equipment change leades culture change by years in cases of institution-wide adoption.
BUT:
Tests of literacy don't measure some of the advantages of computer
literacy that were probably touted to the orginal school committees that purchased the equipment. The fullest analysis of whether spending money
on computers for schools won't be done until
enough years go by for the teaching to catch up to the technology
the schools and locales where computers in homes/classrooms/curriculum HAVE paid off can be studied for what was done right and those showing no or negative gains, studied for what they do wrong
The spectrum of learning, not a narrow test-defined aspect, is assessed for the impact of computers
The need for tailoring of computer usage to learning styles and abilities has been recognized and applied: one-lesson-fits-all has NEVER been a formula for educational success.
Well, it is a very price conscious market in general but I think you have a good point. Generalities dont apply becase electric cars, just now, are bought by believers and folks who want to make a statement...price is NOT such a big deal
which, in a decision like this, is probably all that GM did look at, and they were going to pencil out at a loss of say $1000 per vehicle, nobody would blame GM for killing the project.
if all you look at is the money that
failed to get even a safe transit solution for a project that wasted public money on this scale: The Big Dig project began in 1991 with an initial cost estimate of $2.6 billion, a figure that has since ballooned to $14.6 billion., you have to ask, whether you hate govt subsidies or not, why we wouldnt bail out electric car manufacturing instead of incompetant civil engineering firms. A generous allowance for unexpected costs would still have capped the big dig at 10 billion, the remaining 5 billion would have got 5 million electic cars on the road at a subsidy of $1000 each.
Suppose these name-brand purveyors of enterprise solutions were right. Who are they talking to anyway? I aint the bank of america or general motors. god hasten the day I need hugely redundant server farms and lightning fast SQL service. I know because I have done it that it is possible to transition a complex realtime system with SQL usage, threads and forks from, for instance, a solaris platform to a Red Hat linux platform...so I doubt like hell it could be that hard to go the other way unless I had a stupid system design based on linux hacks.
What I know is that the next Google or Amazon is at least as likely to start in a garage as it is in the chilled and cavernous server rooms of a large corporation. All the arguments, right or wrong about TCO and scalability don't cut it with a guy who has almost $2500 in his budget for "servers"...gimme linux NOW and ask me next year if I need Cadillac Computing Configurations...scalability is the LAST problem you solve. Cost of entry is the FIRST problem.
BTW, haven't these guys at Agility Aliance noticed how much press Google gets for its massively scaled production systems? How much work did EDS do for google?
SPATIAL DOMAIN:
Yes. Distance is critical. Because of interleaving, you have neighboring rasters 180 out of phase...and that is intended to reduce percieved flicker. If you happen to view a monitor from such a distance that the space between even numbered [or harmonics ] rasters approximately projects to the retina at the spacing be individual receptors [rods? cones? idunno] you might undo some of the interleaving effect. This won't be a strong phenomenon because receptor cells are not layed out in a grid.Less than 6 feet and imaged raster separation may exceed receptor spacing, [you begin to be able to actually pick out rasters on a low quality screen but you don't see flicker], greater than [what would it be ? 10, 12, 20] feet projected raster spacing is well less than recpetor spacing so each receptor is summing [ie averaging out] interleaved raster pairs and you can't see flicker.
TIME DOMAIN:
ever noticed flicker [ in periperal vision in my case] if you are looking
off to one side of a monitor across the lab WHILE SOMETHING BUMPS YOUR HEAD? I had to stop the experiments I was doing to get to the bottom of this phenomenon before anyone caught me just standing there looking into space and banging my head with my hand. [sometimes life is just strange but would it add or subtract from your comment to have it modded "Strange"?]
They might as well try to give it away
on
Gmail Goes Public
·
· Score: 1
then again...the very next random blog was http://stoplookenjoy.blogspot.com/ which is just pictures and they are
nice studies of the geometric patterns and visual poetry of architecture
and nature.
I suppose there could be some bias in my surveying technique.
Who knew when he said "in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes" we would use the internet to make his prediction come true and in the process discover that everybody is ugly and stupid looking for all but that 15 minutes.
