Yeah, blame it all on the forigners. If the bottom has fallen out of telecoms, kick a few hard working immigrants out of thier jobs. Thats much more convenient then retraining yourself, or taking a job thats below your (at this point very inflated) expectations. The fact is that people is software have been riding the gravy train for the last few years... and if you've got skills that are in demand, you're still on that train. It just that the skills you need are now broader than just C++/Java. You need domain knowledge, knowledge of good software engineering practice, etc, and you need to be able to prove you know what you're doing. At the hieght of dot com, anyone with a pulse who had read a 21 days book was being hired. The bar is much higher now.
The other thing to remeber is that proportionally just as many H1Bs have lost thier jobs, and they're in worse positions than the locals... In a lot of cases after they are let go, they have 10 days to leave the country.
By the logic used in this article, we should give give carte blanche to some dictator to 'clean up' the US. 'Someone' should clean up all the special interests. Someone should stop the endemic corruption. Just pray to god that 'someone' doesn't decide they don't like the way you look.
I don't think I've ever read an article that more explicitly advocated fascism. Dressing it up in starwars doesn't make it any more amusing.
It's not that they're intent on proving it; it's just that there's little or no evidence of any large settlements before then.
No, there isn't a whole set of people who made their bread and butter on one set of theories, and whose egos have expanded to enormous size. They have no vested interest in preserving the status quo. And there is no peer review, by which the old established theories get entrenched.
All science at the high level is done in spite of the politics that goes on in academia and everywhere else. Probably the examples most familiar to the average/. reader are those dealing with the catholic church. And while today, you wouldn't burn someone at the stake, you could certainly deny him funding, snow job his work, or just attack him personally in academic circles.
In this vien one might think, well there is no evidence, we would have looked and found it. But have we infact looked and found it? Or did funding some piece of revolutionary research not fit in somebody's personal agenda?
Its not all this black, but this sort of thing goes on much more than any academic would like to admit.
News flash: A new bill is making its way through the sentate. Proposed by the senator from Disney, the Unlawful Music Memorization Protection Act (UMMPA) would protect the recording industry from violations of copyright by people who know all the words to any given song, or can hum it. Extra penalties are to proposed for people who can sing. The new law would levey a charge of 10$US per word for each word of a song that a person can remeber. Harsher penalties would be incurred for humming the tune. Under the new law people would be required to report to thier local music stores on the first of next year to be examined for song lyrics they can remeber and melodies they know. The bill would also transfer the copyright for any existing or newly created piece music to the MPAA, to be held in trust on behalf of the artists.
I love the logic, the moment @home shuts down it won't be just hemoraging cash. It will be hemoraging users too. Once those users find alternative service, they won't go back to @home unless @home makes them a really sweet deal. That will just make the cost of starting back up even higher.
Then strictly speaking, there's nothing wrong with me ripping the song off of a CD and putting it on file sharing services because I don't even have a signed contract with you.
Unless some prexisting law forbids it.
Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King....Just how do you figure the world's going to change if people don't bitch about it?
All the people mentioned knew just what they were getting into, and what the possible consequences might be. They chose thier paths and were willing to accept what might happen to them. Picking a career in music, and complaining about the choice after the fact, doesn't put you anywhere near the same category. You have to go into any endevor with your eyes open, or else you are liable to get burnt badly. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you get screwed, and sometimes you have to go do something else.
They represent the kind of people who would gladly pay someone 500 bucks for "Louie Louie" and make millions of dollars from it without thinking of sharing it with the songwriter.
Strictly speaking there's nothing wrong with me paying you 500 bucks for 'Louie Louie', and then selling it to millions of people for 16 bucks a pop.
Under our current system there is also nothing wrong with adjusting the laws to suit your favor. If you muck too much with the laws, the plebs revolt -but thats part of the way the world works too.
Finally, if the shoe was on the other foot, you would be doing whatever you could to protect your paycheque. You would be just as afraid of the unknown, and of the guy who would might grow to be the bigger fish and leave you with nothing.
