This issue is not immune to the scientific method. Much of the approbation for Fox, and kudos for NPR, comes from the Knowledge Networks study almost 15 years ago: http://www.pipa.org/OnlineRepo...
It IS possible for everybody to agree on a few simple facts, no really. Then you can survey news consumers for whether they are right on those really simple facts, and find which consumers have the best score. In this 2003 poll, you actually had the amazing stat that people who watched a lot of Fox had lower scores than the Fox fans who watched a little - a lot of watching actually subtracted from your factual knowledge. And NPR listeners had the highest score.
This study should be repeated yearly, about multiple news stories, and the results should be common knowledge. News sources should be competing on whether their viewers get 80% of 90%, not whether they get 90% or 25%.
It's hilarious to read comments and posts about how this is due to "budget cutting". These cuts are not perceptible at taxpayer level. https://www.statista.com/stati......yes, there's a "drop" in there from 2011-2016, but I believe that's in overseas adventuring. Far more importantly, the "drop" is to the 2008 budget, more than double the 2000 budget, when there were few of these collisions. It's now nearly $2000 per American citizen. Add up all spending on Pentagon, DOE (nukes), DVA, and the spy/surveillance services, debt servicing, and it's a trillion a year, nearly $10,000 per household.
And yet, there isn't enough money for the PEOPLE in the American military, not even enough for their really basic training. Is is really all blown on overpriced weapons systems? Can't you include training in the weapons-system budget or something? Sneak it in.
Tight code that just does the job and no more can be done, but the writer, or the guy standing over him, has to *deeply* understand the problem, from the inside. Frankly, I think it's easier to teach the problem-expert programming than it is to teach a programmer the problem.
I worked for my local water/sewer utility, first as their IT head, then moved back to my first degree, engineering - but it was my IT that got me the engineering job, which was putting all our pipes, valves and other assets into a giant database that was also a "GIS", a map. We had already for years been switching to mapping with CAD, and had various macros and programs written within its development environment to make, say, placing a hydrant a single graphic operation.
So I got the one contract CAD programmer to greatly expand his "macros" into a comprehensive drafting system where the draftsman first drafted the underlying network, then all the pipes and other assets on top of that; the database understood the connected network and could trace it, analyse flow. The coding from the one former draftsman, who completely understood the drafting problem and the needs of his fellow-draftsman customers hired a couple of young programmers,made sure they were doing what his customers needed, and was done in a year for about $400,000. The IT department charged me much more than that to just supervise him and make sure he "met all corporate standards"!
Well, the IT and Mapping departments hated this software because it ran on top of the CAD package, Microstation. They insisted this was at end-of-life and all mapping was going to an "All-GIS" environment in the 800-lb gorilla of the GIS market, ESRI. They went over me (multiple levels) to get a huge project approved to replace my little $400K amateur effort from a mere engineer.
Long story short, that project peaked at 35 staff, went 3 years, spent $8 million and generated I can't imagine how much code because it was all with Microsoft programming tools that load in whole libraries every time you do anything. At that point, management realized that it was another $2M-$3M to finish it, and testing showed it would offer no improvements and maybe some slowdowns.
They cancelled it.
My $400,000 CAD software is still there, not yet "end of life" at the age of 20, some 8 years after it was declared good-as-dead. Pity about the lost $8M. What I could have done with that! (There is, by the way, no sign of the whole CAD market vanishing in favour of GIS. Not surprising. Our IT and mapping people also picked Microsoft Silverlight as a winner.)
Whenever I read about giant code messes, I wonder if good, working software for the same problem would be less than a tenth that size. And it isn't bad programmers, it's bad project management. You should never put IT in charge, always their customer. This absolutely requires IT-savvy customers, and these horrors will go on until we get some.
A bank head was just sentenced to death for a fraud involving less money than this guy's payout. "Dozens" of former employees of the bank have received long jail terms.
Now on the one hand, while Vietnam is on one of its periodic anti-corruption sweeps, this is mostly about the guy being a political opponent.
But, really, it's the very idea of the senior officials of a bank showing up in a criminal court at ALL, receiving jail time at ALL (rather than the bank paying a highly-affordable fine) that's the remarkable sight, here. Western culture can offer no comparable example.
Alas, the programming industry started off on the wrong foot because employees arrived self-trained. I refer to the industry after microcomputers changed it completely. When it was all IBM mainframes, programmer was something of a profession, guys in ties and coats, math degrees and training in the shop.
When the notion of just writing software alone, not as a free add-on to a million-dollar computer, came along for PCs, the programmers were all enthused self-taught hobbyists and industry, well, got spoiled early. The book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1984) writes of Sierra On-Line "training" game programmers, but just about the gaming tricks in 8-bit: they only hired already-fanatic young hackers.
So everybody tried to become a self-taught hacker; after Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and got rich, dropping out of U became almost a badge of honor, of your willingness to risk your career on your talent and hard work alone.
If IT could become a profession - like Medicine, Law, Engineering, Teaching, Accounting - with actual requirements and competence tests - it would change a lot of things. Women piled into Medicine and Law despite the sexism they encountered: Medicine and Law are our best-compensated, most-respected professions. Why should they put up with sexism to get a shit-job competing with foreign wages and tossed at the first grey hair?
And you'd find people lining up to get the degrees that would get them into this respected profession. RIght now, you see CS class enrollment bounce up and down with every bit of good and bad news out of Silicon Valley.
Sorry, didn't intend to: what were those previous goal posts? It was fair to say a few suborbital flights are "opening up space as never before"? I always had the goalposts of "doing more than NASA has already done" for that sentence, and my reply did admit that if he meant "by private industry" then his comment was agreed to.
Unless you mean "as [private industry has] never before", I beg to differ. Call me when Elon has done six moon landings, a few Mars crawlers, and some gas giant probes.
I recently had a "whatever happened to" moment and spent an evening reading his more recent opinion posts, and it was kind of sad to see him become more hardened into an increasingly bitter-sounding, yes, even Trumpist view of the world over time. The one where civilization is always falling into disrepair from the gradual takeover of ever-expanding bureaucracy and government control.
