I cant see that the ratio of cluefullness would go up overseas. I agree that many certificates are useless, not sure how that factors in to the outsourcing discussion. The fact that there are many paper doesnt mean that there are not many many IT worker that know what they are doing, both uncertified and certified. Human nature is not different overseas, what makes you think that the paper cert issue isnt already there?
From where I sit, it looks like it is all about making already wealthy executive types wealthier.
In my youth, I plugged a night light into a socket. I had taken the cover off, and my thumbs were right on the traces. My arms jerked and that pulled me back from it, disconnecting me from the circuit I had formed.
Course, there was the time I plugged a plug into the wall, but first I had stuck a safety pin thru a couple holes in the prongs. Nice red ball as ( I think ) the safety pin vaporized. Loud sound that I cant describe to you now. I fell backwards, and my parent came running in to see what I had destroyed that time.:-)
I used to touch the spark plug wires on the old Fords ( 70's ) I owned while the engine ran ( no, not often, nor as a preoccupation, just accidental ). My uncle dissuaded me from ever doing that again when he told me that that era's GM cars had enough oomph to hurt. I imagine most modern cars are high voltage.
Microsoft have been doing things in the marketplace with lockin and such that I would think that IT would look at and say "I want no part of that" for many years now. I think that exactly this is why so many of us dont like MS all that much.
The IT response, in the main, has been to continue to purchase MS.
I realize that there is backlash against this, that there has been some, and that it is growing. I am just not as sure as you are about where that balance point will be. I think that MS's current tactics will lose them some customers, but I am thinking that these tactics will enable them to keep the vast majority.
I hope and pray that I am wrong and you are right.
On "Laissez-faire", understanding the term and religiously believing it to be the one true way are not synonymous. Should corporations be completely unregulated? I am sure that the corporations ( and the people that run them ) believe they should be. How would that be good for anyone but the corporation and it's owners?
On "never add more regulation", things change. Shouldnt the rules, regulations and laws change with them?
Agreed that it is more of a procedural thing, but there are a ( limited ) number of times when you need a short stupid plain old function, because you dont want to create whole class for that function, and tagging it into every class that uses it defeats one of the benefits of OO programming. And saying I should be using C misses the point. The biggest part of the work correctly uses and benefits from OO thinking and doing. And declaring the function in the class of the application ( where such exists ) may not give it visibility in other classes without making an unwanted dependancy.
Try it from this angle.... Shouldnt the tool be enabling rather than limiting? To the extent possible, of course. Please dont interpret this as anything against good practice, or as a call to enable sloppy stupid programming. Thought should be given to find a way within the logical model the tool promotes, but sometimes ( very very small number of times ) you need to go outside a bit.
You have a bug with or without the exception handler. What the problem is is that with the empty exception handler, the bug will be silent and may be deadly. Without the exception handler, the exception will be expressed in a way that everyone can see, and the business of tracking it down can begin earlier. Should it be there? Sure, along with the cleanup / recovery code. Course, now, someone will mandate that exception handlers cant be empty. Then the programmer that use empty exception handlers will put in do nothing code to work around.
Frankly, I dont like languages ( java or c# ) that tie my hands so much. I do like things that increase productivity and correctness, but it is annoying to run into artificial limitations. Like where you cant have standard "static, global scope" functions, so you end up working around that by having a Utility class ( or somesuch ), and declaring static functions there. The lack of multiple inheritance ( which, in general *should* be avoided ) caused me additional work on a project in C# that could have used it.
Anyone that (IMHO) believes in what the bible teaches AND is corrupt enough to gain elected office in this day and age has got to know what is coming to him / her / it self. And it isnt good.
Course, after saying all that, we do have Jimmy Carter to contend with. He doesnt seem to fit my theory very well. The exception that proves the rule?
Yes, they are currently winning the revenue battle. In doing so, I would suggest that they are alienating more and more of the developers, developers, developers and business people that they depend on for those revenues. I think that a large part of the hostility / angst / disaffect about / against MS on slashdot has been prompted by *how* MS is winning this game. I think, ultimately, that MS will alienate itself into a minor player.
In the beginning, there was Word Perfect and Lotus 123. These were the big products of their day, and they had a DOS command line, "function key" driven interface ( yes, lotus used the slash key.. go away, boy, you bother me....:-).
Then Windows 3.0 came out. It ran on top of DOS, so it was easy to adopt.