In at least one category, this profligate posting of pictures that snare a huge share of traffic is hardly new. blogs like...ehem,
this one "share" pictures as good[bad?] as Penthouse charges for and I hear lots of people like those pictures too. Of course its just a come-on to get you to click through to the paid content but seems like it will be a while before pictures of quilts and puppies take up more bandwidth than publicized private parts
It got that way partly because the math on which it was founded [men living to 60 if they are really lucky, women not working and popping off at 75] has been overturned by medical advances so now there's a shitload of oldsters who need a check every month. boy would immortality or anything like it mess our society up!
but to say "web journalists don't count" also goes too far. It implies that bloggers are all journalists. The blog in question clearly was journalisitic but 99% of the pap on *.blogspot.com is porn, commercials, foaming at the mouth on the politcal and relgious right and mostly self absorbed diarizing...are we protecting that? The so-called blogosphere has way more defamatory, inflamatory, libelous and privacy invading contetent than any print media would get away with and I include buttwipe like the National Enquirer in that. Most of them are read by nearly noone but the authors so there is no big stink... are we protecting that?
I agree with those who think the court doesn't get it because I think that blogging CAN BE simply a lowest-cost-of-entry publishing format, a minor technical distinction exists between that and conventional news media. The caution I suggest is that if we act as if blogging automatically IS journalism then we provide gold settings for all the droppings just becuase they get delivered with the same technology as the diamonds. By intent and content, most blogs don't rate any more protection than a post card, an open piece of first class mail tacked up in public place. How to make a better distinction between "journalism" and electronic flatulence? The courts should consider [a]who reads it and [b]who writes it or what authority is ascribed to the information. The tricky parts would then just boil down to cases where the author always said "this is just a rumor" but the info was always right on the money.
Oh, and the other 1%? I think I bookmarked all 2000 of them!
OK, I am not excited. Even if its just vapor, there are a few features that would get me excited:
What I would hope for is that the chip interfaces support having farms or arrays of them such that a thread for each modeled object gets its own physics context. Except for a controller that would have to ride hurd on the object collisions, the well funded gamer could live in a world were tons of completely realistic motion is happening in vividly detailed realtime. I got dibs on writing the controller!
ok, I am still not excited , not really. But suppose the chip has been modeled and software emulators exist so PC and gamebox manufacturers can be gearing up their drivers. Can I, Joe Gamedevguy, borrow that emulator to get a head start on the problems to be solved when the parts are real...e.g. all the event queue tricks that stream the unfolding physics to the graphics card?
I guess I gotta RTFWP to see if the API is compatible with clustered machines or IP connected machines or what...imagine a GRID of machines and all of the simpler objects in the gameworld opperating under their own agents according to game-wide policies...you could generate a whole city full of action and let players wonder around in it...thats done now but the speed!, the detail and realism!...VR helmets with barf bags!
No...not too excited yet. Ah but if I am creeping up on lightspeed in my space ship...do the physics in the chip operate accurately when the kinematics involve relativistic speeds? What is conservation of energy like when the OTHER guy looks shortened and heavy because he is going so darn fast? OK, I'm excited anyway, sorry.
IANAL but isn't one of ICC's or FTC's jobs to see that there is not, in effect, tariffs imposed in one state blocking commerce from another state? That parity of states in matters of commerce was a problem facing the nation when the constitution was drawn up. This proposed legislation seems to come rather close, in its effect if not its intention, to a unilateral barrier to trade imposed by one state on commerce that may go on between states.
what was written to sound like "apple one, replica"
went through my head as "apple i-replica"
about 6 times. When will Apple come out with the i-replica?
What new market will it invent or conquer with a 3% market share...will it be a photocopier running OS-X? fortunately the parse-error state was thrown before smoke started to come out of my ears.
Which makes you wonder why W pushes democracy on the Arab countries [yes, W and Thomas Friedman do have one point they agree on... sort of]. The american street is what put W in power. The Arab Street has not yet achieved a meaningful power of the ballot.
