(that you should be using the supplies from the fallen army/land to restock). Clausewitz has rather more insight into how you supply your troops. Using supplies from conquered territory is only occasionally sensible.
You could not take out a loan entirely online with Northern Rock.
I know, I have a loan with them. It is, in fact, one of their (smaller) assets.
You can apply for the loan online. You can use their loan calculator to view your payments reschedule. You can do that with a dozen other lenders too.
I went with them because they offered the best rate. Looks like they couldn't quite afford it. But to actually get the cash, I had to sign and return a printed loan agreement. And pass a credit check.
No different to going into a bank really. Except less hassle, cheaper (for me and for the loan provider) and easier to comparison shop.
Offering internet loans is not a dodgy lending practice. Failing to predict a sub-prime credit crunch possibly is. And I strongly doubt Northern Rock are remotely to blame for the state of the housing market - my guess is that it's closer to the opposite.
I'd say there is legal basis in the UK for what they are doing; they have a court order, things don't get much more legal than that.
Posting the text of the document infringes copyright. That's illegal. The court order reflects that.
Posting facts gleaned from the document does not infringe copyright. That's (presumably) why the court didn't block publication of a press report based on it.
I'd say that (within the constraints of copyright law) the law is working fine, nobody is being unduly censored, and the court has managed to simultaneously serve both its duties to the copyright holder and also the public interest.
That the FT were appealing against the ban on posting the copyrighted document is interesting, but I can't be arsed to find out the legal justification they were using. I would guess it would be a public interest argument, but go ask the lawyers if you really care.
Joyfully I'm taking my longbow to Hereford next month for an organised roving shoot. Can any genuine born-in-the-valleys Welsh men living nearby please wave a flag with a dragon on it so I know where to aim?
Unfortunately when my current employer seeks to make a change to my employment - including holidays, how car parking is allocated, any changes to T&Cs, etc - they consult with the union. They don't consult with me.
I'm not in the union. I refuse to join. It doesn't represent my interests, it represents a large number of people that feel they deserve a job for life and that seniority is the appropriate mechanism for identifying who should get a promotion.
At my last company the union specifically negotiated a redundancy settlement that discriminated against me. Being a single white healthy man in your 30s means you have absolutely no protections under law, and the union takes advantage of that to fuck you senseless. Yeah, I can back that up: My disabled black girlfriend picked up 40 weeks pay for her redundancy; I got 6.
So in my view, unions are not a good thing. They are parasitical and actively penalise people that refuse to join them.
Erm. Oracle documentation may not be the greatest out there, but it's all available, for free, and covers everything you need to know.
There are admittedly easier ways to find out how to achieve specific tasks (i.e. Google for them) but I've never found the Oracle docs to be any worse than any major software vendor's.
If Sun add JTA support it'll be 'add' not 'replace'. They like Java, sure, but they're not stupid.
LAMP will still be viable, and remember - the A in LAMP comes from an organisation that provides more Java code to businesses than anybody else except Sun.
(no, I can't back up that last statement. I just made it up. But it's probably close to the truth. Feel free to investigate the precise numbers and publish a study on it.)
Weblogic Server has always been pretty well behaved (well, since 4.5). Portal never really convinced me it added enough benefits to be worth the extra complexity (and BEA licence costs).
Or SAP, or Network Associates, or Tibco, or one of the other big boys.
BEA had a great presence in the middleware market for people that weren't buying full 'industry solutions'. It didn't really play in the market for people that were, and that's rather a large market.
To be fair to Oracle, they kind of do play in that market. Then again, they are indeed buying up everything in sight right now..
The programming teams _are_ the loud ones. They're the people that yell across the office, that hold loud debates about things that don't matter (vi vs emacs, etc), that throw things at each other (or worse), that have the guitars..
I also don't understand why the fuck any good software engineer would want to be shut in a little box (i.e. office) where they can't hear what's going on, can't talk to people, can't yell across to ask a question..
Sure, provide quiet areas where people can sit and do real thinking. Most programming doesn't involve real thinking. How the fuck do you think pair programming works (and every study shows that it works) if people are in different offices?
