in a corporate setting that is good enough because the editors are all your employees.
This probably holds for vandalism-type issues, but not for access control.
Imagine the wiki pages about a pending layoff. In a large organization you might want 20-30 people working on layoff related content, but you wouldn't want your entire staff to have access to it.
There are also issues with corporate intelligence. When you're releasing a top-secret kill-the-competition product you don't want your temporary employees, contractors, janitors etc. to be able to read all about it. Likewise putting staff's names and skills online could be a treasure trove for headhunters stopping by for short times at the company.
Mediawiki doesn't have the functionality to deal with these scenarios.
Sometimes this gets a little ridiculous. One lab I worked with had "depressed" mice. You could see them sort of huddling inactively in the corner. It's amazing that drugs for depression work...We aren't as complex as we think.
Such a big deal is made of IQ of certain ethnicities, but take heart in your own smarts
The ashkenazi test at about 112-115 IQ. That's usually with a ton of socioeconomic advantages (equally wishy-washy, but yes, if your mom can read, you can likely read too). Let's say this drags their true average IQ down to 107 or so.
The VAST majority of slashdot readers are above a 107
Of course, having a high IQ doesn't mean you'll be rich, famous, get all the babes, or even avoid Tay-Sachs
You're either a fool or a troll.
I've develop for Oracle and MySQL. MySQL is faster by magnitudes.
Even something like say, logging in, takes much longer on Oracle than in MySQL. In MySQL you feel like you're interacting with something at about the speed of the unix shell. In Oracle you feel like you are sending telegraphs off to a server that cranks away and responds to you after a while.
Data integrity is not the only Oracle slowdown. Things like character set conversion make everything bog down.
As far as "code overhead", modern development doesn't use much in the way of database constraints. They're nice from an ideal-world point of view, but it's awkard to try to insert a row and catch a constraint violation coming from way down deep in your database access code and few people do it.
A little experiment:
Try building a table in Oracle with the absolute loosest of constraints. All columns can be varchar2(100) with no primary or foreign keys and no check constraints. To be fair, I wouldn't use any exotic options like PARALLEL or NOLOGGING, but do whatever you will. Load it up with 10M rows and check your watch.....
Do the same in MySQL and check your watch....
On second thought, you probably don't have access to either of these pieces of software.
At 18.4c per gallon, the average gas tax for a prius driving 10,000 miles a year at $2 a gallon is about $70. The proposed GPS devices cost around $100 -- over a year of gas tax per vehicle. Consider that there are 40M people in California, and each will probably have 5 cars in a lifetime, factor in installation and maintenance of roadside stations and this becomes some real money. A simple 'no parking' sign costs hundreds of dollars to install, these babies will cost 10s of thousands each.
In any case, the argument that high mileage vehicles have lowered gas taxes is outrageous. I don't know hybrid sales numbers, but gas prices have increased substantially since the Prius was released, and every report I've read says gas mileage is way down from its high, thanks to SUVs, trucks, and beefed up engines. A little math should bear out that gas tax has increased, not to mention CA state sales tax, which is applied on top of gas tax.
It doesn't really add up, the gas tax is doing fine and this would cost so much to implement. Other than plots to spy on the populus, I'd say this is this could be back alley to toll-roads and more complex pricing schemes. Once the GPS infrastructure is in place, it doesn't require a whole lot of code to change the tax rate for people driving through 880 during rush hour all by their lonesomes. It could also lead to commuters becoming political footballs -- the SoCal contingent arguing the NoCal lemmings aren't paying their share and vice versa.
Old thread that probably isn't read anymore, but this comment is important:
Public Schools exist only to service the Teacher UNION....The local city here (Atlanta) is a prime example of this problem with far more admins than necessary.
Teachers unions have plenty of issues, but what makes you think the union is responsible for bloated administration ("admins")? A budget is finite, from it teacher wants more teachers and LESS admins, to spread the teaching work around more. This has the beneificial effect on students of smaller class sizes.