Its not an area where laws are consistent except to the extent that they have been consistently manipulated by/for the benefit of large companies. Analogies to railroads are apt but dangerous: a century and a half ago, our government knew it needed rails badly to make commerce efficient and mobility of the population easier. IT GAVE AWAY LAND AND GRANTED OR TOLERATED MONOPOLIES just to meet those objectives and the Goulds, ROCKEFELLERs and a host of other robber barons saw their chance. The debate about whether the
public good is better served by public investiment or the enlightened greed of private enterpise is
nearly as old as our repbulic. We the wireless public who will be ill served or well served by the decision about how the new infrastructure will be financed ought to be screaming at our congressmen right now. The risk/reward model for investiment in this technology is very different from the infrastructure developments that set the precedents for industrial lobbying in utilities. The cost of WiFi set up is low enough that many municipalities have it on their adgendas. Cities with money to burn are practially nonexistent in this country and still many are trying to be the first or best to enable a wirles citizenry. With costs that low and benefits that manifest, it is obscene that we as tax payers or wireless users would sit by and let corporations meter and profit from a service we could easily afford ourselves. Where the analogy to older utility development may hold is uniformity of service: is local government, perhaps with guidance from standards bodies, or is private industry, jockying as it must for advantage over its internal competition and alternate services, the better way to provide a seamless or the most uniform WiFi service? Rail commerce did not take off until all the rail barons agreed on a rail guage that allowed cars to move from one carriers territory to another. Similarly, I expect WiFi won't be more than a convenience for pockets business travelers until WiFi is uniformly [and securely] supported in urban areas and the travel corridors between them. I want to be getting and sending my VOIP and email CONTINUOUSLY all the way from Boston to NY to DC and on my train ride to work in the morning...Are Verizon and SBC and their ilk going to cooperate on billing so I can do that?
either wifi is a public infrastructure like roads and rails or its not. if it is, the "state" in its more general sense has a power and an obligation to see that this data road of the radio frequencies reaches all the citizens and it has the power to collect our taxes to make sure the infrastructure is adequate in capacity and properly maintained. if its NOT, then let the moneygrubbing telco's sharpen their knives and move in. but as I road-warrior-drive about, I don't want to be disconnected at every jurisdictional and regulatory boundary such as state lines and city limits.
10 startups. 9 layoffs. once I got the brass ring. and that was pure dumb luck. Huge Company bought us and gave us options in HUGECO stock that was doubling yearly. Then Huge company got greedy and tried to spin us off as a dotcom. They forced us to cash our options at the very peak of the market and we all bitched about the taxes. I netted a little under half a millon...and plowed the proceeds into WCOM:-( What can I say? I'm a programmer, not an investor.
Yup.
And much more important than the shift in technology for developers is the change in management style and company policies...you are in a sandbox and asking if it makes a difference what color the pales and shovels are...the questions should be whether the sandbox has gotten smaller and whether the new owner thinks the sand is cheaper in India or China.
and been re-hired 3 times, though each was a unique circumstance. But NEVER ask to go back...it
almost never works out and you mostly never get to find out honest answers about why they don't want you back.
The happiest outcomes seem to stem from leaving a large, stale, hide-bound bureaucratic corporation [defense contractor in my case] for a raw startup with maybe 1st round funding...the new situation should be fluid and even if it is risky, it can be absolutely engaging and require all the energy and smarts you possess. Unless you are a weak performer, you will usually not wait too long between jobs and in the end, the jobs you will be fondest off will be the ones that needed you the most and let you be the best programmer you were capable of being. This is, of course, MHO: your personality and comfort level in uncertain circumstances is a huge part of the decision.
I should temper this idealism a bit. A startup either grows up and each programmer's role shrinks, or it fails and you go looking again. That optimum state of programmerly grace is fleeting yet you don't want to be a start-up junky. A good rule of thumb [I've heard it from others who have worked in the same ways at the same companies as I] is about 3 years at a start up. You are either rich by then or have settled into some role with depleted novelty and challenges...or you are suddenly cleaning the pizza boxes and coke cans out of your cube and using the pink slip to book mark where you left off in your latest programming manual. It is no shame and in some quarters a sign of your value that you went down with the ship. YMMV but JUMP anyway 'cause life is short.
I still have a few friends that work at the company where this little drama played out so I will have to be coy about names and dates BUT.
"...I don't blame this on the programmers however so much as weak or stupid management."
pretty much nails the root problem. The CEO was a man with a brilliant marketing insight that put the company 4 years ahead even the best funded competition. The tragedy was this CEO was a total babe in the woods about software development and he was bedazzled by this prima donna, who was intially hired as a consultant. We blew the entire four year lead and wound up getting bought and sold twice while most programming effort was expended fixing bugs or adding stuff the "design" had never considered.
you got that right, I consider him, taken alltogther , as a sorry looser. and he actually got fired by the CEO in a very public fight one afternoon...I loved that moment.
You are trolling but there are much better educated responses than your taunt deserves.
