Down here we have disclosure laws. You have to disclose certain things like air routes, within so many miles of a landfill, etc. And you can't sell your home until you've corrected any building code violations it might have. Good luck. BTW, my townhome has gone from $140K to $450K in 8 years. California is beyond insane.
I'm not sure "builders" build much of anything. All that stuff you describe is subcontracted out -- a cement company does their thing, a plumbing company comes in and does their thing, etc. At least that's how it works in your neighbor to the south. I think builders are more financial and legal and design companies. They put up the money, subcontract out the pieces, and are legally responsible for the whole mess. So crooked outlets is probably courtesy of the electrician company your builder hired. If they were so obviously crooked as to negatively affect the esthetics and potential resale value of your home, you may have been able to get them back and straightened out at the builder's expense, in the first 30 days or so, or before signing their release. In my condo I had a crooked toilet straightened out. The builder sent a plumber to cut up the vinyl flooring and center and recaulk it. Then the builder sent an installer to redo the floor. I also had my fireplace fascia completely regrouted. Didn't cost me a penny. As for accusations of things not being up to code, like the stairwell, how did the builder get the approval to build that design if it wasn't up to code? That doesn't even seem possible, unless Canada has payoffs/corruption problems in the builder industry.
Some of us are not so callous about "collateral damage". It might be fun to the average Slashdotter to take down a big evil corporation, because they're too immature to think about thousands being separated from their livelihoods and more having their retirement nest eggs taking a small dive.
What should be targeted is the top executives. Criminal prosecution/short stays in country club jails doesn't seem to be working, so I think very large personal fines need to be tried.
The problem is a CEO can do something to trash the company's reputation, or a school district administrator can implement a policy that causes them to lose huge amounts of precious education money defending against or settling lawsuits, and they don't care, because it's not their money. It only hurts the little guys like us.
And until 1) judges throw out lawsuits where a more powerful entity has no case and is just trying to abuse its power over a littler guy, 2) and people boycott larger entities that engage in such sleazy tactics, then such injustices will continue. I'm not holding my breath on #1, because judges are attorneys too, litigation is their business, and they like it, and the last thing they would want is less of it.
Your accusation of fallacy is resting on those two examples being perceived as bad. For those who don't, your assertion is therefore in effect groundless. For those who do, they probably tended to believe in your thesis anyways. So why bother?
What big problems did you have going from NT 3.1/VC++ 2.0 to NT 4/VC++ 4? The only thing I can think of is maybe compiler standards compliance (C++ wasn't standardized yet, and the draft standard was a moving target). But that's a compiler thing -- the platform on NT was still Win32.
Technologies evolve and are deprecated all the time. (Java's API docs was where I first encountered the term "deprecated", and that was only Java version 1.1! That didn't take long!) I think what you're talking about is not portable coding, but modular coding, where you isolate the main code from whatever the email or database technology is you're currently using, that may change later.
And Windows 95/98/ME/NT aren't exactly 4 different incarnations of one platform. NT is Win32, with full support for that API, security, Unicode, etc. The other three were together a single other category, hybrid 16/32-bit OS's, missing or having NOOP'ed some of the more powerful but less relevant to home users portions of Win32. You just code to the lowest common denominator (95). Not sure how that makes a "fiasco".
I thought you were going to say AJAX is here, you can't hide, you will be assimilated...
Which I think is true. Just like Java was a PHB's wet dream (no longer need smart, expensive C++ people, some of whom still couldn't keep it together), so is AJAX, in that it enables businesses to get away from install and upgrade and differing desktop configuration nightmares. And who cares if a browser app is not as easy to use, afterall in business the person who makes decisions about software is not the person that has to use it.
You still need to have a portable language on the server or you won't be able to move your code from system to system.
I do not understand the great need for portability on the server. (And as I think Java is only suitable for server-side development, I don't understand the great need for Java.) If you've just bought a bunch of expensive Windows or Solaris servers, why would you later decide to throw them all away and buy new servers just so you could move your software to another OS?
Clinton, while less than perfect, at least had some economic sense. Republicans now attribute his success to luck.
Clinton had no economic sense, and Republicans have always attributed the successful economy falling under his watch to luck. Clinton's budgets, before the dot-com boom fell into his lap, proposed to add around $200 billion to our national debt each year for the next five years (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy96/browse.htm l, take the first link in the table, and see the bottom of page 2 of that PDF), adding another trillion to our already 5 trillion national debt.