Go back a ways and you can see all the attitudes there - the "Fallen Angels" book from 1991 isn't just about how an ice age is far more likely than this liberal global warming theory (which the liberals in the book stick to even as mile-high ice sheets wipe out Canada and are eating Wisconsin), it's about how government with liberal concerns becomes a kind of fascist dictatorship, controlling individual economic choices and oppressing honest scientists who won't toe a party line.
And then there's Mote in Gods Eye which proposes an enemy which must be inherently treated like an enemy no matter how nice and reasonable they are as individuals, because as a race, they breed like flies... and just can't help but displace us utterly from the universe if we let them out of their cage. Which are defeated by a hereditary nobility, because feudalism turned out to be the best way to bring order to our race in an age of star travel.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
People who get upset when authors weave their opinions into their work all need to take a deep breath: if YOU can see it, can you possibly credit the rest of us with seeing it, too? We can filter our own inputs, honest: we live in a world of advertising. [Criticized for advertising certain products to the very young, advertisers today plead back that their sneakiest approaches can't break through the suspicious natures of modern kids: by nine, they know the toy isn't really as fun as it looks on TV.]
So, yeah, I sputtered with disbelief at his column when Obamacare was enacted, raging that for the first time in his life he was now held responsible for the medical care of complete strangers - I supposed he'd never before in his life considered complete strangers over 65, despite being there himself - but I bid him farewell with sorrow. He gave me a lot of fun hours in fantasyland, and a lot of fun hours reading about the latest in WORM drives (look it up) and literally a hundred other technologies that have come, and mostly gone, all building the world's most exciting industry. I thank him for his opinions even though I shared few; testing my reasoning against his was good for me.
Jerry-haters can take some comfort, if you feel mean today: Jerry's fondest youthful dreams for The Future (i.e. now) were all cruelly disappointed. We got no moonbase, no space industries, no asteroid miners. Worse yet, while Jerry may have convinced himself that NASA bureaucracy and general liberal anti-science budget cutting were at fault, I doubt it; he was opinionated but not irrational. And the painful fact is that no private industry was ever found for space.
Jerry's stories always featured a booming space industry by 2020 because zero-gee manufacturing was going to lead to ultra-fast computer chips, amazing new drugs, and ultra-strong materials. No such private, commercial reason to build in space ever materialized, despite billions of dollars of publicly-funded experiments to find such industrial processes. That's a shame for a space dreamers, but it's nobody's fault, it's just a scientific fact about the universe: space is way harder to conquer and way less rewarding than we hoped. Some front
...not perfectly, of course. A previous poster is correct that no system is perfect. But systems that are well-regulated can be pretty good. The airline industry used to drop planes as frequently as we hear about major data-breaches today: like every month. Now it's less than one per year, despite travel having increased over 10 fold.
We could be hearing about 1/100th as many data-breaches, as well. A bunch of financial services would get a little more expensive, but only a little, just like airline fares have not gone out of sight - they didn't even go out of sight after 9/11 when new regulations made flying more expensive. Just not much.
This company has NO reason to spend more money on security next year. Why would they? The actual financial consequences of this event are really quite minor for them. No fines, no lawsuits, and almost no compensation. (The "year of monitoring" will cost about as much as a coffee for each of the 1% that sign up for it.)
If Corporate Death Penalty were the consequence of an event like this, you'd see OpenBSD web sites with custom web servers written to only provide the application; you'd see humans paid to monitor the logs in real time, and more humans to watch them. You'd see the difference between how civilians do things and how the military do things, not caring that they spend a hundred dollars where a civilian would spend five. And you'd see some real results. Right now, failure is not just an option, its the cheaper one.
People prattling on about how "nothing could have prevented this" are exactly like those who said the same about the Titanic - until new regulations that were "utterly unaffordable" the day before Titanic were suddenly gospel: double-hulls were very expensive, watertight compartments that go 20ft above water line, enough lifeboats for everybody, 7x24 ice patrols, 7x24 wireless monitoring on every ship. All of that was "impossible" the day before Titanic. The security equivalent is still "impossible" here, because there is essentially no penalty for failure.
Learning a whole profession in a matter of weeks sounds pretty tough, might be why there are no "engineering boot camps" or "accounting boot camps". But I can imagine an "accounting for engineers" boot camp that gave an engineer enough mental tools to talk productively with their accountant, do simple accounting if they run a 1-man consulting firm, that sort of thing.
Accounting is one thing that engineers, doctors, dentists and lawyers and many other professionals could all stand several weeks of. Programming is another, especially for the engineers like myself. I got a whole CompSci degree after my P.Eng. and it changed my whole career, very much for the better. But I effectively *gave* that coding boot camp to several engineers that worked under me over the course of my career. Posters on/. sneer at "VBA coders" but I can't overstate how much more productive a professional engineer can be in certain jobs (in my case, managing over 200,000 underground pipes) with decent "201 level" skills in SQL and VBA.
My suggestion would, alas, *eliminate* programming jobs. Right now, all those professionals have to turn to their I.T. department, which charges them $10,000 for coding and $25,000 for "requirements gathering", "systems analysis" and "enterprise architecture integration", that resulted in a sweet shiny C# application.... that also does what they could have done themselves with Excel and VBA in an afternoon if they'd been through about 50 hours of instruction and 100 of practice.
All three are comparable because all three at least *have* a lot of space, but don't use it, being 80% or more urban. Whether you have the rest evenly distributed in exurbs or semi-clumped in small towns, the 80% of ratepayers in urban areas pretty much ensures pretty good service overall. Or should, where the regulator enforces transparency and high standards.
Conservatives love to point out that 75% (or some such) of journalists "lean left" or "identify as liberal" or whatever. It's rarely noted that the people who hire and fire them "lean" way, way conservative. This leaves the journalists "leaning left" inside an Overton Window that's well right of centre. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
The Overton Window of this private research group (Isn't "think tank" overdue for the dumpster?) has just been given a clear left-hand frame that's a ways to right of its old position.
But you can't say this group "lacks credibility" in a world where the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute still get on TV, and revolve employees in and out of government jobs in order to cut & paste their papers into legislation that passes. They have enormously more "credibility" than you do.
"We have crappy Internet provision because of Big Government!"
"Yeah! Let's make our government even less like those in France, Germany, and Scandinavia where the Internet access is several times as good."
