FAA uses web to introduce millions of morons world-wide to a new and fun recreational use of their laser pointers. Pilot community thrilled. News at eleven.
The problem is not lack of Programmers. The problem is managers who think a developer needs many years of experience with a specific language or technology to be able to work with it. I am sure many programmers would be willing to work on their COBOL systems, but without the required "10 years of experience with COBOL" on their resume, they would never be hired.
True. A lot of programmers wouldn't need 10 years of experience in COBOL. May be ten years of experience in any programming using different languages and paradigms would be enough. On the other hand some programmers would need 10 years of experience in COBOL to be able to work on a given job.
A lot of managers can't tell the difference, luckily some do. The others have to rely on matching buzzwords on offered CVs to buzzwords on RFQs.
How much longer are we going to rely on the bald space marine? Or how much longer are we going to rely on the Elven female warrior whose armor barely covers her breasts? Is that all we can do with this medium or is there more that can be done?" I think some people just don't push themselves hard enough.
I think it's pretty obvious that the problem is not people pushing themselves to softly... 95% of all characters in any popular media are heavily clicheed. Even though every single game designer, author, movie director, musician and whatnot would really like to do better. But you don't get project funding for better, you get funding for dependable and predictable sales. As "they" say: It's a hit driven business (with "it" being just about everything).
Characters must always meet expectations so that no one changes the channel because they don't understand the plot anymore after fetching beer from the fridge. Consequently any clearly identifiable group is badly misrepresented in popular media.
Also, Slashdot readers, you just have to love this quote from the article:
I mean, there's hip-hop in Cuba, there's hip-hop in Poland, there's hip-hop in the Soviet Union;
It's also about educating the employees more than anything IT can do to protect the network. If I can call one of your employees and pretend to be the remote helpdesk, and say that I need your password so I can install some software on your computer, and they give me the password, I am in your network.
In other news:
"That's not our problem", says area CIO. "Our problem is educating our helpdesk, that if someone calls and says he's an employee and needs a new password for his account, they shouldn't just give out a password without further identification. "
Seen it happen in three companies in the last 5 years. Each company with more than 2000 employees & one of them a fortune-500 company.
Instead they're encapsulating the user generated stuff within their own domain where they can use it to support their ad money generating bread and butter. Not embedding this stuff within their own output would be more of a threat.
And they will still use all the best content in their mainstream news. You grant them cost free rights to all of the content you submit. It's in the terms of use. Consequently all of the really valuable footage can still be broadcast on CNN, in addition the stuff that has been found to work on ireport.com by popular vote.
It's perfect. They create a pre-screening room that tests all kinds of content and also makes some money, generates a few content gems (bridge collapse footage, etc.) every once in a while and that doesn't affect the serious/professional-flavour of their premium brand. Still they exploit the top content in all of their programs.
Now to really change the news business: Can't someone create a popular site that does auctions of valuable cell phone footage, with news companies as bidders? Stop giving away your content for free, people!
That's pretty cool, but what about non-alphabetic systems, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?
Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic system. The study might be really interesting there because Korean letters are always aggregated in blocks of two or three letters. It's part of the way they write. I have no idea if Koreans read these blocks as one.
It's also a cool system because it was designed from scratch and follows a number of logical rules that makes it comparatively easy to learn (the alphabet... not the language). You can learn reading basic Hangul while on the plane to Korea.
The wikipedia article is quite good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Define an appropriate granularity of your actions that you expose to the client.
Ensure that each action block results in something the client wants.
Do not do whatever your client wants you to do inside of an action block.
In time & material based projects an action block length may be atomic (client advises you on microscopic action, e.g. client says: Now press return. Now write 10 ?"Hello World").
In fixed price projects action block lengths can be defined by milestones (possibly with deliverables). Communication during action blocks may be a matter of tactics (e.g. misrepresenting project state as better or worse than in reality if necessary).
Client triggered course changes during action blocks in fixed price projects result in billable change requests.
Yes, insightful. (A)D&D rules are about imagining how much fun playing this game would be.
Reading rules, looking at monsters in the monster manual, discussing adventures and planning and planning and planning all those great games you are going to play.
The actual game experience never lives up to the imagination. They sell content that inspires dreams of games.