The $10B spent on public education would also generate spending and taxes. The question is which is more valuable -- educated kids or a big laser in the sky?
FYI Oakland already has charter schools, and has had them for years. Google coulda told you this.
The teacher's unions aren't going away anytime soon. The OPS teachers probably wouldn't mind giving up their union if things without it were fair, but they have been historically underpaid. Oakland has been very top heavy and corrupt -- but this should not be an alter to sacrifice innocent minds upon.
Your post might carry more weight if you cited evidence of *teachers unions* turning public schools into political and multicultural advocacy centers. I've seen plenty of cases where local school boards do this -- note the recent Atlanta "evolution is just a theory" sticker.
If you did even the tiniest bit of research I'd give you the tiniest bit of respect, but you haven't.
"All public school students" are not getting a crappy education. There are several world-class public universities in the USA that give less than crappy educations. In the K-12 level, there are numerous school districts that consistently turn out top-notch students. Compare Bellevue, WA and Oakland, CA to see what kind of differences exist.
OPS is actually over 100M in the hole. I don't know the figures, but I'd estimate interest and principal on this could be 10M a year. For the federal government with a 1T budget this is only a few minutes worth of spending, but to take 10M per year from a local school district hampers ability to educate. 1,000 teachers in Oakland were just sent layoff notices on top of the over 300 laid off in 2002. Not all of those will go, but firing hundreds of teachers is a quick recipe to "magically" undereducate.
Just like the previous poster, you give no proof or logic whatsoever. "Umn. He's right" doesn't get us any further than the original statement. Why is he/she right? The federal government gives money to universities, public and private, around the country. Are you seeking to stop those payments? What about the numerous less-related other subsidies and incentives, such as those for Native American whalers in Alaska, importers of chinese ceiling fans, and NASCAR track owners? The federal government recently spent a billion dollars (50 OPS bailouts worth) repairing Florida. As far as I know, hurricanes are not mentioned in the Constitution. If you are for the federal government behaving as it was intended by the Constitution in all cases, then you've got a leg to stand on. But, since you exclusively mention OPS, your comments imply ulterior motivations.
Again, great point, except that you give no justification whatsoever for your free-market-in-the-public-school-sector attitude. If your point is that we should get rid of public schools altogether you'd have a leg to stand on...but to merely say the federal government shouldn't support local schools requires some sort of handwavy proof.
If your argument is that it isn't the federal government's domain to support education, then we'd also expect the federal government to get out of university level funding. We'd also expect the federal government to stop regulating anything other than interstate and international transactions. If its just a matter of stopping bailouts maybe you'd mention the federal deficit, or the PG&E bailout, or what about Long Term Capital? But you mention none of these...you just don't want to help out urban kids.
No, what you are saying is that it's not worth 20M to prevent the over 200,000 kids that will go through OPS in the next 20 years from getting a crappy education. Holding kids responsible for financial mismanagement by a group of adults that took place in many cases before they were moved to Oakland, entered the USA, or were BORN is a ludicrous stand to take. A rational thinker would estimate the cost of trying in a court of law, incarcerating, paying welfare for even a few of these kids will quickly surpass 20M....but a self-made know-it-all who has taken Econ 1A will just chant the familiar free-market laissez faire refrains.
PERL is a great language. Ugly yes, but once you get used to it there's is no going back to C/C++ or JAVA, at least in a mostly tool-less environment like UNIX. For many classes of programs, the productivity you get from PERL is an order of magnitude greater than in C/C++ (some would argue that I just need to learn the STL classes....). I think most of this is because PERL is interpreted....the code, debug, compile cycle is significantly shortened. You also never wonder what version of the code you are running.
PERL 6, however, seems to be dead. I've been following its progress for a couple years now and it is going almost nowhere. The decision to move to a bytecode interpreter looks like a huge mistake. Most people are fine without the bytecode interpreter and it has split off dev resources from the issues that would help your everyday user -- "syntactic sugar". For instance, PERL as it is doesn't have named function parameters, each function is just passed an array of parameters (unlike in pretty much every other language I know--C, LISP, Java, etc)). Adding this functionality would presumably be simple to do, without implementing a bytecode interpreter. OO support is also lousy in the current PERL.
