"The point of Genesis 1 was not to give a scientific account"
Oh, great! But, wait a second, where does the Genesis say that?
Or is it, well, you know, it's a poetic interpretation, not to be taken literally... But then, what's the difference between that tale, that shouldn't be taken literally, and those other tales when that Jesus Christ they talk about goes resurrecting people, wandering over the waters and all that jazz? I remember owning a bible when I was a child and I don't remember the tales coming some of them in blue ink and some in black, or something like that, to know when it's a "poetic description" and when a "revealed truth".
"I think that makes way more sense than saying he created the sun after creating the earth."
Of course it makes more sense. But that only points out what a nonsense Genesis is:
"13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."
That's no open to interpretation: The two great lights, the one to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night were created the fourth day. So yes, god created the heaven and the earth, *then* the light, *then* the day and the night, *then* the starts, the sun and the moon.
""However, fuelled by alcohol, the crowd turned to violence when a young man of "Middle Eastern appearance"[1] was spotted on the beach." Well, there you go. TERRIST! "
"No, they don't. Prove it. I'm basing this assumption on the fact that most people want to ensure they have food on their plates."
Therefore, by your own premise, most coders will push more for their food on the plate than for a good work.
"Not doing your job ensures the opposite."
For that to be true you first need to define what's "your job". My point is that for most people "their job" is not "to do what has to be done" but "to do whatever my boss tells to do".
"Whether or not you want to do the best you can at your job has no bearing on how much influence one has over the project they work on."
Quite on the contrary. All jobs have "doers" and "planners". No matter how persuading the planners are, in the end, the job gets done or doesn't get done by whatever the doers do or don't do.
"It's variables such as tight deadlines,"
Just to show the absurd: the deadline is to build from scratch a complete ERP by tomorrow. That's the deadline as told by the planners. Do you think it has the slightest pressure for the doers? The ERP from scratch won't be done by tomorrow no matter how persuading the planners are because the doers won't have it by tomorrow.
That's, obviously, an extreme case but for each and every case it is the same: the thing will be done when the doers do it, not a minute before.
"Come back and argue your point when you figure out a way for developers to completely control all of these variables."
I can do it right now if only by (simple) example:
Let's take a simple data entry HTML form that introduces data to a DB backend.
Workflow one: 1) You produce a simple HTML form. 2) You link it to the database 3) You feed the form with the usual data and test that the data gets into the database. 4) You go after boundary conditions, tests and business-logic constraints. 5) With all that in place, you refactor your code so it's not all dynamic SQL strings but prepared statements 6) You add documentation.
Workflow two: 0) All the way around you use literate and self-documenting code (say, doxygen). 1) You implement all the needed business logic at the database layer (say, stored procedures) 2) You produce a data abstraction layer. 3) You add boundary tests for such a layer 4) You add an HTML for to feed the data layer. 5) You add client-side constraints to the HTML data form (i.e. actionscript code).
Now, you are completly free to do it one way or another, after all is *you* the one coding it and your manager, by the very definition of manager, can say all he wants but nothing will be done if it's not you the one doing it.
It's obvious that the workflow two will produce "high quality code" if by nothing else because your code doesn't work *at all* till at leat step 4 is completed, and then, without step five the "user experience" will be so bad that it will be your manager the one pressing you to go after it.
On the other hand, you and I know that workflow one never will go beyond step 3.
But the vast majority of coders will go after workflow one... and will cry about how the bad manager didn't allow him to add tests and safewards. And they'll do that way for two reasons: 1) It's the best they can come to. 2) The thinking that "if I don't do that way I'll be fired and they'll hire another one that does it this way -therefore giving me the reason: producing "the best code they can" is far, far from the top motivation, call it "the tragedy of the commons" or any way you want, that's the fact.
"I'd say that most developers want to create the best code they can"
No, they don't.
Because if they did, they are in a perfect position to enforce their rules: you just don't write down a single semicolon and the software doesn't run at all. It's up to the developer when exactly to write down said semicolon.
"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"
In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.
"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"
Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.
"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"
Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.
"There is, however, a big difference between enlightened self-interest and sociopathy."
And that is?
"Sociopathic behavior is only a requirement for capitalism when sociopaths participate"
Then, it *is* a requirement, because sociopaths are not going anywhere.
"I would love to find a system that actively punishes all forms of sociopathy and works decently to well for everyone else."
Me too.