And to fend off the inevitable "But we have it harder because the US is less dense than Europe!"
1) You are not less dense than Canada and Australia 2) US Internet provision sucks in US cities, too, and they are quite dense
You do not have crappy Internet because of "corrupt Clinton-style government". You have it because of not-technically-corrupt government that is *influenced* by large corporations that have an oligopoly on service provision. This influence is bipartisan, with a slight preference for Republican. (Until Trump, whose level of revolving-door state/corporate appointments has hit a new level.)
Oh, yeah, my rant skipped another thing. When it was still debatable that Moore's was over, one counterargument was that maybe GHz had stopped climbing, but we were getting more and more cores! I see the new line also quits at 6 cores, maybe you can get 8 later at high prices. Exponential increase in core-count has also stopped dead. (Just as well; Amdahl's Law says it wasn't a really productive direction, going to 16 and higher...)
"Obviously, nothing is free" [so speed had to go down to pay for other improvements].
I assure you, sir, that in the past, we got stuff for free all the time. Basically, every new generation had more complex circuitry (oh, man, that jump from 16-bit to 32!) with more instructions and a drop in cycles/operation, **A*N*D** the chip ran faster.
The curve has been bending for some time, of course - I read these things because I got a high-end i7 in 2013 that had come out in 2012, (i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz) and I'm still not sure if I would *notice* the speedup if I bought a 2017 system to replace it. A gamer friend tells me I will notice, but only if I get the latest thing in RAM and the latest thing in SSD disks, each on the latest thing in buses. All of that together will not double the performance of my early-2013 purchase, and "double" used to be every couple of years.
But, anyway, it was that "of course" that got to me. It means that the psychology has changed; the lack of automatic silicon progress has been accepted at a deep level, and people are planning around an era of Limits To Growth. "Moores Law" as a *social* era, has ended. We no longer expect next year's progress to solve this year's problems. We'll have to make some Hard Choices, give up something, to solve a resource lack.
I was a schoolchild, arguably (13) when I became self-taught. On mainframes. By stealing the "account cards" out of the garbage at the University computing centre. The problem would have been *stopping* me.
So I would recommend making tools available, and giving demonstrations of what you can do with 10-line and 20-line programs, demonstrate the writing of 5 and 10-line programs, and leave self-teaching materials available. I would make time for it, and provide other things to do - reading and educational toys and art stuff, I guess - for the kids that don't *want* to program. I would repeatedly mention the commercial value of the skill, maybe a talk or two from people who started as kids and made careers of it.
And that's it. No, wait, help available, that too, of course. But no pressure, no lessons, no exams.
I figure about 90% of those who would actually learn programming from ANY lesson plan, no matter how coercive, will learn as much or more from this.
You like it or you don't, I can't recall an exception where somebody learned to like programming, or became a decent programmer without liking it.
I was just in a municipal government, but the dysfunctionality really was amazing.
I know I'm an anti-authoritarian personality, so most problems look to me to be caused by authoritarianism, but I'm pretty sure about this one. I watched it grow for 20 years.
Every large corporate (and this goes double for "municipal corporations" and other governments) IT shop that goes back decades started off as a *mainframe* shop, with all IT totally Under Control. As they took over the PCs, everything there had to be brought totally Under Control, which included things like Only One Application for every need, followed 2 years later by Everything Must Be Microsoft.
And they could back this up, and hold up the rest of the corporation for any sum they demanded for the simplest applications, because IT was *their* turf and no other department could do their own, hire their own contractors, nothing.
Whenever they developed a service or application, NOTHING could be done until EVERY ramification had been explored and the perfect One Application For All Needs Of All Stakeholders was developed. This made every application a huge project. Indeed, it soon became clear that they hated small projects and those would either not be done, or be made large.
I retired feeling that until the power of centralized IT departments is broken, that IT in large corporate bodies will be like the Soviet central-command economy: hopelessly broken and incapable of producing the simplest things even at huge cost mark-ups, with frequent spectacular failures.
This isn't about government-vs-private, it's just centralized-vs-flexible. I compared notes with an engineer at our phone company, which sells all sorts of services now, TV and Internet, etc. They do have a business imperative that government services do not: they have had to constantly innovate to develop and grow these new businesses lately. So their IT department was forced to change away from the centralized mainframe shop of yore. It's a chaotic mess, alas, because they never acknowledged they'd have to do this, so it all kind of slipped away on them with no planning for it. But, while it's a chaotic mess, they are functioning and making money; even in the worst case scenario for control-vs-chaos, the chaos is not as bad as the over-control.
...automation and job loss. Lack of a minimum wage for farming did not stop those plucky "automators" from reducing farm jobs by about 97% in a century flat. Nor were Luddite concerns related to 19th-century English minimum wage policies.
The automatiion/wage situation was really nailed to the wall by this fine journalism in The Atlantic five years back: https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
We are taken to hang-ten on the dividing line between automation and human-work in the case of Maddie Parlier, auto-parts worker who was next up for replacement. The nearly-empty auto-parts factory in which she works automates a job when the machine to do it falls in price below two years' salary. She makes $13/hour, or about $25K/year - and the machine that could replace her exists, but costs $100,000 so her job is "safe" - for a few years.
So this is really about your societal standards. "We don't work for less than $13 an hour" is no different conceptually from "We don't work full time before age 16" and "We don't let employers work people more than 16 hours at a time" and "We don't let our employers work people with no safety equipment" even though safety equipment costs money and therefore, mandating it costs jobs.
These societal rules of COURSE have prices: "forbidding child labour" caused 100% job loss for the affected kids, and serious financial hardship for their families, I'm sure there was a lot of smirking at the time about how much harm had been done by Good Intentions.
If you hate the minimum wage, consider reading "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. One of the cases for Universal Basic Income is that the moral argument about minimum wage vanishes: with the minimum already taken care of, $1/hour for a job you enjoy might make perfect sense.
May I interject this is a silicon valley thing more than it is an everywhere thing. There's certainly some point at which younger bosses start to disregard older opinions, but especially if you've put in many of those years in the company, I found GenX and Millenials quite willing to listen to me and learn from me. (And I'm one of those jerks that will get his back up about an issue and sends around multi-page e-mail rants; people didn't read those, mostly, but they didn't stop listening when I had short, relevant comments to make.)
