"The facts on the case remain unchanged, however, and so does my position: Amazon was using deeper pockets to control the market and marginalise any potential competition. They were selling for very slim margins in a way that would be unsustainable for smaller companies and ultimately the industry as a whole, over the long term."
This is a problem with Amazon and in fact capitalism in general. Amazon works by scouring the web for retailers selling cheaper and then discounts their price relative to the wholesale price to always be the same price or cheaper unless they override it (because for example they believe for say the latest Call of Duty they'll be better off selling it at RRP because they'll make hundreds of sales anyway).
I agree it sucks and I agree it's a problem, a number of UK stores and chains I like have gone out of business because of it but it's a fundamental fault of capitalism combined with modern algorithms and data mining. It means a company can effectively automate itself to always outdo the competition and the only way to beat that is to either negotiate lower wholesale prices so you can undercut without loss or build a better algorithm.
But that doesn't make what Apple did better, Amazon is merely following the rules of capitalism and consumers are getting lower prices as a result which is what capitalism is meant to bring to the consumer - efficiency of pricing, whilst Apple was engaged in price gouging which is effectively illegal market manipulation designed to steal money from the consumer.
The problem is that having a monopoly isn't actually illegal - only abusing it is, hence Amazon isn't doing anything illegal by killing off companies left, right and centre with it's strategy as annoying as that is. This is why I'm not exactly sold on the ideology of unbridled capitalism. It needs restrictions and it needs limit to be healthy.
In fact, one might wonder if the solution is to simply make having a monopoly in a retail sector illegal regardless of any abuse or lack of such that if you end up finding yourself in a monopoly you're legally obliged to subsidise smaller players to help protect plurality and competition but I'm sure there are many cases where this would cause problems too. This is of course what Microsoft had to do in funding Apple when they were under their monopoly abuse investigation - perhaps it should be a standard thing?
That's actually the way it works. If for example you drive off from a petrol station without paying the police would have to prove you did so intentionally and that it wasn't just an honest mistake.
This is to prevent people's lives being ruined for nothing more than a moment of forgetfulness.
It's also to avoid entrapment situations, i.e. neighbour A Lends neighbour B his lawnmower than tells the police that neighbour B stole it. The police have to prove he never intended to give it back which they could do if he'd put an ad in the local paper to sell it on for example, but couldn't if he had no intention to permanently deprive A of it and A was just causing shit.
Whilst in the past I'd agree, I don't think that's true anymore, in fact here in some of the UK some of the laws specifically require intent and intent is in the very title of the charge when charged.
"Intending to incite racial hatred" for example.
If the crime is in itself a crime of intention then the onus on the police is to prove intent.
Of course it makes more sense to just remove such laws full stop, but there you go.
This is what I was wondering, doesn't this sort of thing risk giving real criminals an excuse too?
If intent is relevant then with the prevalence of police officers posing in this manner and now bots, couldn't a real criminal just claim "I assumed nowadays that they were all just chatbots or above age of consent officers" if caught chatting to someone who is underage?
It seems to be a dangerous precedent to set. If the police have to prove intent how can they prove he didn't now believe it was a bot or an officer and hence not illegal?
You still seem to be evading the fundamental fact that smokers are less productive whilst they are alive due to poorer health. Let me factor this in for you:
Smoker(50-60) ~= Nonsmoker(70-80) Smoker(0-50) > Nonsmoker(0-70) (Due to lower productivity)
The last 10 years of life cost about the same for everyone not killed suddenly, and smokers have fewer years before the last 10 years during which they're not productive members of society because they're already on their death bed and hence cost more without contributing anything. For smokers to cost less they'd have to be more productive in their shorter lives than non-smokers which they're not, the opposite is true because they take more smoke breaks and have more health issues.
I'll even extend your example with numbers:
Smoker(50-60) ~= Nonsmoker(70-80) = $0 contributed to economy (and hence healthcare) on both sides due to both being too ill to work.
Smoker(0-50) > Nonsmoker(0-70) $50k contributed to economy $65k contributed to economy assuming normal retirement age of 65, and $10k per year example contribution.
thus
Smoker = $50k Nonsmoker = $65k
Hence the smoker contributes less for their care because they have less time to contribute and hence costs more. Even if you believe the smoker can contribute a full $10k up until their death in their last decade (they can't, they're on their way out) then they still end up contributing less and hence costing more.
The same thing we've always done when developing on Windows, Linux, and even the web with browsers all of which have even greater degrees of fragmentation than Android even though we've never made much of a fuss about it on these other development platforms.
If you can't deal with this problem and think it's somehow unique to or worse on Android then you shouldn't be programming because your knowledge is insufficient to the point of being dangerous.
"There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake."
I disagree. I did a long analysis on that before (I'm non-US and have no interest in moving to the US so was able to approach the issue objectively) and basically if anything H1-B hires are increasing US salaries because H1-B highers are more often than not getting higher than the average salaries in the US. They're also a small enough portion of the total developer population to not have a massive impact anyway.