All of the large financial institutions I know of (pretty much all that count) are hilt-deep in open source, and it will take more then a "memo from a lawyer" to remove all open source software.
Dude, all frigging patent offices are hilt-deep in open source. At least the ones I know in Europe.
I think they should use steamrollers, or the equivalent thereof, to clear mine fields. Those solid steel drums can be built thick enough to withstand any ordinary land mine.
We need something stronger. We need to understand the principles of graphic design.
No, we don't. At least not if "we" are supposed to be IT professionals.
May be the statement is true for small teams working on internal projects (intranet applications). But seriously, the article has a very hobbyist ring to it.
Everybody working on larger web-based applications is used to cooperating with external designers. There may be different views on who has to produce CSS/HTML (or whatever markup code) from photoshop designs (same issue with who does the "usability"), but in general there is not too much danger that graphic designers somehow take over anything apart from trivial programming tasks (e.g. writing markup code). Unless of course they are looking for a complete carreer change. I've seen that happen. But after being accepted as full-fledged developers, they somehow never got to do any designing any more.
Anyhow, any sufficiently large project will involve a 50-page layout spec, corporate identity definition or a bunch of obnoxious product managers who will see to it, that you - the develevoper - won't get too much say in where anything is located on the screen. And that is okay by me, as division of labor has proven to be a pretty succesful concept over the last, say, ten-thousand years.
I find the whole idea of "graphics designers somehow at war with IT people" a little strange. In the projects I work in/have worked in graphics designers are fellow-suppliers who have to handle the same basic problems of budget & time-constraints that we have. At the end of the proverbial day they usually make good companions for discussing the idiosyncracies of the current project over a few beers.
This is actually a fairly clear cut situation. If your code is a derivative of GPLed code, then the derivative is under the GPL, regardless of any other agreements..[...]
Okay so far,...
If it were any other way, contract law would crumble. Imagine a world where some random Contract [...] can arbitrarily change the terms and conditions of some other random Contract Y .
True [1], but you can easily sign a contract X with entity A that forbids that you sign contract Y with B. Then you go ahead and still sign contract Y with entity B. The contracts may be contradictory. But still both may be binding.
A typical case is an executive (working for company A) with full power to close deals up to a certain limit, say 100,000,- EUR. If this guy signs a deal with a volume of 200,000,- EUR (with company B) the contract may be binding for his company [2]. If the company looses money due to this, B can still insist on the contract to be executed.
To resolve the situation and to keep smoke from coming from everyone's ears - the executive becomes liable personally to his company for the loss. But that is of no concern to B. B doesn't care that the executive already had a contradictory contract with A.
Bottom line: The employer in the article can argue that the guy was forbidden to use GPL'ed code by the IP regulation in his contract with the employer. The GPL is valid for the produced software. But the coder is liable for any losses to his employer.
[1] There is a standing expression for this in German "Keine Verträge zu Lasten Dritter" (no contracts at the expenses of third parties) - what's the corresponding expression in English?
[2] Again... IANAL and I am not even English. So someone help me out with "Innenverhältnis" und "Aussenverhältnis".
I honestly think it's sickening to imagine people willing to spend this much money on something that isn't real. That's just my opinion though.
Sorry? The value of the money spent isn't real, either.
People treating imaginary stuff as if it were "real" is a normal thing. Actually, our entire society is based on the fact that people do that.
Consider these simple examples just to get you started:
Laws
Borders
The concept of "owning" things
I can very well imagine a number of reasons why it can be considered sickening to trade everquest characters for that much money. For example you might argue that it is decadent. But the fact that everquest characters are not "real" is nothing special.
You can attach boosters to anything. It just costs more.
Bravo! Bravo! Encore!
From now on this line shall be known as my personal motto! It shall be enscribed in the family coat of arms. It shall be engraved in the family ring. It shall greet the trespasser when approaching the gates of the family manor.
A timeless truth to live by. Bold words to guide us.
If some off-shore company was hired to process millions of government-held records, wouldn't the safest way be to let that company only produce software for that purpose, and 'apply' that software locally?
Can anyone give some compelling reasons why you would move that data itself (knowing that it's privacy-sensitive)?
