Actually, there is a right/wrong to be considered.
Either the Founding Fathers meant what they wrote when they agreed to the Constitution, or the idea behind the entire American system of government has absolutely no basis.
Either Congress has absolute authority to do whatever we let them get away with (which is pretty much what the Supreme Court has given them over the centuries), or those men in Philadelphia (what other people have later considered "the greatest collection of brilliant minds ever assembled"...more or less..I forget the source and probably have the quote wrong) when they decided things like, for example, they would not allow a central bank.
You'd have to have a mind as convoluted as a lawyer's to argue that anyone in the Federal government actually had the authority to start this whole stupid "war on drugs" thing in the first place. Especially since it took a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit alcohol.
Every time the Federal government takes another step down the road to tyranny, we all lose. Even if you don't happen to have a dog in that particular fight.
That option depends on what state you live in. Here, it's next to impossible for a 3rd party candidate to get on the ballot. The higher the office, the harder it gets. And they don't accept write-in votes.
Voting endorses a system which has been totally broken.
I couldn't bring myself to vote for either candidate in the last general election. Not only am I finished voting for the lesser of two evils (it's still a vote for evil), but I also couldn't decide which candidate would be worse (and I still think McCain would have every bit as disastrous).
Since that was the first time I've ever turned in a non-vote for President, I got curious about how many others felt the same way. Turns out that, in my state, those sorts of details aren't available to the general public.
Just one more example of how the Democrat and Republican parties have conspired to keep each other in power.
I was thinking more of the perennial "It works fine on my machine" problem.
Then a tester (or worse, a client) installs it, and there's some Terrible Thing that happens pretty much at random that you don't have any way to get enough information about to reproduce.
We had a case a few years back where, every 2 or 3 months, all our machines at one client would quit responding to input. They'd have to shut down production, hard reset the server, and then all the clients.
We spent months trying to repro this in-house (the client was in France, so flying someone out to their site just wasn't in the budget...although wasting those months probably cost more in the long run.
We finally narrowed the problem down to e-m interference between some machine they only used about once a month (so it still didn't happen every time) and our wireless network.
The solution, which took one guy a weekend, was to switch our communication protocol from TCP to UDP.
It's kind of hard to predict test cases for that sort of thing.
I currently maintain several million lines of perl. It's not hard,
Bow to your superior wisdom. I look at ~3 lines of perl and my brain overloads.
it mostly just works, and when it doesn't, it's not that hard to figure out where it's broken IFF there is a consistent repro case for the problem.
Ah...you just lost a huge degree of the admiration I was feeling.
All the interesting problems I've run across in my career did not have consistent repro cases. If they had, they'd have been easy to fix.
If you have a proper development/production divide, there shouldn't be any weird production issues unless you or your predecessor missed some test cases.
This sentence made me wish for troll mod points.
Even if (and that's a big if) you (much less your predecessor) managed to convince your boss that spending time writing unit tests was worth the time/money, you missed some test cases.
If you don't have test cases, that's a problem, if you don't have a properly firewalled and complete development environment, that's a problem, the code itself? Shouldn't be a problem.
Automated unit tests would make the OP's life easier, to a degree. But they wouldn't make this code base any easier to learn. I feel like I'm feeding a troll here, but someone mod'd this up. So someone actually thinks you were saying something worthwhile, and I just don't see it.
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
Maybe that's a hint that we should re-think this whole house-of-cards/smoke-and-mirrors economy we have going?
Kind of ironically, I have three friends with consulting jobs doing the real work for those people without GED's who are propping up multiple sites/data sources, etc. in Sharepoint.
I don't know the exact numbers, but they're all pulling in well over six figures. (One's in Houston, another in NYC, the third's in Tulsa; location's not really all that big a factor for them).
A better answer might be "It can be. A lot depends on how willing and able you are to demonstrate your value to the suits." Picking a good niche market helps, too.
Then again, for some of us, there's a lot more to it than money. I'm willing to take a hefty pay cut if I get to work with fun smart people on projects that I actually enjoy.
That's pretty much been tried already. It's this little country called the United States. The national government promptly forgot completely about that whole set of rules that tells them what they can and can't do.:(
It sounds like a good idea, but it's still snake oil.
1) It's written deceptively. Everyone I know thinks 8% sales tax means a $100 item costs $108. 8% under the "fair tax" would cost ~$108.696. It's been a while since I actually ran the numbers, but it's something like that.
