Yea congress cut them and funded the cost of the others. We still paid for it.
We send our manufacturing to China.
We send our space capabilties to Russia.
The Rich send there money out of the country.
We pimp our youth in the army to other countries.
As long as the Rich can pay for their toys who cares.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with communism or capitalism. Every rocket is expensive, uses alot of resources and spews a tremenous amount of crap into the atmosphere. I would not believe that 50 mil would pay for the cost of the trip into space for a joy rider.
We have temporarily, or so I hope, given up our ability to get into space. We rely on the Russian's to supply the resources to the one effort we still have needs. Without us they would also no longer have a space program as we provide the continuing funds to keep it going. It has nothing to do with marketing but just plain stupidity.
I see no problem with a group getting a patent for a new discovery. However, it it was done with public money then the patent is owned by the people of the US and no fees should be charged for its use. This also means corporate research using the patent should be considered as public property.
The parents complaining about not enough homework should spend some more time with their own kids. Education can be fun and entertaining. Hell, you kids can be fun and entertaining make some time for them.
I actually wonder if parents have forgotten what it is to be a parent. A part of a 7 year old life is Mom and Dad looking out in exactly this way. At 5 my daughter has a much longer attention span than 15 minutes. I believe my wife and I are the cause of this. She watches Mr Roger's Neighborhood but not Sesame Street. Soon we will allow this to but Sesame Street enforces the 5 minutes time span rule and this is just plain wrong for a child. If she watches a video it has a story behind it. At 5 she loves the Jungle Book. She will watch the whole thing and explain what is going on. At the same time she loves Winnie the Pooh but at the end of an hour will get the various stories mixed up. They change too fast.
Off topic there. The point is she will rarely understand she needs to remember to bring something to Kindergarden or not. 7 is not much older. What is wrong with a parent coordinating whether they remember their homework or not. Sound more like a parent that either does not care or both work and their kids are a part time hobby.
I pretty much agree with you. I would like to ask if you came from a family where both parents worked. I am probably older than you. My parents pushed pretty hard but it included extra reading, boy scouts, etc. where I could often choose what I wanted to work harder at. In addition I pretty much had a hammer and saw in my hand by the time I was 5 and spent a lot of time building (mostly crap)? I directly correlate these skills with my skills at programming.
Pushing is not the problem. Balance is and our schools fail miserably. I like the post where the father told the teacher that 90 minutes is enough every day. I would further reduce this to 60 minutes plus reading.
One of the requirements my wife and I decided on before my daughter came about was that at least one of us had to be stay at home. My wife does a lot of part time odd piece secretarial work but it is more important to us that she has the time to treat my daughter as "OUR" child and not an eventing hobby. I make as much time as I can for her but not nearly enough.
It has more to do with the big guys rubbing elbows than anything else. It is far easier to share titles on boards with your friends and their companies if they are somewhat geographically close.
In the late 90's people were flocking to the valley to write web pages for 90 and 100 thou. They got there and found rent on an apartment took a big chunk and then they were spending hours in traffic. And each and everyone that showed up drove prices higher and made traffic worse. Part of the tech crash was simple the salary pressure to cover the living issues in the valley. What kind of sense does that make. The better question is why should any of the CEOs give a shit.
So what happened. The DSEOs (dip shits in charge) started looking for a place where they could get work done for pennies on the dollar. The fact that productivity has more often than to gone to zero is irrelevent. With a bit of brains they could have created tech areas in a distributed fashion. But that would not have been the business practice of the day.
Don't get me wrong. I think some of the out sourcing is a good thing. There is a lack of really good engineering talent here. Companies should look for competency. But it needs to nake sense. I have worked on so many projects that I knew would not ever make it out the door. But delivering real products is not the business of most companies. Their business is mostly looking good on the books for a while so management can get a pay out.
I will agree with this summation with one stipulation. The movie theaters are going to need to make the experience better than it now is. I can overlook most of the popcorn munching noises (I do it myself), the sticky floors, and load comments. What I can not overlook is being crammed into a seat that is too narrow, no leg room and in a room that holds a hundred or so seats. The screen in the front needs to give that theater experience and it often does not. Being a bit older I remember the theaters that had a REALLY LARGE screen in the front. Star Wars would not have been the same in most of the "modern" theaters. The last movie I saw at a theater was Star Wars Episode 3. I admit I saw it the last week it was playing but the screen was very minimal at a Ciniplex with 30 or so screens. I just watched it recently on DVD and I enjoyed it much more.