This is why it's quite valid to call it an issue of xenophobia - because there's no evidence for the oft cited suggestion that they're depressing developer wages in the US when they seem to be doing the exact opposite. If anything the fact that most H1-B hires are high paid implies they're highly skilled and so have something to offer the US economy. In general then it suggests that H1-B does actually benefit the US to a worthwhile degree.
So the problem is that there is no economic argument against H1-B, and given that, it's not surprising everyone else hence jumps to the conclusion that complaints are just about xenophobia, because what else could it be?
If you want to compete in a global economy you need to attract the brightest and best to your industries wherever they may or may not have been born. This is what H1-B aims to do and given the wages being paid by the large tech companies to H1-B hires it seems to be exactly what they're doing. All countries try to do the same, and the US' H1-B cap is actually quite restrictive. Limiting yourselves to only the 50,000 brightest and best when you could have the 100,000 brightest and best for example is self-defeating and actually cripples your economy and certainly doesn't help it. If you think you can get away with purely homegrown talent you're inevitably going to lose ground to the nations that don't, because you'll get far better people that do far better for your economy when you have a pool of 7 billion to choose from rather than a pool of a mere 320 million.
Below wholesale doesn't mean not making a profit. If the wholesale price still has a 50% profit margin and Amazon discount by 20% then the publishers are still making a 50% profit and Amazon a 20% loss. That doesn't mean other firms couldn't discount by 30% and take a 30% loss or just make a deal with the publishers to receive 30% lower wholesale prices.
Which is almost certainly the case given that these books were sometimes still more expensive than the even more expensive to produce printed versions.
Instead they chose to conspire with Apple to engage in illegal price fixing to raise prices, which they have all now quite rightly been punished/forced to settle for.
There's no defending their actions any more, the case is over and the verdict is in, what they did was wrong, and that's a fact.
"I disagree. In this market, you had en extremely dominant player with 80-90% market share [cnn.com] selling products at a loss."
How can this possibly true given that the paperback versions were pretty much always cheaper again and producing a paperback product is always drastically more expensive than producing a digital version.
I think the publishers might have been telling a little white lie about the whole "loss" thing.
"Node.js is powerful and I see the server-side language used to power node being JavaScript as arbitrary to that value. It's the reduced lines of code that have to be written to get to an end result, the unique non-blocking paradigm it offers "for free" and it's open nature that gives it great value."
This is the thing though, the non-blocking paradigm isn't unique. C#/WCF let you do this in even less lines of code again but with far higher quality tools and with a more powerful language and framework that is also far easier to debug and far less prone to programming errors due to compile time checking, better unit test support, and all of which is more mature to boot.
That's the issue. If it offered anything special I'd absolutely agree with you, but it brings absolutely nothing to the table and the only reason some people think it does is because they don't have the pre-requisite breadth of knowledge of other technologies to know that it doesn't. I mostly do technical architecture work now so maybe I have an advantage there over many developers in this respect but the only niche into which I could fit node.js with any degree of reasonable justification is into areas where there is a massive amount of Javascript to be exchanged client/server where the data structures can be shared and even this would likely only be as part of a larger system - someone else pointed out that LinkedIn uses it to server their HTML/Javascript based mobile app but the rest of their setup does not use it. Anything other than that extremely small niche and there's no point, I might as well take the other options - they do everything else it does other than sharing Javascript and they just do it better.
Yeah to be fair there's some truth to it, if anything the reason I do know languages like C, C++ and so forth is because I come from a desktop and server background as opposed to web. I do find a lot of developers who have done nothing but web development all of their lives do seem to be extremely low calibre.
As the AC said I'm talking about code scalability - the ability for a codebase to grow without becoming unmanageable. This is difficult to achieve with Javascript because it's prototype approach and lack of decent support for things like namespaces, libraries and so forth coupled with the inherently greater difficulty of capturing many classes of bugs in a dynamic language and Javascript in particular means it's a nightmare getting a Javascript codebase to scale beyond a point when compared to something like C#, Java, or C++.
It's not like database communication is the sort of thing that's not well understood and isn't fairly easy to build a solid test suite for. It's even easier for the consuming developer to test their own use of the even smaller subset of the features their product requires too.
So yes these sorts of things tend to be extremely unlikely to result in bugs that just pop up out of nowhere. Where it is a possibility the occurrence is so small as to not be a factor in overall language/technology stack choice because there are much bigger factors to worry about.
If this is prominent enough to be a concern in your choice of technology/stack then yes you're definitely doing something wrong.
Hey not all of us are bad, I'd say I'm a "web developer" because it's mostly what I do, but I use C/C++ for some server products because when performance and flexibility matters it's not like I'm going to use a toy such as node.js.
I absolutely agree with you and think node.js is redundant for this very reason, everything it does can be done in languages like C and C++ and in fact if you want to do anything that requires performance you have to drop back to C with node.js in the first place which begs the question, why bother with it at all?
The fact is node.js is just a tool to get Javascript developers up and running on the server. If you know, or are willing to learn languages other than that it's of no value because they already offer better options.
He's probably talking about the.NET connector which allows Oracle databases to be consumed by.NET framework features like the EF or to integrate with tools in visual studio.
