This is more like natural as in we're still animals who eat, shit, and have offspring.
I agree that right to reproduce does not mean right to over-consume. But my point is that telling someone "hey, you don't have enough money to have children" is malicious beyond belief. I have no idea how it has survived in modern mainstream thought -- it's only one step removed from "Jews have no future, that's policy now."
I've paid my share of taxes too, actually a bit more because I've been in a high backet since leaving college. And I've got no problem with my taxes helping poor people raise their children, because that's the Morally Right thing to do. These conservatives who believe that there's some magic income line below which no one should have children are nothing more than economic Nazis.
And now I've mentioned Nazis so this thread is officially off-topic.
Well you're right, you're not likely to change my mind. Primarily because you're ignoring US history, but hey.
If you really want to look at laissez-faire capitalism, research Britian in the late 1800's. Then decide if our (tiny) steps economically in the socialist direction are helping or hurting most Americans. But seriously, if you think our politics have become more socialist in the last fifty years, you *really* need to crack a history book. (Did you know Nixon proposed a national health care system ala Canada? That was a Republican president and only forty years ago. Nowadays not even the most liberal Democrat can survive that position.) As for bread lines, we had those for about ten years before WWII, and during the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War. Seems we too have had lots of historical problems just feeding our own. Hell even the Pilgrims were about to starve until the Indians took pity on them.
But you really don't want to add the genocide numbers do you? Remember the 200 million American Indians that were wiped out? Our diseases killed most of them, but we've still got 20-50 million to account for. And remember the millions of would-be slaves that died on the ocean trip. Then there's the million or so Timorese we helped Suharto kill, and the 2 million Pol Pot beheaded with our help. And the Nazi's we continued to trade freely with after they had conquered Europe. And the half million Japanese we killed with nuclear weapons.
Sorry, despite Soviet Russia and China's brutal and well-known histories, we've still got 'em beat. The Indian genocide alone matches Stalin and Hitler combined.
(BTW George Bush's felonies were documented in the Houston Press while he was running for governor: land fraud, multiple counts of insider trading, and desertion to start the list. The DNC doesn't seem to care.)
You forgot to add: control over what their citizens can read, talk about and/or do. Oh, and if you wanted to speak-out about what your government is doing, don't forget the nice people that take you away in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again, or the tanks that roll up to disperse your demonstration.
That's why I put the "Communism" in quotes. Soviet Russia and China practiced something closer to totatitarian despotism that happened to have communistic economic policies. See, political policy and economic policy live on two different axes.
And if you're serious about US political freedom, you forgot to mention the following events: Shay's Rebellion, Federal strikebreakers, Dred Scott, COINTELPRO, the reaction to "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Jim Crow laws, the Indian Wars, and the Nisei slave camps.
Soviet Russia and China certainly have no monopolies in suppressing free speech and the right to assembly, or genocide, or repressing their population. They don't even have nearly as long a history of supporting such repressive regimes, unless you count the 3000 years China existed before the US did.
Before you start knocking the US, you really need to tak a closer look at what Communism really means. At least in this country we get a chance to change our elected representatives every few years, even if they are all liars and crooks.
*ahem* You pot, me kettle. Before praising the US, you should take a deeper look at its history. And then decide if our choice to maximize political freedom at the cost of economic freedom was a good one for most of our people. And don't forget to include the sweatshops and petrodollar -- those too are integral parts of our economy. Finally, consider just how much policial freedom we really got from the deal (hint: look up what police are doing to today's anti-war demonstrators).
Too bad you're an AC, I'd dearly love to take you down to the Fifth Ward in Houston so you can shout out to all the poor people there who "should have exercised a little more responsibility". Yeah, better wear a Kevlar vest when you say that.
You obviously don't know that reproduction is one of our "natural rights." Thomas Jefferson calls natural rights "unalienable rights" because they are outside the proper domain of control of the state. He even used an argument based on unalienable rights to justify the right of the people to overthrow their government, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Modern nations that don't recognize natural rights (including the right to reproduce) and as a result refuse to shape their economies in such a way that most of the population can exercise their unalianable rights are illegitimate forms of government.
For example, deliberately shaping the economy such that 19.8 million people are unable to support their own offspring, when there are economic alternatives in plain sight just across the northern border, is an act made only by an illegitimate government. And of course the small slice of people who support this government's economic policies are complicit in its human rights violations. And that means you, Anonymous Coward.
I'm guessing you really don't have a clue. Perhaps this will help make it clear:
SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU UNEDUCATION FUCKING MORON FUCKING FUCKWAD.
Your sig: Heartless capitalism has saved more people from poverty than any progressive program of social equality ever has.
Dead wrong. Under "Communism" (very loosely defined), Soviet Russia and China have both brought literacy, crime control, and medical care to about 2 billion people. Under "Socialist Democracy" European nations, India, and Canada have brought the same to another billion people. With the collapse of Soviet Russia, the Eastern Bloc nations have had serious increases in infant mortality and crime, and losses in medical care and crime control.
The United States OTOH has managed to provide medical care, education, and crime control to only about 100 million people, and only then by stealing (by which I mean "taking without paying for") resources from about one billion citizens in Mexico, Central America, Oceania, and Africa. Hardly the most efficient economy.