Actually you just hit the real problem. In my book they were emailing each other personal pictures of legal sex. Emailing personal stuff is pretty stupid when considering the number of places it touches in between but not illegal.
As a result I would ask a couple of question. Why are the pictures dirty? Is it because they involve sex? Or is it simply because the two of them were naked? What if she was in a bikini and he had speedos on. What constitutes a "dirty" picture.
The real problem in this country is its prudity. (spelling?)
These pictures could very possibly get into the hands of some pretty weird types out there. Seems more like there should be a penalty for not being responsible and more than a little bit stupid. Despite all the "my parents should trust me" crap in the various posts, the reality is these two are minors and, from the article, their parents were trying to take care of the situation.
Part of breaking law is supposed to involve INTENT. It is pretty clear these two minors did not intend for anybody else to see the pictures. This is a case of holier than thou cops, a prosecutor looking to make a name for himself and judges that can not differ their personal opinion from the law.
You hit on the most important aspect of the problem. The lack of parental control. As I approach 50 i find the concept of parental control has slipped over the years.
I remember in early grade school if I did something I should not have around the neighborhood my mother already knew about it when I got home. Sometimes just minutes later. The communities we lived in seems to be real communities and parents were involved across the neighborhood. During this time if I did something in school I should not have there was not questions about it getting to my parents.
By the time I had hit junior high school I there were several small ass holes in the neighborhood. One in particular was a couple of years younger than I. He very much liked to pick on kids younger and smaller than he was. Several of the parents had discussions with his mother. She never believed a word they said. I really think it was more she did not give a shit. It took several instances of my threatening him and then dipping his head in a toilet one day before he stopped most of it. A couple of years later this degraded again. Shortly after high school (which he did not finish) I heard he was doing time for burglary.
During this time I also noticed that fewer of the parents in the neighborhood communicated. The best of parents cannot act with no information. I believe this has gotten much worse over the years. I am pretty sure that schools where shying away from informing parents during the early 70s also. In 1970 I got caught in some the last of desegregation in Columbus Georgia also. The kinds in the school were bused from several locations. The parents no longer had any relationship to the other parents. Distance caused problems with some parents even being able to get in to meet the teacher of their child.
We live in a paranoid society. It is destroying the concept of community. Children are the responsibility of the parents and the community. School is part of the community. So is Law enforcement.
Parents need to take an active role in their child's life. This does not mean get them to school in the morning and feed them before putting them to bed at night. It means knowing what is going on in their lives. it means monitoring their activity to know what is good or bad. It means taking a look at the logs on their computer to find out what problems my be. Remember as a minor your child is not yet a full citizen. A parent still has responsibility for his or her actions.
Part of being a parent and finding solutions to problems the child can not is contacting other parents involved or the schools of their child. Unfortunately a large percentage of the other parents are complete ass holes themselves and could not care less about their kids. They create little shits that will plague society until somebody stops them. The somebody may become the school system. Lets face it where have created this propaganda device and given them the OK to teach our children. We should at least tell them what it teach. If we let them get away with making sports more important than education then it is in the end our fault. >Off soapbox about sports now>. If the first level of contact at the school does nothing then move up the line until they do.
If this does not work then file a complaint with the police, use the parents for the problems they are causing with their child, report the situation to the paper (this will piss of the school and maybe they will do something about it).
There is a difference between a tattler and child reporting a real problem.
More more soap box item. Kids get off it about your parents looking into your private mail, im, etc. It does not exist. They are responsible for your health, safety and actions. It is a requirement of them to know what your are doing and what is being done to you. So shut the hell up and be a little gratefull once in a while
One observation though is that most people using the parks have a dog. That might be one link.
There is more than one reason for this. Our neighborhood in Portland suburbia has excellent walking paths and scattered playgrounds. My daughter makes good use of these. There is a pond with muskrats in it and we often go to see if they are out.