Don't get me wrong, pay back is a bitch, if you trample people... But as best I can tell you're jsut bitching about how unfair the world is in general.
--locust
The mathematical sense of language equivalence is academic.
I agree that language ease of use is not just a function of programmer skill. But I think its more of a function of the programmers background. Consider, Java. It syntax is designed to look a lot like C and C++, to make it easier to use for people coming from those languages. While the syntax of Java may appear close enough to someone who has done all thier programming functionally in C, object orientation, exception handling, and so forth are still foriegn. By cloaking them in a familiar syntax you make it easier for them to learn, but drop that programmer into an interpreted smalltalk environemnt, or throw prolog at them, and they will be much more lost.
The analogy has to be made to natural languages. In english we 'get on a bus' where in fact we ride inside it. In other languages you do in fact 'get in the bus'. More particularly, in navaho (sp?) a man cannot be kicked by a horse, he allows the horse to kick him. In that language the horse cannot be though of as having intent. The same sorts of things are true for programming languages. In some langauges particular thoughts are easier to express than others, and lend themselves to specific ways of thinking. In C no matter how hard I try I cannot encapsulate... Yet C remains a perfectly satisfactory way of expressing a great number of things. At times it is expressiveness superior to languages that do provide encapsulation.
When you pick the right tool for the job, you are picking it based on what you know, and that boils down to a qualitative decision based on how you are used to thinking.
Think of your favorite language, it doesn't have to be a programming language... Lets say sanskrit.. Now fill in the blanks.
I've read and written quite a lot of ______ and other ______-like languages, not only in school, but also in the real world. I've spent much time reading, understanding and modifying huge complex ____ systems written by other people, and I don't think it's unreadable at all. Well written _____ code is extremely elegant, and a joy to read.
Readability is a function of the level of understanding of both the person reading and the person writing. If I write in a very verbose style I could make my code completely unreadable. You may not be able to fit all of one particularly ostentiated thought in your head. If I write code in a very terse style same thing, but now you need to do too much expansion. This particular argument about the joys of _____ is moot. If you wish to argue on this level it must be about the expresiveness of a language. Show thoughts that are easy to express in one language but not in another -a problem that appears in both human and computer languages.
Can we really point at companies that failed and say "they were stupid"?
Experience dictates that if you have the right people with sound business experience -and I mean across the board, engineering, marketting, finance, etc- you can make money producing shit on a stick. If you have a good product you will simply make a whole lot more money.
I don't think its Afghanistan they're after, but rather the networking resources that the terrorists use in first world powers. I wonder if there is a #osama channel somewhere? Seriously, with the ubiquity of internet access both for private individuals and students it stands to reason that a terror network would use the internet to communicate.
Watching the news, all of the stations, particularly the military correspondents (Gen. Schwarzkopf included) talked about the complete failure of our intelligence community to provide us with any warning about this attack. Reporters asking "how could such a thing have happened with no warning," "haven't we infiltrated these groups," "how can you maintain secrecy on something this widespread," etc.
A co-worker and I did the math on this. You need a minum of 4 people, 8 for better success. They have to coordinate... But: If they are people working at air ports (in bagadge handling or cleaning) they can get a weapon(s) on a plane. Security at US airports isn't exactly tight. Then you need someone who can fly an aircraft enough to steer, not take it off or land it. After take off, the armed party goes to the front bathroom, slips into the cockpit kills both pilots, and locks the door (or there is another person there for crowd control). You need one, but more likely two people per plane. In a country of 300 million, with our freedoms you have to look out for 8 guys.
It won't be the police that demand it. It will be the insurance companies. They have a profit incentive to know if: you are driving regularly through a bad nieghborhood, driving too fast, driving farther than you tell them you drive to work. All of these things impinge upon the chances they will have to have to pay you if your car is stolen, crashed, etc. Further as large scale computing power becomes cheaper it will be come more practical to generate much more detailed actuarial tables that reflect these changes. These will translate into higher profits in the reinsurance market (insurers get insured against having to pay claims).