The point of capitalism*1 is that it acknowledges Plautus' "man is wolf to man" and tries to work within such a constraint. On the other hand, most other utopias (from Plato's Republic to Marx's communist society), are based on Voltaire's bon sauvage which, sadly, History shows once and again to be bullshit (not only because sociopaths do exist but because, given proper circumnstances, *everybody* behaves sociopathically).
*1 Understanding "capitalism" as a socipolitical model, not just an economic one.
Yes. And it was the wrong assumption, because all this came from a guy talking about the bussiness side coming to him asking if something was possible (first question) and then, after that, "...within these and these constrains" (second question) and begging they going directly to the second question.
And given the assumpion, he could -and should, choose a problem that wasn't obviously trivial but costly, because *that* was exactly the point of the guy he tried to counter argue.
"Yes, "reasonable" is a wiggle-word, and might be anywhere from under 1 second to 1,000 years, depending upon the problem you are trying to solve."
Exactly: "reasonable", even for exactly the same problem is not the same for an advertising company wanting to harvest users' data than for the NSA trying to decipher and Al-Qaeda message. So, again, the important part is not if "it is possible" but "whiting *this* framework" and you can't always know -if not told so, what the (bussiness) constrains exactly are.
"Response to your boss: Coding is like chess. it's easy to learn, but takes a lifetime to master."
Boss: chess? what's chess? that stupid game about moving little men on a checkered board? *I* make real men move at my will and it didn't take me "a life to master" (which obviously shows how and why I'm light years above you).
"I was thinking about factorizing the product of two large primes. There are numerous problems in computer science that we can't do with current technology;"
Excellent point... Against your position. Factorizing large primes it's not only possible but trivial. It's only that it's general case horribly time consuming (thus, expensive). Hence the "don't ask me if it's possible and go directly to the second question".
"You seemed to imply that success in capitalism requires people to at least behave like sociopaths"
Probably. Capitalism is meant to (somehow) work *even* under the consideration that people is egotistic but probably works better (up to the point it can work) if people is in fact selfish.
"You seemed to indicate that sociopathic behavior is viewed as meritorious in a capitalist system."
No, I didn't say that. But now that you say it, hummm... yes, at the very least, capitalism rewards sociopathy. Do you remember that study that pointed out that sociopathy incidence was higher among chief officers than general population? And given the percentage of businessmen that make to the Forbes first page, yes, being sociopath is seen as meritorious.
"lol, the man misspelling philosophy as "phylosophy" is trying to take the intellectual high ground here?"
What's highly intellectual about making mistakes on a foreign language? I admit is much better to do it properly and it's not a justification but an explanation. And then, last I looked at it, neither Aristotle nor Plato spoke modern English fluently; probably that's a proof they are not on "intellectual high ground" either.
Did I say anything to that point? All that I said is that capitalism (as a sociopolitical regime) is taming selfishness into common welfare.
"In a market free of sociopaths, it would be perfectly possible for a decent person to participate indefinitely."
In a world made of cotton-sugar and candies... Well, in a world free of sociopaths, you can bet comunism would work infinitely better, more so with our current IT powers. Have you stop any time to think why, if capitalism is so good, each and every corporation in the whole world, in the whole history, has been managed under comunist rules?
"OpenStack is intended for computing infrastructure, not for end-user desktop use."
Whose to say? Openstack is an VDI target as good as any other and being open, once it's a bit more matured (and no question Red Hat with help to that) a very strong competitor to the likes of VMware on private and/or hibrid clusters.
Given that Red Hat is positioning itself in the VDI field and in the cloud infrastructure management, you do your own math with ease.
Slashdot Mirror
"The point of Genesis 1 was not to give a scientific account"
Oh, great! But, wait a second, where does the Genesis say that?
Or is it, well, you know, it's a poetic interpretation, not to be taken literally... But then, what's the difference between that tale, that shouldn't be taken literally, and those other tales when that Jesus Christ they talk about goes resurrecting people, wandering over the waters and all that jazz? I remember owning a bible when I was a child and I don't remember the tales coming some of them in blue ink and some in black, or something like that, to know when it's a "poetic description" and when a "revealed truth".
"I think that makes way more sense than saying he created the sun after creating the earth."
Of course it makes more sense. But that only points out what a nonsense Genesis is:
"13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."
That's no open to interpretation: The two great lights, the one to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night were created the fourth day. So yes, god created the heaven and the earth, *then* the light, *then* the day and the night, *then* the starts, the sun and the moon.