In conclusion, you're the one who has (as we say in Texas) swallowed a big pile of bull.
Yeah sure. Pick up a "Programming X in 24 Hours", play with it for about four years, and you too will be just as well-trained as the mechanical engineer who designed your car engine.
Quoting the article: "Giving the [software architects] tools to shape software will transform the landscape, according to Simonyi. Otherwise, you're stuck in the unsatisfactory present, where the people who know the most about what the software is supposed to accomplish can't directly shape the software itself: All they can do is 'make a humble request to the programmer.'"
As a programmer who recently stopped working for a very very very large computer firm that sells both hardware and software, let me say that Simonyi's point makes zero sense. Tools already exist to "shape software," and they are known as programming languages like Visual Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, etc...
I'm frankly sick of architects (that's the term for people who say they design software but don't actually design software) who bemoan the gap between their glorious visions and the real products their teams end up producing. These people need to click "Close" on their UML models and go get their hands dirty by writing parts of the production code. Then they'll understand the real-world constraints that their codeless design didn't account for, like internationalization, performance bottlenecks, user authentication, heterogenous networked environments, and ACID transaction support (to name the first few).
Oh yeah, and the reason open-source developers wrote a Unix-like operating system (Linux) and put a Windows-like interface on top of it (X11 + GNOME/KDE) is because these are both very reasonable and mature solutions for a variety of computing needs. If any of you architects out there want something besides Linux that conveniently abstracts away 99.9% of the hardware interaction yet also provides an easy-to-learn interface for general users, you are more than welcome to write it yourself. Or you can model it in UML, click some buttons, and hope it compiles.
Why do I think software sucks? Because market droids and architects who forgot how to program get together and promise their customers AI in only six months.
Nobody is forcing you to stay in America if you don't like it. America, love it or leave it fscker.
You want to pay for my moving expenses? You want to lobby a foreign government on my behalf to grant me a visa to stay in that country?
No? Well OK then, go shut the fuck up.
There's LOTS of people forcing me to stay in America: my creditors, American politicians, foreign politicians, my parents, my wife's family, better-educated-than-American European citizens, poor foreign workers who don't want me to have one of the few jobs in their neck of the world. You Mr Anonymous Coward are a nitwitted dumbass who obviously has had no direct contract with foreign cultures if you think any old middle-class American family with a beef against the government can just pick up and leave. Shit I can't even get into Mexico to work at a sweatshop.
Let me also point out the American idea that we vote for our own government misleaders, hence the government is "by the people, for the people". When you defend a totalitarian government, you point out to the entire world that you don't know shit from squat about the idealistic American Dream, and that it's YOU who don't belong here. If you had given any clue that you knew what the hell you were talking about you might have appeared to be one of the minority of Americans who know the actual brutal history of the country and the struggle of its people to create a real democracy despite the government. But you're obviously not one of those people, so again Fuck You for being a dumbass who believes in the thin blue line and will vote for the creation of a despotism in the land *I* call home.
YOU are the non-American here, and your First Amendment right to ignorant speech ends at my property line in rural Texas. Actually not too far from the place a few ATF agents upholding a corrupt regime got their lives terminated in self-defense by some religious nuts in 1993.
Do you Mr Anonymous Coward want me to leave America? I invite you to try and kick me out. You'll need lots of bullets.
Depth is a simple investment of time and energy on the part of the prospective employee. Meaning that everyone can do that -- no barriers prevent every moderate programmer who just lost their job from becoming a fucking awesome guru capable of rewriting the SCSI layer from scratch. But the demand for that kind of skill is way too small to support millions of people in that role. (I actually saw an IBM internal job posting in mid-2003 for someone with five years experience developing on the Linux kernel. The KERNEL, not just a loadable-module driver. I talked to the manager; she was waiting for one of the hundred-or-so people in the ENTIRE WORLD who qualified for the position. And if it wasn't one of them she wasn't going to hire.)
Yes, if you play your cards right and dance through the tsunami you might be able to survive twenty years as a "computer person" of some kind (programmer, architect, etc.). But by the time they finally get around to laying you off you'll find your eXtr3m3! T3cH skillz won't get you ANY kind of professional job.
You want MY solution? Here:
1) Eliminate the currency trading markets. Those are the reason US dollars go so far, and third-world markets are so "cheap". They aren't really cheap, they don't really live way below our lifestyle, rather the markets are manipulated to prevent them from purchasing world goods at the same strength US citizens can.
2) Restore the corporate taxation rates we had back in the early 80's. Reduce the income tax paid by the working and lower middle classes.
3) Eliminate the electoral college and institute multiple-seat districts to bring our aging Republic into the Nineteenth Century. This will allow the American political sphere to return to the center where most Real People(tm) live.
4) Disengage our military and our neo-liberal aggressive trade practices from the third world. Let the dreams of Empire fade and the colonies can recover on their own.
Radical? Not at all. Read some history books and you'll see it's just a restoration to life before the Imperials took over.
I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?
Never.
Lotus has announced repeatedly that they are never going to port Notes 5+ to the linux/unix desktop. And now that WINE is capable of running Notes 5 they have even less incentive.