MS bought Excel, and started producing early versions of Word. Since they were MS products, and MS was promoting Windows 3.0, these applications utilized the Windows GUI ( and dont forget that the printer driver was part of Windows, not the individual applications anymore ) to a good advantage. The other application vendors did not know which way the wind would eventually blow, so they were late to adopt the Windows GUI, as the cost to support the various desktop schemes of the day and DOS was prohibitive. And there was likely some unwillingness to give MS any additional credibility by supporting their new baby. There is a reason for the old "dos isnt done till lotus doesnt run" slogan.
Revenues started to tilt in MS's favor, and we found ourselves in the "nobody was fired for buying MS" days. Integration with the OS and support for the OS, dontcha know.
The Word Perfect company sold itself / was aquired as there werent revenues sufficient to sustain itself anymore. I forget to whom now, but it wasnt Novell, and the damage was done before ( and continued after ) this sale. I think Novell picked it up as part of its fight against MS.
The Lotus company "merged" or somesuch a period after that, I think, with IBM. Again, the damage was done previously.
Borland, owner of Quattro Pro never seemed to me to be a big player. I expect they sold Quattro pro off to put some cash in the bank and to allow them to continue with there core business of compilers ( Pascal, C++ ). Again, Borland not knowing where things would land, straddled the line. Also, they could not support the new MS technologies as quickly as the MS tools people ( suprised? ) could, so if you wanted to work in the MS world, you pretty much had to use the MS toolset. MS, AFAIK, made sure that that playing field was not level. (This is one of the data points on which I dislike MS's business tactics).
I am sure that some will say that these players should have seen this coming, and that MS was just forsighted to have made the decisions they did. I would say no, it was not at all clear at that time that Windows would be the player it became. Hindsight is 20/20, forsight is not. And MS is not gifted for having chosen things the way they did, they were tied to the new "operating environment" to promote this new "operating environment", not because of any technical decisions.
So, on the idea that Novell ran those products into the ground, no, they didnt.
They bought DR-DOS, to run against MS-DOS. DR-DOS was, in that day, considered at least even with, or technically better than MS-DOS, but the marketing machine that is MS drove them under. Lots of FUD, I recall seeing warnings that DR-DOS wasnt MS-DOS, and that MS couldnt be responsible or somesuch... ( sidebar, I installed a windows 3.x version on top of a dual boot DOS/OS/2 installation. The windows installer detected that OS/2 was on the machine ( why? ), and told me that there was some other OS that I was probably not using on the machine, would I like the installer to remove it to free up the disk space? If I had known less about my machine, I would probably have told it to do it. I am positive Joe Sixpack ( course, how would Joe Sixpack get OS/2 on his / her / it's machine... ) would have said yes. )
Novell also purchased USL as a defence against MS. I think they then realized they had bitten off more than they could chew, and sold it off a few years later.
Why did they do these things? In my opinion, they were afraid that MS would hide and marginalize Novell servers, and eventually replace them once they were just machines sitting in the server room that the people at the desktops di
The real fight is in educating "Joe sixpack" (hereafter JSP) and getting him / her / it to also refuse. The JSPs are the ones doing most of the buying, and we can protest all we want, as long as JSP is buying, not many will care.
1: They *did* what? Surrender? Yes, after a couple of bombs were dropped on them. Would they have otherwise? Probably eventually. Negotiate? Yes, I am familiar with the negotiation attempts via the USSR. What were they trying to gain?
2: So much ammunition was provided. Did they surrender? No. They fought hard. Very hard.
3: I have heard of partisans. Some had govts in exile in England or elsewhere, but all had some contact with and news from forces *still fighting*. Those Japanese soldiers *had no such thing*. Still they waited for years.
1: No, I dont see your point. If they were so eager to surrender, then why stick at that one point?
2: So, where was the "giving up"? Look at the records for the fight for Okinawa. They were heavily damaged, but somehow, they found the means to fight on. Recall the kamakazi attacks? Does that sound ready to surrender to you?
3: Yes, honestly it does. How many other conflicts have we humans been involved in, and when has such a thing ever happened before? The earliest holdout you mentioned was in, I think, 1947. About 1 to 2 years after the war? Can you imagine what it took to make those people ready to continue to try to hold their positions without contact for that lenght of time? Yeah, I call that powerful, in a race where staying on a diet to improve your own life for more than 2 months is difficult.
1: One condition surrender != unconditional surrender. And yes, I know full well that we gave them that condition.
2: Can you substantiate that the talks were not gamesmanship? Aside from the bombing survery? Japan had been in negotiations with the US leading up to the war, and after a time, used the negotiations as "cover" for the buildup to war. Also, do you give *that* much weight to one document? Is it *that* infallible? The documents' authors may have been sure, were they also correct? And how do you know? And this just leads me back to "why didnt they surrender"?