There are signs everywhere posting to keep dogs on leash and clean up after them. They are very often ignored. If I complain because a german shepard has jumped up on me and smeared mud everywhere then I am called a dog hater. Not true. I have owned 2 doges in my life. Neither were allowed this kind of behavior.
Last week we had one of the rare times it snows significantly in Portland. Caused a lot of road issues but I was able to take my daughter to the hill in the park literally behind our house and do some tubing. We had been at it about 15 minutes when our neighbor let his dogs loose and the first thing one of them did was take a crap right in the middle of our tube path. The ###hole laughed and walked away.
I graduated with a CS degree in 1988. I immediately found work at a large corporation for more money a year than I had ever made in 3 years. Got good raises, etc. Spent a lot of time helping the workers around me. About 3 years into it I got sick and tired of the workers that wanted me to do their work for them.
The truth is there are a limited number of people with the ability and the interest to be good engineers. As far as I can tell about 10% of the engineers I saw in the late 90's were really good. There was another quarter or so with either ability or interest and they were good if someone showed they the way. They rest should have stayed at home. The percentages were true of white, black, indians, women, or whatever.
The truth is the work needs to be spread around the globe to allow the people who are really productive to produce quality, well designed products.
However, I do not believe this is what most companies are getting from their outsourcing. I have yet to be part of a project that correct set up the contract and the work so far has been crap. Coordination has been for the most part non existent.
I really do believe the cost reduction aspect is vapor. It does not exist. If the share holders of a company really cared about cost reduction they would be all over the CEO's ass about his bonuses. Company boards are more old boys clubs than anything else. If share holders really cared about the company they would get all of them out and some in that would pay attention. I have recently had the privilege of working contracts for two companies that have a couple of owners, great products and making money. What an education. They knew what they wanted, when they wanted it and what it should do. Wow!!!!!!
The truth of the matter is that Wall Street is in charge and does not have a clue about how to create a quality product. So go to it all you Wall Mart shoppers. Everybody should buy 2 shares of ever company so only your brokers and their pals on the company boards have any power in this country.
Previous to the Indian outsourceing binge a couple of companies I have worked for have outsourced projects to companies in the US. I found the outsourcing track record to be mixed at best even then. When I was assigned to be the interface I had to watch the deliveries like a hawk to make sure they attempted to meet the requirements. If requirements were meet often quality was severely lacking. Like everything there are the exceptions.
I never understood how a company thought they could do better by sending the work out of the country. I worked with a group in Russia for a while. I do not think the phones in their office worked very often. I often exchanged email at midnight. The work coming back was terrible.
I think managers should never be allowed to get a bonus until a set number of customers have bought a product being produced. I believe CEO's should never get a bonus, or allowed to sell stock options for a minimum of 5 years. If the product associated with the bonus or stock option grant has made the company significant amount of profit the fine. Otherwise go screw up some other company.
And what's wrong with an emotional argument for space exploration. I am familiar with several contries where they have concentrated on the population. I am very familiar with Germany. They have high income taxes and their sales tax just went to 20%. They had super medical benifits true. But they were not free. Typically employeers pay 50% of the insurance costs and the employee the other. These costs are going up and the benifits are going down. It seems in every country, except for Sweden, the programs are failing.
And what about smart people - scientists, engineers, etc. Should we let companies hog all the brain power? Is it not good to create knowledge for the public? Again I am familier with Germany more than others. German Universitys produce very good engineers, doctors and scientists. Germany has a very large brain drain out of the country. The cost of doing business in Germany is just too high. Companies doing a lot of research are slowly moving out. Who is it that are going to pay the costs of your social programs.
You are very right in one point. The space program has become (maybe it always was) a way to make money for big corporations. A generation of dreams were made on the Apollo missions. Instead now video games fill the heads of the next generation. NASA has many good programs but Washington seems use it as another pork repository. Science is a quest for knowledge. Should we reduce that quest to only commercialy viable results?
The space program did bring new inventions to the world. It brought many more refinements. So what is your point here?