The feature request framework was also lacking. Everything went up to Larry Wall, who decided things basically as God. I saw at least one simple and powerul thing dismissed out of hand -- a built in loop counter. So often in while loops it makes sense to have a counter of the iteration #...this requires at most a single addition for each iteration but was skipped.
The stated goal of PERL6 was improving XS, but this doesn't require a bytecode interpreter either.
Of course, this is all running off volunteer labor so I shouldn't complain too much!
Your employees probably don't need to install new software to get their work done. Don't let them run as administrator and you'll avoid spyware installations.
Most of you guys don't have much experience with outsourcing/H1Bs, at least not from the other side of the fence.
Outsourcing (I'm not shore about offshoring) is not any cheaper than hiring, not initially anyway. Talk to an H1B and you'll see their wages are often quite high, for seemingly lowly skilled labor (such as deploying software or being on a team that keeps software from Siebel etc up and running).
I know a fellow doing QA in the bay area making 80k+, which isn't too shabby for QA. This is AFTER his "consulting company" is paid money. Almost all H1Bs operate through middlemen that take a large share of their earnings (sometimes as much as 50%). For a 80k salary the actual amount paid is probably more like 110 to 120k.
NOTE: There are many extremely qualified foreign engineers that are a lot smarter than me, these are not the people I'm talking about. There are jobs that probably any American with a good attitude at above the 75th%ile on standardized intelligence tests could do with a few months of training. I'm also not all that concerned about people that intend to immigrate here -- we've got plenty of uneducated people arriving, accepting intelligent, employed, english speakers is hard for me to argue with.
Back to the point, outsourcing savings come in a few ways that aren't obvious.
- Healthcare costs. For older employees, healthcare can get very expensive. Throw in a whole family of people and it gets real expensive.
- Risk management. if you get Wipro to do something for you, when it fails, Wipro is responsible. They'll do anything to avoid failing and facing a lawsuit. Hire your own people and you risk employees quitting, going on maternity leave, failing to document etc. The PHBs "manage" the risk, in other words they take no risk and do no management so they won't risk being held responsible.
These kinds of deals frequently cost more money than if you had managed it well and hired your own folks. You also avoid things like unionization, but this is rare among programmers anyway.
- Annual reports. you can claim to have lowered your payroll--stockholders love this--and they also love to see that you are involved in contracting work out, as its perceived as good business. Sort of a lemmings approach.
- Eventual offshoring. If you've got a lot of Indian guys working on a project, it isn't much of a leap to send them back to India to keep them working on the project.
The whole thing is foolish as far as I'm concerned. You save a few bucks but the economy and tax base overall loses. I read an article about expatriate Indians returning to India and luring venture capital there. Every H1B employee working on a project is exposed to inefficiencies and business opportunities that get their brains ticking--once their visa expires or their parents call them home to get married they have the chance to act on these opportunities. If American residents (immigrants or native-borns) were working in these jobs, they would be creating these new businesses. I have yet to see a business that suffered huge losses because they hired locally. Enron didn't go under because their call center was in Houston.
This is an issue that's not up to the governor of California.
The citizens of California voted against extending benefits to illegal immigrants, but this was nullified by the federal supreme court. Answering this question can only be bad--either you offend some taxpaying citizens, or offend some former illegal immigrants and their families.
By the way, they do pay taxes. You can hide from the INS but not the IRS.
its not too late to come back and marry one of us ugly male citizens.
hey if citizenship isn't enough to get a job it should at least get us each beautiful brazilian geek architects.
Seeing as you can't spell "latter", I doubt you could google the California tax rates and find out they don't burden the richest.
California has plenty of rich people. They aren't fleeing the state. If they were, who would be paying for all the million dollar houses? The poor unemployed middle-class people are the ones who are leaving and can't pay the rents.