Well, I am no UML monkey and I have seen software development process overdone so badly even the lowliest coder had rigor mortis. But let me share a few experiences that may be exceptional but I doubt it.
I have actually worked with a programmer-turned-project-lead who often stated exactly the premise of TFA as a defense of his designs. He also used design reviews and other people's UML as target practice for a particularly nasty and apparently insecure dismissiveness. He was one of the most brilliant coders I ever met. He understood many programming principles better than others but had a pathological aversion to sharing insight. He was utter hell to work with, poison for the work and the workers in the team. His designs ultimately foundered when noone but him could extend or maintain them.
Though language and architecture are not completely seperable, its a shitty design that can't be expressed in any thing but some particular language...saying UML or flowcharts or whatever gets in your way is just a huge hint that you don't know how to express your idea or you don't really have an idea.
There is not much argument about the proclivities of programmers: they don't read other peoples code, not often enough, not with sufficient comprehension, not unless they are paid to maintain it. That is a generalization of course but with way too few exceptions. Comments, as others will surely point out, are more important for the longevity of code than the code itself. But commenting that can stand in for requirements and specifications? Virtually nonexistent, there is less of that than there is of good UML. I have been to the long, expensive funerals of way too many programs and sometimes, the companies that were built upon those programs to have much respect for an aproach to software that de-emphasises visibility of the big ideas and critical commonalities in code. Those are aspects that good design documents capture. Those are what make real software, software that can be changed by someone other than the author, software that can be quickly re-tooled for another market or a new platform, hang around long enough to make a company some money.
I'd say the great failing of UML or other design languages or symbology is only that it is not tied to code in such a way that code changes back-propagate to the design document. Its just plain hard work to keep design and code on the same page [litterally and figuratively] but that's what you would pay a competant programmer to do. And that's why JavaDoc and its ilk are my preferred solution in this area[ but I can't point you to a solution that completes the higher level documentation job.]
real information if a bit OT...where are the Moderators? oh, well, Timing is everything on/.
The speed and effectiveness with which the CR
defense force set up protection for a broadcaster
under right wing threat forces me to toss a lot
of assumptions I was ready to make about the
topic of this post. I would have assumed CR
authorities would lack the technical know how
to stop anyone who could arrange for VOIP through some tunneling protocol. The theories to the
effect that Telcos pressured the gov't to set
this policy fits my stereotype of latin american
governments but now I gotta wonder.
Slashdot Mirror
BUT:
Tests of literacy don't measure some of the advantages of computer literacy that were probably touted to the orginal school committees that purchased the equipment. The fullest analysis of whether spending money on computers for schools won't be done until
Well, it is a very price conscious market in general but I think you have a good point. Generalities dont apply becase electric cars, just now, are bought by believers and folks who want to make a statement...price is NOT such a big deal
which, in a decision like this, is probably all that GM did look at, and they were going to pencil out at a loss of say $1000 per vehicle, nobody would blame GM for killing the project.
if all you look at is the money that failed to get even a safe transit solution for a project that wasted public money on this scale: The Big Dig project began in 1991 with an initial cost estimate of $2.6 billion, a figure that has since ballooned to $14.6 billion., you have to ask, whether you hate govt subsidies or not, why we wouldnt bail out electric car manufacturing instead of incompetant civil engineering firms. A generous allowance for unexpected costs would still have capped the big dig at 10 billion, the remaining 5 billion would have got 5 million electic cars on the road at a subsidy of $1000 each.
Suppose these name-brand purveyors of enterprise solutions were right. Who are they talking to anyway? I aint the bank of america or general motors. god hasten the day I need hugely redundant server farms and lightning fast SQL service. I know because I have done it that it is possible to transition a complex realtime system with SQL usage, threads and forks from, for instance, a solaris platform to a Red Hat linux platform...so I doubt like hell it could be that hard to go the other way unless I had a stupid system design based on linux hacks.
What I know is that the next Google or Amazon is at least as likely to start in a garage as it is in the chilled and cavernous server rooms of a large corporation. All the arguments, right or wrong about TCO and scalability don't cut it with a guy who has almost $2500 in his budget for "servers"...gimme linux NOW and ask me next year if I need Cadillac Computing Configurations...scalability is the LAST problem you solve. Cost of entry is the FIRST problem.
BTW, haven't these guys at Agility Aliance noticed how much press Google gets for its massively scaled production systems? How much work did EDS do for google?