Granted, I worked at the opposite end of some kind of job-type spectrum: municipal utilities, where knowing what was different about how we put water pipes in the ground 20 years back is useful information. And most new ideas are suspicious. But, you know, a third of our economy is in things like government and basic services that are NOT dynamically changing with consumer fashions every year; there's a lot of good jobs with that "dull" part of the economy.
One funny thing is that I was teaching latest-thing high-tech to those people 20 and 30 years my junior, some of them were my bosses. I'm a civil engineer, but also had a CompSci degree, and kept up with many new things even if not the very latest. So they would be coming to me for help just doing Excel VBA macros or basic cgi-bin web solutions when the corporate apps were very clumsy. And I lost count of the people I taught basic SQL skills to, because "Report Applications" like Crystal Reports or Business Objects are a huge pain to learn when you just want a simple answer to a basic query.
I left at 57 to a lot of backpats and almost-tearful cries that they couldn't manage without me. They have, of course, though I've answered a lot of phone calls about How I Did That One Thing for them.
If Silicon Valley is indeed a dysfunctional family of overwork and discrimination and backstabbing competition, maybe you should stop picking your career based on Hollywood imagery of superhackers, not to mention dreams of millions before you're 30. Your odds are about the same as that high-school star quarterback who imagines a life starring in the NFL. Your odds suck, the place is a toxic-waste bin, so the game's not worth the candle.
Once enough people say, "screw silicon valley, I want to work with sane people", maybe silicon valley will have to start treating employees a little better.
Yow, cool to bump into another GIS guy. Drop by brander.ca if you'd like a few screen snaps of the maps.
I'm not sure if you meant that you had *legacy GIS* applications in Oracle - most legacy programming work for GIS is in ESRI's various programming languages, upon their app, not the underlying SQL. But I'll stop right there, as the thing about ESRI is that they themselves support Oracle very well, and PostGIS rather poorly and with obvious reluctance that has smelled to me more of Oracle pressure than simple lack of interest in a smaller product base.
Tell me, would you say that our IT people would not even run the numbers on the cost of getting out from under the legacy programming? Oracle really does cost a LOT and if you run, say, 10-year projections, you can really afford a boatload of de-programming, so to speak, and still break even. But in my experience, they won't even take the idea seriously enough to do the cost-benefit analysis.
...man, Google must be the nicest, least authoritarian, near-democracy of a workplace ever. Where I worked, you couldn't send out to co-workers ANY kind of criticism of, or input into, any kind of corporate policy, standards, or work processes. If you had a problem with anything about your work conditions, you took that up with your boss, privately.
If you really needed to discuss hiring policy because you were doing some of the hiring, say, you take THAT up with your boss and have a committee struck to sit about discussing your issues for long enough to write up your concerns and pass them upward. If Management, at its discretion, thought, yeah, our hiring policies need revision, they'd tell you. Otherwise, thanks for sharing, and please go back to implementing the existing policy, and smile while you do it.
Obviously, anybody can gripe at lunch. But leaving a paper trail back to your complaints, would get you at least a talking-to.
How anybody can imagine this guy can sue successfully is beyond me.
I was an Oracle user for 25 years, took my first course on Oracle 6 in 1991. That was the introduction of it into my employer (City of Calgary) which was locked in IBM mainframery at the time; they had to accept Oracle as needed for GIS mapping, the ESRI and other GIS products all practically demanded Oracle.
Now, I was not up at the sysadmin end, where Oracle's tools for moving whole databases about, and spreading them across disks and servers and all that, are greatly appreciated. But just as a user, all the needs I had for a GIS database had been replicated in Free Software by the time I retired.
I think Postgres stacks up fairly well against Oracle, even for the sysadmins fussing over partitions and multiple servers, these days; but for my needs, now considered humble, a mere 10GB database of every pipe, every house, every lot and street, every bit of water infrastructure in a large city and all the work-orders done on those pipes in 10 years - was handled by PostGIS (Postgres with a GIS plug-in) with ease. On a laptop. I started doing real work on my PostGIS copy (and no, transfer from Oracle to Postgres was not remotely difficult) because I had more control over it, was the DBA. Convenient sometimes.
I guess some Oracle admins will always have a situation where they can say "the free software alternatives just don't let me manage my petabytes easily for 365x24 service", fair enough.
But so many work needs can be handled well by a reliable database product that can manage a mere few hundred gigabytes quickly and well, that I think if everybody who *could* switch to Postgres *did* switch to Postgres, Oracle would be trying to fund itself on a small fraction of their current customer base, though they would all be huge customers.
I wouldn't have written that in 2012 when I first looked at Postgres, but their developments since 8.5 have been especially impressive. I recall a debate in their committees a few years back where they worried not enough developers were handling the routine bug-fixes and minor upgrades with each version: too many people were excitedly putting in major new features like 'big database support' and UPSERT (9.5), "parallel query and synchronous replication" (9.6) and so on, to take care of basics. They've had a very impressive five years. As to the predictions for Postgres 10, I can't even understand them: http://rhaas.blogspot.ca/2017/...... but they are apparently awesome from the fan reviews.
I tried to get IT at work to have a look at Postgres, but it was a non-starter: our PeopleSoft application is married to Oracle and there's no way they'd have two DB products. Indeed, Oracle may be safe for decades yet unless somebody like EnterpriseDB comes up with a really popular Oracle-to-PG migration for both SAP and PeopleSoft. Those things could not be removed from most large corporations with a nuclear-powered crowbar, so they're Oracle's best lock-in partners right now.
"Women are often better at it" was the sentence to which you replied, with an answer appropriate to the sentence "women are better at it".
My sentence indicated that it is *possible* for a woman to be "better at it", more frequently than "seldom", but "often" does not take a stand on the frequency exceeding 50%. If group B is "often" better at X than group A, then group B should not be systematically excluded from doing X. Clear now?
Women are often better at reading the meaning of English sentences, too - yet another vitally important engineering skill.
Slashdot Mirror
This issue is not immune to the scientific method. Much of the approbation for Fox, and kudos for NPR, comes from the Knowledge Networks study almost 15 years ago:
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineRepo...
