I think the word union is a bad idea. It bring to mind to many harmful images. Rather engineers, programmers and IT worker should perhaps consider a professional association. Doctors, accountants and lawyers have then. Rather than thinking of strikes and pickets and such we should be thinking of an information technology assocciation. One that could lobby governments and put the points of view that slashdot readers have(with a little more coherence tho). In time perhaps even considering things like being and accredited information worker(think like being certified to practice law or practice medicine).
When you say "programmers in a software company" I am usally one of them(as Im assuming not a programmer in a fiancial consulting service or a bank or whatever). I think youre probably right about a business programmer. From my perspective the situation would depend mostly on the situation. Ive worked in a few different situations... from R&D, to developing apps for vertical markets to startups. The thing about working on a product, as opposed to punching out business code(and Ive done that also), is I think generally a product tends to develop coder who become "gurus" in a particular aspect of the product.
For example... I once worked on a product in a team of 4 developers. I was the driver, communications guru, one was the database engine guru, one the UI guru and one systems guru. We all worked on it for about 3 years... if the UI guru was off sick or on vacation and a problem arose then we could fix it if we had to. However it would have taken us ten times the amount of time it would have taken him.
We could picket IBMs headquarters armed with nerf weapons ! Scab workers wouldnt stand a chance ! Our striking song could be SF filk and instead of lighting those fires in bin things to keep warm in winter we'd just warm ourselves next to a small beowolf cluster. And of course our picket signs would actually be plasma screens ties to sticks... with nicely rendered 3d slogans.
Im there... but only if I dont have to stand up for too long... and make sure there is plenty of coffee and snacks.
The other problem with DRM is that it never works. Never ever ever. The software industry has been thru all this already! It didnt work for em... everything from dongles to weird ass disk formats. If some DRM standard come about and everyone standards all computers and consumer electronic gear on it, Ill give it about two weeks before some wacky obsessed geek has broken it and submitted a mod to a public forum for my shiney new DRMed DVD player. There are people in the world obsessed with cracking things like this, not from malice, but because they enjoy it so much.
Im not defending the argument on P2P downloding of copyrighted material is ethically right here. But I grow really tired of it being said that it is "stealing". It isnt. I was watching a BBC news report on the BitTorrent crackdown and some movie indistry suit kept referring to stealing and theives. Its copyright violation ! If it were stealing then we already have laws about stealing so those laws would be used... copyright violation is civil.
It depends on what he means by not very useful. Early Ge transisters transisters were (Im told... Im not that old) extremely unreliable, prone to thermal noise problems and more expensive initally than the much more stable tubes. So maybe thats what he was referring to.
Let me ask you. Is that the UAL unitmatic and apollo systems ? I know they run on Unisys key. The reason I ask is cause my fiance was a UAL flight attendant and I used to use unimatic to check her schedule. I was actually very impressed with the system... the user interface is almost like a text based hypercard or web type dealy. And whoever wrote the online tutorial had a fantastic sense of humor:)
Yep... I still recall when VB was being touted as the "programmer killer". Silly. The one thing Im starting to worry about now is Model Driven Architecture. MDA is starting to get a bit of press these days Im noticing and Ive started hearing soe disturbing simular statements from business analyst/PM types... "All we do is get the analyst to draw a some use case and sequence diagrams and were all sweet"
Sigh.
Repeat after me "The is no such thing a silver bullet". That statment is still as true and wise today as when Brooks said it.
And interesting footnote was once told to me by a mathematics prof when I was an undergrad. Apparently NASA wanted to make really certain that their calculations for the moonshots were correct. So they sent the problems to math depts of unis all thru the western world... this particular prof worked on the problem in Australia and sent the results back(kinda like a cross between SETI@Home/Folding@HOME and open source... many eyes and shallow bugs).The prof liked to give the problem to students in his numerical analysis class... what took him weeks now takes matmatica about 2 seconds:)
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I think the word union is a bad idea. It bring to mind to many harmful images. Rather engineers, programmers and IT worker should perhaps consider a professional association. Doctors, accountants and lawyers have then. Rather than thinking of strikes and pickets and such we should be thinking of an information technology assocciation. One that could lobby governments and put the points of view that slashdot readers have(with a little more coherence tho). In time perhaps even considering things like being and accredited information worker(think like being certified to practice law or practice medicine).