3: Just those four are pretty powerful evidence in my mind. And if you recall, I specifically said that there was no groupthink about this, I specifically allowed that there was diversity of viewpoint. And these holdouts were not on Japanese territory, so there is no compelling parallel in your "hillbilly" argument. And how do you know that they list is conclusive? I dont know where Palawan or Lubang are, but Luzon and Mindanao are in the Philipines. Kinda a long way from home.
How much have you studied this issue outside of the documents you are basing your arguments on?
So, an unconditional surrender with conditions? When was an unconditional surrender offered? I would also suggest that talks on the subject may have been gamesmanship to buy time, and introduce dissent between the various allied parties (Britain, USA, USSR...)
While my reading on the subject does not as yet include the documents you mention, it does include many other items that give me, in my view anyway, a fairly good pre-war, war and post-war perspective.
I fully understand that the bomb dropping decision is far more nuanced than "we have it, lets drop it". I would suggest that the argument that the Japanese were prepared to surrender was far more nuanced than you have represented. We could have ended the way in 1942, if we had only simply decided to let the Japanese hold what they had gained.
And further on the subject of surrender, I recall reading news stories in the '70's about how Japanese soldiers were found on various pacific islands ready to do the will of thier emperor. I know that this does not indicate that there was a groupthink spread across every Japanese, it does have a bearing on how far some were willing to go.
All it would have taken was a broadcast. "We surrender". If they were so ready to surrender, *why didnt they*.
According to your text, the strategic bombing survey was conducted *after* the war. What does it matter what it confirms? Also, the deal was that the surrender was to be unconditional. So they were willing to surrender with terms. Why unconditional? I think it was because then the surrendering party would have no leverage to attempt to hold on to any conquered lands.
Slashdot Mirror
I cant see that the ratio of cluefullness would go up overseas. I agree that many certificates are useless, not sure how that factors in to the outsourcing discussion. The fact that there are many paper doesnt mean that there are not many many IT worker that know what they are doing, both uncertified and certified. Human nature is not different overseas, what makes you think that the paper cert issue isnt already there?
From where I sit, it looks like it is all about making already wealthy executive types wealthier.
Dont worry about the consumption. The fatass will buy enough to make up for it. See? All is well after all.
[The previous was sarcasm]
In my youth, I plugged a night light into a socket. I had taken the cover off, and my thumbs were right on the traces. My arms jerked and that pulled me back from it, disconnecting me from the circuit I had formed.
:-)
Course, there was the time I plugged a plug into the wall, but first I had stuck a safety pin thru a couple holes in the prongs. Nice red ball as ( I think ) the safety pin vaporized. Loud sound that I cant describe to you now. I fell backwards, and my parent came running in to see what I had destroyed that time.
GM?
I used to touch the spark plug wires on the old Fords ( 70's ) I owned while the engine ran ( no, not often, nor as a preoccupation, just accidental ). My uncle dissuaded me from ever doing that again when he told me that that era's GM cars had enough oomph to hurt. I imagine most modern cars are high voltage.
RE: point 3,
Microsoft have been doing things in the marketplace with lockin and such that I would think that IT would look at and say "I want no part of that" for many years now. I think that exactly this is why so many of us dont like MS all that much.
The IT response, in the main, has been to continue to purchase MS.
I realize that there is backlash against this, that there has been some, and that it is growing. I am just not as sure as you are about where that balance point will be. I think that MS's current tactics will lose them some customers, but I am thinking that these tactics will enable them to keep the vast majority.
I hope and pray that I am wrong and you are right.
I read it as:
SCOsource thief Chris Sontag
Funny what one letter can do to meaning...
They adopted that, a while ago.
Maybe because of how these corporations act? :-)
On "Laissez-faire", understanding the term and religiously believing it to be the one true way are not synonymous. Should corporations be completely unregulated? I am sure that the corporations ( and the people that run them ) believe they should be. How would that be good for anyone but the corporation and it's owners?
On "never add more regulation", things change. Shouldnt the rules, regulations and laws change with them?
Sorry, I was trying for humor. I think I failed. :-)
Maybe ENRON could do the job for us?
If they charge by the CPU count, then lets just patch the OS we use to report zero CPUs. Problem solved!
Or, even better, report a negative number of CPUs, then the vendor will pay us!