It is readily apparent from the previous election that some people will do anything and say anything (while hiding their true identities) to get their way.
Yup, that's why I could not in good conscience have voted for John Kerry. At least Howard Dean was (and remains) real about who and what he is.
Looks like Hillary will be following the Kerry strategy. Maybe she'll have the charisma to pull it off.
It is time people stepped back and quit comparing people to Hitler.
I like it. As mentioned by a previous poster, the side of the political spectrum that goes around comparing people to Hitler in doing so end up defeating themselves, by turning swing voters off with their crazy talk. Since I'm on the other side of the spectrum, I say keep up the hysterics.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with who believed that Bill Clinton never actually fooled around with Monica Lewinsky. I tried to explain to him that it wasn't exactly in dispute.
You are dead-on with that. I've also noticed one additional related thing, that has prevented me from ever getting into some of the later Star Trek franchise shows: everyone, even the aliens, are also too thoughtful and sensitive and they all talk about their feelings and it's just so all-the-same boring. If the writers are creative enough to come up with interesting looks for these beings, how about personalities/cultural pecularities that manifest themselves in personal interactions? Not every creature from every corner of the galaxy is going to be as emotive and eloquent as the fairer sex of this race.
They're talking about outsourcing/having automated for you your HR, payroll, etc., so that you don't need to set up and maintain all that on your own just to start a business (that you're going to shut down in a few months anyways, when the tiny window of opportunity you're serving passes).
Also, the fact that their life spans will be measured in months or a short number of years will not be grounds for dismissal from Harvard Business School. A successful business model doesn't need to be measured by its staying power.
Who's going to purchase an IT solution from a business that admittedly is only going to be around for several more months?
Java is not cross-platform, it is a platform. If you write to the Java platform, your code will/can only run on that platform. Same as writing to the Win32 platform. At my first job in addition to the Wintel boxes running Windows NT we also had a DEC Alpha RISC machine running NT for Alpha, which we recompiled our code for and tested on. I didn't suddenly rejoice that Win32 was "cross-platform".
Java is cross-OS insofar as there's a VM available for it on the target OS. Similar to C++, which is cross-OS for all OS's that have C++ compilers.
Also, I don't think a language should be designed around keeping a stupid programmer or project team from shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, all languages are designed with some safety features, like type checking. There really isn't anything wrong with different languages designed for not only different problems, but different skill levels. When Java was introduced it was touted as the language "for the rest of us". That's fine, not everyone has a CS degree and wants to get down to the C or C++ level. During the dot-com heyday I did a short stint at a VB shop. No one there was CS degreed, they were all IS majors, and some of them once commented they have no interest in dicking with pointers etc., they're only interested in solving business problems. That's fine. For me, I like to get a little geekier, and have more control/flexibility. I like using abstractions in C++ like operator overloading to shield me from lower-level details when I'm not interested at the moment, but giving me the ability to look deeper when/if I need to.
You talk about stats and strong contributors and output quantity and demanding environments. Maybe what you mean is that older workers tend not to be as willing to put up with sweatshops and being taken advantage of. That is completely true. But being older and wiser and finding yourself with choices/other opportunities doesn't mean diminished mental capacity. And less interest in being abused does not equal less interest in ones work.
I think appearing desperate/like you're willing to take anything will land you in a hole sooner. If you know what you're worth, and expect it, you command some level of respect for that. The last time I was laid off, I was approached by the person who's now my boss of 4+ years, who found me on Monster, who I initially turned down when I inferred from the job description that there wouldn't be much development involved. It was a risk, as nothing else might've come along for a while, but he called back with reassurances, and accepted my counter-offer, which was backed by a salary web site's data, and he later said that he was impressed by that.
And GP is right. For example your new boss may try to hire you for less than you want with promises of adjusting you up in six months, but s/he might not even be your boss in six months, or might not even work there anymore. Things change -- better to get what you'll be content with up front.
I say we find somebody crazy enough in congress to propose a salary cap for CEO's bill.
An interesting thought. Maybe instead of certain congresscritters focusing on a Minimum Wage, it would do more good for the average worker if they instead or in addition advocated a Maximum Wage. Either an absolute number, or even better, a ratio, whereby no one is allowed to be compensated more than x times what the lowest-paid person is. Then when bigshot wants to pay himself, he has to pay everyone else as well. There's already somewhat of a precedent for this, nondiscrimination rules for 401K's, where highly-compensated employees can't contribute more (benefit from the tax effect) unless they get more of the lesser-paids to also save (and benefit) more.