2) The numbers are deceptively low. It needs to be at least double what they're marketing it as to get into the ballpark of what people are paying as income tax now
3) You've already pointed out its biggest weakness: people are only taxed on what they spend. When we go into a recession, people spend less. Government income drops. Deficits rise, because government will never willingly cut its costs. They require a stable tax base in order to maintain the charade of their utility.
4) Although it repeals all other forms of immediate taxation, it doesn't do anything to stop Congress from turning right back around and slapping those taxes right back down on us. Which is exactly what would happen. Unless it repeals the 16th Amendment, it's just another tax tacked onto what we're [Americans] are already paying.
The biggest reason for the Revolution in the first place was back-breaking taxes. We're paying *way* more now than we were then. The vast majority of us are paying more than medieval serfs did. And all we're getting in return is wars in foreign lands that don't concern us and full body scans at the airports by idiots who are too stupid to manage a job in the real world. Oh, and the highest per capita prison population on the planet (almost all for victimless crimes).
Why do we put up with it?
One friend has told me that he doesn't care, since he doesn't believe it affects him all that much. Sadly, I think his apathy is the perfect example. "The land of the free and the home of the brave" seems to have turned into "The land of flee and home of the slave," and we just seem to care about it all that much.
I know this is a dead horse, and way off topic, but I figure I'll get back up on my soap box.
First of all, America is not a democracy. We were never meant to be a democracy. We're a republic. I'm surprised the Founding Fathers haven't gone on a zombie rampage with all the recent talk about bringing democracy to the rest of the world.
Democracy != freedom. Democracy == rule by the mob. We elect congressmen etc. simply because the Founding Fathers hoped we'd elect enough vaguely competent & wise people to make up for most of the buffoons who run for office. We hire them to run the government because most people don't have time to study any of the issues deeply enough to make any sort of intelligent decision.
Even with that, their power is (theoretically) limited by the constitution.
Those two points combined make us a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy.
Companies to China
As far as all those companies (and the government) bending over backward to make headway into China...I don't really know. Could they actually be thinking long-term (as opposed to just the end of this quarter) for a change? I think America's economy might be on the brink of collapse. Maybe they figure that giving up some profits from a few industries now is worth getting their collective foot in the door. Wonder what will happen to China if the doom-and-gloom people are right about the next Great Depression being just around the bend.
Or maybe they just see that potential market of a gazillion people and figure it doesn't really matter how poor they are.
I really really really want to like this... but how is relying on the client to run code properly sane, with all the different clients out there?
I'm pretty much with you here. gmail doesn't rely on the client handling anything properly. They have a straight html version (which I keep meaning to check out through lynx. There just aren't enough hours in the day. Anyone played with that?)
Anyway, this sort of thing's really exciting. In a lot of ways, I've never much liked writing GUI stuff. Developing for the web takes away most of that worry.
I've been avoiding ruby up to now, but I guess I'm going to have to look into it. *Sigh.* It's time to start my annual "learn a new language" anyway.
Re:Cliff's Notes: Start Using TCP Sequence Number
on
Examining ICMP Flaws
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· Score: 1
How worried were the vendors, way back when? It's not like the internet was all that big a deal in the 80's.
In almost every software project I've ever seen/worked on, there are shortcuts taken somewhere. Probably the only time this never happens is with a major open source vendor who has enough weight with the distributions to say "No, I'm not ready to release yet."
Then again, the article mentioned all the problems linux had. Are these kernel flaws, or in a networking layer above the kernel?
(I've been using Linux for years and don't have a clue how it works under the covers. Kind of embarassing, really).
An overwhelming majority do. The only people I know who dont are people running from the police who feel that gives them an added layer of anonymity.
and not every American is required to carry one at all times,
Well, not officially. But practically? We do. And there are a lot of laws getting ready to pass that will make it a lot worse.
which.. well would make it a hard thing to let the government "help" with security in this way. I only see advantages to the obligation to carry an ID overhere, and never knew it different either.
Im not positive what youre saying here, so I may be responding completly wrong.
From what Ive read and been told, Belgiums government is quite a bit less obtrusive and obnoxious, and it provides a lot more value than the US federal government.
Until recently in the US, we wanted the govt to mind its own business and leave us alone. We had this idea that people have the right to privacy. Since 9/11, such ideas are liable to get a person labeled terrorist and carted off to Gitmo, but thats the way it used to be.
I know, the argument runs that if youre not doing anything wrong, you dont have anything to hide. I dont particularly want to get into the argument today.
It might pop up in the US as well though, as Bill Gates has showed alot of interest in this kind of technology. But maybe not in the form of a passport-like ID;
There are also a lot of christians over here who are convinced this sort of thing will show up as a barcode that gets tattooed on the forehead, or some such. The whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Beast>
mark of the beast thing. So that creates a lot of resistance to some sort of biometric
I believe these are the future for identification, perhaps with added layers like biometric identification.