Finally, when it comes down to having an extra 20 bucks a month to feed your kids, or having that extra bit of privacy, I'm pretty sure where most people will come down.
Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and Alan Cox could probably code in one weekend what it would take
a team of coders a week to do, yet they at best are not even making twice what an intern at a Fortuen 500
makes. Then to add insult to injury the overpaid MBAs who have wrecked the tech industry now have the
nerve to call them Primma Donnas.
Each of these people are great programmers, but more important to thier success, they are good managers (and its unfair to call them primma donnas!). After a project grows beyond a one person some form of communication must be established, and some chain of command must be established. Someone in the team has to take the responsiblity for managing whats going to go in, whats going to go out and so on. Someone has to direct the effort, and keep it on track. A lot of that work are things that most programmers don't want to do.
In short if you want a successful product (and linux is a product) you need to:
1. Identify your goal.
2. Identify the most cost effective way of achieving it (wrt time, money, etc).
3. Execute according to this plan.
4. Adjust your plan and execution to compensate for changes in the conditions on the ground to get to your goal.
The manager is responsible for keeping all this going.
I will trade a primma donna for a solid engineer anyday. My experice is that a primma donna does not have the where-with-all to go through this process. They are bored or frustrated by steps that you have to take to communicate, and to ensure quality in a production system. So you can keep 'em.
The article says that the bots are set up to self upgrade from the IRC channel. So hide the cleanup program in the upgrade, and send it to the channel. Hell, innoculate the machine against sub7 while youre at it. Worst case put a message on the user's desktop "You've been HaX0r3d!".
Been there, done that. Doesn't matter what your personality is, or how much you know. It matters how much you fit in. In this sort of situation the higher ups are intimidated by the technology and the people presenting it. They are much more likely to listen to someone who they can (at least ostensibly) relate to.
Number four - xp should be given out for a number of situations, not just conquest in battle... Sell a hijacked
star destroyer get a million xp and the chance to become a rebel admiral.
Here's something I didn't see in the FAQ. How do they plan to do ship to ship combat, or getting from planet to planet? One of the coolest things about running around the starwars universe is the ships. I don't particularly care to play a jedi, but getting into the rogue squadron or trying to out run/fast talk imperials as a smuggler, would be really cool.
Corporations are ultimately accountable to the consumer.
If the consumer stops buying their
products, the corporation must change their business model to meet their needs or go out of business.
Or they can try to change the laws (a la DCMA) through paying off politicians, so that thier business model is unaffected.
An entity can not be accountable to another if no framework exists by which it can be accountable. That modern framework is the law. Where the entity can alter the law, so that it avoids punishment, that entity is no longer accountable. Also where an entity does not have the same access to the law, as another, no accountability can exist.
he magazine explored their
concerns and the reasons for their popularity amongst a certain portion of the public.
As I recall, in the end they explained why the concerns were unfounded/mitigated. As a pro- free-trade/world-trade publication, they must write this story with this conclusion in mind.
I agree that the economist is a very well writen magazine, but remeber no matter how good the writing you are still being sold thier company line.
Being a British paper, they do a good job of getting the news across, neutrally
The economist has its own biases. It is a capitalist publication. These views are evident in its editorial policy, the subject matter it persues (the stories that are not writen), and the recomendations of its columnist on given issues. This is not to say its a bad publication... Simply be aware, that just because a you are not being beaten over the head with propaganda your are being given an objective view of a situation.
Slashdot Mirror
The other thing to remeber is that proportionally just as many H1Bs have lost thier jobs, and they're in worse positions than the locals... In a lot of cases after they are let go, they have 10 days to leave the country.
--locust
I didn't realize Al Gore read /.
I don't think I've ever read an article that more explicitly advocated fascism. Dressing it up in starwars doesn't make it any more amusing.
--locust
The moderation options need a '+/-1: he asked for it'.
--locust
No, there isn't a whole set of people who made their bread and butter on one set of theories, and whose egos have expanded to enormous size. They have no vested interest in preserving the status quo. And there is no peer review, by which the old established theories get entrenched.