In 1999 IBM Server Group was literally only two days away from receiving the source code to the Notes 4.6 client and they were going to port it to linux for internal use. The Lotus higher-level managers cancelled the deal. (Even though the 4.5 client for AIX had been ported to linux, then re-ported again to AIX with better stability and performance.) With the 5.0 release they dropped support for AIX and OS/2.
Inside IBM, Lotus still behaves like a separate company and basically never give out their code to other IBM groups. I don't know who precisely is sleeping with who, but clearly there's some bad mojo at work here.
To reiterate: we will NEVER see a native Notes client for linux. Support the Evolution folks instead. Their client is very similar, and if it ever supports the Domino server natively that will be our Notes client.
Everyone seems to assume that US-based corporations will always have the upper hand in deciding how to control the job market, i.e. the jobs may move but the owners remain American. I don't agree.
I believe that eventually the large American firms will run out of US dollars to pay for jobs after we reach double-digit unemployment and the US-dollar-paying customer base is unable to continue purchasing what are essentially "luxury" goods.
Do the Indian companies share my belief? If not, why not? If so, are they making any plans to survive the permanent collapse of the American firms?
Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.
(Other posts discount the historical accuracy of the parent, I don't know about that. But I do know IBM.)
Had IBM bought it, they would have killed any chance that serious video editing would exist outside the high-end Unix machines. They would have also used their patents to squish any independent development of said features.
Remember, in 1984 IBM *HATED* the PC market. PC's were only ever meant to interface with mainframes via 3270 emulators using SNA over a token-ring network.
Do any of y'all even know where Eclipse came from?!
Let an ex-IBMer inform you: Eclipse was meant from the start to take out MS Visual Studio, and was started around '98-ish. IBM spent $30 million for about 4 years on it, discovered that it was still so slow compared to VS that no one would dish out the money to use it, so it was then forked into an open source project for PR value (and probably tax writeoff) and an expensive version customized for WebSphere development called WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD).
Eclipse is just a PR move to recover from a very expensive mistake made by the Senior Technical Staff Members (STSMs) in Software Group (SWG). Any penetration it makes against NetBeans is an irrelevant side effect, so far as IBM is concerned.
Oh yeah, and the IBMers who have put WSAD and NetBeans up against each other have consistently preferred NetBeans. The most recent versions of NetBeans are significantly faster and MUCH better integrated with the professional Java tools (ant, tomcat, junit, etc.).
I was laid off in the last Software Group batch (Dec 19). Patents are still compensated something like $1000/pop. Every project cycle before and after the patent evangelist shows up to ask all the developers if anything can be filed. The laywers will often split patents into two filings (for example one for screen I/O and one for printed I/O).
I know several IBMers that have abused the patent office by filing obvious claims and been rewarded thousands of dollars by the company. Most have been promoted to managers.
And now I don't have to post anonymously anymore! Don't y'all feel a little silly being unable to discuss IBM's policies with you own names? I mean y'all are just saying what the BOV instructor did when you were hired on.
But don't speak for all CS majors; this one is doing just fine.
My work history is similar. I co-op'd in 05/99, graduated in 05/00, and became a *very good* developer since then inside IBM. I had consistent raises, and was making 50% more than my starting salary and kept working hard right on through the DotBomb as my friends exhausted their unemployment; my final salary was equivalent to a ChemE with twice my work experience (I know one, we compared). My layoff was due entirely to a personal beef with my last micro-manager. I had two other managers ready to pick me back up but I decided to accept the generous severance package. I know I could get another (good) job with my skillset, and could probably even last a good 10-15 years.
But.
Let's talk about what grown-up industries do, like mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering. Student chapters exist at all the universities, *big* corporations commit lots of money not only on college recruiting but also internships, luncheons, and raising awareness. At my local school for ChemE, $20 dues in AIChE gets you access to 12 luncheons/year with some really big names. You get your money back on the first meal, actually. Then there are several national design competitions that you can get to for about $100+food (the corporate sponsors cover the hotel, dues, and most of the flight). And inside the school, there's always a strong bond between upperclass students tutoring the freshman/sophmores.
All this is for *undergraduate students* who can still drop out anytime! I've *never* seen that kind of attention devoted to the fields of software design, development, or engineering. Nor have any of my Old Skool IBM friends. Some were around doing real work on the mainframes through the 80's, others have worked with HP and Sun. (No DECers alas.)
To continue though, the grown-up industries have annual salary surveys, work satisfaction reports, employer critiques, and research opportunities galore. Computer Science has ACM (which has been *dead* on most of the campuses I've been to), a big taboo inside the industry for discussing wages, terrible overtime compensation, and hardly any big-dollar *software* research outside the games sub-industry, Los Alamos, and a handful of universities. (Hardware research is still funded, but those are Computer Engineering/Electrical Engineering degrees.)
This is what I mean by grown-up industry. If you lost your job right now, you'd be tossed into a pool of business and communications majors looking for work, and you'd really have no place to start in the well-established job search circles. Your local unemployment office might not even have a job title that matches your skills. Software architect? Software engineer? Network troubleshooter? System administrator? When you apply for a job, your technical skills would have to match *very closely* to it's listed requirements to get an interview. And I do mean CLOSE: like "JSP" instead of "JavaServer Pages" because it's a wildcard filter. And you can ask your friends for help, but between July and December no one is hiring full-time so networking won't get you far.