It IS possible for everybody to agree on a few simple facts, no really. Then you can survey news consumers for whether they are right on those really simple facts, and find which consumers have the best score. In this 2003 poll, you actually had the amazing stat that people who watched a lot of Fox had lower scores than the Fox fans who watched a little - a lot of watching actually subtracted from your factual knowledge. And NPR listeners had the highest score.
This study should be repeated yearly, about multiple news stories, and the results should be common knowledge. News sources should be competing on whether their viewers get 80% of 90%, not whether they get 90% or 25%.
It's hilarious to read comments and posts about how this is due to "budget cutting". These cuts are not perceptible at taxpayer level. https://www.statista.com/stati... ...yes, there's a "drop" in there from 2011-2016, but I believe that's in overseas adventuring. Far more importantly, the "drop" is to the 2008 budget, more than double the 2000 budget, when there were few of these collisions. It's now nearly $2000 per American citizen. Add up all spending on Pentagon, DOE (nukes), DVA, and the spy/surveillance services, debt servicing, and it's a trillion a year, nearly $10,000 per household.
And yet, there isn't enough money for the PEOPLE in the American military, not even enough for their really basic training. Is is really all blown on overpriced weapons systems? Can't you include training in the weapons-system budget or something? Sneak it in.
Tight code that just does the job and no more can be done, but the writer, or the guy standing over him, has to *deeply* understand the problem, from the inside. Frankly, I think it's easier to teach the problem-expert programming than it is to teach a programmer the problem.
I worked for my local water/sewer utility, first as their IT head, then moved back to my first degree, engineering - but it was my IT that got me the engineering job, which was putting all our pipes, valves and other assets into a giant database that was also a "GIS", a map. We had already for years been switching to mapping with CAD, and had various macros and programs written within its development environment to make, say, placing a hydrant a single graphic operation.
So I got the one contract CAD programmer to greatly expand his "macros" into a comprehensive drafting system where the draftsman first drafted the underlying network, then all the pipes and other assets on top of that; the database understood the connected network and could trace it, analyse flow. The coding from the one former draftsman, who completely understood the drafting problem and the needs of his fellow-draftsman customers hired a couple of young programmers,made sure they were doing what his customers needed, and was done in a year for about $400,000. The IT department charged me much more than that to just supervise him and make sure he "met all corporate standards"!
Well, the IT and Mapping departments hated this software because it ran on top of the CAD package, Microstation. They insisted this was at end-of-life and all mapping was going to an "All-GIS" environment in the 800-lb gorilla of the GIS market, ESRI. They went over me (multiple levels) to get a huge project approved to replace my little $400K amateur effort from a mere engineer.
Long story short, that project peaked at 35 staff, went 3 years, spent $8 million and generated I can't imagine how much code because it was all with Microsoft programming tools that load in whole libraries every time you do anything.
At that point, management realized that it was another $2M-$3M to finish it, and testing showed it would offer no improvements and maybe some slowdowns.
They cancelled it.
My $400,000 CAD software is still there, not yet "end of life" at the age of 20, some 8 years after it was declared good-as-dead. Pity about the lost $8M. What I could have done with that! (There is, by the way, no sign of the whole CAD market vanishing in favour of GIS. Not surprising. Our IT and mapping people also picked Microsoft Silverlight as a winner.)
Whenever I read about giant code messes, I wonder if good, working software for the same problem would be less than a tenth that size. And it isn't bad programmers, it's bad project management. You should never put IT in charge, always their customer. This absolutely requires IT-savvy customers, and these horrors will go on until we get some.
A bank head was just sentenced to death for a fraud involving less money than this guy's payout. "Dozens" of former employees of the bank have received long jail terms.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
Now on the one hand, while Vietnam is on one of its periodic anti-corruption sweeps, this is mostly about the guy being a political opponent.
But, really, it's the very idea of the senior officials of a bank showing up in a criminal court at ALL, receiving jail time at ALL (rather than the bank paying a highly-affordable fine) that's the remarkable sight, here. Western culture can offer no comparable example.
Alas, the programming industry started off on the wrong foot because employees arrived self-trained. I refer to the industry after microcomputers changed it completely. When it was all IBM mainframes, programmer was something of a profession, guys in ties and coats, math degrees and training in the shop.
When the notion of just writing software alone, not as a free add-on to a million-dollar computer, came along for PCs, the programmers were all enthused self-taught hobbyists and industry, well, got spoiled early. The book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1984) writes of Sierra On-Line "training" game programmers, but just about the gaming tricks in 8-bit: they only hired already-fanatic young hackers.
So everybody tried to become a self-taught hacker; after Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and got rich, dropping out of U became almost a badge of honor, of your willingness to risk your career on your talent and hard work alone.
If IT could become a profession - like Medicine, Law, Engineering, Teaching, Accounting - with actual requirements and competence tests - it would change a lot of things. Women piled into Medicine and Law despite the sexism they encountered: Medicine and Law are our best-compensated, most-respected professions. Why should they put up with sexism to get a shit-job competing with foreign wages and tossed at the first grey hair?
And you'd find people lining up to get the degrees that would get them into this respected profession. RIght now, you see CS class enrollment bounce up and down with every bit of good and bad news out of Silicon Valley.
Sorry, didn't intend to: what were those previous goal posts? It was fair to say a few suborbital flights are "opening up space as never before"? I always had the goalposts of "doing more than NASA has already done" for that sentence, and my reply did admit that if he meant "by private industry" then his comment was agreed to.
Unless you mean "as [private industry has] never before", I beg to differ.
Call me when Elon has done six moon landings, a few Mars crawlers, and some gas giant probes.
I recently had a "whatever happened to" moment and spent an evening reading his more recent opinion posts, and it was kind of sad to see him become more hardened into an increasingly bitter-sounding, yes, even Trumpist view of the world over time. The one where civilization is always falling into disrepair from the gradual takeover of ever-expanding bureaucracy and government control.
Go back a ways and you can see all the attitudes there - the "Fallen Angels" book from 1991 isn't just about how an ice age is far more likely than this liberal global warming theory (which the liberals in the book stick to even as mile-high ice sheets wipe out Canada and are eating Wisconsin), it's about how government with liberal concerns becomes a kind of fascist dictatorship, controlling individual economic choices and oppressing honest scientists who won't toe a party line.