All science at the high level is done in spite of the politics that goes on in academia and everywhere else. Probably the examples most familiar to the average /. reader are those dealing with the catholic church. And while today, you wouldn't burn someone at the stake, you could certainly deny him funding, snow job his work, or just attack him personally in academic circles.
In this vien one might think, well there is no evidence, we would have looked and found it. But have we infact looked and found it? Or did funding some piece of revolutionary research not fit in somebody's personal agenda?
Its not all this black, but this sort of thing goes on much more than any academic would like to admit.
--locust
Welcome to Iraq. Please download your copy of sadam@home...
--locust
News flash: A new bill is making its way through the sentate. Proposed by the senator from Disney, the Unlawful Music Memorization Protection Act (UMMPA) would protect the recording industry from violations of copyright by people who know all the words to any given song, or can hum it. Extra penalties are to proposed for people who can sing. The new law would levey a charge of 10$US per word for each word of a song that a person can remeber. Harsher penalties would be incurred for humming the tune. Under the new law people would be required to report to thier local music stores on the first of next year to be examined for song lyrics they can remeber and melodies they know. The bill would also transfer the copyright for any existing or newly created piece music to the MPAA, to be held in trust on behalf of the artists.
Time to starting looking for a new provider.
--locust
Unless some prexisting law forbids it.
Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King....Just how do you figure the world's going to change if people don't bitch about it?
All the people mentioned knew just what they were getting into, and what the possible consequences might be. They chose thier paths and were willing to accept what might happen to them. Picking a career in music, and complaining about the choice after the fact, doesn't put you anywhere near the same category. You have to go into any endevor with your eyes open, or else you are liable to get burnt badly. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you get screwed, and sometimes you have to go do something else.
--locust
Strictly speaking there's nothing wrong with me paying you 500 bucks for 'Louie Louie', and then selling it to millions of people for 16 bucks a pop.
Under our current system there is also nothing wrong with adjusting the laws to suit your favor. If you muck too much with the laws, the plebs revolt -but thats part of the way the world works too.
Finally, if the shoe was on the other foot, you would be doing whatever you could to protect your paycheque. You would be just as afraid of the unknown, and of the guy who would might grow to be the bigger fish and leave you with nothing.
Don't get me wrong, pay back is a bitch, if you trample people... But as best I can tell you're jsut bitching about how unfair the world is in general.
--locust
I agree that language ease of use is not just a function of programmer skill. But I think its more of a function of the programmers background. Consider, Java. It syntax is designed to look a lot like C and C++, to make it easier to use for people coming from those languages. While the syntax of Java may appear close enough to someone who has done all thier programming functionally in C, object orientation, exception handling, and so forth are still foriegn. By cloaking them in a familiar syntax you make it easier for them to learn, but drop that programmer into an interpreted smalltalk environemnt, or throw prolog at them, and they will be much more lost.
The analogy has to be made to natural languages. In english we 'get on a bus' where in fact we ride inside it. In other languages you do in fact 'get in the bus'. More particularly, in navaho (sp?) a man cannot be kicked by a horse, he allows the horse to kick him. In that language the horse cannot be though of as having intent. The same sorts of things are true for programming languages. In some langauges particular thoughts are easier to express than others, and lend themselves to specific ways of thinking. In C no matter how hard I try I cannot encapsulate... Yet C remains a perfectly satisfactory way of expressing a great number of things. At times it is expressiveness superior to languages that do provide encapsulation.
When you pick the right tool for the job, you are picking it based on what you know, and that boils down to a qualitative decision based on how you are used to thinking.
--locust
I've read and written quite a lot of ______ and other ______-like languages, not only in school, but also in the real world. I've spent much time reading, understanding and modifying huge complex ____ systems written by other people, and I don't think it's unreadable at all. Well written _____ code is extremely elegant, and a joy to read.
Readability is a function of the level of understanding of both the person reading and the person writing. If I write in a very verbose style I could make my code completely unreadable. You may not be able to fit all of one particularly ostentiated thought in your head. If I write code in a very terse style same thing, but now you need to do too much expansion. This particular argument about the joys of _____ is moot. If you wish to argue on this level it must be about the expresiveness of a language. Show thoughts that are easy to express in one language but not in another -a problem that appears in both human and computer languages.