OTOH, if my brother (who is a ChemE) lost his job, he would have places to go. Employers routinely post their engineering positions to AIChE's site, the unemployment office would know how to place him, and if all else fails he could just apply for those government positions that require a Professional Engineering license. (Note: license, not certification: it takes five years understudy and a battery of tests to get it.)
I don't see Computer Science ever reaching this point. Which is a real shame, because there's plenty for us to do before we have Star Trek-like AI. Instead, companies are abandoning the CS major via outsourcing just at the moment they should be pushing for it to get past adolescence. We could see a university program offer students a rigorous education in creating quality production-ready code ("Software Engineering") in any lan
Yup, I've already got a CS degree and just got laid off from IBM. Now I'm in school again for Chemical Engineering.
Truth is CS is never going to grow up in this country. I spent five years inside IBM and can say with confidence that IBM isn't going anywhere with real computer science (the software stuff I mean). They solved some hard problems twenty years ago with high-performance computing and data storage, and now they're just milking existing revenue streams and selling products solely on marketing hype. Reducing development costs by moving software development and testing to India and Poland. To be fair the Indian developers are very good. It's just IBM isn't in the business of innovating software anymore.
I would suggest that if anyone is still more than two years away from graduation, switch immediately to another major. Or plan on leaving the USA to have a viable career.
If these currency controls were eliminated tomorrow, we'd see a rapid increase in the cost of sending jobs overseas.
Actually we need to eliminate the concept of floating currencies entirely (e.g. legally ban money markets). Then the major currencies will stay fixed relative to each other and the real cost of non-US currencies will rise.
Other probable side effects include a higher standard of living in the "undeveloped" world, and a lower standard of living here in the USA. So you can expect this idea to get nowhere will our (un)elected (non)representatives.
You are correct that a degree should not automatically presume incompetence. However, a degree does NOT qualify someone for the "work" they supposedly studied for. What the books teach and what the job requires are not the same. Furthermore, I have found in my work that the more education an employee has, the WORSE code they tend to create, primarily because they can't seem to grasp the "Keep It Simple Stupid" principle that leads to obvious, hard-to-break, and easy-to-fix systems.
The Master's students always want to re-invent everything using the coolest language feature doo-dads, yet they cringe when forced to actually TRY THE SHIT OUT on a Unix command-line-only server. For example, in Java I have seen Master's students:
1) Place constants in an interface and then implement that interface so they could use CONSTANT instead of ClassName.CONSTANT.
2) Mix-and-match static and class-level data for imaginary performance gains. ("Statics save memory." "Sure, but it's already running under a J2EE server. Memory doesn't matter. And if we ever synchronize or volatile it we risk deadlocks.")
3) Use single-digit variable names scoped at the class level.
4) Catch Exception and ignore the stack trace because the error condition is "very unlikely".
Some of these are nit-picky, but the point is after five years of Java coding in the J2EE server environment you pick up habits that school doesn't teach, and I'd bet nearly every other EXPERIENCED coder could tell you why these issues can be problematic later.
This entire notion of "just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're qualified" is a pantload. It is arbitrary, subjective and unfair. Creeping qualifications are no more efficient than creeping featurism.
Welcome to the real world, where your manager will be arbitrary, subjective, and unfair in rating your performance every year. Featurism is bad, I agree, but by the same token high-level concepts have almost no place in the corporate coding houses where Java is in the exact same role as COBOL was twenty years ago.
I would call into question the qualifications of a hiring manager who does not recognize the significance of a Masters Degree to the character and values of a candidate.
Likewise, I would challenge any hiring manager to prove the assertion that the skills associated with a graduate degree are actually NECESSARY to complete the job. The extra money spent for the education in cognitive research, genetic algorithms, and compiler design could instead go toward newer hardware or an ITT grad who is more than capable of creating a test harness and running lots of performance regressions.
There are places where graduate degrees belong: breakthrough algorithms, compilers, database systems, language processing,... I could go on at length. The grads are very necessary in their roles, but they rarely belong in the trenches of typical product creation.
Finally, though I respect the work that obtaining a graduate degree requires, I do not hold the recipients in any higher esteem than I hold myself. Perhaps it is because I started college at 16, or maybe it was my friend's Full Professor Department Chair father who told me that a lot of dumbasses hold PhD's. Regardless, I would suggest if you have not yet done so, talk to some of the people out here who saw college and chose another path. Their reasoning might surprise you.
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This is more like natural as in we're still animals who eat, shit, and have offspring.
I agree that right to reproduce does not mean right to over-consume. But my point is that telling someone "hey, you don't have enough money to have children" is malicious beyond belief. I have no idea how it has survived in modern mainstream thought -- it's only one step removed from "Jews have no future, that's policy now."
I've paid my share of taxes too, actually a bit more because I've been in a high backet since leaving college. And I've got no problem with my taxes helping poor people raise their children, because that's the Morally Right thing to do. These conservatives who believe that there's some magic income line below which no one should have children are nothing more than economic Nazis.