SPATIAL DOMAIN:
Yes. Distance is critical. Because of interleaving, you have neighboring rasters 180 out of phase...and that is intended to reduce percieved flicker. If you happen to view a monitor from such a distance that the space between even numbered [or harmonics ] rasters approximately projects to the retina at the spacing be individual receptors [rods? cones? idunno] you might undo some of the interleaving effect. This won't be a strong phenomenon because receptor cells are not layed out in a grid.Less than 6 feet and imaged raster separation may exceed receptor spacing, [you begin to be able to actually pick out rasters on a low quality screen but you don't see flicker], greater than [what would it be ? 10, 12, 20] feet projected raster spacing is well less than recpetor spacing so each receptor is summing [ie averaging out] interleaved raster pairs and you can't see flicker.
TIME DOMAIN:
ever noticed flicker [ in periperal vision in my case] if you are looking off to one side of a monitor across the lab WHILE SOMETHING BUMPS YOUR HEAD? I had to stop the experiments I was doing to get to the bottom of this phenomenon before anyone caught me just standing there looking into space and banging my head with my hand. [sometimes life is just strange but would it add or subtract from your comment to have it modded "Strange"?]
I ran out of people to give my 150 invites too...
then again...the very next random blog was http://stoplookenjoy.blogspot.com/ which is just pictures and they are nice studies of the geometric patterns and visual poetry of architecture and nature. I suppose there could be some bias in my surveying technique.
Who knew when he said "in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes" we would use the internet to make his prediction come true and in the process discover that everybody is ugly and stupid looking for all but that 15 minutes.
In at least one category, this profligate posting of pictures that snare a huge share of traffic is hardly new. blogs like...ehem, this one "share" pictures as good[bad?] as Penthouse charges for and I hear lots of people like those pictures too. Of course its just a come-on to get you to click through to the paid content but seems like it will be a while before pictures of quilts and puppies take up more bandwidth than publicized private parts
you work in machine vision? I was too busy shoveling snow and my mod points evaporated...this rates an insightful or interesting.
It got that way partly because the math on which it was founded [men living to 60 if they are really lucky, women not working and popping off at 75] has been overturned by medical advances so now there's a shitload of oldsters who need a check every month.
boy would immortality or anything like it mess our society up!
I noticed that many blogs run stats/hitcounters and was wondering which one I should put on mine.
but to say "web journalists don't count" also goes too far. It implies that bloggers are all journalists. The blog in question clearly was journalisitic but 99% of the pap on *.blogspot.com is porn, commercials, foaming at the mouth on the politcal and relgious right and mostly self absorbed diarizing...are we protecting that? The so-called blogosphere has way more defamatory, inflamatory, libelous and privacy invading contetent than any print media would get away with and I include buttwipe like the National Enquirer in that. Most of them are read by nearly noone but the authors so there is no big stink... are we protecting that?
I agree with those who think the court doesn't get it because I think that blogging CAN BE simply a lowest-cost-of-entry publishing format, a minor technical distinction exists between that and conventional news media. The caution I suggest is that if we act as if blogging automatically IS journalism then we provide gold settings for all the droppings just becuase they get delivered with the same technology as the diamonds. By intent and content, most blogs don't rate any more protection than a post card, an open piece of first class mail tacked up in public place.
How to make a better distinction between "journalism" and electronic flatulence? The courts should consider [a]who reads it and [b]who writes it or what authority is ascribed to the information. The tricky parts would then just boil down to cases where the author always said "this is just a rumor" but the info was always right on the money.
Oh, and the other 1%? I think I bookmarked all 2000 of them!
OK, I am not excited. Even if its just vapor, there are a few features that would get me excited:
What I would hope for is that the chip interfaces support having farms or arrays of them such that a thread for each modeled object gets its own physics context. Except for a controller that would have to ride hurd on the object collisions, the well funded gamer could live in a world were tons of completely realistic motion is happening in vividly detailed realtime. I got dibs on writing the controller!
ok, I am still not excited , not really. But suppose the chip has been modeled and software emulators exist so PC and gamebox manufacturers can be gearing up their drivers. Can I, Joe Gamedevguy, borrow that emulator to get a head start on the problems to be solved when the parts are real...e.g. all the event queue tricks that stream the unfolding physics to the graphics card?