Slashdot Mirror
This probably holds for vandalism-type issues, but not for access control.
Imagine the wiki pages about a pending layoff. In a large organization you might want 20-30 people working on layoff related content, but you wouldn't want your entire staff to have access to it.
There are also issues with corporate intelligence. When you're releasing a top-secret kill-the-competition product you don't want your temporary employees, contractors, janitors etc. to be able to read all about it. Likewise putting staff's names and skills online could be a treasure trove for headhunters stopping by for short times at the company.
Mediawiki doesn't have the functionality to deal with these scenarios.
Sometimes this gets a little ridiculous. One lab I worked with had "depressed" mice. You could see them sort of huddling inactively in the corner. It's amazing that drugs for depression work...We aren't as complex as we think.
Such a big deal is made of IQ of certain ethnicities, but take heart in your own smarts The ashkenazi test at about 112-115 IQ. That's usually with a ton of socioeconomic advantages (equally wishy-washy, but yes, if your mom can read, you can likely read too). Let's say this drags their true average IQ down to 107 or so. The VAST majority of slashdot readers are above a 107 Of course, having a high IQ doesn't mean you'll be rich, famous, get all the babes, or even avoid Tay-Sachs
You're either a fool or a troll. I've develop for Oracle and MySQL. MySQL is faster by magnitudes. Even something like say, logging in, takes much longer on Oracle than in MySQL. In MySQL you feel like you're interacting with something at about the speed of the unix shell. In Oracle you feel like you are sending telegraphs off to a server that cranks away and responds to you after a while. Data integrity is not the only Oracle slowdown. Things like character set conversion make everything bog down. As far as "code overhead", modern development doesn't use much in the way of database constraints. They're nice from an ideal-world point of view, but it's awkard to try to insert a row and catch a constraint violation coming from way down deep in your database access code and few people do it. A little experiment: Try building a table in Oracle with the absolute loosest of constraints. All columns can be varchar2(100) with no primary or foreign keys and no check constraints. To be fair, I wouldn't use any exotic options like PARALLEL or NOLOGGING, but do whatever you will. Load it up with 10M rows and check your watch..... Do the same in MySQL and check your watch.... On second thought, you probably don't have access to either of these pieces of software.
At 18.4c per gallon, the average gas tax for a prius driving 10,000 miles a year at $2 a gallon is about $70. The proposed GPS devices cost around $100 -- over a year of gas tax per vehicle. Consider that there are 40M people in California, and each will probably have 5 cars in a lifetime, factor in installation and maintenance of roadside stations and this becomes some real money. A simple 'no parking' sign costs hundreds of dollars to install, these babies will cost 10s of thousands each.
In any case, the argument that high mileage vehicles have lowered gas taxes is outrageous. I don't know hybrid sales numbers, but gas prices have increased substantially since the Prius was released, and every report I've read says gas mileage is way down from its high, thanks to SUVs, trucks, and beefed up engines. A little math should bear out that gas tax has increased, not to mention CA state sales tax, which is applied on top of gas tax.
It doesn't really add up, the gas tax is doing fine and this would cost so much to implement. Other than plots to spy on the populus, I'd say this is this could be back alley to toll-roads and more complex pricing schemes. Once the GPS infrastructure is in place, it doesn't require a whole lot of code to change the tax rate for people driving through 880 during rush hour all by their lonesomes. It could also lead to commuters becoming political footballs -- the SoCal contingent arguing the NoCal lemmings aren't paying their share and vice versa.
Public Schools exist only to service the Teacher UNION....The local city here (Atlanta) is a prime example of this problem with far more admins than necessary.
Teachers unions have plenty of issues, but what makes you think the union is responsible for bloated administration ("admins")? A budget is finite, from it teacher wants more teachers and LESS admins, to spread the teaching work around more. This has the beneificial effect on students of smaller class sizes.
