can't avoid it. If our federal government worked consistently on this zero-sum basis, some might like it, but I think it would make most people gasp in horror.
You're recommending we send a delusional hack, who aspires to an imaginary childhood in Levittown, NY, to the White House?
O'Reilly did grow up in Levittown, despite what Al Franken says. O'Reilly managed to dig up the old title to the house where he grew up, and displayed it a few times on his show (guess you weren't watching). Yep, he grew up there. Sorry you were misled.
If you hate what's happening to the American workforce, go to a union, and ask them how to help organize your fellow info workers. That's the only politics that's ever protected American labor. It's no accident that such a successful movement would send O'Reilly into a spasmatic fury.
And this will help the American IT workforce how? Just because a company is unionized doesn't prevent that company from outsourcing work and putting the unionized staff out of work. IMO, unions work best when they have a "captive audience". In other words, the business has limited mobility. Retail is a perfect example. There's little chance that most of the work in a store is going to be outsourced. It can't realistically be done. Though with RFID coming down the pike, we'll probably see retail stores that need fewer workers one day.
I have a liberal friend who votes consistently Democrat and he doesn't like unions. He's told me why in the past. He's seen how they set up rules to stifle creativity and productivity in the workplace, just so more union employees will be ensured they have (pointless) jobs. But hey, it's a paycheck, right? Since he likes a work environment that encourages creativity and productivity, he doesn't like the environment that unions create. I tend to agree with him.