XP is an Agile methodology, but there are many others. Not all methodologies work for all organisations, so someone that knows agile principles can help a company adopt an appropriate methodology without forcing them to follow any specific one. The principles behind them all are much the same. And if someone is requiring reams of documentation/paperwork as part of an agile methodology then either their methods are not agile, or the customer is demanding the documentation (in which case they should hire technical writers and not developers).
These days OO means much the same as it always used to. Basic OO principles are still very valid. ISomething interfaces are very strongly a Microsoft thing, no languages I've worked with have ever needed that. The use of Abstract base classes, factories, etc results from the use of design patterns, and if you think those are bad then you're in disagreement with every software engineer I know.
Refactoring as a technique is very sensible. Fowler's book is exceedingly well written, and the approaches he recommends very sensible. The people factors (explaining things to project managers) are complicated, but the underlying refactoring mechanisms are sound. Don't confuse the tools and techniques with the difficulties of getting them accepted within an organisation.
If you think that nowadays refactoring means going through turning everything into an interface+impl+factory then frankly you're not following the book, even remotely.
Sounds to me like you've entered a Microsoft shop, you're receiving very poor guidance, and you're attempting to use technology/languages that you aren't sufficiently trained/expert in. You have my sympathy, but don't let that scare you away from the very real benefits that OO programming, design patterns, agile development activities and refactoring can provide. At the very least make sure the people around you stop using incorrect terms to describe the things they're doing.
I own no Apple hardware. I never have. Not much of a fanboy.
And no, investment banks don't hold bidding wars for my skills. Consultancies have done, but I turned them down anyway. Not enough of a egotistical cunt, you see. Shrug, I've moved beyond the hands-on development roles anyway.
Many people do a job that's below their capabilities. Many people enjoy it. Many people tackle challenges that aren't below their capabilities, but aren't as highly paid as City contractors are, yet are more intelligent and/or skilled than those contractors. All of which leaves you sounding like a smug twat. And leaves me sounding childish for pointing it out. Ah, the joys of the Internet.
Perhaps you and the two people you're replying to should learn how to use a web browser window that isn't fullscreen.
Failing that, turn your monitor 90 degrees. Ooh, look - 1200x1920 resolution, perfect for tall thin webpages.
I'm writing this on a 1920x1200 widescreen laptop. The web browser window dimensions are (at a guess) around 1400x1100. On the rest of my screen I have useful information displayed, that isn't interfering with (or interfered with by) my web browsing. At the same time the web browser and its contents are perfectly readable, and web pages fit nicely.
Widescreen monitors and tall thin web pages are not a problem, and are off-topic for this discussion.
Oh man, you're so full of shit I can easily believe you're a headhunter - in my experience it's the profession of people that couldn't hold a real job.
Apple's OS these days is based on BSD. If you want a stable *nix like OS with extremely good UI and good hardware then it's an excellent choice.
Expecting people interviewing to join an investment bank to be kernel hackers is pointless. Expecting them to have good signal processing skills is stupid. I work for a investment bank and I've never transformed a JPG or submitted a patch to kernel.org. I do however know how to develop exceedingly high quality business software in extraordinarily short timescales based on unfeasibly fluffy requirements, delivering something that can make astonishly large amounts of cash for the organisation.
Ask me for criteria for developer recruitment and I'll identify skills, attitudes and aptitudes that will lead to good software engineers capable of working at the business system level. Some of them may well be kernel hacking mathematicians, but that'd coincidence not design.
I've been programming since 1982, on the internet since 1992 and commercially since 1994. I've needed to use calculus as part of my software twice. Ever.
I don't do game programming (although I used to - in the days before 3D graphics were anywhere outside an SGI workstation) and I don't do engineering solutions, and I don't do fancy UI. I accept that there are many such examples where calculus and more advanced mathematics is beneficial or even required.
I suspect there's also a correlation between being good at maths and being good at programming.
But calculus is not used a lot. Not when you consider all types of programming, and especially not when you consider the types of programming most programmers do.
The ones that actually belong in the field will catch on real quick. You mean they find source.zip, find the code for the package they're not allowed to use and copy-paste it into a whole new package they've just created? With appropriate acknowledgements of course:)
If you belong in the field you'll quickly realise that it's stupid to write something that already exists..
(Writing something that'll pass your assignment is an entirely different exercise..;)
people go to the university to understand the foundations of their field Engineering and the traditional sciences are pretty much the only areas where this is actually true.