The $10B spent on public education would also generate spending and taxes. The question is which is more valuable -- educated kids or a big laser in the sky?
FYI Oakland already has charter schools, and has had them for years. Google coulda told you this.
The teacher's unions aren't going away anytime soon. The OPS teachers probably wouldn't mind giving up their union if things without it were fair, but they have been historically underpaid. Oakland has been very top heavy and corrupt -- but this should not be an alter to sacrifice innocent minds upon.
Your post might carry more weight if you cited evidence of *teachers unions* turning public schools into political and multicultural advocacy centers. I've seen plenty of cases where local school boards do this -- note the recent Atlanta "evolution is just a theory" sticker.
If you did even the tiniest bit of research I'd give you the tiniest bit of respect, but you haven't.
"All public school students" are not getting a crappy education. There are several world-class public universities in the USA that give less than crappy educations. In the K-12 level, there are numerous school districts that consistently turn out top-notch students. Compare Bellevue, WA and Oakland, CA to see what kind of differences exist.
OPS is actually over 100M in the hole. I don't know the figures, but I'd estimate interest and principal on this could be 10M a year. For the federal government with a 1T budget this is only a few minutes worth of spending, but to take 10M per year from a local school district hampers ability to educate. 1,000 teachers in Oakland were just sent layoff notices on top of the over 300 laid off in 2002. Not all of those will go, but firing hundreds of teachers is a quick recipe to "magically" undereducate.
Just like the previous poster, you give no proof or logic whatsoever. "Umn. He's right" doesn't get us any further than the original statement. Why is he/she right? The federal government gives money to universities, public and private, around the country. Are you seeking to stop those payments? What about the numerous less-related other subsidies and incentives, such as those for Native American whalers in Alaska, importers of chinese ceiling fans, and NASCAR track owners? The federal government recently spent a billion dollars (50 OPS bailouts worth) repairing Florida. As far as I know, hurricanes are not mentioned in the Constitution. If you are for the federal government behaving as it was intended by the Constitution in all cases, then you've got a leg to stand on. But, since you exclusively mention OPS, your comments imply ulterior motivations.
Again, great point, except that you give no justification whatsoever for your free-market-in-the-public-school-sector attitude. If your point is that we should get rid of public schools altogether you'd have a leg to stand on...but to merely say the federal government shouldn't support local schools requires some sort of handwavy proof.
If your argument is that it isn't the federal government's domain to support education, then we'd also expect the federal government to get out of university level funding. We'd also expect the federal government to stop regulating anything other than interstate and international transactions. If its just a matter of stopping bailouts maybe you'd mention the federal deficit, or the PG&E bailout, or what about Long Term Capital? But you mention none of these...you just don't want to help out urban kids.
No, what you are saying is that it's not worth 20M to prevent the over 200,000 kids that will go through OPS in the next 20 years from getting a crappy education. Holding kids responsible for financial mismanagement by a group of adults that took place in many cases before they were moved to Oakland, entered the USA, or were BORN is a ludicrous stand to take. A rational thinker would estimate the cost of trying in a court of law, incarcerating, paying welfare for even a few of these kids will quickly surpass 20M....but a self-made know-it-all who has taken Econ 1A will just chant the familiar free-market laissez faire refrains.
PERL is a great language. Ugly yes, but once you get used to it there's is no going back to C/C++ or JAVA, at least in a mostly tool-less environment like UNIX. For many classes of programs, the productivity you get from PERL is an order of magnitude greater than in C/C++ (some would argue that I just need to learn the STL classes....). I think most of this is because PERL is interpreted....the code, debug, compile cycle is significantly shortened. You also never wonder what version of the code you are running.
PERL 6, however, seems to be dead. I've been following its progress for a couple years now and it is going almost nowhere. The decision to move to a bytecode interpreter looks like a huge mistake. Most people are fine without the bytecode interpreter and it has split off dev resources from the issues that would help your everyday user -- "syntactic sugar". For instance, PERL as it is doesn't have named function parameters, each function is just passed an array of parameters (unlike in pretty much every other language I know--C, LISP, Java, etc)). Adding this functionality would presumably be simple to do, without implementing a bytecode interpreter. OO support is also lousy in the current PERL.