And then there's Mote in Gods Eye which proposes an enemy which must be inherently treated like an enemy no matter how nice and reasonable they are as individuals, because as a race, they breed like flies... and just can't help but displace us utterly from the universe if we let them out of their cage. Which are defeated by a hereditary nobility, because feudalism turned out to be the best way to bring order to our race in an age of star travel.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
People who get upset when authors weave their opinions into their work all need to take a deep breath: if YOU can see it, can you possibly credit the rest of us with seeing it, too? We can filter our own inputs, honest: we live in a world of advertising. [Criticized for advertising certain products to the very young, advertisers today plead back that their sneakiest approaches can't break through the suspicious natures of modern kids: by nine, they know the toy isn't really as fun as it looks on TV.]
So, yeah, I sputtered with disbelief at his column when Obamacare was enacted, raging that for the first time in his life he was now held responsible for the medical care of complete strangers - I supposed he'd never before in his life considered complete strangers over 65, despite being there himself - but I bid him farewell with sorrow. He gave me a lot of fun hours in fantasyland, and a lot of fun hours reading about the latest in WORM drives (look it up) and literally a hundred other technologies that have come, and mostly gone, all building the world's most exciting industry. I thank him for his opinions even though I shared few; testing my reasoning against his was good for me.
Jerry-haters can take some comfort, if you feel mean today: Jerry's fondest youthful dreams for The Future (i.e. now) were all cruelly disappointed. We got no moonbase, no space industries, no asteroid miners. Worse yet, while Jerry may have convinced himself that NASA bureaucracy and general liberal anti-science budget cutting were at fault, I doubt it; he was opinionated but not irrational. And the painful fact is that no private industry was ever found for space.
Jerry's stories always featured a booming space industry by 2020 because zero-gee manufacturing was going to lead to ultra-fast computer chips, amazing new drugs, and ultra-strong materials. No such private, commercial reason to build in space ever materialized, despite billions of dollars of publicly-funded experiments to find such industrial processes. That's a shame for a space dreamers, but it's nobody's fault, it's just a scientific fact about the universe: space is way harder to conquer and way less rewarding than we hoped. Some front
...not perfectly, of course. A previous poster is correct that no system is perfect. But systems that are well-regulated can be pretty good. The airline industry used to drop planes as frequently as we hear about major data-breaches today: like every month. Now it's less than one per year, despite travel having increased over 10 fold.
We could be hearing about 1/100th as many data-breaches, as well. A bunch of financial services would get a little more expensive, but only a little, just like airline fares have not gone out of sight - they didn't even go out of sight after 9/11 when new regulations made flying more expensive. Just not much.
This company has NO reason to spend more money on security next year. Why would they? The actual financial consequences of this event are really quite minor for them. No fines, no lawsuits, and almost no compensation. (The "year of monitoring" will cost about as much as a coffee for each of the 1% that sign up for it.)
If Corporate Death Penalty were the consequence of an event like this, you'd see OpenBSD web sites with custom web servers written to only provide the application; you'd see humans paid to monitor the logs in real time, and more humans to watch them. You'd see the difference between how civilians do things and how the military do things, not caring that they spend a hundred dollars where a civilian would spend five. And you'd see some real results. Right now, failure is not just an option, its the cheaper one.
People prattling on about how "nothing could have prevented this" are exactly like those who said the same about the Titanic - until new regulations that were "utterly unaffordable" the day before Titanic were suddenly gospel: double-hulls were very expensive, watertight compartments that go 20ft above water line, enough lifeboats for everybody, 7x24 ice patrols, 7x24 wireless monitoring on every ship. All of that was "impossible" the day before Titanic. The security equivalent is still "impossible" here, because there is essentially no penalty for failure.
Learning a whole profession in a matter of weeks sounds pretty tough, might be why there are no "engineering boot camps" or "accounting boot camps". But I can imagine an "accounting for engineers" boot camp that gave an engineer enough mental tools to talk productively with their accountant, do simple accounting if they run a 1-man consulting firm, that sort of thing.
Accounting is one thing that engineers, doctors, dentists and lawyers and many other professionals could all stand several weeks of. Programming is another, especially for the engineers like myself. I got a whole CompSci degree after my P.Eng. and it changed my whole career, very much for the better. But I effectively *gave* that coding boot camp to several engineers that worked under me over the course of my career. Posters on /. sneer at "VBA coders" but I can't overstate how much more productive a professional engineer can be in certain jobs (in my case, managing over 200,000 underground pipes) with decent "201 level" skills in SQL and VBA.
My suggestion would, alas, *eliminate* programming jobs. Right now, all those professionals have to turn to their I.T. department, which charges them $10,000 for coding and $25,000 for "requirements gathering", "systems analysis" and "enterprise architecture integration", that resulted in a sweet shiny C# application.... that also does what they could have done themselves with Excel and VBA in an afternoon if they'd been through about 50 hours of instruction and 100 of practice.
All three are comparable because all three at least *have* a lot of space, but don't use it, being 80% or more urban. Whether you have the rest evenly distributed in exurbs or semi-clumped in small towns, the 80% of ratepayers in urban areas pretty much ensures pretty good service overall. Or should, where the regulator enforces transparency and high standards.
Yeah, you're just i favour of no birth control for poor people. That's sure to work out well.
...but not a separate category.
Conservatives love to point out that 75% (or some such) of journalists "lean left" or "identify as liberal" or whatever. It's rarely noted that the people who hire and fire them "lean" way, way conservative. This leaves the journalists "leaning left" inside an Overton Window that's well right of centre. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
The Overton Window of this private research group (Isn't "think tank" overdue for the dumpster?) has just been given a clear left-hand frame that's a ways to right of its old position.
But you can't say this group "lacks credibility" in a world where the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute still get on TV, and revolve employees in and out of government jobs in order to cut & paste their papers into legislation that passes. They have enormously more "credibility" than you do.
"We have crappy Internet provision because of Big Government!"
"Yeah! Let's make our government even less like those in France, Germany, and Scandinavia where the Internet access is several times as good."