--locust
Experience dictates that if you have the right people with sound business experience -and I mean across the board, engineering, marketting, finance, etc- you can make money producing shit on a stick. If you have a good product you will simply make a whole lot more money.
--locust
It costs money to train people to use Windows too. Have you ever seen the price list for MCS* trainging courses + exams.
In the college scenario, the article takes no account that many colleges make these decisions based on what the students use.
Beg to differ. Most colleges use a) what ever they've been using forever, or b) what the profs who have funding want to use for a given course.
--locust
I don't think its Afghanistan they're after, but rather the networking resources that the terrorists use in first world powers. I wonder if there is a #osama channel somewhere? Seriously, with the ubiquity of internet access both for private individuals and students it stands to reason that a terror network would use the internet to communicate.
--locust
A co-worker and I did the math on this. You need a minum of 4 people, 8 for better success. They have to coordinate... But: If they are people working at air ports (in bagadge handling or cleaning) they can get a weapon(s) on a plane. Security at US airports isn't exactly tight. Then you need someone who can fly an aircraft enough to steer, not take it off or land it. After take off, the armed party goes to the front bathroom, slips into the cockpit kills both pilots, and locks the door (or there is another person there for crowd control). You need one, but more likely two people per plane. In a country of 300 million, with our freedoms you have to look out for 8 guys.
--
locust
Finally, when it comes down to having an extra 20 bucks a month to feed your kids, or having that extra bit of privacy, I'm pretty sure where most people will come down.
--locust
Each of these people are great programmers, but more important to thier success, they are good managers (and its unfair to call them primma donnas!). After a project grows beyond a one person some form of communication must be established, and some chain of command must be established. Someone in the team has to take the responsiblity for managing whats going to go in, whats going to go out and so on. Someone has to direct the effort, and keep it on track. A lot of that work are things that most programmers don't want to do.
In short if you want a successful product (and linux is a product) you need to:
- 1. Identify your goal.
- 2. Identify the most cost effective way of achieving it (wrt time, money, etc).
- 3. Execute according to this plan.
- 4. Adjust your plan and execution to compensate for changes in the conditions on the ground to get to your goal.
The manager is responsible for keeping all this going.I will trade a primma donna for a solid engineer anyday. My experice is that a primma donna does not have the where-with-all to go through this process. They are bored or frustrated by steps that you have to take to communicate, and to ensure quality in a production system. So you can keep 'em.
--locust
--locust.
--locust
Here's something I didn't see in the FAQ. How do they plan to do ship to ship combat, or getting from planet to planet? One of the coolest things about running around the starwars universe is the ships. I don't particularly care to play a jedi, but getting into the rogue squadron or trying to out run/fast talk imperials as a smuggler, would be really cool.
--locust
If the consumer stops buying their products, the corporation must change their business model to meet their needs or go out of business.
Or they can try to change the laws (a la DCMA) through paying off politicians, so that thier business model is unaffected.
An entity can not be accountable to another if no framework exists by which it can be accountable. That modern framework is the law. Where the entity can alter the law, so that it avoids punishment, that entity is no longer accountable. Also where an entity does not have the same access to the law, as another, no accountability can exist.
--locust
As I recall, in the end they explained why the concerns were unfounded/mitigated. As a pro- free-trade/world-trade publication, they must write this story with this conclusion in mind.
I agree that the economist is a very well writen magazine, but remeber no matter how good the writing you are still being sold thier company line.
--locust
The economist has its own biases. It is a capitalist publication. These views are evident in its editorial policy, the subject matter it persues (the stories that are not writen), and the recomendations of its columnist on given issues. This is not to say its a bad publication... Simply be aware, that just because a you are not being beaten over the head with propaganda your are being given an objective view of a situation.
--locust
Could have been worse. You could have started reading wheel of time when the first book came out. What was that...? 1990? 1991?
--locust