This is one of the few areas our sold out government actually does any real research anymore. Now if you were advocating a program to spend some of those dollars on fuel cell research with the resulting patents available to everybody, or how about solving aids with the patented results free to everybody I just might understand your point. Then as a nation and a people we might have somthing to be proud of.
What are the concrete results you are looking for?
I started as a student intern at the Unisys Unix facility in Salt Lake City in 1986. In 1988 I graduated and was hired as a engineer. Between this time and when I left in 1992 we had a number of women software engineers. As far as I could tell there were a higher percentage of good ones than the percentage of good guys.
This was probably before or just as the "sexual harassment" crap started happening in the industry. As a rule they fit in very well with the guys. I got a few "good" jokes from a couple of them. They sometimes had a different way of addressing issues and I did learn something from this. I got a little hot under the collar with one of them for leaving in the middle of problems to deal with her teen age daughter a little too often. I also dated one of them and found out that this is not a good idea.
I think the industry has lost a lot that the software engineering environment is almost exclusivly male these days.
I would modify this slightly. I believe that software development is more like a science. I also believe that art and science have a lot in common.
In any cutting edge project I have been on there were many more unknowns at the start than knowns. In general most of the preconcieved specifications generated were at least somewhat inaccurate. Part of the scientific methodology is to propose, experiment to find out what is not correct, modify and propose again.
With a particular goal in mind truely worthy results can occur. When combined with good software tools for tracking what hapened and why ideas changed art is modified with engineering principles.
The key to the whole thing is to allow change. About half of the organizations I have worked for/with could not handle this concept. Either the results were patched together to minic the origional spec or the code did not reflect the spec. Either way is bad.
The only thing I can think of is that he defines a spec as something that is inherently written once, before implementation begins, and is strictly adhered to no matter what. However, I don't think any sane person would agree with that definition
Unfortunatly I have worked for in a number of insane situations if this statement is true. Where I work now specs get commited to some archane saving place. No development can get going (officially) until they are in and automagically placed on the intranet. Getting one updated requires several forms, appovals, etc.
Needless to say I will not be here much longer but I beleive the Linus' point is that specs almost never get modified once they are set or the modification is painful.
I first I thought it was strange that hardware did not seem to be as big a problem with this. But then I realized that hardware, even when it conforms to some spec, is inherently propriatary. Software, even if Microsoft does not want to beleive it, must mostly interact with other software. And it must conform to the proprietary nature of the hardware. It tends to get complicated quickly.
Linux is the prime example, as Unix was in the past, of an evolved software solution. Many of the major steps involved morphing the kernel to a particular purpose. Each bit of code gets changed again within a short time span. Trying to keep specs on this is pretty imposible.
Once upon a time Apple let Mac OS be placed on machines from other vendors. As far as I know Motorola was the only one who took them up on it. They developed a machine called the Star Max. It ran much faster than the Mac at the time.
The next year Apple decided not to renew the license for Motorola. Whoed a thunk it?
Do we really thing that IBM, HP, numberous embedded hardware suppliers, etc will suddenly swith to Mac OS.
The one negative that hits us big is the fact that this is San Diego. The sun is nice but it cost just as much to live here as in Silicon Valley now. Very little incentive to move here.
The second thing is it takes my company 2 to 3 weeks to get through the red tape once a candidate has been selected. This has been too long. In two cases the person had already selected another position.
Yes we have been looking for specific skill sets but have been offering competitive money. Quite frankly I suspect the bar is being raised again right now.
I've been doing this a long time and I will admit that I am good as selling myself. Primarily because I state facts, do not hesitate to say I do not have a specific answer down to a line of existing code and back up everything with facts. I can tell within 30 minutes of any interview if the candidate has what I need.
I must say I have not worked for such companies, for very long that is. This is usually not the only sign of problems. In one case once I got a look at the actual code that was being produced I knew I did not want my name associated with it. I actually just walked out after a week without even asking for the pay check. I just plain did not to admit I had been there.
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Yea congress cut them and funded the cost of the others. We still paid for it.
We send our manufacturing to China.
We send our space capabilties to Russia.
The Rich send there money out of the country.
We pimp our youth in the army to other countries.
As long as the Rich can pay for their toys who cares.