Agreed that it is more of a procedural thing, but there are a ( limited ) number of times when you need a short stupid plain old function, because you dont want to create whole class for that function, and tagging it into every class that uses it defeats one of the benefits of OO programming. And saying I should be using C misses the point. The biggest part of the work correctly uses and benefits from OO thinking and doing. And declaring the function in the class of the application ( where such exists ) may not give it visibility in other classes without making an unwanted dependancy.
Try it from this angle.... Shouldnt the tool be enabling rather than limiting? To the extent possible, of course. Please dont interpret this as anything against good practice, or as a call to enable sloppy stupid programming. Thought should be given to find a way within the logical model the tool promotes, but sometimes ( very very small number of times ) you need to go outside a bit.
You have a bug with or without the exception handler. What the problem is is that with the empty exception handler, the bug will be silent and may be deadly. Without the exception handler, the exception will be expressed in a way that everyone can see, and the business of tracking it down can begin earlier. Should it be there? Sure, along with the cleanup / recovery code. Course, now, someone will mandate that exception handlers cant be empty. Then the programmer that use empty exception handlers will put in do nothing code to work around.
Frankly, I dont like languages ( java or c# ) that tie my hands so much. I do like things that increase productivity and correctness, but it is annoying to run into artificial limitations. Like where you cant have standard "static, global scope" functions, so you end up working around that by having a Utility class ( or somesuch ), and declaring static functions there. The lack of multiple inheritance ( which, in general *should* be avoided ) caused me additional work on a project in C# that could have used it.
I would tend toward disagreement.
Anyone that (IMHO) believes in what the bible teaches AND is corrupt enough to gain elected office in this day and age has got to know what is coming to him / her / it self. And it isnt good.
Course, after saying all that, we do have Jimmy Carter to contend with. He doesnt seem to fit my theory very well. The exception that proves the rule?
Yes, they are currently winning the revenue battle. In doing so, I would suggest that they are alienating more and more of the developers, developers, developers and business people that they depend on for those revenues. I think that a large part of the hostility / angst / disaffect about / against MS on slashdot has been prompted by *how* MS is winning this game. I think, ultimately, that MS will alienate itself into a minor player.
In the beginning, there was Word Perfect and Lotus 123. These were the big products of their day, and they had a DOS command line, "function key" driven interface ( yes, lotus used the slash key.. go away, boy, you bother me.... :-).
Then Windows 3.0 came out. It ran on top of DOS, so it was easy to adopt.
MS bought Excel, and started producing early versions of Word. Since they were MS products, and MS was promoting Windows 3.0, these applications utilized the Windows GUI ( and dont forget that the printer driver was part of Windows, not the individual applications anymore ) to a good advantage. The other application vendors did not know which way the wind would eventually blow, so they were late to adopt the Windows GUI, as the cost to support the various desktop schemes of the day and DOS was prohibitive. And there was likely some unwillingness to give MS any additional credibility by supporting their new baby. There is a reason for the old "dos isnt done till lotus doesnt run" slogan.
Revenues started to tilt in MS's favor, and we found ourselves in the "nobody was fired for buying MS" days. Integration with the OS and support for the OS, dontcha know.
The Word Perfect company sold itself / was aquired as there werent revenues sufficient to sustain itself anymore. I forget to whom now, but it wasnt Novell, and the damage was done before ( and continued after ) this sale. I think Novell picked it up as part of its fight against MS.
The Lotus company "merged" or somesuch a period after that, I think, with IBM. Again, the damage was done previously.
Borland, owner of Quattro Pro never seemed to me to be a big player. I expect they sold Quattro pro off to put some cash in the bank and to allow them to continue with there core business of compilers ( Pascal, C++ ). Again, Borland not knowing where things would land, straddled the line. Also, they could not support the new MS technologies as quickly as the MS tools people ( suprised? ) could, so if you wanted to work in the MS world, you pretty much had to use the MS toolset. MS, AFAIK, made sure that that playing field was not level. (This is one of the data points on which I dislike MS's business tactics).
I am sure that some will say that these players should have seen this coming, and that MS was just forsighted to have made the decisions they did. I would say no, it was not at all clear at that time that Windows would be the player it became. Hindsight is 20/20, forsight is not. And MS is not gifted for having chosen things the way they did, they were tied to the new "operating environment" to promote this new "operating environment", not because of any technical decisions.
So, on the idea that Novell ran those products into the ground, no, they didnt.