And to fend off the inevitable "But we have it harder because the US is less dense than Europe!"
1) You are not less dense than Canada and Australia
2) US Internet provision sucks in US cities, too, and they are quite dense
You do not have crappy Internet because of "corrupt Clinton-style government". You have it because of not-technically-corrupt government that is *influenced* by large corporations that have an oligopoly on service provision. This influence is bipartisan, with a slight preference for Republican. (Until Trump, whose level of revolving-door state/corporate appointments has hit a new level.)
Yow, those ARE cool! And in my 5-year-old CPU.
Oh, yeah, my rant skipped another thing. When it was still debatable that Moore's was over, one counterargument was that maybe GHz had stopped climbing, but we were getting more and more cores! I see the new line also quits at 6 cores, maybe you can get 8 later at high prices. Exponential increase in core-count has also stopped dead. (Just as well; Amdahl's Law says it wasn't a really productive direction, going to 16 and higher...)
"Obviously, nothing is free" [so speed had to go down to pay for other improvements].
I assure you, sir, that in the past, we got stuff for free all the time. Basically, every new generation had more complex circuitry (oh, man, that jump from 16-bit to 32!) with more instructions and a drop in cycles/operation, **A*N*D** the chip ran faster.
The curve has been bending for some time, of course - I read these things because I got a high-end i7 in 2013 that had come out in 2012, (i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz) and I'm still not sure if I would *notice* the speedup if I bought a 2017 system to replace it. A gamer friend tells me I will notice, but only if I get the latest thing in RAM and the latest thing in SSD disks, each on the latest thing in buses. All of that together will not double the performance of my early-2013 purchase, and "double" used to be every couple of years.
But, anyway, it was that "of course" that got to me. It means that the psychology has changed; the lack of automatic silicon progress has been accepted at a deep level, and people are planning around an era of Limits To Growth. "Moores Law" as a *social* era, has ended. We no longer expect next year's progress to solve this year's problems. We'll have to make some Hard Choices, give up something, to solve a resource lack.
I was a schoolchild, arguably (13) when I became self-taught. On mainframes. By stealing the "account cards" out of the garbage at the University computing centre. The problem would have been *stopping* me.
So I would recommend making tools available, and giving demonstrations of what you can do with 10-line and 20-line programs, demonstrate the writing of 5 and 10-line programs, and leave self-teaching materials available. I would make time for it, and provide other things to do - reading and educational toys and art stuff, I guess - for the kids that don't *want* to program. I would repeatedly mention the commercial value of the skill, maybe a talk or two from people who started as kids and made careers of it.
And that's it. No, wait, help available, that too, of course. But no pressure, no lessons, no exams.
I figure about 90% of those who would actually learn programming from ANY lesson plan, no matter how coercive, will learn as much or more from this.
You like it or you don't, I can't recall an exception where somebody learned to like programming, or became a decent programmer without liking it.
I was just in a municipal government, but the dysfunctionality really was amazing.
I know I'm an anti-authoritarian personality, so most problems look to me to be caused by authoritarianism, but I'm pretty sure about this one. I watched it grow for 20 years.
Every large corporate (and this goes double for "municipal corporations" and other governments) IT shop that goes back decades started off as a *mainframe* shop, with all IT totally Under Control. As they took over the PCs, everything there had to be brought totally Under Control, which included things like Only One Application for every need, followed 2 years later by Everything Must Be Microsoft.
And they could back this up, and hold up the rest of the corporation for any sum they demanded for the simplest applications, because IT was *their* turf and no other department could do their own, hire their own contractors, nothing.
Whenever they developed a service or application, NOTHING could be done until EVERY ramification had been explored and the perfect One Application For All Needs Of All Stakeholders was developed. This made every application a huge project. Indeed, it soon became clear that they hated small projects and those would either not be done, or be made large.
I retired feeling that until the power of centralized IT departments is broken, that IT in large corporate bodies will be like the Soviet central-command economy: hopelessly broken and incapable of producing the simplest things even at huge cost mark-ups, with frequent spectacular failures.
This isn't about government-vs-private, it's just centralized-vs-flexible. I compared notes with an engineer at our phone company, which sells all sorts of services now, TV and Internet, etc. They do have a business imperative that government services do not: they have had to constantly innovate to develop and grow these new businesses lately. So their IT department was forced to change away from the centralized mainframe shop of yore. It's a chaotic mess, alas, because they never acknowledged they'd have to do this, so it all kind of slipped away on them with no planning for it. But, while it's a chaotic mess, they are functioning and making money; even in the worst case scenario for control-vs-chaos, the chaos is not as bad as the over-control.
...automation and job loss. Lack of a minimum wage for farming did not stop those plucky "automators" from reducing farm jobs by about 97% in a century flat. Nor were Luddite concerns related to 19th-century English minimum wage policies.
The automatiion/wage situation was really nailed to the wall by this fine journalism in The Atlantic five years back:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
We are taken to hang-ten on the dividing line between automation and human-work in the case of Maddie Parlier, auto-parts worker who was next up for replacement. The nearly-empty auto-parts factory in which she works automates a job when the machine to do it falls in price below two years' salary. She makes $13/hour, or about $25K/year - and the machine that could replace her exists, but costs $100,000 so her job is "safe" - for a few years.
So this is really about your societal standards. "We don't work for less than $13 an hour" is no different conceptually from "We don't work full time before age 16" and "We don't let employers work people more than 16 hours at a time" and "We don't let our employers work people with no safety equipment" even though safety equipment costs money and therefore, mandating it costs jobs.
These societal rules of COURSE have prices: "forbidding child labour" caused 100% job loss for the affected kids, and serious financial hardship for their families, I'm sure there was a lot of smirking at the time about how much harm had been done by Good Intentions.
If you hate the minimum wage, consider reading "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. One of the cases for Universal Basic Income is that the moral argument about minimum wage vanishes: with the minimum already taken care of, $1/hour for a job you enjoy might make perfect sense.
May I interject this is a silicon valley thing more than it is an everywhere thing. There's certainly some point at which younger bosses start to disregard older opinions, but especially if you've put in many of those years in the company, I found GenX and Millenials quite willing to listen to me and learn from me. (And I'm one of those jerks that will get his back up about an issue and sends around multi-page e-mail rants; people didn't read those, mostly, but they didn't stop listening when I had short, relevant comments to make.)