I guess I gotta RTFWP to see if the API is compatible with clustered machines or IP connected machines or what...imagine a GRID of machines and all of the simpler objects in the gameworld opperating under their own agents according to game-wide policies...you could generate a whole city full of action and let players wonder around in it...thats done now but the speed!, the detail and realism!...VR helmets with barf bags!
No...not too excited yet. Ah but if I am creeping up on lightspeed in my space ship...do the physics in the chip operate accurately when the kinematics involve relativistic speeds? What is conservation of energy like when the OTHER guy looks shortened and heavy because he is going so darn fast? OK, I'm excited anyway, sorry.
IANAL but isn't one of ICC's or FTC's jobs to see that there is not, in effect, tariffs imposed in one state blocking commerce from another state? That parity of states in matters of commerce was a problem facing the nation when the constitution was drawn up. This proposed legislation seems to come rather close, in its effect if not its intention, to a unilateral barrier to trade imposed by one state on commerce that may go on between states.
what was written to sound like
"apple one, replica" went through my head as
"apple i-replica"
about 6 times. When will Apple come out with the i-replica? What new market will it invent or conquer with a 3% market share...will it be a photocopier running OS-X? fortunately the parse-error state was thrown before smoke started to come out of my ears.
Which makes you wonder why W pushes democracy on the Arab countries [yes, W and Thomas Friedman do have one point they agree on ... sort of]. The american street is what put W in power. The Arab Street has not yet achieved a meaningful power of the ballot.
Its not an area where laws are consistent except to the extent that they have been consistently manipulated by/for the benefit of large companies. Analogies to railroads are apt but dangerous: a century and a half ago, our government knew it needed rails badly to make commerce efficient and mobility of the population easier. IT GAVE AWAY LAND AND GRANTED OR TOLERATED MONOPOLIES just to meet those objectives and the Goulds, ROCKEFELLERs and a host of other robber barons saw their chance. The debate about whether the public good is better served by public investiment or the enlightened greed of private enterpise is nearly as old as our repbulic. We the wireless public who will be ill served or well served by the decision about how the new infrastructure will be financed ought to be screaming at our congressmen right now. The risk/reward model for investiment in this technology is very different from the infrastructure developments that set the precedents for industrial lobbying in utilities. The cost of WiFi set up is low enough that many municipalities have it on their adgendas. Cities with money to burn are practially nonexistent in this country and still many are trying to be the first or best to enable a wirles citizenry. With costs that low and benefits that manifest, it is obscene that we as tax payers or wireless users would sit by and let corporations meter and profit from a service we could easily afford ourselves.
Where the analogy to older utility development may hold is uniformity of service: is local government, perhaps with guidance from standards bodies, or is private industry, jockying as it must for advantage over its internal competition and alternate services, the better way to provide a seamless or the most uniform WiFi service? Rail commerce did not take off until all the rail barons agreed on a rail guage that allowed cars to move from one carriers territory to another. Similarly, I expect WiFi won't be more than a convenience for pockets business travelers until WiFi is uniformly [and securely] supported in urban areas and the travel corridors between them. I want to be getting and sending my VOIP and email CONTINUOUSLY all the way from Boston to NY to DC and on my train ride to work in the morning...Are Verizon and SBC and their ilk going to cooperate on billing so I can do that?
either wifi is a public infrastructure like roads and rails or its not. if it is, the "state" in its more general sense has a power and an obligation to see that this data road of the radio frequencies reaches all the citizens and it has the power to collect our taxes to make sure the infrastructure is adequate in capacity and properly maintained.
if its NOT, then let the moneygrubbing telco's sharpen their knives and move in.
but as I road-warrior-drive about, I don't want to be disconnected at every jurisdictional and regulatory boundary such as state lines and city limits.
10 startups. 9 layoffs. once I got the brass ring. and that was pure dumb luck. Huge Company bought us and gave us options in HUGECO stock that was doubling yearly. Then Huge company got greedy and tried to spin us off as a dotcom. They forced us to cash our options at the very peak of the market and we all bitched about the taxes. I netted a little under half a millon...and plowed the proceeds into WCOM :-( What can I say? I'm a programmer, not an investor.
Yup.
And much more important than the shift in technology for developers is the change in management style and company policies...you are in a sandbox and asking if it makes a difference what color the pales and shovels are...the questions should be whether the sandbox has gotten smaller and whether the new owner thinks the sand is cheaper in India or China.
and been re-hired 3 times, though each was a unique circumstance. But NEVER ask to go back...it almost never works out and you mostly never get to find out honest answers about why they don't want you back.