Because "applying the software" is a process that requires manual interaction and is repeated constantly. It's not something that is done once and then it's over. The data will also be poorly formatted in parts and may need heavy reformatting. So, it requires people (all of the time until no more data is coming in or the world runs dry) - hence outsourcing.
Outsourcing the operation of software systems (aka "business process outsourcing") is a common thing.
The fact is, there IS NO OTHER SIDE. [...] and scientists who say otherwise are hired by
special interest groups or oil companies.
(italics added by me)
Mhmmm, aahhhhh, I don't even know where to begin... It's so hard to resist writing something really sarcastic... okay, but I won't.
I think you should point at the "scientific process" and at refereed papers. If your claim is right then there should be minimal amounts of refereed papers claiming the contra-point (when compared to the papers claiming your point). But certainly "oil companies" and "special interest groups" don't really qualify as "NO OTHER SIDE". Especially not in all caps.
Also don't get me started with puns going into the direction "siggraph and how they secretly dominate the world's oil industry".
[... Examples of how code reviews slowed down this guy's work without doing any good...]
If this happens to you on a regular basis then you are probably a better-than-average developer. Which is just fine as long as we find a way to make your work more average. And code reviews seem to do the job.
Seriously, the productivity spread between developers (20 times as effective... adding more people... Thank you Mr. DeMarco) is what a lot of very strict process models and practices (such as code reviews) really attack - and it is a good thing, too. Because otherwise developer workforce does not scale well.
The productivity spread is the enemy of plans, predictions, estimations and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the most successful human scaling mechanism.
In other news: Big cooperations have difficulty exploiting the individual genius of low-level members of their workforce.
Instead of fusion power constantly being 10 years in the future, it'll now be stuck at 5!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that do not.
Why does the new X price delay the advent of fusion power by three years?
This is interesting: "what would you do to ensure that your administration receives genuinely impartial scientific advice?"
Both essentially answer: "It is really important to get impartial advice, that's why I will take only impartial advice."
Both don't get at all into the problem - which is "how do you know what advice is impartial?".
Both answers have nice parts like Bush's world class sentence "I have sought out the best scientific minds..." - completely ignoring that the question was "how do you deal with the problem that it is hard to know what good science is?"
Kerry's reasoning is equally interesting when he says "[Hey, how do I ensure that I receive impartial advice?] My administration would never utilize biased advice."
That's true Mr. President. You can very well be sure that you receive impartial advice when you just don't utilize the biased advice!
JUST ALWAYS BE SURE THAT YOU PERSONALLY SEEK OUT THE BEST SCIENTIFIC MINDS!
Both candidates didn't say anything about the problem itself stating trueisms of the worst order.
If the internet really was to die (say, for example due to something or other happening to the way IP works), it would be completely legitimate for publications such as the NYT to make this "death of WWW". Because that's the effect that 90% of their readers would be interested in.
On the other hand I think it's even worse when they say on TV that some scientist "has invented a computer" that does X - when they really mean someone wrote a software that does X.
Slashdot Mirror
FAA uses web to introduce millions of morons world-wide to a new and fun recreational use of their laser pointers. Pilot community thrilled. News at eleven.
It's GPL! If you like it that much, just fork it and the community will... wait, oh, I see. Sorry, never mind.
Wikileaks plans to use the profits for a small but capable force of mercenaries to protect their collective asses.
IFYPFY.
The problem is not lack of Programmers. The problem is managers who think a developer needs many years of experience with a specific language or technology to be able to work with it. I am sure many programmers would be willing to work on their COBOL systems, but without the required "10 years of experience with COBOL" on their resume, they would never be hired.
True. A lot of programmers wouldn't need 10 years of experience in COBOL. May be ten years of experience in any programming using different languages and paradigms would be enough. On the other hand some programmers would need 10 years of experience in COBOL to be able to work on a given job.
A lot of managers can't tell the difference, luckily some do. The others have to rely on matching buzzwords on offered CVs to buzzwords on RFQs.
I think it's pretty obvious that the problem is not people pushing themselves to softly... 95% of all characters in any popular media are heavily clicheed. Even though every single game designer, author, movie director, musician and whatnot would really like to do better. But you don't get project funding for better, you get funding for dependable and predictable sales. As "they" say: It's a hit driven business (with "it" being just about everything).