It's just plain sad.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with communism or capitalism. Every rocket is expensive, uses alot of resources and spews a tremenous amount of crap into the atmosphere. I would not believe that 50 mil would pay for the cost of the trip into space for a joy rider.
We have temporarily, or so I hope, given up our ability to get into space. We rely on the Russian's to supply the resources to the one effort we still have needs. Without us they would also no longer have a space program as we provide the continuing funds to keep it going. It has nothing to do with marketing but just plain stupidity.
How the hell can you bump NASA from a space mission? What a fucked up world.
That is a true statement. I'll give you that. But that is no excuse for "much suckier than the previous version".
I see no problem with a group getting a patent for a new discovery. However, it it was done with public money then the patent is owned by the people of the US and no fees should be charged for its use. This also means corporate research using the patent should be considered as public property.
This is one of the few things Universities are really doing to prepare students for the corporate world. Let the laying down of rights begin.
The parents complaining about not enough homework should spend some more time with their own kids. Education can be fun and entertaining. Hell, you kids can be fun and entertaining make some time for them.
I actually wonder if parents have forgotten what it is to be a parent. A part of a 7 year old life is Mom and Dad looking out in exactly this way. At 5 my daughter has a much longer attention span than 15 minutes. I believe my wife and I are the cause of this. She watches Mr Roger's Neighborhood but not Sesame Street. Soon we will allow this to but Sesame Street enforces the 5 minutes time span rule and this is just plain wrong for a child. If she watches a video it has a story behind it. At 5 she loves the Jungle Book. She will watch the whole thing and explain what is going on. At the same time she loves Winnie the Pooh but at the end of an hour will get the various stories mixed up. They change too fast.
Off topic there. The point is she will rarely understand she needs to remember to bring something to Kindergarden or not. 7 is not much older. What is wrong with a parent coordinating whether they remember their homework or not. Sound more like a parent that either does not care or both work and their kids are a part time hobby.
I pretty much agree with you. I would like to ask if you came from a family where both parents worked. I am probably older than you. My parents pushed pretty hard but it included extra reading, boy scouts, etc. where I could often choose what I wanted to work harder at. In addition I pretty much had a hammer and saw in my hand by the time I was 5 and spent a lot of time building (mostly crap)? I directly correlate these skills with my skills at programming.
Pushing is not the problem. Balance is and our schools fail miserably. I like the post where the father told the teacher that 90 minutes is enough every day. I would further reduce this to 60 minutes plus reading.
One of the requirements my wife and I decided on before my daughter came about was that at least one of us had to be stay at home. My wife does a lot of part time odd piece secretarial work but it is more important to us that she has the time to treat my daughter as "OUR" child and not an eventing hobby. I make as much time as I can for her but not nearly enough.
It has more to do with the big guys rubbing elbows than anything else. It is far easier to share titles on boards with your friends and their companies if they are somewhat geographically close.
In the late 90's people were flocking to the valley to write web pages for 90 and 100 thou. They got there and found rent on an apartment took a big chunk and then they were spending hours in traffic. And each and everyone that showed up drove prices higher and made traffic worse. Part of the tech crash was simple the salary pressure to cover the living issues in the valley. What kind of sense does that make. The better question is why should any of the CEOs give a shit.
So what happened. The DSEOs (dip shits in charge) started looking for a place where they could get work done for pennies on the dollar. The fact that productivity has more often than to gone to zero is irrelevent. With a bit of brains they could have created tech areas in a distributed fashion. But that would not have been the business practice of the day.
Don't get me wrong. I think some of the out sourcing is a good thing. There is a lack of really good engineering talent here. Companies should look for competency. But it needs to nake sense. I have worked on so many projects that I knew would not ever make it out the door. But delivering real products is not the business of most companies. Their business is mostly looking good on the books for a while so management can get a pay out.
I will agree with this summation with one stipulation. The movie theaters are going to need to make the experience better than it now is. I can overlook most of the popcorn munching noises (I do it myself), the sticky floors, and load comments. What I can not overlook is being crammed into a seat that is too narrow, no leg room and in a room that holds a hundred or so seats. The screen in the front needs to give that theater experience and it often does not. Being a bit older I remember the theaters that had a REALLY LARGE screen in the front. Star Wars would not have been the same in most of the "modern" theaters. The last movie I saw at a theater was Star Wars Episode 3. I admit I saw it the last week it was playing but the screen was very minimal at a Ciniplex with 30 or so screens. I just watched it recently on DVD and I enjoyed it much more.