Youre quite possibly right. Now that the govt can do anything it wants, as long as it can link it to the war on terror, this sort of thing cant be very far off. (Actually, well wind up getting some half-assed version that gets rushed through Congress and any idiot with a Bluetooth mobile phone can hack in about 30 seconds).
Buying things and using Pay Pal is a good idea. You can very easily get your money back. Selling things and accepting PayPal is dumb. Its way too easy to get screwed.
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Actually, there is a right/wrong to be considered.
Either the Founding Fathers meant what they wrote when they agreed to the Constitution, or the idea behind the entire American system of government has absolutely no basis.
Either Congress has absolute authority to do whatever we let them get away with (which is pretty much what the Supreme Court has given them over the centuries), or those men in Philadelphia (what other people have later considered "the greatest collection of brilliant minds ever assembled"...more or less..I forget the source and probably have the quote wrong) when they decided things like, for example, they would not allow a central bank.
You'd have to have a mind as convoluted as a lawyer's to argue that anyone in the Federal government actually had the authority to start this whole stupid "war on drugs" thing in the first place. Especially since it took a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit alcohol.
Every time the Federal government takes another step down the road to tyranny, we all lose. Even if you don't happen to have a dog in that particular fight.
That option depends on what state you live in. Here, it's next to impossible for a 3rd party candidate to get on the ballot. The higher the office, the harder it gets. And they don't accept write-in votes.
Voting endorses a system which has been totally broken.
I couldn't bring myself to vote for either candidate in the last general election. Not only am I finished voting for the lesser of two evils (it's still a vote for evil), but I also couldn't decide which candidate would be worse (and I still think McCain would have every bit as disastrous).
Since that was the first time I've ever turned in a non-vote for President, I got curious about how many others felt the same way. Turns out that, in my state, those sorts of details aren't available to the general public.
Just one more example of how the Democrat and Republican parties have conspired to keep each other in power.
I was thinking more of the perennial "It works fine on my machine" problem.
Then a tester (or worse, a client) installs it, and there's some Terrible Thing that happens pretty much at random that you don't have any way to get enough information about to reproduce.
We had a case a few years back where, every 2 or 3 months, all our machines at one client would quit responding to input. They'd have to shut down production, hard reset the server, and then all the clients.
We spent months trying to repro this in-house (the client was in France, so flying someone out to their site just wasn't in the budget...although wasting those months probably cost more in the long run.
We finally narrowed the problem down to e-m interference between some machine they only used about once a month (so it still didn't happen every time) and our wireless network.
The solution, which took one guy a weekend, was to switch our communication protocol from TCP to UDP.
It's kind of hard to predict test cases for that sort of thing.
Someone with mod points, please...mod this up!
I know plenty of people who do exactly this.
They've written their own personal preprocessors that remove comments and mangle variable names, just for job security.
I can think of all sorts of names to call them. I won't.
I currently maintain several million lines of perl. It's not hard,
Bow to your superior wisdom. I look at ~3 lines of perl and my brain overloads.
it mostly just works, and when it doesn't, it's not that hard to figure out where it's broken IFF there is a consistent repro case for the problem.
Ah...you just lost a huge degree of the admiration I was feeling.
All the interesting problems I've run across in my career did not have consistent repro cases. If they had, they'd have been easy to fix.
If you have a proper development/production divide, there shouldn't be any weird production issues unless you or your predecessor missed some test cases.
This sentence made me wish for troll mod points.
Even if (and that's a big if) you (much less your predecessor) managed to convince your boss that spending time writing unit tests was worth the time/money, you missed some test cases.
If you don't have test cases, that's a problem, if you don't have a properly firewalled and complete development environment, that's a problem, the code itself? Shouldn't be a problem.
Automated unit tests would make the OP's life easier, to a degree. But they wouldn't make this code base any easier to learn. I feel like I'm feeding a troll here, but someone mod'd this up. So someone actually thinks you were saying something worthwhile, and I just don't see it.
This *totally* deserves a mod up
That *totally* depends on the code base and the way the OP thinks. Sometimes they're a complete waste of time. Others...not so much.
I've worked with plenty of programmers who see pretty much every software problem in terms of FSMs. One size does not fit all.
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
Maybe that's a hint that we should re-think this whole house-of-cards/smoke-and-mirrors economy we have going?
They're probably rolling over in their graves, wondering how we turned into such sniveling cowards that we're willing to put up with such a burden.