People go to university for many reasons, and mostly go into jobs unconnected to their degree. Understanding the foundations of their field doesn't really help them on either count.
It's a good question as it tests understanding of a basic programming construct/pattern, as opposed to the ability to copy/paste a working piece of code.
I'd use it as a fairly entry level test though, and the correct answer is "I wouldn't; the Collections API is perfectly adequate and capable". Of course, the follow-up question is "Tell me anyway.":)
Having done multithreaded programming in too many languages I must say that Java does make it much much easier. Although I'd hope/expect that other modern languages provide similar support (not tried concurrent programming in Ruby,.net yet).
Still need to know the theory and what you're doing of course. But it's not difficult, just needs you to think things through properly. I'm continually confused by the media reports that programmers struggle with concurrent code; I think most of them just never really tried it.
I could've made excellent money, a good solid well paid professional career, leaving school at 18 and getting a job. I had the opportunity, the skills, the contacts.
I went to Uni instead out of curiousity for the experience and the fun.
If people could make good money without college, many people would still go. Getting the skills/education to make more money is only part of the attraction of further education.
Incidentally, if I want someone that knows how to program, I'm not going to look on a computer science course. Frankly they're usually shit programmers. In my experience the best programmers have a degree in physics*. So much for university teaching you that sort of skills. University (as the person you responded to highlighted) gives you an education, teaches you how to think. Buy a book if you need to learn how to program.
* based on a very small and highly subjective sample set. I'd guess it's because people doing physics degrees these days need to write software to test/analyse their experiments/theories, and so learn how to write software - which isn't the focus of a CS degree.
If you change the data held on a remote diablo server using hacks then I believe you are guilty of an offence under the computer misuse act. That's using laws that predate the one under discussion.
If you're hacking your local copy of Diablo then you can be presumed to have given permission to yourself to do so and so no offence is committed. If you copy the hacking tools used (e.g. into memory, if child pornography precedents are followed) then it's the a flick of a coin as to whether this new law will criminalise that act of copying (i.e. distribution). Which is why it's such a poorly framed law.
Slashdot Mirror
On that regard I suspect there is no legal obligation - hence requesting a written undertaking.
Anyway, this is slashdot, fuck off with your 'citation needed'. This is uneducated opinion masquerading as fact, of course there are no citations.
You could not take out a loan entirely online with Northern Rock.
I know, I have a loan with them. It is, in fact, one of their (smaller) assets.
You can apply for the loan online. You can use their loan calculator to view your payments reschedule. You can do that with a dozen other lenders too.
I went with them because they offered the best rate. Looks like they couldn't quite afford it. But to actually get the cash, I had to sign and return a printed loan agreement. And pass a credit check.
No different to going into a bank really. Except less hassle, cheaper (for me and for the loan provider) and easier to comparison shop.
Offering internet loans is not a dodgy lending practice. Failing to predict a sub-prime credit crunch possibly is. And I strongly doubt Northern Rock are remotely to blame for the state of the housing market - my guess is that it's closer to the opposite.
I'd say there is legal basis in the UK for what they are doing; they have a court order, things don't get much more legal than that.
Posting the text of the document infringes copyright. That's illegal. The court order reflects that.
Posting facts gleaned from the document does not infringe copyright. That's (presumably) why the court didn't block publication of a press report based on it.
I'd say that (within the constraints of copyright law) the law is working fine, nobody is being unduly censored, and the court has managed to simultaneously serve both its duties to the copyright holder and also the public interest.
That the FT were appealing against the ban on posting the copyrighted document is interesting, but I can't be arsed to find out the legal justification they were using. I would guess it would be a public interest argument, but go ask the lawyers if you really care.
Joyfully I'm taking my longbow to Hereford next month for an organised roving shoot. Can any genuine born-in-the-valleys Welsh men living nearby please wave a flag with a dragon on it so I know where to aim?
Possibly the same, possibly less.
It would have been more equitable though.
Unfortunately when my current employer seeks to make a change to my employment - including holidays, how car parking is allocated, any changes to T&Cs, etc - they consult with the union. They don't consult with me.
I'm not in the union. I refuse to join. It doesn't represent my interests, it represents a large number of people that feel they deserve a job for life and that seniority is the appropriate mechanism for identifying who should get a promotion.