Actually you just hit the real problem. In my book they were emailing each other personal pictures of legal sex. Emailing personal stuff is pretty stupid when considering the number of places it touches in between but not illegal.
As a result I would ask a couple of question. Why are the pictures dirty? Is it because they involve sex? Or is it simply because the two of them were naked? What if she was in a bikini and he had speedos on. What constitutes a "dirty" picture.
The real problem in this country is its prudity. (spelling?)
These pictures could very possibly get into the hands of some pretty weird types out there. Seems more like there should be a penalty for not being responsible and more than a little bit stupid. Despite all the "my parents should trust me" crap in the various posts, the reality is these two are minors and, from the article, their parents were trying to take care of the situation.
Part of breaking law is supposed to involve INTENT. It is pretty clear these two minors did not intend for anybody else to see the pictures. This is a case of holier than thou cops, a prosecutor looking to make a name for himself and judges that can not differ their personal opinion from the law.
You hit on the most important aspect of the problem. The lack of parental control. As I approach 50 i find the concept of parental control has slipped over the years.
I remember in early grade school if I did something I should not have around the neighborhood my mother already knew about it when I got home. Sometimes just minutes later. The communities we lived in seems to be real communities and parents were involved across the neighborhood. During this time if I did something in school I should not have there was not questions about it getting to my parents.
By the time I had hit junior high school I there were several small ass holes in the neighborhood. One in particular was a couple of years younger than I. He very much liked to pick on kids younger and smaller than he was. Several of the parents had discussions with his mother. She never believed a word they said. I really think it was more she did not give a shit. It took several instances of my threatening him and then dipping his head in a toilet one day before he stopped most of it. A couple of years later this degraded again. Shortly after high school (which he did not finish) I heard he was doing time for burglary.
During this time I also noticed that fewer of the parents in the neighborhood communicated. The best of parents cannot act with no information. I believe this has gotten much worse over the years. I am pretty sure that schools where shying away from informing parents during the early 70s also. In 1970 I got caught in some the last of desegregation in Columbus Georgia also. The kinds in the school were bused from several locations. The parents no longer had any relationship to the other parents. Distance caused problems with some parents even being able to get in to meet the teacher of their child.
We live in a paranoid society. It is destroying the concept of community. Children are the responsibility of the parents and the community. School is part of the community. So is Law enforcement.
Parents need to take an active role in their child's life. This does not mean get them to school in the morning and feed them before putting them to bed at night. It means knowing what is going on in their lives. it means monitoring their activity to know what is good or bad. It means taking a look at the logs on their computer to find out what problems my be. Remember as a minor your child is not yet a full citizen. A parent still has responsibility for his or her actions.
Part of being a parent and finding solutions to problems the child can not is contacting other parents involved or the schools of their child. Unfortunately a large percentage of the other parents are complete ass holes themselves and could not care less about their kids. They create little shits that will plague society until somebody stops them. The somebody may become the school system. Lets face it where have created this propaganda device and given them the OK to teach our children. We should at least tell them what it teach. If we let them get away with making sports more important than education then it is in the end our fault. >Off soapbox about sports now>. If the first level of contact at the school does nothing then move up the line until they do.
If this does not work then file a complaint with the police, use the parents for the problems they are causing with their child, report the situation to the paper (this will piss of the school and maybe they will do something about it).
There is a difference between a tattler and child reporting a real problem.
More more soap box item. Kids get off it about your parents looking into your private mail, im, etc. It does not exist. They are responsible for your health, safety and actions. It is a requirement of them to know what your are doing and what is being done to you. So shut the hell up and be a little gratefull once in a while
One observation though is that most people using the parks have a dog. That might be one link.
There is more than one reason for this. Our neighborhood in Portland suburbia has excellent walking paths and scattered playgrounds. My daughter makes good use of these. There is a pond with muskrats in it and we often go to see if they are out.