And now I've mentioned Nazis so this thread is officially off-topic.
Well you're right, you're not likely to change my mind. Primarily because you're ignoring US history, but hey.
If you really want to look at laissez-faire capitalism, research Britian in the late 1800's. Then decide if our (tiny) steps economically in the socialist direction are helping or hurting most Americans. But seriously, if you think our politics have become more socialist in the last fifty years, you *really* need to crack a history book. (Did you know Nixon proposed a national health care system ala Canada? That was a Republican president and only forty years ago. Nowadays not even the most liberal Democrat can survive that position.) As for bread lines, we had those for about ten years before WWII, and during the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War. Seems we too have had lots of historical problems just feeding our own. Hell even the Pilgrims were about to starve until the Indians took pity on them.
But you really don't want to add the genocide numbers do you? Remember the 200 million American Indians that were wiped out? Our diseases killed most of them, but we've still got 20-50 million to account for. And remember the millions of would-be slaves that died on the ocean trip. Then there's the million or so Timorese we helped Suharto kill, and the 2 million Pol Pot beheaded with our help. And the Nazi's we continued to trade freely with after they had conquered Europe. And the half million Japanese we killed with nuclear weapons.
Sorry, despite Soviet Russia and China's brutal and well-known histories, we've still got 'em beat. The Indian genocide alone matches Stalin and Hitler combined.
(BTW George Bush's felonies were documented in the Houston Press while he was running for governor: land fraud, multiple counts of insider trading, and desertion to start the list. The DNC doesn't seem to care.)
You forgot to add: control over what their citizens can read, talk about and/or do. Oh, and if you wanted to speak-out about what your government is doing, don't forget the nice people that take you away in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again, or the tanks that roll up to disperse your demonstration.
That's why I put the "Communism" in quotes. Soviet Russia and China practiced something closer to totatitarian despotism that happened to have communistic economic policies. See, political policy and economic policy live on two different axes.
And if you're serious about US political freedom, you forgot to mention the following events: Shay's Rebellion, Federal strikebreakers, Dred Scott, COINTELPRO, the reaction to "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Jim Crow laws, the Indian Wars, and the Nisei slave camps.
Soviet Russia and China certainly have no monopolies in suppressing free speech and the right to assembly, or genocide, or repressing their population. They don't even have nearly as long a history of supporting such repressive regimes, unless you count the 3000 years China existed before the US did.
Before you start knocking the US, you really need to tak a closer look at what Communism really means. At least in this country we get a chance to change our elected representatives every few years, even if they are all liars and crooks.
*ahem* You pot, me kettle. Before praising the US, you should take a deeper look at its history. And then decide if our choice to maximize political freedom at the cost of economic freedom was a good one for most of our people. And don't forget to include the sweatshops and petrodollar -- those too are integral parts of our economy. Finally, consider just how much policial freedom we really got from the deal (hint: look up what police are doing to today's anti-war demonstrators).
Too bad you're an AC, I'd dearly love to take you down to the Fifth Ward in Houston so you can shout out to all the poor people there who "should have exercised a little more responsibility". Yeah, better wear a Kevlar vest when you say that.
You obviously don't know that reproduction is one of our "natural rights." Thomas Jefferson calls natural rights "unalienable rights" because they are outside the proper domain of control of the state. He even used an argument based on unalienable rights to justify the right of the people to overthrow their government, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Modern nations that don't recognize natural rights (including the right to reproduce) and as a result refuse to shape their economies in such a way that most of the population can exercise their unalianable rights are illegitimate forms of government.
For example, deliberately shaping the economy such that 19.8 million people are unable to support their own offspring, when there are economic alternatives in plain sight just across the northern border, is an act made only by an illegitimate government. And of course the small slice of people who support this government's economic policies are complicit in its human rights violations. And that means you, Anonymous Coward.
I'm guessing you really don't have a clue. Perhaps this will help make it clear:
SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU UNEDUCATION FUCKING MORON FUCKING FUCKWAD.
Your sig: Heartless capitalism has saved more people from poverty than any progressive program of social equality ever has.
Dead wrong. Under "Communism" (very loosely defined), Soviet Russia and China have both brought literacy, crime control, and medical care to about 2 billion people. Under "Socialist Democracy" European nations, India, and Canada have brought the same to another billion people. With the collapse of Soviet Russia, the Eastern Bloc nations have had serious increases in infant mortality and crime, and losses in medical care and crime control.
The United States OTOH has managed to provide medical care, education, and crime control to only about 100 million people, and only then by stealing (by which I mean "taking without paying for") resources from about one billion citizens in Mexico, Central America, Oceania, and Africa. Hardly the most efficient economy.
In conclusion, you're the one who has (as we say in Texas) swallowed a big pile of bull.
Yeah sure. Pick up a "Programming X in 24 Hours", play with it for about four years, and you too will be just as well-trained as the mechanical engineer who designed your car engine.
Not.
Quoting the article: "Giving the [software architects] tools to shape software will transform the landscape, according to Simonyi. Otherwise, you're stuck in the unsatisfactory present, where the people who know the most about what the software is supposed to accomplish can't directly shape the software itself: All they can do is 'make a humble request to the programmer.'"