Characters must always meet expectations so that no one changes the channel because they don't understand the plot anymore after fetching beer from the fridge. Consequently any clearly identifiable group is badly misrepresented in popular media.
Also, Slashdot readers, you just have to love this quote from the article:
Knock yourselves out...
In other news:
"That's not our problem", says area CIO. "Our problem is educating our helpdesk, that if someone calls and says he's an employee and needs a new password for his account, they shouldn't just give out a password without further identification. "
Seen it happen in three companies in the last 5 years. Each company with more than 2000 employees & one of them a fortune-500 company.
It's perfect. They create a pre-screening room that tests all kinds of content and also makes some money, generates a few content gems (bridge collapse footage, etc.) every once in a while and that doesn't affect the serious/professional-flavour of their premium brand. Still they exploit the top content in all of their programs.
Now to really change the news business: Can't someone create a popular site that does auctions of valuable cell phone footage, with news companies as bidders? Stop giving away your content for free, people!
According to http://www.census.gov/ :
WORLD 2007 Total, all ages 6,602,236,753
According to http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html :
[...] one estimates that 96,100,000,000 people have lived on the earth.
The dead outnumber the living roughly 15 to 1.
So chances are you are already dead!
Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic system. The study might be really interesting there because Korean letters are always aggregated in blocks of two or three letters. It's part of the way they write. I have no idea if Koreans read these blocks as one.
It's also a cool system because it was designed from scratch and follows a number of logical rules that makes it comparatively easy to learn (the alphabet... not the language). You can learn reading basic Hangul while on the plane to Korea.
The wikipedia article is quite good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Elaboration:
- Define an appropriate granularity of your actions that you expose to the client.
- Ensure that each action block results in something the client wants.
- Do not do whatever your client wants you to do inside of an action block.
- In time & material based projects an action block length may be atomic (client advises you on microscopic action, e.g. client says: Now press return. Now write 10 ?"Hello World").
- In fixed price projects action block lengths can be defined by milestones (possibly with deliverables). Communication during action blocks may be a matter of tactics (e.g. misrepresenting project state as better or worse than in reality if necessary).
- Client triggered course changes during action blocks in fixed price projects result in billable change requests.
Or something to that effect...Yes, insightful. (A)D&D rules are about imagining how much fun playing this game would be.
Reading rules, looking at monsters in the monster manual, discussing adventures and planning and planning and planning all those great games you are going to play.
The actual game experience never lives up to the imagination. They sell content that inspires dreams of games.
No, we don't. At least not if "we" are supposed to be IT professionals.
May be the statement is true for small teams working on internal projects (intranet applications). But seriously, the article has a very hobbyist ring to it.
Everybody working on larger web-based applications is used to cooperating with external designers. There may be different views on who has to produce CSS/HTML (or whatever markup code) from photoshop designs (same issue with who does the "usability"), but in general there is not too much danger that graphic designers somehow take over anything apart from trivial programming tasks (e.g. writing markup code). Unless of course they are looking for a complete carreer change. I've seen that happen. But after being accepted as full-fledged developers, they somehow never got to do any designing any more.
Anyhow, any sufficiently large project will involve a 50-page layout spec, corporate identity definition or a bunch of obnoxious product managers who will see to it, that you - the develevoper - won't get too much say in where anything is located on the screen. And that is okay by me, as division of labor has proven to be a pretty succesful concept over the last, say, ten-thousand years.
I find the whole idea of "graphics designers somehow at war with IT people" a little strange. In the projects I work in/have worked in graphics designers are fellow-suppliers who have to handle the same basic problems of budget & time-constraints that we have. At the end of the proverbial day they usually make good companions for discussing the idiosyncracies of the current project over a few beers.
yet dare criticize OS X on slashdot and you invoke the wrath of Apple zealots everywhere.
Wait a second. I find it hard to follow the discussion.
Who are the apple zealots? And what is their relation to the apple nazis?
Then you go ahead and still sign contract Y with entity B. The contracts may be contradictory. But still both may be binding.