The happiest outcomes seem to stem from leaving a large, stale, hide-bound bureaucratic corporation [defense contractor in my case] for a raw startup with maybe 1st round funding...the new situation should be fluid and even if it is risky, it can be absolutely engaging and require all the energy and smarts you possess. Unless you are a weak performer, you will usually not wait too long between jobs and in the end, the jobs you will be fondest off will be the ones that needed you the most and let you be the best programmer you were capable of being. This is, of course, MHO: your personality and comfort level in uncertain circumstances is a huge part of the decision.
I should temper this idealism a bit. A startup either grows up and each programmer's role shrinks, or it fails and you go looking again. That optimum state of programmerly grace is fleeting yet you don't want to be a start-up junky. A good rule of thumb [I've heard it from others who have worked in the same ways at the same companies as I] is about 3 years at a start up. You are either rich by then or have settled into some role with depleted novelty and challenges...or you are suddenly cleaning the pizza boxes and coke cans out of your cube and using the pink slip to book mark where you left off in your latest programming manual. It is no shame and in some quarters a sign of your value that you went down with the ship. YMMV but JUMP anyway 'cause life is short.
I still have a few friends that work at the company where this little drama played out so I will have to be coy about names and dates BUT. "...I don't blame this on the programmers however so much as weak or stupid management."
pretty much nails the root problem. The CEO was a man with a brilliant marketing insight that put the company 4 years ahead even the best funded competition. The tragedy was this CEO was a total babe in the woods about software development and he was bedazzled by this prima donna, who was intially hired as a consultant. We blew the entire four year lead and wound up getting bought and sold twice while most programming effort was expended fixing bugs or adding stuff the "design" had never considered.
you got that right, I consider him, taken alltogther , as a sorry looser. and he actually got fired by the CEO in a very public fight one afternoon...I loved that moment.
Well, I am no UML monkey and I have seen software development process overdone so badly even the lowliest coder had rigor mortis. But let me share a few experiences that may be exceptional but I doubt it.
- I have actually worked with a programmer-turned-project-lead who often stated exactly the premise of TFA as a defense of his designs. He also used design reviews and other people's UML as target practice for a particularly nasty and apparently insecure dismissiveness. He was one of the most brilliant coders I ever met. He understood many programming principles better than others but had a pathological aversion to sharing insight. He was utter hell to work with, poison for the work and the workers in the team. His designs ultimately foundered when noone but him could extend or maintain them.
- Though language and architecture are not completely seperable, its a shitty design that can't be expressed in any thing but some particular language...saying UML or flowcharts or whatever gets in your way is just a huge hint that you don't know how to express your idea or you don't really have an idea.
- There is not much argument about the proclivities of programmers: they don't read other peoples code, not often enough, not with sufficient comprehension, not unless they are paid to maintain it. That is a generalization of course but with way too few exceptions. Comments, as others will surely point out, are more important for the longevity of code than the code itself. But commenting that can stand in for requirements and specifications? Virtually nonexistent, there is less of that than there is of good UML. I have been to the long, expensive funerals of way too many programs and sometimes, the companies that were built upon those programs to have much respect for an aproach to software that de-emphasises visibility of the big ideas and critical commonalities in code. Those are aspects that good design documents capture. Those are what make real software, software that can be changed by someone other than the author, software that can be quickly re-tooled for another market or a new platform, hang around long enough to make a company some money.
I'd say the great failing of UML or other design languages or symbology is only that it is not tied to code in such a way that code changes back-propagate to the design document. Its just plain hard work to keep design and code on the same page [litterally and figuratively] but that's what you would pay a competant programmer to do. And that's why JavaDoc and its ilk are my preferred solution in this area[ but I can't point you to a solution that completes the higher level documentation job.]real information if a bit OT...where are the Moderators? oh, well, Timing is everything on /.
The speed and effectiveness with which the CR defense force set up protection for a broadcaster under right wing threat forces me to toss a lot of assumptions I was ready to make about the topic of this post. I would have assumed CR authorities would lack the technical know how to stop anyone who could arrange for VOIP through some tunneling protocol. The theories to the effect that Telcos pressured the gov't to set this policy fits my stereotype of latin american governments but now I gotta wonder.