But either way what he says shouldn't ever happen. The.NET connectors don't just randomly break unless you upgrade to a version that's broken. If you test and integration test and everything works then don't upgrade without regression testing. If you upgrade and don't regression test and it breaks then it serves you fucking right.
The GP's problem is one of a poor development, testing and go live procedure.
I'm not really a fan of node.js (because it's redundant) but I think you misunderstand the point of node.js. If you're reimplementing a full fledged HTTP server with it then you're really using it wrong because it's not meant for tasks that heavyweight and really uses a different request processing model than that.
But I take issue with it because even in that role you can configure technologies like IIS, various JAS' and WCF to work in pretty much the exact same manner but with the benefit of being able to use languages and tools more well designed for large scale development on top whilst also having the benefit that these technologies automatically scale better than node.js and perform better to boot. WCF for example can be run in single threaded mode but such that it automatically uses a thread per core or processor, whilst with node you have to set up clustering to make it do this. Most of node's advocates make inflated claims of it being better than these sorts of server products for no other reason than they are inexperienced with these products and don't understand them and their flexibility.
Effectively node.js allows inexperienced developers to do something that people who understand IIS, many Java Application Servers, WCF, or even raw sockets programming have already been doing for many years already.
So to answer the OP's question I think as I say that in the enterprise node.js is really quite redundant. It doesn't do anything that can't already be done with better performing, more tried and tested, more scalable more enterprise friendly technologies already.
Effectively it's become popular because Javascript developers have had to start working on the server side and it's an easy jump for them, but what server side developers already have is much more secure, much better performing, and much better for development.
About the only valid argument I've heard for node.js is it means you can share code between server and client and write once as a result, but I'm not sure how useful this is in practice given that you'll normally be doing different things server side to client side and hence having different data structures and processing needs anyway. Technologies like Java and.NET make serialisation/deserialisation to/from JSON happen automagically anyway so it's not as if getting data structures between the two is any kind of chore.
If you already have server side developers who know their stuff then use them and don't waste your time with node. If you only have Javascript developers then use node.js until you can't. I say can't because Javascript's language design and node.js' limitations do make it increasingly more difficult to write anything of any real complexity after a point whereas C, C++, Java, C# all allow a much greater degree of scalability. It all depends on what developers you have currently and how far your needs are going to scale as to whether the deficiencies of node.js and Javascript will become a problem.
You're assuming that smokers suddenly just drop dead without the long healthcare requiring lead up to death that non-smokers suffer. This isn't true and is why your myth about smokers not costing more is false. Smokers do die younger yes, but they also get the onset of poor health everyone else suffers younger too, so they require the same healthcare everyone else does but at a much younger age when everyone else is still healthy enough to contribute to the economy and hence society.
Smokers at 50 - 60 have the healthcare costs of most non-smokers at 70, and that's the problem, and that's where the added cost of smokers comes from.
There's a plethora of studies demonstrating the problem and they're not hard to find, Google throws up hundreds if you Google it. Your argument seems to be based on that of Kip Viscusi whose study which he claimed to produce without funding from the Tobacco industry was in fact done at an organisation that received sizeable funding from the Tobacco industry and ignored key points as above - he claimed that other studies didn't factor in everything and picked and chose what they factored in, but his study does exactly that also.
It's like being a global warming denialist, ignoring all the thousands of objective studies produced by neutral organisations stating it as fact and instead just taking the one or two done by the fossil fuel industry funded shills. If you base your opinion on those then you're a fool.
"It's all political BS. Lifetime healthcare costs for smokers are similar to non-smokers. Smokers tend to die younger, and lung cancer is an average-cost way to die."
Any evidence for this? Everything I've ever seen is to the contrary, are you sure you're not just making this up? Scientifically sound objective studies have always shown smokers to cost more to society not just in terms of healthcare costs but in terms of lost productivity and such too:
Even if they do die much younger they're going to be less healthy and require more sick leave at a younger age when everyone is still productive and contributing to the economy.
Most people who think there's no cost to anyone else of smoking is smokers who want to try and justify that it's their habit and theirs alone and no one else has any right to interfere in it, or tobacco companies simply spreading FUD to protect their profits. Sorry, but it isn't true, that bad habit is costing people like me, the rest of us have to carry smokers because of the choice they made. You talk about smokers right to smoke, what happened to everyone elses right to breathe clean air when a smoker walks past them smoking in a public place? what happened to everyone else's right to choose not to subsidise people's bad habits? It's funny how smokers and their supporters only talk about protecting rights when it suits the smokers when what they really mean is they want their rights protected at the expense of everyone else's. Talk about selfish.
I'll defend the right of smokers to smoke but only if they do so such that it has no impact on anyone else - do it in their own homes sure, pay for the added healthcare costs and accept a reduction in wage for the loss of productivity it causes, and it's fine. Do that and you can smoke all you want, I could care less, but smoke in a way that impacts me and yes I'll campaign to have it banned and made more costly so that I'm not subsidising it. Everyone else has rights too, not just smokers.
I guess the problem is that sometimes obesity is a genetic issue (definitely not always, but sometimes) and it's hard to determine when it's the result of a natural trait someone suffers from and when it's not, so to discriminate would be unfair on those tiny few who genuinely can't help it.