As a programmer who recently stopped working for a very very very large computer firm that sells both hardware and software, let me say that Simonyi's point makes zero sense. Tools already exist to "shape software," and they are known as programming languages like Visual Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, etc...
I'm frankly sick of architects (that's the term for people who say they design software but don't actually design software) who bemoan the gap between their glorious visions and the real products their teams end up producing. These people need to click "Close" on their UML models and go get their hands dirty by writing parts of the production code. Then they'll understand the real-world constraints that their codeless design didn't account for, like internationalization, performance bottlenecks, user authentication, heterogenous networked environments, and ACID transaction support (to name the first few).
Oh yeah, and the reason open-source developers wrote a Unix-like operating system (Linux) and put a Windows-like interface on top of it (X11 + GNOME/KDE) is because these are both very reasonable and mature solutions for a variety of computing needs. If any of you architects out there want something besides Linux that conveniently abstracts away 99.9% of the hardware interaction yet also provides an easy-to-learn interface for general users, you are more than welcome to write it yourself. Or you can model it in UML, click some buttons, and hope it compiles.
Why do I think software sucks? Because market droids and architects who forgot how to program get together and promise their customers AI in only six months.
Damn, I lost my chance to moderate just to say:
"Fuck you."
Nobody is forcing you to stay in America if you don't like it. America, love it or leave it fscker.
You want to pay for my moving expenses? You want to lobby a foreign government on my behalf to grant me a visa to stay in that country?
No? Well OK then, go shut the fuck up.
There's LOTS of people forcing me to stay in America: my creditors, American politicians, foreign politicians, my parents, my wife's family, better-educated-than-American European citizens, poor foreign workers who don't want me to have one of the few jobs in their neck of the world. You Mr Anonymous Coward are a nitwitted dumbass who obviously has had no direct contract with foreign cultures if you think any old middle-class American family with a beef against the government can just pick up and leave. Shit I can't even get into Mexico to work at a sweatshop.
Let me also point out the American idea that we vote for our own government misleaders, hence the government is "by the people, for the people". When you defend a totalitarian government, you point out to the entire world that you don't know shit from squat about the idealistic American Dream, and that it's YOU who don't belong here. If you had given any clue that you knew what the hell you were talking about you might have appeared to be one of the minority of Americans who know the actual brutal history of the country and the struggle of its people to create a real democracy despite the government. But you're obviously not one of those people, so again Fuck You for being a dumbass who believes in the thin blue line and will vote for the creation of a despotism in the land *I* call home.
YOU are the non-American here, and your First Amendment right to ignorant speech ends at my property line in rural Texas. Actually not too far from the place a few ATF agents upholding a corrupt regime got their lives terminated in self-defense by some religious nuts in 1993.
Do you Mr Anonymous Coward want me to leave America? I invite you to try and kick me out. You'll need lots of bullets.
Score +5, Sad But Accurate
Bzzt...wrong.
Depth is a simple investment of time and energy on the part of the prospective employee. Meaning that everyone can do that -- no barriers prevent every moderate programmer who just lost their job from becoming a fucking awesome guru capable of rewriting the SCSI layer from scratch. But the demand for that kind of skill is way too small to support millions of people in that role. (I actually saw an IBM internal job posting in mid-2003 for someone with five years experience developing on the Linux kernel. The KERNEL, not just a loadable-module driver. I talked to the manager; she was waiting for one of the hundred-or-so people in the ENTIRE WORLD who qualified for the position. And if it wasn't one of them she wasn't going to hire.)
Yes, if you play your cards right and dance through the tsunami you might be able to survive twenty years as a "computer person" of some kind (programmer, architect, etc.). But by the time they finally get around to laying you off you'll find your eXtr3m3! T3cH skillz won't get you ANY kind of professional job.
You want MY solution? Here:
1) Eliminate the currency trading markets. Those are the reason US dollars go so far, and third-world markets are so "cheap". They aren't really cheap, they don't really live way below our lifestyle, rather the markets are manipulated to prevent them from purchasing world goods at the same strength US citizens can.
2) Restore the corporate taxation rates we had back in the early 80's. Reduce the income tax paid by the working and lower middle classes.
3) Eliminate the electoral college and institute multiple-seat districts to bring our aging Republic into the Nineteenth Century. This will allow the American political sphere to return to the center where most Real People(tm) live.
4) Disengage our military and our neo-liberal aggressive trade practices from the third world. Let the dreams of Empire fade and the colonies can recover on their own.
Radical? Not at all. Read some history books and you'll see it's just a restoration to life before the Imperials took over.
IBM's JDK's are modified versions of Sun's JDK to run on Linux, AIX, and Windows.
IBM get's the latest JDK from Sun - minus Hotspot, then they:
1) Apply their performance improvements from previous IBM JDK's.
2) Port it to Linux, AIX, and Windows.
3) Brand it IBM's JDK.
4) Release the public version.
5) Add the IBM JCE/JSSE library, ORB, and some other proprietary IBM code.
6) Release it under the covers with WebSphere, DB2, WSAD, etc.