There are signs everywhere posting to keep dogs on leash and clean up after them. They are very often ignored. If I complain because a german shepard has jumped up on me and smeared mud everywhere then I am called a dog hater. Not true. I have owned 2 doges in my life. Neither were allowed this kind of behavior.
Last week we had one of the rare times it snows significantly in Portland. Caused a lot of road issues but I was able to take my daughter to the hill in the park literally behind our house and do some tubing. We had been at it about 15 minutes when our neighbor let his dogs loose and the first thing one of them did was take a crap right in the middle of our tube path. The ###hole laughed and walked away.
Local parks are a mixed bag of expectations.
I graduated with a CS degree in 1988. I immediately found work at a large corporation for more money a year than I had ever made in 3 years. Got good raises, etc. Spent a lot of time helping the workers around me. About 3 years into it I got sick and tired of the workers that wanted me to do their work for them.
The truth is there are a limited number of people with the ability and the interest to be good engineers. As far as I can tell about 10% of the engineers I saw in the late 90's were really good. There was another quarter or so with either ability or interest and they were good if someone showed they the way. They rest should have stayed at home. The percentages were true of white, black, indians, women, or whatever.
The truth is the work needs to be spread around the globe to allow the people who are really productive to produce quality, well designed products.
However, I do not believe this is what most companies are getting from their outsourcing. I have yet to be part of a project that correct set up the contract and the work so far has been crap. Coordination has been for the most part non existent.
I really do believe the cost reduction aspect is vapor. It does not exist. If the share holders of a company really cared about cost reduction they would be all over the CEO's ass about his bonuses. Company boards are more old boys clubs than anything else. If share holders really cared about the company they would get all of them out and some in that would pay attention. I have recently had the privilege of working contracts for two companies that have a couple of owners, great products and making money. What an education. They knew what they wanted, when they wanted it and what it should do. Wow!!!!!!
The truth of the matter is that Wall Street is in charge and does not have a clue about how to create a quality product. So go to it all you Wall Mart shoppers. Everybody should buy 2 shares of ever company so only your brokers and their pals on the company boards have any power in this country.
Previous to the Indian outsourceing binge a couple of companies I have worked for have outsourced projects to companies in the US. I found the outsourcing track record to be mixed at best even then. When I was assigned to be the interface I had to watch the deliveries like a hawk to make sure they attempted to meet the requirements. If requirements were meet often quality was severely lacking. Like everything there are the exceptions.
I never understood how a company thought they could do better by sending the work out of the country. I worked with a group in Russia for a while. I do not think the phones in their office worked very often. I often exchanged email at midnight. The work coming back was terrible.
I think managers should never be allowed to get a bonus until a set number of customers have bought a product being produced. I believe CEO's should never get a bonus, or allowed to sell stock options for a minimum of 5 years. If the product associated with the bonus or stock option grant has made the company significant amount of profit the fine. Otherwise go screw up some other company.
Na, then we would loose the Sopranos.
And what's wrong with an emotional argument for space exploration. I am familiar with several contries where they have concentrated on the population. I am very familiar with Germany. They have high income taxes and their sales tax just went to 20%. They had super medical benifits true. But they were not free. Typically employeers pay 50% of the insurance costs and the employee the other. These costs are going up and the benifits are going down. It seems in every country, except for Sweden, the programs are failing.
And what about smart people - scientists, engineers, etc. Should we let companies hog all the brain power? Is it not good to create knowledge for the public? Again I am familier with Germany more than others. German Universitys produce very good engineers, doctors and scientists. Germany has a very large brain drain out of the country. The cost of doing business in Germany is just too high. Companies doing a lot of research are slowly moving out. Who is it that are going to pay the costs of your social programs.
You are very right in one point. The space program has become (maybe it always was) a way to make money for big corporations. A generation of dreams were made on the Apollo missions. Instead now video games fill the heads of the next generation. NASA has many good programs but Washington seems use it as another pork repository. Science is a quest for knowledge. Should we reduce that quest to only commercialy viable results?
The space program did bring new inventions to the world. It brought many more refinements. So what is your point here?