Contrast that to smoking and smoking is always a bad health choice that people explicitly make.
It's therefore much easier to single out, because it's always an explicit lifestyle choice, whilst obesity is not always a lifestyle choice (though usually is).
"Where do we stop having the govt STOP trying to tell you how to live, and fining you for your CHOICE in lifestyle?"
You have to look at the other side of the equation though, why should everyone else subsidise the healthcare needs caused by a bad habit? We have the same problem here in the UK with the NHS where smokers have their greater healthcare needs subsidised by everyone else. Sure you can look at it as smokers having their rights to choose how to live their life taken away, but you can also view it as non-smokers being forced to subsidise smokers against their will too. Either way someone is going to have their rights trampled on, it might as well be the ones who make the choice to pursue the bad habit, rather than those who have no choice but to subsidise it.
No you don't get hacked to death in front of everyone, you just get blown up at marathons, have your primary schools shot up, your universities shot up, your cinemas shot up and your face chewed on alive by drugged up schizophrenics in front of everyone. Much better, luckily you have those guns right?
The question is whether you need a gun in the scenario when they break in when you're in it. In the cases this has happened in the UK in recent years the burglars have all attempted to flee, because it's natural instinct for them to do so when discovered in someone elses territory.
Some of them have still come off worse being stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by the home owner before they managed to escape (despite outnumbering the home owner 4 to 1) or being crippled by a cricket bat. See here for example:
I think Americans are so used to having guns around that they fail to realise how little chance there is of their family coming to any harm whatsoever when guns are removed from the equation to the point that you're probably more safe having to resort to hand to hand combat than you are if there is a high risk that the criminal robbing you also has a gun.
I'd rather fancy my chances here in the UK knowing all the items in my house I could grab as a weapon on my way downstairs to confront a burglar than I would in America with a gun where the burglar upon hearing me may be waiting round the corner to shoot me first before I can shoot him. I stand more chance of defence in melee regardless of who gets the jump, than I do with a firearm when there is a chance that he has the jump. That is again of course assuming he doesn't just run when he realises he's awoken me because the knowledge a burglar has of the fact that he's in a building that's alien to him against someone who knows it inside out and has the drive to fight to defend his family alone is enough to send them packing.
That can't happen. As someone from a country where much gun ownership is banned I have been reliably informed by American NRA supporters that I should push for removal of said gun controls in my country because guns prevent crime, hence, if they have guns, they can't possibly get burgled. The guns prevent that.
To be fair I'm not sure that argument works, I imagine some unis do have a culture of "untouchable" professors such that if you are the questioning type it's not worth even bothering to continue your education there.
I never got on at school or college (that's 16 - 18 college, not university) in the UK in IT/Computing because I was already at a level well ahead of what the teachers could teach me and really it was a waste of time me even bothering with those subjects because yes the teacher in college at least would find excuses to give me low grades for seemingly no other reason than a feeling of malice that a pupil 30 years younger than him was already working at a higher level than him. My teacher in school at least recognised that what he was teaching was boring to me and said explicitly at parents evenings and so forth to my parents that I wasn't getting anything out of the national curriculum on the topic for this reason - he was much nicer.
But fundamentally I might as well have dropped out of college at least because the teacher was a dick who just wouldn't listen. For example, he let me do my final project in C but he only knew Pascal and when I explained to him why my code was correct he wouldn't have it, not because he was right, but because he didn't know C and didn't understand why it was correct.
I ended up doing my first degree in maths in large part because after that experience at college I knew at least I had a lot to learn in maths so would not get on the wrong side of the teachers by questioning them but it was hit and miss such that I was tempted not to go to uni at all and could just as well have ended up with the same opinion as her as a result.
But anyway, I digress, as for her time at Valve, I don't think it's the same thing - she was fired from Valve, it's not like she quit and given that it sounds like she didn't do anything wrong, Valve just one minute decided they wanted her project and the next decided they didn't, I think she's probably quite deserving of feeling a bit bitter about that. It does sound of a bit of a case of one half of the company not knowing what the other is doing with her being a victim of nothing more than a slight tip in the balance of power within the company.
Anyway, I don't think two very loosely related incidents many years apart and with very different circumstances are particularly evidence of someone being a "cry baby" else frankly that description can similarly be attached to just about every single poster on Slashdot and likely every employee Valve has ever had to boot. I think very few people have never quit anything and never been bitter about something.
I'm in the same place having worked on large PHP projects.
It doesn't mean it's a good technology though, it's still shit and if you're starting a project rather than taking one over then there's always a better option to choose than PHP unless the client stubbornly mandates it.
It really is high time PHP was phased out, there's just too many better alternatives out there, which if you're as experienced in other languages as you say I'm sure you already know.
I don't think anyone is saying don't use it if it's where the money is, but if you have the option then advise against it or outright opt for something else if the decision is yours.
Actively choosing it, nowadays, is outright negligent, and that's the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
"The facts on the case remain unchanged, however, and so does my position: Amazon was using deeper pockets to control the market and marginalise any potential competition. They were selling for very slim margins in a way that would be unsustainable for smaller companies and ultimately the industry as a whole, over the long term."