The feature request framework was also lacking. Everything went up to Larry Wall, who decided things basically as God. I saw at least one simple and powerul thing dismissed out of hand -- a built in loop counter. So often in while loops it makes sense to have a counter of the iteration #...this requires at most a single addition for each iteration but was skipped.
The stated goal of PERL6 was improving XS, but this doesn't require a bytecode interpreter either.
Of course, this is all running off volunteer labor so I shouldn't complain too much!
Your employees probably don't need to install new software to get their work done. Don't let them run as administrator and you'll avoid spyware installations.
Outsourcing (I'm not shore about offshoring) is not any cheaper than hiring, not initially anyway. Talk to an H1B and you'll see their wages are often quite high, for seemingly lowly skilled labor (such as deploying software or being on a team that keeps software from Siebel etc up and running).
I know a fellow doing QA in the bay area making 80k+, which isn't too shabby for QA. This is AFTER his "consulting company" is paid money. Almost all H1Bs operate through middlemen that take a large share of their earnings (sometimes as much as 50%). For a 80k salary the actual amount paid is probably more like 110 to 120k.
NOTE: There are many extremely qualified foreign engineers that are a lot smarter than me, these are not the people I'm talking about. There are jobs that probably any American with a good attitude at above the 75th%ile on standardized intelligence tests could do with a few months of training. I'm also not all that concerned about people that intend to immigrate here -- we've got plenty of uneducated people arriving, accepting intelligent, employed, english speakers is hard for me to argue with.
Back to the point, outsourcing savings come in a few ways that aren't obvious.
- Healthcare costs. For older employees, healthcare can get very expensive. Throw in a whole family of people and it gets real expensive.
- Risk management. if you get Wipro to do something for you, when it fails, Wipro is responsible. They'll do anything to avoid failing and facing a lawsuit. Hire your own people and you risk employees quitting, going on maternity leave, failing to document etc. The PHBs "manage" the risk, in other words they take no risk and do no management so they won't risk being held responsible.
These kinds of deals frequently cost more money than if you had managed it well and hired your own folks. You also avoid things like unionization, but this is rare among programmers anyway.
- Annual reports. you can claim to have lowered your payroll--stockholders love this--and they also love to see that you are involved in contracting work out, as its perceived as good business. Sort of a lemmings approach.
- Eventual offshoring. If you've got a lot of Indian guys working on a project, it isn't much of a leap to send them back to India to keep them working on the project.
The whole thing is foolish as far as I'm concerned. You save a few bucks but the economy and tax base overall loses. I read an article about expatriate Indians returning to India and luring venture capital there. Every H1B employee working on a project is exposed to inefficiencies and business opportunities that get their brains ticking--once their visa expires or their parents call them home to get married they have the chance to act on these opportunities. If American residents (immigrants or native-borns) were working in these jobs, they would be creating these new businesses. I have yet to see a business that suffered huge losses because they hired locally. Enron didn't go under because their call center was in Houston.
What about safety for the rest of us who have to drive with these guys on the roaD?
This is an issue that's not up to the governor of California.
The citizens of California voted against extending benefits to illegal immigrants, but this was nullified by the federal supreme court. Answering this question can only be bad--either you offend some taxpaying citizens, or offend some former illegal immigrants and their families.
By the way, they do pay taxes. You can hide from the INS but not the IRS.
its not too late to come back and marry one of us ugly male citizens. hey if citizenship isn't enough to get a job it should at least get us each beautiful brazilian geek architects.
Seeing as you can't spell "latter", I doubt you could google the California tax rates and find out they don't burden the richest.
California has plenty of rich people. They aren't fleeing the state. If they were, who would be paying for all the million dollar houses? The poor unemployed middle-class people are the ones who are leaving and can't pay the rents.