Kind of ironically, I have three friends with consulting jobs doing the real work for those people without GED's who are propping up multiple sites/data sources, etc. in Sharepoint.
I don't know the exact numbers, but they're all pulling in well over six figures. (One's in Houston, another in NYC, the third's in Tulsa; location's not really all that big a factor for them).
A better answer might be "It can be. A lot depends on how willing and able you are to demonstrate your value to the suits." Picking a good niche market helps, too.
Then again, for some of us, there's a lot more to it than money. I'm willing to take a hefty pay cut if I get to work with fun smart people on projects that I actually enjoy.
Yep. Hook, line, and sinker.
That's pretty much been tried already. It's this little country called the United States. The national government promptly forgot completely about that whole set of rules that tells them what they can and can't do. :(
It sounds like a good idea, but it's still snake oil. 1) It's written deceptively. Everyone I know thinks 8% sales tax means a $100 item costs $108. 8% under the "fair tax" would cost ~$108.696. It's been a while since I actually ran the numbers, but it's something like that. 2) The numbers are deceptively low. It needs to be at least double what they're marketing it as to get into the ballpark of what people are paying as income tax now 3) You've already pointed out its biggest weakness: people are only taxed on what they spend. When we go into a recession, people spend less. Government income drops. Deficits rise, because government will never willingly cut its costs. They require a stable tax base in order to maintain the charade of their utility. 4) Although it repeals all other forms of immediate taxation, it doesn't do anything to stop Congress from turning right back around and slapping those taxes right back down on us. Which is exactly what would happen. Unless it repeals the 16th Amendment, it's just another tax tacked onto what we're [Americans] are already paying. The biggest reason for the Revolution in the first place was back-breaking taxes. We're paying *way* more now than we were then. The vast majority of us are paying more than medieval serfs did. And all we're getting in return is wars in foreign lands that don't concern us and full body scans at the airports by idiots who are too stupid to manage a job in the real world. Oh, and the highest per capita prison population on the planet (almost all for victimless crimes). Why do we put up with it? One friend has told me that he doesn't care, since he doesn't believe it affects him all that much. Sadly, I think his apathy is the perfect example. "The land of the free and the home of the brave" seems to have turned into "The land of flee and home of the slave," and we just seem to care about it all that much.
I know this is a dead horse, and way off topic, but I figure I'll get back up on my soap box.
First of all, America is not a democracy. We were never meant to be a democracy. We're a republic. I'm surprised the Founding Fathers haven't gone on a zombie rampage with all the recent talk about bringing democracy to the rest of the world.
Democracy != freedom. Democracy == rule by the mob. We elect congressmen etc. simply because the Founding Fathers hoped we'd elect enough vaguely competent & wise people to make up for most of the buffoons who run for office. We hire them to run the government because most people don't have time to study any of the issues deeply enough to make any sort of intelligent decision.
Even with that, their power is (theoretically) limited by the constitution.
Those two points combined make us a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy.
Companies to ChinaAs far as all those companies (and the government) bending over backward to make headway into China...I don't really know. Could they actually be thinking long-term (as opposed to just the end of this quarter) for a change? I think America's economy might be on the brink of collapse. Maybe they figure that giving up some profits from a few industries now is worth getting their collective foot in the door. Wonder what will happen to China if the doom-and-gloom people are right about the next Great Depression being just around the bend.
Or maybe they just see that potential market of a gazillion people and figure it doesn't really matter how poor they are.
I'm pretty much with you here. gmail doesn't rely on the client handling anything properly. They have a straight html version (which I keep meaning to check out through lynx. There just aren't enough hours in the day. Anyone played with that?)
Anyway, this sort of thing's really exciting. In a lot of ways, I've never much liked writing GUI stuff. Developing for the web takes away most of that worry.
I've been avoiding ruby up to now, but I guess I'm going to have to look into it. *Sigh.* It's time to start my annual "learn a new language" anyway.
How worried were the vendors, way back when? It's not like the internet was all that big a deal in the 80's. In almost every software project I've ever seen/worked on, there are shortcuts taken somewhere. Probably the only time this never happens is with a major open source vendor who has enough weight with the distributions to say "No, I'm not ready to release yet." Then again, the article mentioned all the problems linux had. Are these kernel flaws, or in a networking layer above the kernel? (I've been using Linux for years and don't have a clue how it works under the covers. Kind of embarassing, really).
Buying things and using Pay Pal is a good idea. You can very easily get your money back. Selling things and accepting PayPal is dumb. Its way too easy to get screwed.