This is a problem with Amazon and in fact capitalism in general. Amazon works by scouring the web for retailers selling cheaper and then discounts their price relative to the wholesale price to always be the same price or cheaper unless they override it (because for example they believe for say the latest Call of Duty they'll be better off selling it at RRP because they'll make hundreds of sales anyway).
I agree it sucks and I agree it's a problem, a number of UK stores and chains I like have gone out of business because of it but it's a fundamental fault of capitalism combined with modern algorithms and data mining. It means a company can effectively automate itself to always outdo the competition and the only way to beat that is to either negotiate lower wholesale prices so you can undercut without loss or build a better algorithm.
But that doesn't make what Apple did better, Amazon is merely following the rules of capitalism and consumers are getting lower prices as a result which is what capitalism is meant to bring to the consumer - efficiency of pricing, whilst Apple was engaged in price gouging which is effectively illegal market manipulation designed to steal money from the consumer.
The problem is that having a monopoly isn't actually illegal - only abusing it is, hence Amazon isn't doing anything illegal by killing off companies left, right and centre with it's strategy as annoying as that is. This is why I'm not exactly sold on the ideology of unbridled capitalism. It needs restrictions and it needs limit to be healthy.
In fact, one might wonder if the solution is to simply make having a monopoly in a retail sector illegal regardless of any abuse or lack of such that if you end up finding yourself in a monopoly you're legally obliged to subsidise smaller players to help protect plurality and competition but I'm sure there are many cases where this would cause problems too. This is of course what Microsoft had to do in funding Apple when they were under their monopoly abuse investigation - perhaps it should be a standard thing?
That's actually the way it works. If for example you drive off from a petrol station without paying the police would have to prove you did so intentionally and that it wasn't just an honest mistake.
This is to prevent people's lives being ruined for nothing more than a moment of forgetfulness.
It's also to avoid entrapment situations, i.e. neighbour A Lends neighbour B his lawnmower than tells the police that neighbour B stole it. The police have to prove he never intended to give it back which they could do if he'd put an ad in the local paper to sell it on for example, but couldn't if he had no intention to permanently deprive A of it and A was just causing shit.
Whilst in the past I'd agree, I don't think that's true anymore, in fact here in some of the UK some of the laws specifically require intent and intent is in the very title of the charge when charged.
"Intending to incite racial hatred" for example.
If the crime is in itself a crime of intention then the onus on the police is to prove intent.
Of course it makes more sense to just remove such laws full stop, but there you go.
This is what I was wondering, doesn't this sort of thing risk giving real criminals an excuse too?
If intent is relevant then with the prevalence of police officers posing in this manner and now bots, couldn't a real criminal just claim "I assumed nowadays that they were all just chatbots or above age of consent officers" if caught chatting to someone who is underage?
It seems to be a dangerous precedent to set. If the police have to prove intent how can they prove he didn't now believe it was a bot or an officer and hence not illegal?
You still seem to be evading the fundamental fact that smokers are less productive whilst they are alive due to poorer health. Let me factor this in for you:
Smoker(50-60) ~= Nonsmoker(70-80)
Smoker(0-50) > Nonsmoker(0-70)
(Due to lower productivity)
thus
Smoker(0-50) + Smoker(50-60) > Nonsmoker(0-70) + Nonsmoker(70-80)
The last 10 years of life cost about the same for everyone not killed suddenly, and smokers have fewer years before the last 10 years during which they're not productive members of society because they're already on their death bed and hence cost more without contributing anything. For smokers to cost less they'd have to be more productive in their shorter lives than non-smokers which they're not, the opposite is true because they take more smoke breaks and have more health issues.
I'll even extend your example with numbers:
Smoker(50-60) ~= Nonsmoker(70-80) = $0 contributed to economy (and hence healthcare) on both sides due to both being too ill to work.
Smoker(0-50) > Nonsmoker(0-70)
$50k contributed to economy $65k contributed to economy assuming normal retirement age of 65, and $10k per year example contribution.
thus
Smoker = $50k Nonsmoker = $65k
Hence the smoker contributes less for their care because they have less time to contribute and hence costs more. Even if you believe the smoker can contribute a full $10k up until their death in their last decade (they can't, they're on their way out) then they still end up contributing less and hence costing more.
Clear?
The same thing we've always done when developing on Windows, Linux, and even the web with browsers all of which have even greater degrees of fragmentation than Android even though we've never made much of a fuss about it on these other development platforms.
If you can't deal with this problem and think it's somehow unique to or worse on Android then you shouldn't be programming because your knowledge is insufficient to the point of being dangerous.
"There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake."
I disagree. I did a long analysis on that before (I'm non-US and have no interest in moving to the US so was able to approach the issue objectively) and basically if anything H1-B hires are increasing US salaries because H1-B highers are more often than not getting higher than the average salaries in the US. They're also a small enough portion of the total developer population to not have a massive impact anyway.
This is why it's quite valid to call it an issue of xenophobia - because there's no evidence for the oft cited suggestion that they're depressing developer wages in the US when they seem to be doing the exact opposite. If anything the fact that most H1-B hires are high paid implies they're highly skilled and so have something to offer the US economy. In general then it suggests that H1-B does actually benefit the US to a worthwhile degree.