They bought DR-DOS, to run against MS-DOS. DR-DOS was, in that day, considered at least even with, or technically better than MS-DOS, but the marketing machine that is MS drove them under. Lots of FUD, I recall seeing warnings that DR-DOS wasnt MS-DOS, and that MS couldnt be responsible or somesuch... ( sidebar, I installed a windows 3.x version on top of a dual boot DOS/OS/2 installation. The windows installer detected that OS/2 was on the machine ( why? ), and told me that there was some other OS that I was probably not using on the machine, would I like the installer to remove it to free up the disk space? If I had known less about my machine, I would probably have told it to do it. I am positive Joe Sixpack ( course, how would Joe Sixpack get OS/2 on his / her / it's machine... ) would have said yes. )
Novell also purchased USL as a defence against MS. I think they then realized they had bitten off more than they could chew, and sold it off a few years later.
Why did they do these things? In my opinion, they were afraid that MS would hide and marginalize Novell servers, and eventually replace them once they were just machines sitting in the server room that the people at the desktops di
Could you edify us with what you think the "pervasive abuses" are?
The real fight is in educating "Joe sixpack" (hereafter JSP) and getting him / her / it to also refuse. The JSPs are the ones doing most of the buying, and we can protest all we want, as long as JSP is buying, not many will care.
It's the "five finger restoration system".
1: They *did* what? Surrender? Yes, after a couple of bombs were dropped on them. Would they have otherwise? Probably eventually. Negotiate? Yes, I am familiar with the negotiation attempts via the USSR. What were they trying to gain?
2: So much ammunition was provided. Did they surrender? No. They fought hard. Very hard.
3: I have heard of partisans. Some had govts in exile in England or elsewhere, but all had some contact with and news from forces *still fighting*. Those Japanese soldiers *had no such thing*. Still they waited for years.
1: No, I dont see your point. If they were so eager to surrender, then why stick at that one point?
2: So, where was the "giving up"? Look at the records for the fight for Okinawa. They were heavily damaged, but somehow, they found the means to fight on. Recall the kamakazi attacks? Does that sound ready to surrender to you?
3: Yes, honestly it does. How many other conflicts have we humans been involved in, and when has such a thing ever happened before? The earliest holdout you mentioned was in, I think, 1947. About 1 to 2 years after the war? Can you imagine what it took to make those people ready to continue to try to hold their positions without contact for that lenght of time? Yeah, I call that powerful, in a race where staying on a diet to improve your own life for more than 2 months is difficult.
1: One condition surrender != unconditional surrender. And yes, I know full well that we gave them that condition.
2: Can you substantiate that the talks were not gamesmanship? Aside from the bombing survery? Japan had been in negotiations with the US leading up to the war, and after a time, used the negotiations as "cover" for the buildup to war. Also, do you give *that* much weight to one document? Is it *that* infallible? The documents' authors may have been sure, were they also correct? And how do you know? And this just leads me back to "why didnt they surrender"?
3: Just those four are pretty powerful evidence in my mind. And if you recall, I specifically said that there was no groupthink about this, I specifically allowed that there was diversity of viewpoint. And these holdouts were not on Japanese territory, so there is no compelling parallel in your "hillbilly" argument. And how do you know that they list is conclusive? I dont know where Palawan or Lubang are, but Luzon and Mindanao are in the Philipines. Kinda a long way from home.
How much have you studied this issue outside of the documents you are basing your arguments on?
So, an unconditional surrender with conditions? When was an unconditional surrender offered? I would also suggest that talks on the subject may have been gamesmanship to buy time, and introduce dissent between the various allied parties (Britain, USA, USSR...)
While my reading on the subject does not as yet include the documents you mention, it does include many other items that give me, in my view anyway, a fairly good pre-war, war and post-war perspective.
I fully understand that the bomb dropping decision is far more nuanced than "we have it, lets drop it". I would suggest that the argument that the Japanese were prepared to surrender was far more nuanced than you have represented. We could have ended the way in 1942, if we had only simply decided to let the Japanese hold what they had gained.
And further on the subject of surrender, I recall reading news stories in the '70's about how Japanese soldiers were found on various pacific islands ready to do the will of thier emperor. I know that this does not indicate that there was a groupthink spread across every Japanese, it does have a bearing on how far some were willing to go.
All it would have taken was a broadcast. "We surrender". If they were so ready to surrender, *why didnt they*.
According to your text, the strategic bombing survey was conducted *after* the war. What does it matter what it confirms? Also, the deal was that the surrender was to be unconditional. So they were willing to surrender with terms. Why unconditional? I think it was because then the surrendering party would have no leverage to attempt to hold on to any conquered lands.
IE will teach you religion.