At my last company the union specifically negotiated a redundancy settlement that discriminated against me. Being a single white healthy man in your 30s means you have absolutely no protections under law, and the union takes advantage of that to fuck you senseless. Yeah, I can back that up: My disabled black girlfriend picked up 40 weeks pay for her redundancy; I got 6.
So in my view, unions are not a good thing. They are parasitical and actively penalise people that refuse to join them.
Erm. Oracle documentation may not be the greatest out there, but it's all available, for free, and covers everything you need to know.
There are admittedly easier ways to find out how to achieve specific tasks (i.e. Google for them) but I've never found the Oracle docs to be any worse than any major software vendor's.
If Sun add JTA support it'll be 'add' not 'replace'. They like Java, sure, but they're not stupid.
LAMP will still be viable, and remember - the A in LAMP comes from an organisation that provides more Java code to businesses than anybody else except Sun.
(no, I can't back up that last statement. I just made it up. But it's probably close to the truth. Feel free to investigate the precise numbers and publish a study on it.)
Weblogic Server has always been pretty well behaved (well, since 4.5). Portal never really convinced me it added enough benefits to be worth the extra complexity (and BEA licence costs).
Or SAP, or Network Associates, or Tibco, or one of the other big boys.
BEA had a great presence in the middleware market for people that weren't buying full 'industry solutions'. It didn't really play in the market for people that were, and that's rather a large market.
To be fair to Oracle, they kind of do play in that market. Then again, they are indeed buying up everything in sight right now..
Strange, they haven't irritated me at all. Maybe that's because I just don't go there.
Get your gadget news elsewhere. Shit, there are print magazines that'll give it to you, apply some lateral thinking here.
I just don't get this whole discussion.
The programming teams _are_ the loud ones. They're the people that yell across the office, that hold loud debates about things that don't matter (vi vs emacs, etc), that throw things at each other (or worse), that have the guitars..
I also don't understand why the fuck any good software engineer would want to be shut in a little box (i.e. office) where they can't hear what's going on, can't talk to people, can't yell across to ask a question..
Sure, provide quiet areas where people can sit and do real thinking. Most programming doesn't involve real thinking. How the fuck do you think pair programming works (and every study shows that it works) if people are in different offices?
XP is an Agile methodology, but there are many others. Not all methodologies work for all organisations, so someone that knows agile principles can help a company adopt an appropriate methodology without forcing them to follow any specific one. The principles behind them all are much the same. And if someone is requiring reams of documentation/paperwork as part of an agile methodology then either their methods are not agile, or the customer is demanding the documentation (in which case they should hire technical writers and not developers).
These days OO means much the same as it always used to. Basic OO principles are still very valid. ISomething interfaces are very strongly a Microsoft thing, no languages I've worked with have ever needed that. The use of Abstract base classes, factories, etc results from the use of design patterns, and if you think those are bad then you're in disagreement with every software engineer I know.
Refactoring as a technique is very sensible. Fowler's book is exceedingly well written, and the approaches he recommends very sensible. The people factors (explaining things to project managers) are complicated, but the underlying refactoring mechanisms are sound. Don't confuse the tools and techniques with the difficulties of getting them accepted within an organisation.
If you think that nowadays refactoring means going through turning everything into an interface+impl+factory then frankly you're not following the book, even remotely.
Sounds to me like you've entered a Microsoft shop, you're receiving very poor guidance, and you're attempting to use technology/languages that you aren't sufficiently trained/expert in. You have my sympathy, but don't let that scare you away from the very real benefits that OO programming, design patterns, agile development activities and refactoring can provide. At the very least make sure the people around you stop using incorrect terms to describe the things they're doing.
I own no Apple hardware. I never have. Not much of a fanboy.
And no, investment banks don't hold bidding wars for my skills. Consultancies have done, but I turned them down anyway. Not enough of a egotistical cunt, you see. Shrug, I've moved beyond the hands-on development roles anyway.
Many people do a job that's below their capabilities. Many people enjoy it. Many people tackle challenges that aren't below their capabilities, but aren't as highly paid as City contractors are, yet are more intelligent and/or skilled than those contractors. All of which leaves you sounding like a smug twat. And leaves me sounding childish for pointing it out. Ah, the joys of the Internet.