So the problem is that there is no economic argument against H1-B, and given that, it's not surprising everyone else hence jumps to the conclusion that complaints are just about xenophobia, because what else could it be?
If you want to compete in a global economy you need to attract the brightest and best to your industries wherever they may or may not have been born. This is what H1-B aims to do and given the wages being paid by the large tech companies to H1-B hires it seems to be exactly what they're doing. All countries try to do the same, and the US' H1-B cap is actually quite restrictive. Limiting yourselves to only the 50,000 brightest and best when you could have the 100,000 brightest and best for example is self-defeating and actually cripples your economy and certainly doesn't help it. If you think you can get away with purely homegrown talent you're inevitably going to lose ground to the nations that don't, because you'll get far better people that do far better for your economy when you have a pool of 7 billion to choose from rather than a pool of a mere 320 million.
Below wholesale doesn't mean not making a profit. If the wholesale price still has a 50% profit margin and Amazon discount by 20% then the publishers are still making a 50% profit and Amazon a 20% loss. That doesn't mean other firms couldn't discount by 30% and take a 30% loss or just make a deal with the publishers to receive 30% lower wholesale prices.
Which is almost certainly the case given that these books were sometimes still more expensive than the even more expensive to produce printed versions.
Instead they chose to conspire with Apple to engage in illegal price fixing to raise prices, which they have all now quite rightly been punished/forced to settle for.
There's no defending their actions any more, the case is over and the verdict is in, what they did was wrong, and that's a fact.
"I disagree. In this market, you had en extremely dominant player with 80-90% market share [cnn.com] selling products at a loss."
How can this possibly true given that the paperback versions were pretty much always cheaper again and producing a paperback product is always drastically more expensive than producing a digital version.
I think the publishers might have been telling a little white lie about the whole "loss" thing.
"Node.js is powerful and I see the server-side language used to power node being JavaScript as arbitrary to that value. It's the reduced lines of code that have to be written to get to an end result, the unique non-blocking paradigm it offers "for free" and it's open nature that gives it great value."
This is the thing though, the non-blocking paradigm isn't unique. C#/WCF let you do this in even less lines of code again but with far higher quality tools and with a more powerful language and framework that is also far easier to debug and far less prone to programming errors due to compile time checking, better unit test support, and all of which is more mature to boot.
That's the issue. If it offered anything special I'd absolutely agree with you, but it brings absolutely nothing to the table and the only reason some people think it does is because they don't have the pre-requisite breadth of knowledge of other technologies to know that it doesn't. I mostly do technical architecture work now so maybe I have an advantage there over many developers in this respect but the only niche into which I could fit node.js with any degree of reasonable justification is into areas where there is a massive amount of Javascript to be exchanged client/server where the data structures can be shared and even this would likely only be as part of a larger system - someone else pointed out that LinkedIn uses it to server their HTML/Javascript based mobile app but the rest of their setup does not use it. Anything other than that extremely small niche and there's no point, I might as well take the other options - they do everything else it does other than sharing Javascript and they just do it better.
Yeah to be fair there's some truth to it, if anything the reason I do know languages like C, C++ and so forth is because I come from a desktop and server background as opposed to web. I do find a lot of developers who have done nothing but web development all of their lives do seem to be extremely low calibre.
As the AC said I'm talking about code scalability - the ability for a codebase to grow without becoming unmanageable. This is difficult to achieve with Javascript because it's prototype approach and lack of decent support for things like namespaces, libraries and so forth coupled with the inherently greater difficulty of capturing many classes of bugs in a dynamic language and Javascript in particular means it's a nightmare getting a Javascript codebase to scale beyond a point when compared to something like C#, Java, or C++.
It's not like database communication is the sort of thing that's not well understood and isn't fairly easy to build a solid test suite for. It's even easier for the consuming developer to test their own use of the even smaller subset of the features their product requires too.
So yes these sorts of things tend to be extremely unlikely to result in bugs that just pop up out of nowhere. Where it is a possibility the occurrence is so small as to not be a factor in overall language/technology stack choice because there are much bigger factors to worry about.
If this is prominent enough to be a concern in your choice of technology/stack then yes you're definitely doing something wrong.
Hey not all of us are bad, I'd say I'm a "web developer" because it's mostly what I do, but I use C/C++ for some server products because when performance and flexibility matters it's not like I'm going to use a toy such as node.js.
I absolutely agree with you and think node.js is redundant for this very reason, everything it does can be done in languages like C and C++ and in fact if you want to do anything that requires performance you have to drop back to C with node.js in the first place which begs the question, why bother with it at all?
The fact is node.js is just a tool to get Javascript developers up and running on the server. If you know, or are willing to learn languages other than that it's of no value because they already offer better options.
He's probably talking about the .NET connector which allows Oracle databases to be consumed by .NET framework features like the EF or to integrate with tools in visual studio.
But either way what he says shouldn't ever happen. The .NET connectors don't just randomly break unless you upgrade to a version that's broken. If you test and integration test and everything works then don't upgrade without regression testing. If you upgrade and don't regression test and it breaks then it serves you fucking right.