In that order, go figure.
""However, fuelled by alcohol, the crowd turned to violence when a young man of "Middle Eastern appearance"[1] was spotted on the beach."
Well, there you go. TERRIST! "
What terrist? IT WAS A HOBBIT!
"No, they don't.
Prove it. I'm basing this assumption on the fact that most people want to ensure they have food on their plates."
Therefore, by your own premise, most coders will push more for their food on the plate than for a good work.
"Not doing your job ensures the opposite."
For that to be true you first need to define what's "your job". My point is that for most people "their job" is not "to do what has to be done" but "to do whatever my boss tells to do".
"Whether or not you want to do the best you can at your job has no bearing on how much influence one has over the project they work on."
Quite on the contrary. All jobs have "doers" and "planners". No matter how persuading the planners are, in the end, the job gets done or doesn't get done by whatever the doers do or don't do.
"It's variables such as tight deadlines,"
Just to show the absurd: the deadline is to build from scratch a complete ERP by tomorrow. That's the deadline as told by the planners. Do you think it has the slightest pressure for the doers? The ERP from scratch won't be done by tomorrow no matter how persuading the planners are because the doers won't have it by tomorrow.
That's, obviously, an extreme case but for each and every case it is the same: the thing will be done when the doers do it, not a minute before.
"Come back and argue your point when you figure out a way for developers to completely control all of these variables."
I can do it right now if only by (simple) example:
Let's take a simple data entry HTML form that introduces data to a DB backend.
Workflow one:
1) You produce a simple HTML form.
2) You link it to the database
3) You feed the form with the usual data and test that the data gets into the database.
4) You go after boundary conditions, tests and business-logic constraints.
5) With all that in place, you refactor your code so it's not all dynamic SQL strings but prepared statements
6) You add documentation.
Workflow two:
0) All the way around you use literate and self-documenting code (say, doxygen).
1) You implement all the needed business logic at the database layer (say, stored procedures)
2) You produce a data abstraction layer.
3) You add boundary tests for such a layer
4) You add an HTML for to feed the data layer.
5) You add client-side constraints to the HTML data form (i.e. actionscript code).
Now, you are completly free to do it one way or another, after all is *you* the one coding it and your manager, by the very definition of manager, can say all he wants but nothing will be done if it's not you the one doing it.
It's obvious that the workflow two will produce "high quality code" if by nothing else because your code doesn't work *at all* till at leat step 4 is completed, and then, without step five the "user experience" will be so bad that it will be your manager the one pressing you to go after it.
On the other hand, you and I know that workflow one never will go beyond step 3.
But the vast majority of coders will go after workflow one... and will cry about how the bad manager didn't allow him to add tests and safewards. And they'll do that way for two reasons:
1) It's the best they can come to.
2) The thinking that "if I don't do that way I'll be fired and they'll hire another one that does it this way -therefore giving me the reason: producing "the best code they can" is far, far from the top motivation, call it "the tragedy of the commons" or any way you want, that's the fact.
The best code they can? My ass.
...or Aramco's *windows* computer network?
"I'd say that most developers want to create the best code they can"
No, they don't.
Because if they did, they are in a perfect position to enforce their rules: you just don't write down a single semicolon and the software doesn't run at all. It's up to the developer when exactly to write down said semicolon.
"Nobody involved is Roman, you insensitive clod!"
Are you sure? What about that guy, Remittitur, they talk about?
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
Populusque romanus, of course... but it seems it doesn't want to commit to its due work.
Yeah, of course: moving to a country with a civilized public health system. Each and every first world country but USA, that is.
"Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative"
Yes, it is.
"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"
In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.
"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"
Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.
"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"
Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.
"Panama will not extradite its citizens so there's no way the US will get him as long as he stays in Panama"
Maybe Noriega can illustrate you about the options.
"A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep."
Yes it is, of course it is. IT claims to be an engineering and engineering is about solving problems, rationally, and under current constrains.
That means that when the current option is dismissing a case and trash all data , a meagre 150US$ SATA disk is a perfectly suitable alternative.
"There is, however, a big difference between enlightened self-interest and sociopathy."
And that is?
"Sociopathic behavior is only a requirement for capitalism when sociopaths participate"
Then, it *is* a requirement, because sociopaths are not going anywhere.
"I would love to find a system that actively punishes all forms of sociopathy and works decently to well for everyone else."
Me too.