Perhaps you and the two people you're replying to should learn how to use a web browser window that isn't fullscreen.
Failing that, turn your monitor 90 degrees. Ooh, look - 1200x1920 resolution, perfect for tall thin webpages.
I'm writing this on a 1920x1200 widescreen laptop. The web browser window dimensions are (at a guess) around 1400x1100. On the rest of my screen I have useful information displayed, that isn't interfering with (or interfered with by) my web browsing. At the same time the web browser and its contents are perfectly readable, and web pages fit nicely.
Widescreen monitors and tall thin web pages are not a problem, and are off-topic for this discussion.
Nobody said this was going to be easy
Oh man, you're so full of shit I can easily believe you're a headhunter - in my experience it's the profession of people that couldn't hold a real job.
Apple's OS these days is based on BSD. If you want a stable *nix like OS with extremely good UI and good hardware then it's an excellent choice.
Expecting people interviewing to join an investment bank to be kernel hackers is pointless. Expecting them to have good signal processing skills is stupid. I work for a investment bank and I've never transformed a JPG or submitted a patch to kernel.org. I do however know how to develop exceedingly high quality business software in extraordinarily short timescales based on unfeasibly fluffy requirements, delivering something that can make astonishly large amounts of cash for the organisation.
Ask me for criteria for developer recruitment and I'll identify skills, attitudes and aptitudes that will lead to good software engineers capable of working at the business system level. Some of them may well be kernel hacking mathematicians, but that'd coincidence not design.
I've been programming since 1982, on the internet since 1992 and commercially since 1994. I've needed to use calculus as part of my software twice. Ever.
I don't do game programming (although I used to - in the days before 3D graphics were anywhere outside an SGI workstation) and I don't do engineering solutions, and I don't do fancy UI. I accept that there are many such examples where calculus and more advanced mathematics is beneficial or even required.
I suspect there's also a correlation between being good at maths and being good at programming.
But calculus is not used a lot. Not when you consider all types of programming, and especially not when you consider the types of programming most programmers do.
If you belong in the field you'll quickly realise that it's stupid to write something that already exists..
(Writing something that'll pass your assignment is an entirely different exercise..
People go to university for many reasons, and mostly go into jobs unconnected to their degree. Understanding the foundations of their field doesn't really help them on either count.
It's a good question as it tests understanding of a basic programming construct/pattern, as opposed to the ability to copy/paste a working piece of code.
I'd use it as a fairly entry level test though, and the correct answer is "I wouldn't; the Collections API is perfectly adequate and capable". Of course, the follow-up question is "Tell me anyway."
Having done multithreaded programming in too many languages I must say that Java does make it much much easier. Although I'd hope/expect that other modern languages provide similar support (not tried concurrent programming in Ruby,
Still need to know the theory and what you're doing of course. But it's not difficult, just needs you to think things through properly. I'm continually confused by the media reports that programmers struggle with concurrent code; I think most of them just never really tried it.
I could've made excellent money, a good solid well paid professional career, leaving school at 18 and getting a job. I had the opportunity, the skills, the contacts.
I went to Uni instead out of curiousity for the experience and the fun.
If people could make good money without college, many people would still go. Getting the skills/education to make more money is only part of the attraction of further education.
Incidentally, if I want someone that knows how to program, I'm not going to look on a computer science course. Frankly they're usually shit programmers. In my experience the best programmers have a degree in physics*. So much for university teaching you that sort of skills. University (as the person you responded to highlighted) gives you an education, teaches you how to think. Buy a book if you need to learn how to program.
* based on a very small and highly subjective sample set. I'd guess it's because people doing physics degrees these days need to write software to test/analyse their experiments/theories, and so learn how to write software - which isn't the focus of a CS degree.
If you change the data held on a remote diablo server using hacks then I believe you are guilty of an offence under the computer misuse act. That's using laws that predate the one under discussion.
If you're hacking your local copy of Diablo then you can be presumed to have given permission to yourself to do so and so no offence is committed. If you copy the hacking tools used (e.g. into memory, if child pornography precedents are followed) then it's the a flick of a coin as to whether this new law will criminalise that act of copying (i.e. distribution). Which is why it's such a poorly framed law.
Only people to have ever done that. It's why we're still Great Britain.
(stupid law though, I'll have to write to my MP about it. Again.)