The GP's problem is one of a poor development, testing and go live procedure.
I'm not really a fan of node.js (because it's redundant) but I think you misunderstand the point of node.js. If you're reimplementing a full fledged HTTP server with it then you're really using it wrong because it's not meant for tasks that heavyweight and really uses a different request processing model than that.
But I take issue with it because even in that role you can configure technologies like IIS, various JAS' and WCF to work in pretty much the exact same manner but with the benefit of being able to use languages and tools more well designed for large scale development on top whilst also having the benefit that these technologies automatically scale better than node.js and perform better to boot. WCF for example can be run in single threaded mode but such that it automatically uses a thread per core or processor, whilst with node you have to set up clustering to make it do this. Most of node's advocates make inflated claims of it being better than these sorts of server products for no other reason than they are inexperienced with these products and don't understand them and their flexibility.
Effectively node.js allows inexperienced developers to do something that people who understand IIS, many Java Application Servers, WCF, or even raw sockets programming have already been doing for many years already.
So to answer the OP's question I think as I say that in the enterprise node.js is really quite redundant. It doesn't do anything that can't already be done with better performing, more tried and tested, more scalable more enterprise friendly technologies already.
Effectively it's become popular because Javascript developers have had to start working on the server side and it's an easy jump for them, but what server side developers already have is much more secure, much better performing, and much better for development.
About the only valid argument I've heard for node.js is it means you can share code between server and client and write once as a result, but I'm not sure how useful this is in practice given that you'll normally be doing different things server side to client side and hence having different data structures and processing needs anyway. Technologies like Java and .NET make serialisation/deserialisation to/from JSON happen automagically anyway so it's not as if getting data structures between the two is any kind of chore.
If you already have server side developers who know their stuff then use them and don't waste your time with node. If you only have Javascript developers then use node.js until you can't. I say can't because Javascript's language design and node.js' limitations do make it increasingly more difficult to write anything of any real complexity after a point whereas C, C++, Java, C# all allow a much greater degree of scalability. It all depends on what developers you have currently and how far your needs are going to scale as to whether the deficiencies of node.js and Javascript will become a problem.
You're assuming that smokers suddenly just drop dead without the long healthcare requiring lead up to death that non-smokers suffer. This isn't true and is why your myth about smokers not costing more is false. Smokers do die younger yes, but they also get the onset of poor health everyone else suffers younger too, so they require the same healthcare everyone else does but at a much younger age when everyone else is still healthy enough to contribute to the economy and hence society.
Smokers at 50 - 60 have the healthcare costs of most non-smokers at 70, and that's the problem, and that's where the added cost of smokers comes from.
There's a plethora of studies demonstrating the problem and they're not hard to find, Google throws up hundreds if you Google it. Your argument seems to be based on that of Kip Viscusi whose study which he claimed to produce without funding from the Tobacco industry was in fact done at an organisation that received sizeable funding from the Tobacco industry and ignored key points as above - he claimed that other studies didn't factor in everything and picked and chose what they factored in, but his study does exactly that also.
It's like being a global warming denialist, ignoring all the thousands of objective studies produced by neutral organisations stating it as fact and instead just taking the one or two done by the fossil fuel industry funded shills. If you base your opinion on those then you're a fool.
"It's all political BS. Lifetime healthcare costs for smokers are similar to non-smokers. Smokers tend to die younger, and lung cancer is an average-cost way to die."
Any evidence for this? Everything I've ever seen is to the contrary, are you sure you're not just making this up? Scientifically sound objective studies have always shown smokers to cost more to society not just in terms of healthcare costs but in terms of lost productivity and such too:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_137481.html
http://bma.org.uk/working-for-change/improving-and-protecting-health/tobacco/smoking-statistics
Even if they do die much younger they're going to be less healthy and require more sick leave at a younger age when everyone is still productive and contributing to the economy.
Most people who think there's no cost to anyone else of smoking is smokers who want to try and justify that it's their habit and theirs alone and no one else has any right to interfere in it, or tobacco companies simply spreading FUD to protect their profits. Sorry, but it isn't true, that bad habit is costing people like me, the rest of us have to carry smokers because of the choice they made. You talk about smokers right to smoke, what happened to everyone elses right to breathe clean air when a smoker walks past them smoking in a public place? what happened to everyone else's right to choose not to subsidise people's bad habits? It's funny how smokers and their supporters only talk about protecting rights when it suits the smokers when what they really mean is they want their rights protected at the expense of everyone else's. Talk about selfish.
I'll defend the right of smokers to smoke but only if they do so such that it has no impact on anyone else - do it in their own homes sure, pay for the added healthcare costs and accept a reduction in wage for the loss of productivity it causes, and it's fine. Do that and you can smoke all you want, I could care less, but smoke in a way that impacts me and yes I'll campaign to have it banned and made more costly so that I'm not subsidising it. Everyone else has rights too, not just smokers.
I guess the problem is that sometimes obesity is a genetic issue (definitely not always, but sometimes) and it's hard to determine when it's the result of a natural trait someone suffers from and when it's not, so to discriminate would be unfair on those tiny few who genuinely can't help it.