Anyways... just my 2 shiney cents.
When you say "programmers in a software company" I am usally one of them(as Im assuming not a programmer in a fiancial consulting service or a bank or whatever). I think youre probably right about a business programmer. From my perspective the situation would depend mostly on the situation. Ive worked in a few different situations... from R&D, to developing apps for vertical markets to startups. The thing about working on a product, as opposed to punching out business code(and Ive done that also), is I think generally a product tends to develop coder who become "gurus" in a particular aspect of the product.
For example... I once worked on a product in a team of 4 developers. I was the driver, communications guru, one was the database engine guru, one the UI guru and one systems guru. We all worked on it for about 3 years... if the UI guru was off sick or on vacation and a problem arose then we could fix it if we had to. However it would have taken us ten times the amount of time it would have taken him.
We could picket IBMs headquarters armed with nerf weapons ! Scab workers wouldnt stand a chance ! Our striking song could be SF filk and instead of lighting those fires in bin things to keep warm in winter we'd just warm ourselves next to a small beowolf cluster. And of course our picket signs would actually be plasma screens ties to sticks... with nicely rendered 3d slogans.
Im there... but only if I dont have to stand up for too long... and make sure there is plenty of coffee and snacks.
Disruntled geek and greedy geek ? You make us sounds like smurfs :) I wanna be handsome geek.
The other problem with DRM is that it never works. Never ever ever. The software industry has been thru all this already! It didnt work for em... everything from dongles to weird ass disk formats. If some DRM standard come about and everyone standards all computers and consumer electronic gear on it, Ill give it about two weeks before some wacky obsessed geek has broken it and submitted a mod to a public forum for my shiney new DRMed DVD player. There are people in the world obsessed with cracking things like this, not from malice, but because they enjoy it so much.
("how dare they stop me from stealing!")
Im not defending the argument on P2P downloding of copyrighted material is ethically right here. But I grow really tired of it being said that it is "stealing". It isnt. I was watching a BBC news report on the BitTorrent crackdown and some movie indistry suit kept referring to stealing and theives. Its copyright violation ! If it were stealing then we already have laws about stealing so those laws would be used... copyright violation is civil.
It depends on what he means by not very useful. Early Ge transisters transisters were (Im told... Im not that old) extremely unreliable, prone to thermal noise problems and more expensive initally than the much more stable tubes. So maybe thats what he was referring to.
Let me ask you. Is that the UAL unitmatic and apollo systems ? I know they run on Unisys key. The reason I ask is cause my fiance was a UAL flight attendant and I used to use unimatic to check her schedule. I was actually very impressed with the system... the user interface is almost like a text based hypercard or web type dealy. And whoever wrote the online tutorial had a fantastic sense of humor :)
Aye... WYSE-80 green screens... I still have one somewhere. But you tell that to kids today and they wont beleive you.
Hey I can provide Z80 services ? I think I could still code away in CPM if I had to. Wanna start a consultancy startup ? :)
Yep... I still recall when VB was being touted as the "programmer killer". Silly. The one thing Im starting to worry about now is Model Driven Architecture. MDA is starting to get a bit of press these days Im noticing and Ive started hearing soe disturbing simular statements from business analyst/PM types... "All we do is get the analyst to draw a some use case and sequence diagrams and were all sweet"
Sigh.
Repeat after me "The is no such thing a silver bullet". That statment is still as true and wise today as when Brooks said it.
And interesting footnote was once told to me by a mathematics prof when I was an undergrad. Apparently NASA wanted to make really certain that their calculations for the moonshots were correct. So they sent the problems to math depts of unis all thru the western world... this particular prof worked on the problem in Australia and sent the results back(kinda like a cross between SETI@Home/Folding@HOME and open source... many eyes and shallow bugs).The prof liked to give the problem to students in his numerical analysis class... what took him weeks now takes matmatica about 2 seconds :)
Movies are expensive. Yet, thousands still are made worldwide, and still are overall profitable.
And the grunts that work in movies(including the actors)have unions.