Also, IBM is banned by contract from running the modified JDK on Solaris.
In summary, IBM's JDK is Sun's JDK. There is no competing clean-room JDK out there I know of except Kaffe (and TowerJ?).
I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?
Never.
Lotus has announced repeatedly that they are never going to port Notes 5+ to the linux/unix desktop. And now that WINE is capable of running Notes 5 they have even less incentive.
In 1999 IBM Server Group was literally only two days away from receiving the source code to the Notes 4.6 client and they were going to port it to linux for internal use. The Lotus higher-level managers cancelled the deal. (Even though the 4.5 client for AIX had been ported to linux, then re-ported again to AIX with better stability and performance.) With the 5.0 release they dropped support for AIX and OS/2.
Inside IBM, Lotus still behaves like a separate company and basically never give out their code to other IBM groups. I don't know who precisely is sleeping with who, but clearly there's some bad mojo at work here.
To reiterate: we will NEVER see a native Notes client for linux. Support the Evolution folks instead. Their client is very similar, and if it ever supports the Domino server natively that will be our Notes client.
Everyone seems to assume that US-based corporations will always have the upper hand in deciding how to control the job market, i.e. the jobs may move but the owners remain American. I don't agree.
I believe that eventually the large American firms will run out of US dollars to pay for jobs after we reach double-digit unemployment and the US-dollar-paying customer base is unable to continue purchasing what are essentially "luxury" goods.
Do the Indian companies share my belief? If not, why not? If so, are they making any plans to survive the permanent collapse of the American firms?
Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.
(Other posts discount the historical accuracy of the parent, I don't know about that. But I do know IBM.)
Had IBM bought it, they would have killed any chance that serious video editing would exist outside the high-end Unix machines. They would have also used their patents to squish any independent development of said features.
Remember, in 1984 IBM *HATED* the PC market. PC's were only ever meant to interface with mainframes via 3270 emulators using SNA over a token-ring network.
Dynix was the Sequent version of Unix designed to run on their Hypercube systems. I believe this is the precursor to NUMA-Q.
Do any of y'all even know where Eclipse came from?!
Let an ex-IBMer inform you: Eclipse was meant from the start to take out MS Visual Studio, and was started around '98-ish. IBM spent $30 million for about 4 years on it, discovered that it was still so slow compared to VS that no one would dish out the money to use it, so it was then forked into an open source project for PR value (and probably tax writeoff) and an expensive version customized for WebSphere development called WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD).
Eclipse is just a PR move to recover from a very expensive mistake made by the Senior Technical Staff Members (STSMs) in Software Group (SWG). Any penetration it makes against NetBeans is an irrelevant side effect, so far as IBM is concerned.
Oh yeah, and the IBMers who have put WSAD and NetBeans up against each other have consistently preferred NetBeans. The most recent versions of NetBeans are significantly faster and MUCH better integrated with the professional Java tools (ant, tomcat, junit, etc.).
I was laid off in the last Software Group batch (Dec 19). Patents are still compensated something like $1000/pop. Every project cycle before and after the patent evangelist shows up to ask all the developers if anything can be filed. The laywers will often split patents into two filings (for example one for screen I/O and one for printed I/O).
I know several IBMers that have abused the patent office by filing obvious claims and been rewarded thousands of dollars by the company. Most have been promoted to managers.
And now I don't have to post anonymously anymore! Don't y'all feel a little silly being unable to discuss IBM's policies with you own names? I mean y'all are just saying what the BOV instructor did when you were hired on.
But don't speak for all CS majors; this one is doing just fine.
My work history is similar. I co-op'd in 05/99, graduated in 05/00, and became a *very good* developer since then inside IBM. I had consistent raises, and was making 50% more than my starting salary and kept working hard right on through the DotBomb as my friends exhausted their unemployment; my final salary was equivalent to a ChemE with twice my work experience (I know one, we compared). My layoff was due entirely to a personal beef with my last micro-manager. I had two other managers ready to pick me back up but I decided to accept the generous severance package. I know I could get another (good) job with my skillset, and could probably even last a good 10-15 years.
But.
Let's talk about what grown-up industries do, like mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering. Student chapters exist at all the universities, *big* corporations commit lots of money not only on college recruiting but also internships, luncheons, and raising awareness. At my local school for ChemE, $20 dues in AIChE gets you access to 12 luncheons/year with some really big names. You get your money back on the first meal, actually. Then there are several national design competitions that you can get to for about $100+food (the corporate sponsors cover the hotel, dues, and most of the flight). And inside the school, there's always a strong bond between upperclass students tutoring the freshman/sophmores.
All this is for *undergraduate students* who can still drop out anytime! I've *never* seen that kind of attention devoted to the fields of software design, development, or engineering. Nor have any of my Old Skool IBM friends. Some were around doing real work on the mainframes through the 80's, others have worked with HP and Sun. (No DECers alas.)
To continue though, the grown-up industries have annual salary surveys, work satisfaction reports, employer critiques, and research opportunities galore. Computer Science has ACM (which has been *dead* on most of the campuses I've been to), a big taboo inside the industry for discussing wages, terrible overtime compensation, and hardly any big-dollar *software* research outside the games sub-industry, Los Alamos, and a handful of universities. (Hardware research is still funded, but those are Computer Engineering/Electrical Engineering degrees.)