Contrast that to smoking and smoking is always a bad health choice that people explicitly make.
It's therefore much easier to single out, because it's always an explicit lifestyle choice, whilst obesity is not always a lifestyle choice (though usually is).
"Where do we stop having the govt STOP trying to tell you how to live, and fining you for your CHOICE in lifestyle?"
You have to look at the other side of the equation though, why should everyone else subsidise the healthcare needs caused by a bad habit? We have the same problem here in the UK with the NHS where smokers have their greater healthcare needs subsidised by everyone else. Sure you can look at it as smokers having their rights to choose how to live their life taken away, but you can also view it as non-smokers being forced to subsidise smokers against their will too. Either way someone is going to have their rights trampled on, it might as well be the ones who make the choice to pursue the bad habit, rather than those who have no choice but to subsidise it.
Fox News LOL. You must like being wrong.
No you don't get hacked to death in front of everyone, you just get blown up at marathons, have your primary schools shot up, your universities shot up, your cinemas shot up and your face chewed on alive by drugged up schizophrenics in front of everyone. Much better, luckily you have those guns right?
Hmm, this is your second post repeating this viewpoint with the most pathetic of evidence.
Why do you seem so desperate to try and character assassinate her?
The question is whether you need a gun in the scenario when they break in when you're in it. In the cases this has happened in the UK in recent years the burglars have all attempted to flee, because it's natural instinct for them to do so when discovered in someone elses territory.
Some of them have still come off worse being stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by the home owner before they managed to escape (despite outnumbering the home owner 4 to 1) or being crippled by a cricket bat. See here for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-15211250
I think Americans are so used to having guns around that they fail to realise how little chance there is of their family coming to any harm whatsoever when guns are removed from the equation to the point that you're probably more safe having to resort to hand to hand combat than you are if there is a high risk that the criminal robbing you also has a gun.
I'd rather fancy my chances here in the UK knowing all the items in my house I could grab as a weapon on my way downstairs to confront a burglar than I would in America with a gun where the burglar upon hearing me may be waiting round the corner to shoot me first before I can shoot him. I stand more chance of defence in melee regardless of who gets the jump, than I do with a firearm when there is a chance that he has the jump. That is again of course assuming he doesn't just run when he realises he's awoken me because the knowledge a burglar has of the fact that he's in a building that's alien to him against someone who knows it inside out and has the drive to fight to defend his family alone is enough to send them packing.
"Not to mention the first person to get burgled"
That can't happen. As someone from a country where much gun ownership is banned I have been reliably informed by American NRA supporters that I should push for removal of said gun controls in my country because guns prevent crime, hence, if they have guns, they can't possibly get burgled. The guns prevent that.
To be fair I'm not sure that argument works, I imagine some unis do have a culture of "untouchable" professors such that if you are the questioning type it's not worth even bothering to continue your education there.
I never got on at school or college (that's 16 - 18 college, not university) in the UK in IT/Computing because I was already at a level well ahead of what the teachers could teach me and really it was a waste of time me even bothering with those subjects because yes the teacher in college at least would find excuses to give me low grades for seemingly no other reason than a feeling of malice that a pupil 30 years younger than him was already working at a higher level than him. My teacher in school at least recognised that what he was teaching was boring to me and said explicitly at parents evenings and so forth to my parents that I wasn't getting anything out of the national curriculum on the topic for this reason - he was much nicer.
But fundamentally I might as well have dropped out of college at least because the teacher was a dick who just wouldn't listen. For example, he let me do my final project in C but he only knew Pascal and when I explained to him why my code was correct he wouldn't have it, not because he was right, but because he didn't know C and didn't understand why it was correct.
I ended up doing my first degree in maths in large part because after that experience at college I knew at least I had a lot to learn in maths so would not get on the wrong side of the teachers by questioning them but it was hit and miss such that I was tempted not to go to uni at all and could just as well have ended up with the same opinion as her as a result.
But anyway, I digress, as for her time at Valve, I don't think it's the same thing - she was fired from Valve, it's not like she quit and given that it sounds like she didn't do anything wrong, Valve just one minute decided they wanted her project and the next decided they didn't, I think she's probably quite deserving of feeling a bit bitter about that. It does sound of a bit of a case of one half of the company not knowing what the other is doing with her being a victim of nothing more than a slight tip in the balance of power within the company.
Anyway, I don't think two very loosely related incidents many years apart and with very different circumstances are particularly evidence of someone being a "cry baby" else frankly that description can similarly be attached to just about every single poster on Slashdot and likely every employee Valve has ever had to boot. I think very few people have never quit anything and never been bitter about something.
I'm in the same place having worked on large PHP projects.
It doesn't mean it's a good technology though, it's still shit and if you're starting a project rather than taking one over then there's always a better option to choose than PHP unless the client stubbornly mandates it.
It really is high time PHP was phased out, there's just too many better alternatives out there, which if you're as experienced in other languages as you say I'm sure you already know.
I don't think anyone is saying don't use it if it's where the money is, but if you have the option then advise against it or outright opt for something else if the decision is yours.
Actively choosing it, nowadays, is outright negligent, and that's the problem.