This is one of the few areas our sold out government actually does any real research anymore. Now if you were advocating a program to spend some of those dollars on fuel cell research with the resulting patents available to everybody, or how about solving aids with the patented results free to everybody I just might understand your point. Then as a nation and a people we might have somthing to be proud of.
What are the concrete results you are looking for?
This is intended to take the publics mind off of gas issue. Looky, looky we are promoting energy efficency. Anyhing else will piss off the lobbies.
This statement if false. How much "American goods" are the Indians and Chinese buying?
I started as a student intern at the Unisys Unix facility in Salt Lake City in 1986. In 1988 I graduated and was hired as a engineer. Between this time and when I left in 1992 we had a number of women software engineers. As far as I could tell there were a higher percentage of good ones than the percentage of good guys.
This was probably before or just as the "sexual harassment" crap started happening in the industry. As a rule they fit in very well with the guys. I got a few "good" jokes from a couple of them. They sometimes had a different way of addressing issues and I did learn something from this. I got a little hot under the collar with one of them for leaving in the middle of problems to deal with her teen age daughter a little too often. I also dated one of them and found out that this is not a good idea.
I think the industry has lost a lot that the software engineering environment is almost exclusivly male these days.
I would modify this slightly. I believe that software development is more like a science. I also believe that art and science have a lot in common.
In any cutting edge project I have been on there were many more unknowns at the start than knowns. In general most of the preconcieved specifications generated were at least somewhat inaccurate. Part of the scientific methodology is to propose, experiment to find out what is not correct, modify and propose again.
With a particular goal in mind truely worthy results can occur. When combined with good software tools for tracking what hapened and why ideas changed art is modified with engineering principles.
The key to the whole thing is to allow change. About half of the organizations I have worked for/with could not handle this concept. Either the results were patched together to minic the origional spec or the code did not reflect the spec. Either way is bad.
The only thing I can think of is that he defines a spec as something that is inherently written once, before implementation begins, and is strictly adhered to no matter what. However, I don't think any sane person would agree with that definition Unfortunatly I have worked for in a number of insane situations if this statement is true. Where I work now specs get commited to some archane saving place. No development can get going (officially) until they are in and automagically placed on the intranet. Getting one updated requires several forms, appovals, etc.
Needless to say I will not be here much longer but I beleive the Linus' point is that specs almost never get modified once they are set or the modification is painful.
I first I thought it was strange that hardware did not seem to be as big a problem with this. But then I realized that hardware, even when it conforms to some spec, is inherently propriatary. Software, even if Microsoft does not want to beleive it, must mostly interact with other software. And it must conform to the proprietary nature of the hardware. It tends to get complicated quickly.
Linux is the prime example, as Unix was in the past, of an evolved software solution. Many of the major steps involved morphing the kernel to a particular purpose. Each bit of code gets changed again within a short time span. Trying to keep specs on this is pretty imposible.
Once upon a time Apple let Mac OS be placed on machines from other vendors. As far as I know Motorola was the only one who took them up on it. They developed a machine called the Star Max. It ran much faster than the Mac at the time.
The next year Apple decided not to renew the license for Motorola. Whoed a thunk it?
Do we really thing that IBM, HP, numberous embedded hardware suppliers, etc will suddenly swith to Mac OS.
This guy needs to pull his head out.
The one negative that hits us big is the fact that this is San Diego. The sun is nice but it cost just as much to live here as in Silicon Valley now. Very little incentive to move here.
The second thing is it takes my company 2 to 3 weeks to get through the red tape once a candidate has been selected. This has been too long. In two cases the person had already selected another position.
Yes we have been looking for specific skill sets but have been offering competitive money. Quite frankly I suspect the bar is being raised again right now.
I've been doing this a long time and I will admit that I am good as selling myself. Primarily because I state facts, do not hesitate to say I do not have a specific answer down to a line of existing code and back up everything with facts. I can tell within 30 minutes of any interview if the candidate has what I need.
I must say I have not worked for such companies, for very long that is. This is usually not the only sign of problems. In one case once I got a look at the actual code that was being produced I knew I did not want my name associated with it. I actually just walked out after a week without even asking for the pay check. I just plain did not to admit I had been there.