These listing are probably ridiculously bloated, but if you've been a professional software engineer longer than two hours, you already know they're as bogus as your resume.
Maybe if you bullshit in the requirements, you'll likely get mostly bullshitters applying?
The potential flaws in your chessmaster analogy are that 1) software development takes probably nowhere near the mental effort that these giants bring to bear against each other, and 2) the rate of falloff of being able to exert and sustain this level of concentration among geniuses does not necessarily correlate with software developers, the majority of whom are not geniuses.
I have 12 years of experience, maybe nearing "old fogey" status in your eyes, and looking at my future reading list, plus all the things that I could potentially get into after that, I'd say my "terminal level" is not even within sight. I know developers 10 years younger than I who haven't done dick since college, and haven't learned a thing nor give a whit about elegant, readable, maintainable, extensible solutions. It's not age, it's interest.
In other words, now that I've got mine, I don't want anyone else getting theirs.
Exactly. It's easy to take the "bold and courageous" stand for higher taxes when you have more money than you and several generations of your offspring will know what to do with, and you've already passed a goodly amount of it on.
If your company could replace people with less-skilled counterparts, then they probably should've done so long ago.
Here's what it is with most companies: After a while they take you for granted, and are no longer interested in paying you what you're worth. But to another company you're all new and shiny and irresistably mysterious, so they'll offer you more to lure you away. So your old company now has to pay market value+ to replace you, so they're now paying *more* for someone 1) they don't know, and 2) who's not familiar with the code base and procedures for getting reimbursed for travel etc. Each company would be better off working to retain the competent that are already up-to-speed on that company's stuff, but instead they in effect force musical chairs amongst all but the dead wood.
I don't want to argue either. In the link provided previously, MS refers to it as a "a type-cast expression". That is, nothing is being cast, it's just that an expression of this kind is being used. If that is wrong, so be it, but it's hard to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Down here we have disclosure laws. You have to disclose certain things like air routes, within so many miles of a landfill, etc. And you can't sell your home until you've corrected any building code violations it might have. Good luck. BTW, my townhome has gone from $140K to $450K in 8 years. California is beyond insane.
I'm not sure "builders" build much of anything. All that stuff you describe is subcontracted out -- a cement company does their thing, a plumbing company comes in and does their thing, etc. At least that's how it works in your neighbor to the south. I think builders are more financial and legal and design companies. They put up the money, subcontract out the pieces, and are legally responsible for the whole mess. So crooked outlets is probably courtesy of the electrician company your builder hired. If they were so obviously crooked as to negatively affect the esthetics and potential resale value of your home, you may have been able to get them back and straightened out at the builder's expense, in the first 30 days or so, or before signing their release. In my condo I had a crooked toilet straightened out. The builder sent a plumber to cut up the vinyl flooring and center and recaulk it. Then the builder sent an installer to redo the floor. I also had my fireplace fascia completely regrouted. Didn't cost me a penny. As for accusations of things not being up to code, like the stairwell, how did the builder get the approval to build that design if it wasn't up to code? That doesn't even seem possible, unless Canada has payoffs/corruption problems in the builder industry.
Some of us are not so callous about "collateral damage". It might be fun to the average Slashdotter to take down a big evil corporation, because they're too immature to think about thousands being separated from their livelihoods and more having their retirement nest eggs taking a small dive.
What should be targeted is the top executives. Criminal prosecution/short stays in country club jails doesn't seem to be working, so I think very large personal fines need to be tried.
The problem is a CEO can do something to trash the company's reputation, or a school district administrator can implement a policy that causes them to lose huge amounts of precious education money defending against or settling lawsuits, and they don't care, because it's not their money. It only hurts the little guys like us.
And until
1) judges throw out lawsuits where a more powerful entity has no case and is just trying to abuse its power over a littler guy,
2) and people boycott larger entities that engage in such sleazy tactics,
then such injustices will continue. I'm not holding my breath on #1, because judges are attorneys too, litigation is their business, and they like it, and the last thing they would want is less of it.
Your accusation of fallacy is resting on those two examples being perceived as bad. For those who don't, your assertion is therefore in effect groundless. For those who do, they probably tended to believe in your thesis anyways. So why bother?