Granted, I worked at the opposite end of some kind of job-type spectrum: municipal utilities, where knowing what was different about how we put water pipes in the ground 20 years back is useful information. And most new ideas are suspicious. But, you know, a third of our economy is in things like government and basic services that are NOT dynamically changing with consumer fashions every year; there's a lot of good jobs with that "dull" part of the economy.
One funny thing is that I was teaching latest-thing high-tech to those people 20 and 30 years my junior, some of them were my bosses. I'm a civil engineer, but also had a CompSci degree, and kept up with many new things even if not the very latest. So they would be coming to me for help just doing Excel VBA macros or basic cgi-bin web solutions when the corporate apps were very clumsy. And I lost count of the people I taught basic SQL skills to, because "Report Applications" like Crystal Reports or Business Objects are a huge pain to learn when you just want a simple answer to a basic query.
I left at 57 to a lot of backpats and almost-tearful cries that they couldn't manage without me. They have, of course, though I've answered a lot of phone calls about How I Did That One Thing for them.
If Silicon Valley is indeed a dysfunctional family of overwork and discrimination and backstabbing competition, maybe you should stop picking your career based on Hollywood imagery of superhackers, not to mention dreams of millions before you're 30. Your odds are about the same as that high-school star quarterback who imagines a life starring in the NFL. Your odds suck, the place is a toxic-waste bin, so the game's not worth the candle.
Once enough people say, "screw silicon valley, I want to work with sane people", maybe silicon valley will have to start treating employees a little better.
Yow, cool to bump into another GIS guy. Drop by brander.ca if you'd like a few screen snaps of the maps.
I'm not sure if you meant that you had *legacy GIS* applications in Oracle - most legacy programming work for GIS is in ESRI's various programming languages, upon their app, not the underlying SQL. But I'll stop right there, as the thing about ESRI is that they themselves support Oracle very well, and PostGIS rather poorly and with obvious reluctance that has smelled to me more of Oracle pressure than simple lack of interest in a smaller product base.
Tell me, would you say that our IT people would not even run the numbers on the cost of getting out from under the legacy programming? Oracle really does cost a LOT and if you run, say, 10-year projections, you can really afford a boatload of de-programming, so to speak, and still break even. But in my experience, they won't even take the idea seriously enough to do the cost-benefit analysis.
...man, Google must be the nicest, least authoritarian, near-democracy of a workplace ever. Where I worked, you couldn't send out to co-workers ANY kind of criticism of, or input into, any kind of corporate policy, standards, or work processes. If you had a problem with anything about your work conditions, you took that up with your boss, privately.
If you really needed to discuss hiring policy because you were doing some of the hiring, say, you take THAT up with your boss and have a committee struck to sit about discussing your issues for long enough to write up your concerns and pass them upward. If Management, at its discretion, thought, yeah, our hiring policies need revision, they'd tell you. Otherwise, thanks for sharing, and please go back to implementing the existing policy, and smile while you do it.
Obviously, anybody can gripe at lunch. But leaving a paper trail back to your complaints, would get you at least a talking-to.
How anybody can imagine this guy can sue successfully is beyond me.
I was an Oracle user for 25 years, took my first course on Oracle 6 in 1991. That was the introduction of it into my employer (City of Calgary) which was locked in IBM mainframery at the time; they had to accept Oracle as needed for GIS mapping, the ESRI and other GIS products all practically demanded Oracle.
Now, I was not up at the sysadmin end, where Oracle's tools for moving whole databases about, and spreading them across disks and servers and all that, are greatly appreciated. But just as a user, all the needs I had for a GIS database had been replicated in Free Software by the time I retired.
I think Postgres stacks up fairly well against Oracle, even for the sysadmins fussing over partitions and multiple servers, these days; but for my needs, now considered humble, a mere 10GB database of every pipe, every house, every lot and street, every bit of water infrastructure in a large city and all the work-orders done on those pipes in 10 years - was handled by PostGIS (Postgres with a GIS plug-in) with ease. On a laptop. I started doing real work on my PostGIS copy (and no, transfer from Oracle to Postgres was not remotely difficult) because I had more control over it, was the DBA. Convenient sometimes.
I guess some Oracle admins will always have a situation where they can say "the free software alternatives just don't let me manage my petabytes easily for 365x24 service", fair enough.
But so many work needs can be handled well by a reliable database product that can manage a mere few hundred gigabytes quickly and well, that I think if everybody who *could* switch to Postgres *did* switch to Postgres, Oracle would be trying to fund itself on a small fraction of their current customer base, though they would all be huge customers.
I wouldn't have written that in 2012 when I first looked at Postgres, but their developments since 8.5 have been especially impressive. I recall a debate in their committees a few years back where they worried not enough developers were handling the routine bug-fixes and minor upgrades with each version: too many people were excitedly putting in major new features like 'big database support' and UPSERT (9.5), "parallel query and synchronous replication" (9.6) and so on, to take care of basics. They've had a very impressive five years. As to the predictions for Postgres 10, I can't even understand them: http://rhaas.blogspot.ca/2017/... ... but they are apparently awesome from the fan reviews.
I tried to get IT at work to have a look at Postgres, but it was a non-starter: our PeopleSoft application is married to Oracle and there's no way they'd have two DB products. Indeed, Oracle may be safe for decades yet unless somebody like EnterpriseDB comes up with a really popular Oracle-to-PG migration for both SAP and PeopleSoft. Those things could not be removed from most large corporations with a nuclear-powered crowbar, so they're Oracle's best lock-in partners right now.
And the 750,000 people who live there are 0.21% of your population.
"Women are often better at it" was the sentence to which you replied, with an answer appropriate to the sentence "women are better at it".
My sentence indicated that it is *possible* for a woman to be "better at it", more frequently than "seldom", but "often" does not take a stand on the frequency exceeding 50%. If group B is "often" better at X than group A, then group B should not be systematically excluded from doing X. Clear now?
Women are often better at reading the meaning of English sentences, too - yet another vitally important engineering skill.