The point of capitalism*1 is that it acknowledges Plautus' "man is wolf to man" and tries to work within such a constraint. On the other hand, most other utopias (from Plato's Republic to Marx's communist society), are based on Voltaire's bon sauvage which, sadly, History shows once and again to be bullshit (not only because sociopaths do exist but because, given proper circumnstances, *everybody* behaves sociopathically).
*1 Understanding "capitalism" as a socipolitical model, not just an economic one.
"See? Inflation is really a tax on cash and cash-equivalent assets."
Which is exactly what we want it to be.
Who would want money just piling somewhere instead of serving a purpose?
"ewanm89 made an assumption in his statement "
Yes. And it was the wrong assumption, because all this came from a guy talking about the bussiness side coming to him asking if something was possible (first question) and then, after that, "...within these and these constrains" (second question) and begging they going directly to the second question.
And given the assumpion, he could -and should, choose a problem that wasn't obviously trivial but costly, because *that* was exactly the point of the guy he tried to counter argue.
"Yes, "reasonable" is a wiggle-word, and might be anywhere from under 1 second to 1,000 years, depending upon the problem you are trying to solve."
Exactly: "reasonable", even for exactly the same problem is not the same for an advertising company wanting to harvest users' data than for the NSA trying to decipher and Al-Qaeda message. So, again, the important part is not if "it is possible" but "whiting *this* framework" and you can't always know -if not told so, what the (bussiness) constrains exactly are.
"I'd love to hear how that's possible."
You just go to the user's home and ask it in person.
Done.
Again, it's not about if it is possible, but if it *sensibly possible* (given budget/time constrains).
"Response to your boss:
Coding is like chess. it's easy to learn, but takes a lifetime to master."
Boss: chess? what's chess? that stupid game about moving little men on a checkered board? *I* make real men move at my will and it didn't take me "a life to master" (which obviously shows how and why I'm light years above you).
And now go do as commanded, you pawn!
"Writing good code that solves the problem the business needs solved is what is really hard."
Correction: getting the business people to know what the heck is the problem they in fact want to solve is the *really* difficult part.
Wooosh!
"I was thinking about factorizing the product of two large primes. There are numerous problems in computer science that we can't do with current technology;"
Excellent point... Against your position. Factorizing large primes it's not only possible but trivial. It's only that it's general case horribly time consuming (thus, expensive). Hence the "don't ask me if it's possible and go directly to the second question".
"You seemed to imply that success in capitalism requires people to at least behave like sociopaths"
Probably. Capitalism is meant to (somehow) work *even* under the consideration that people is egotistic but probably works better (up to the point it can work) if people is in fact selfish.
"You seemed to indicate that sociopathic behavior is viewed as meritorious in a capitalist system."
No, I didn't say that. But now that you say it, hummm... yes, at the very least, capitalism rewards sociopathy. Do you remember that study that pointed out that sociopathy incidence was higher among chief officers than general population? And given the percentage of businessmen that make to the Forbes first page, yes, being sociopath is seen as meritorious.
"rm *
Done."
Are you sure?
mkdir mytest && cd mytest .. .ahiddenfile
touch {afile,.ahiddenfile}
rm *
rm: remove regular empty file `afile'? y
ls -a
.
So, no, not done.
"lol, the man misspelling philosophy as "phylosophy" is trying to take the intellectual high ground here?"
What's highly intellectual about making mistakes on a foreign language? I admit is much better to do it properly and it's not a justification but an explanation. And then, last I looked at it, neither Aristotle nor Plato spoke modern English fluently; probably that's a proof they are not on "intellectual high ground" either.
"Not every act of capitalism is an evil."
Did I say anything to that point? All that I said is that capitalism (as a sociopolitical regime) is taming selfishness into common welfare.
"In a market free of sociopaths, it would be perfectly possible for a decent person to participate indefinitely."
In a world made of cotton-sugar and candies... Well, in a world free of sociopaths, you can bet comunism would work infinitely better, more so with our current IT powers. Have you stop any time to think why, if capitalism is so good, each and every corporation in the whole world, in the whole history, has been managed under comunist rules?
"OpenStack is intended for computing infrastructure, not for end-user desktop use."
Whose to say? Openstack is an VDI target as good as any other and being open, once it's a bit more matured (and no question Red Hat with help to that) a very strong competitor to the likes of VMware on private and/or hibrid clusters.
Given that Red Hat is positioning itself in the VDI field and in the cloud infrastructure management, you do your own math with ease.