What big problems did you have going from NT 3.1/VC++ 2.0 to NT 4/VC++ 4? The only thing I can think of is maybe compiler standards compliance (C++ wasn't standardized yet, and the draft standard was a moving target). But that's a compiler thing -- the platform on NT was still Win32.
Technologies evolve and are deprecated all the time. (Java's API docs was where I first encountered the term "deprecated", and that was only Java version 1.1! That didn't take long!) I think what you're talking about is not portable coding, but modular coding, where you isolate the main code from whatever the email or database technology is you're currently using, that may change later.
And Windows 95/98/ME/NT aren't exactly 4 different incarnations of one platform. NT is Win32, with full support for that API, security, Unicode, etc. The other three were together a single other category, hybrid 16/32-bit OS's, missing or having NOOP'ed some of the more powerful but less relevant to home users portions of Win32. You just code to the lowest common denominator (95). Not sure how that makes a "fiasco".
I thought you were going to say AJAX is here, you can't hide, you will be assimilated...
Which I think is true. Just like Java was a PHB's wet dream (no longer need smart, expensive C++ people, some of whom still couldn't keep it together), so is AJAX, in that it enables businesses to get away from install and upgrade and differing desktop configuration nightmares. And who cares if a browser app is not as easy to use, afterall in business the person who makes decisions about software is not the person that has to use it.
You still need to have a portable language on the server or you won't be able to move your code from system to system.
I do not understand the great need for portability on the server. (And as I think Java is only suitable for server-side development, I don't understand the great need for Java.) If you've just bought a bunch of expensive Windows or Solaris servers, why would you later decide to throw them all away and buy new servers just so you could move your software to another OS?
Clinton, while less than perfect, at least had some economic sense. Republicans now attribute his success to luck.
m l, take the first link in the table, and see the bottom of page 2 of that PDF), adding another trillion to our already 5 trillion national debt.
Clinton had no economic sense, and Republicans have always attributed the successful economy falling under his watch to luck. Clinton's budgets, before the dot-com boom fell into his lap, proposed to add around $200 billion to our national debt each year for the next five years (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy96/browse.ht
..."Progressives" have integratity...
Progressives have Acuras with nipples?
It is readily apparent from the previous election that some people will do anything and say anything (while hiding their true identities) to get their way.
Yup, that's why I could not in good conscience have voted for John Kerry. At least Howard Dean was (and remains) real about who and what he is.
Looks like Hillary will be following the Kerry strategy. Maybe she'll have the charisma to pull it off.
It is time people stepped back and quit comparing people to Hitler.
I like it. As mentioned by a previous poster, the side of the political spectrum that goes around comparing people to Hitler in doing so end up defeating themselves, by turning swing voters off with their crazy talk. Since I'm on the other side of the spectrum, I say keep up the hysterics.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with who believed that Bill Clinton never actually fooled around with Monica Lewinsky. I tried to explain to him that it wasn't exactly in dispute.
You are dead-on with that. I've also noticed one additional related thing, that has prevented me from ever getting into some of the later Star Trek franchise shows: everyone, even the aliens, are also too thoughtful and sensitive and they all talk about their feelings and it's just so all-the-same boring. If the writers are creative enough to come up with interesting looks for these beings, how about personalities/cultural pecularities that manifest themselves in personal interactions? Not every creature from every corner of the galaxy is going to be as emotive and eloquent as the fairer sex of this race.
They're talking about outsourcing/having automated for you your HR, payroll, etc., so that you don't need to set up and maintain all that on your own just to start a business (that you're going to shut down in a few months anyways, when the tiny window of opportunity you're serving passes).
Also, the fact that their life spans will be measured in months or a short number of years will not be grounds for dismissal from Harvard Business School. A successful business model doesn't need to be measured by its staying power.
Who's going to purchase an IT solution from a business that admittedly is only going to be around for several more months?
Java is not cross-platform, it is a platform. If you write to the Java platform, your code will/can only run on that platform. Same as writing to the Win32 platform. At my first job in addition to the Wintel boxes running Windows NT we also had a DEC Alpha RISC machine running NT for Alpha, which we recompiled our code for and tested on. I didn't suddenly rejoice that Win32 was "cross-platform".
Java is cross-OS insofar as there's a VM available for it on the target OS. Similar to C++, which is cross-OS for all OS's that have C++ compilers.