This is what I mean by grown-up industry. If you lost your job right now, you'd be tossed into a pool of business and communications majors looking for work, and you'd really have no place to start in the well-established job search circles. Your local unemployment office might not even have a job title that matches your skills. Software architect? Software engineer? Network troubleshooter? System administrator? When you apply for a job, your technical skills would have to match *very closely* to it's listed requirements to get an interview. And I do mean CLOSE: like "JSP" instead of "JavaServer Pages" because it's a wildcard filter. And you can ask your friends for help, but between July and December no one is hiring full-time so networking won't get you far.
OTOH, if my brother (who is a ChemE) lost his job, he would have places to go. Employers routinely post their engineering positions to AIChE's site, the unemployment office would know how to place him, and if all else fails he could just apply for those government positions that require a Professional Engineering license. (Note: license, not certification: it takes five years understudy and a battery of tests to get it.)
I don't see Computer Science ever reaching this point. Which is a real shame, because there's plenty for us to do before we have Star Trek-like AI. Instead, companies are abandoning the CS major via outsourcing just at the moment they should be pushing for it to get past adolescence. We could see a university program offer students a rigorous education in creating quality production-ready code ("Software Engineering") in any lan
Yup, I've already got a CS degree and just got laid off from IBM. Now I'm in school again for Chemical Engineering.
Truth is CS is never going to grow up in this country. I spent five years inside IBM and can say with confidence that IBM isn't going anywhere with real computer science (the software stuff I mean). They solved some hard problems twenty years ago with high-performance computing and data storage, and now they're just milking existing revenue streams and selling products solely on marketing hype. Reducing development costs by moving software development and testing to India and Poland. To be fair the Indian developers are very good. It's just IBM isn't in the business of innovating software anymore.
I would suggest that if anyone is still more than two years away from graduation, switch immediately to another major. Or plan on leaving the USA to have a viable career.
If these currency controls were eliminated tomorrow, we'd see a rapid increase in the cost of sending jobs overseas. Actually we need to eliminate the concept of floating currencies entirely (e.g. legally ban money markets). Then the major currencies will stay fixed relative to each other and the real cost of non-US currencies will rise. Other probable side effects include a higher standard of living in the "undeveloped" world, and a lower standard of living here in the USA. So you can expect this idea to get nowhere will our (un)elected (non)representatives.
You are correct that a degree should not automatically presume incompetence. However, a degree does NOT qualify someone for the "work" they supposedly studied for. What the books teach and what the job requires are not the same. Furthermore, I have found in my work that the more education an employee has, the WORSE code they tend to create, primarily because they can't seem to grasp the "Keep It Simple Stupid" principle that leads to obvious, hard-to-break, and easy-to-fix systems.
The Master's students always want to re-invent everything using the coolest language feature doo-dads, yet they cringe when forced to actually TRY THE SHIT OUT on a Unix command-line-only server. For example, in Java I have seen Master's students:
1) Place constants in an interface and then implement that interface so they could use CONSTANT instead of ClassName.CONSTANT.
2) Mix-and-match static and class-level data for imaginary performance gains. ("Statics save memory." "Sure, but it's already running under a J2EE server. Memory doesn't matter. And if we ever synchronize or volatile it we risk deadlocks.")
3) Use single-digit variable names scoped at the class level.
4) Catch Exception and ignore the stack trace because the error condition is "very unlikely".
Some of these are nit-picky, but the point is after five years of Java coding in the J2EE server environment you pick up habits that school doesn't teach, and I'd bet nearly every other EXPERIENCED coder could tell you why these issues can be problematic later.
This entire notion of "just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're qualified" is a pantload. It is arbitrary, subjective and unfair. Creeping qualifications are no more efficient than creeping featurism.
Welcome to the real world, where your manager will be arbitrary, subjective, and unfair in rating your performance every year. Featurism is bad, I agree, but by the same token high-level concepts have almost no place in the corporate coding houses where Java is in the exact same role as COBOL was twenty years ago.
I would call into question the qualifications of a hiring manager who does not recognize the significance of a Masters Degree to the character and values of a candidate.
Likewise, I would challenge any hiring manager to prove the assertion that the skills associated with a graduate degree are actually NECESSARY to complete the job. The extra money spent for the education in cognitive research, genetic algorithms, and compiler design could instead go toward newer hardware or an ITT grad who is more than capable of creating a test harness and running lots of performance regressions.
There are places where graduate degrees belong: breakthrough algorithms, compilers, database systems, language processing, ... I could go on at length. The grads are very necessary in their roles, but they rarely belong in the trenches of typical product creation.
Finally, though I respect the work that obtaining a graduate degree requires, I do not hold the recipients in any higher esteem than I hold myself. Perhaps it is because I started college at 16, or maybe it was my friend's Full Professor Department Chair father who told me that a lot of dumbasses hold PhD's. Regardless, I would suggest if you have not yet done so, talk to some of the people out here who saw college and chose another path. Their reasoning might surprise you.