A typical case is an executive (working for company A) with full power to close deals up to a certain limit, say 100,000,- EUR. If this guy signs a deal with a volume of 200,000,- EUR (with company B) the contract may be binding for his company [2]. If the company looses money due to this, B can still insist on the contract to be executed.
To resolve the situation and to keep smoke from coming from everyone's ears - the executive becomes liable personally to his company for the loss. But that is of no concern to B. B doesn't care that the executive already had a contradictory contract with A.
Bottom line: The employer in the article can argue that the guy was forbidden to use GPL'ed code by the IP regulation in his contract with the employer. The GPL is valid for the produced software. But the coder is liable for any losses to his employer.
[1] There is a standing expression for this in German "Keine Verträge zu Lasten Dritter" (no contracts at the expenses of third parties) - what's the corresponding expression in English?
[2] Again... IANAL and I am not even English. So someone help me out with "Innenverhältnis" und "Aussenverhältnis".
People treating imaginary stuff as if it were "real" is a normal thing. Actually, our entire society is based on the fact that people do that.
Consider these simple examples just to get you started:
Laws
Borders
The concept of "owning" things
I can very well imagine a number of reasons why it can be considered sickening to trade everquest characters for that much money. For example you might argue that it is decadent. But the fact that everquest characters are not "real" is nothing special.
From now on this line shall be known as my personal motto! It shall be enscribed in the family coat of arms. It shall be engraved in the family ring. It shall greet the trespasser when approaching the gates of the family manor.
A timeless truth to live by. Bold words to guide us.
Ah yes, and my new signature, too.
Because "applying the software" is a process that requires manual interaction and is repeated constantly. It's not something that is done once and then it's over. The data will also be poorly formatted in parts and may need heavy reformatting. So, it requires people (all of the time until no more data is coming in or the world runs dry) - hence outsourcing.
Outsourcing the operation of software systems (aka "business process outsourcing") is a common thing.
Mhmmm, aahhhhh, I don't even know where to begin... It's so hard to resist writing something really sarcastic... okay, but I won't.
I think you should point at the "scientific process" and at refereed papers. If your claim is right then there should be minimal amounts of refereed papers claiming the contra-point (when compared to the papers claiming your point).
But certainly "oil companies" and "special interest groups" don't really qualify as "NO OTHER SIDE". Especially not in all caps.
Also don't get me started with puns going into the direction "siggraph and how they secretly dominate the world's oil industry".
If this happens to you on a regular basis then you are probably a better-than-average developer. Which is just fine as long as we find a way to make your work more average. And code reviews seem to do the job.
Seriously, the productivity spread between developers (20 times as effective... adding more people... Thank you Mr. DeMarco) is what a lot of very strict process models and practices (such as code reviews) really attack - and it is a good thing, too. Because otherwise developer workforce does not scale well.
The productivity spread is the enemy of plans, predictions, estimations and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the most successful human scaling mechanism.
In other news: Big cooperations have difficulty exploiting the individual genius of low-level members of their workforce.
Why does the new X price delay the advent of fusion power by three years?
This is interesting: "what would you do to ensure that your administration receives genuinely impartial scientific advice?"
Both essentially answer: "It is really important to get impartial advice, that's why I will take only impartial advice."
Both don't get at all into the problem - which is "how do you know what advice is impartial?".
Both answers have nice parts like Bush's world class sentence "I have sought out the best scientific minds..." - completely ignoring that the question was "how do you deal with the problem that it is hard to know what good science is?"
Kerry's reasoning is equally interesting when he says "[Hey, how do I ensure that I receive impartial advice?] My administration would never utilize biased advice."
That's true Mr. President. You can very well be sure that you receive impartial advice when you just don't utilize the biased advice!
JUST ALWAYS BE SURE THAT YOU PERSONALLY SEEK OUT THE BEST SCIENTIFIC MINDS!
Both candidates didn't say anything about the problem itself stating trueisms of the worst order.
If the internet really was to die (say, for example due to something or other happening to the way IP works), it would be completely legitimate for publications such as the NYT to make this "death of WWW". Because that's the effect that 90% of their readers would be interested in.
On the other hand I think it's even worse when they say on TV that some scientist "has invented a computer" that does X - when they really mean someone wrote a software that does X.