Also, I don't think a language should be designed around keeping a stupid programmer or project team from shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, all languages are designed with some safety features, like type checking. There really isn't anything wrong with different languages designed for not only different problems, but different skill levels. When Java was introduced it was touted as the language "for the rest of us". That's fine, not everyone has a CS degree and wants to get down to the C or C++ level. During the dot-com heyday I did a short stint at a VB shop. No one there was CS degreed, they were all IS majors, and some of them once commented they have no interest in dicking with pointers etc., they're only interested in solving business problems. That's fine. For me, I like to get a little geekier, and have more control/flexibility. I like using abstractions in C++ like operator overloading to shield me from lower-level details when I'm not interested at the moment, but giving me the ability to look deeper when/if I need to.
Operator overloading is often abused.
That's what I keep hearing, but I've never actually seen anywhere dubious usage of it, such as your "circle + square" example.
You talk about stats and strong contributors and output quantity and demanding environments. Maybe what you mean is that older workers tend not to be as willing to put up with sweatshops and being taken advantage of. That is completely true. But being older and wiser and finding yourself with choices/other opportunities doesn't mean diminished mental capacity. And less interest in being abused does not equal less interest in ones work.
I think appearing desperate/like you're willing to take anything will land you in a hole sooner. If you know what you're worth, and expect it, you command some level of respect for that. The last time I was laid off, I was approached by the person who's now my boss of 4+ years, who found me on Monster, who I initially turned down when I inferred from the job description that there wouldn't be much development involved. It was a risk, as nothing else might've come along for a while, but he called back with reassurances, and accepted my counter-offer, which was backed by a salary web site's data, and he later said that he was impressed by that.
And GP is right. For example your new boss may try to hire you for less than you want with promises of adjusting you up in six months, but s/he might not even be your boss in six months, or might not even work there anymore. Things change -- better to get what you'll be content with up front.
I say we find somebody crazy enough in congress to propose a salary cap for CEO's bill.
An interesting thought. Maybe instead of certain congresscritters focusing on a Minimum Wage, it would do more good for the average worker if they instead or in addition advocated a Maximum Wage. Either an absolute number, or even better, a ratio, whereby no one is allowed to be compensated more than x times what the lowest-paid person is. Then when bigshot wants to pay himself, he has to pay everyone else as well. There's already somewhat of a precedent for this, nondiscrimination rules for 401K's, where highly-compensated employees can't contribute more (benefit from the tax effect) unless they get more of the lesser-paids to also save (and benefit) more.
These listing are probably ridiculously bloated, but if you've been a professional software engineer longer than two hours, you already know they're as bogus as your resume.
Maybe if you bullshit in the requirements, you'll likely get mostly bullshitters applying?
The potential flaws in your chessmaster analogy are that 1) software development takes probably nowhere near the mental effort that these giants bring to bear against each other, and 2) the rate of falloff of being able to exert and sustain this level of concentration among geniuses does not necessarily correlate with software developers, the majority of whom are not geniuses.
I have 12 years of experience, maybe nearing "old fogey" status in your eyes, and looking at my future reading list, plus all the things that I could potentially get into after that, I'd say my "terminal level" is not even within sight. I know developers 10 years younger than I who haven't done dick since college, and haven't learned a thing nor give a whit about elegant, readable, maintainable, extensible solutions. It's not age, it's interest.
In other words, now that I've got mine, I don't want anyone else getting theirs.
Exactly. It's easy to take the "bold and courageous" stand for higher taxes when you have more money than you and several generations of your offspring will know what to do with, and you've already passed a goodly amount of it on.
If your company could replace people with less-skilled counterparts, then they probably should've done so long ago.
Here's what it is with most companies: After a while they take you for granted, and are no longer interested in paying you what you're worth. But to another company you're all new and shiny and irresistably mysterious, so they'll offer you more to lure you away. So your old company now has to pay market value+ to replace you, so they're now paying *more* for someone 1) they don't know, and 2) who's not familiar with the code base and procedures for getting reimbursed for travel etc. Each company would be better off working to retain the competent that are already up-to-speed on that company's stuff, but instead they in effect force musical chairs amongst all but the dead wood.
I don't want to argue either. In the link provided previously, MS refers to it as a "a type-cast expression". That is, nothing is being cast, it's just that an expression of this kind is being used. If that is wrong, so be it, but it's hard to believe.