I've got a personal gripe about folks who think that 'developer' is code for 'guy who's expected to do everything in the project'. Outside of small projects, that's not how it should work in a healthy software development lifecycle.
Developers architect and write code, and some of the topics covered in that short editorial are relevant; use of AJAX necessitates good error handling on the front end, and synchronization of client and server side validations. Sure, they may have a broad skillset besides and understand databases, and graphical design, and so on, but there's no guarantee they're the ones meant to provide those skills.
For example, QA encompasses an incredibly large set of skills, familiarity with a wide range of products, and to be fair, seems to attract folks with a different life philosophy than those who identify themselves as developers. To talk about load testing - which itself is not a simple unit test to be added to a build - as a developer's responsibility, and ignore the vast, separate set of specialized knowledge and experience required to pull it off is ignorance. To include UX and UI design, and say these too are in the developers purview is equally misguided. (in fact, most developers are really, really bad at UI/UX, for some reason)
Not that a developer couldn't do those things, or will automatically lack the knowledge or skills, but those are separate roles and separate disciplines.
So, tell a project manager that they should make sure the QA team does load testing, and tell the project manager that the UI/UX team needs to provide descriptive error messages when validation fails, and so on. Very little of this is important to someone who's currently wearing the 'developer' hat.
This twitter feed started out as part of a network of spam twitter accounts to promote the (probably illegal) sale of ebooks from a russian seller. It often includes random lines of text from the ebooks that it's trying to spam/sell in an attempt to avoid being classified as spam. Basically, bayesian poisoning.
Some folks thought it was amusing because it would create odd non-sequiturs, and in the same way that people started posting zombo.com links, it perputated, though apparently only among folks with their heads way far up the twitter lower GI.
So, it was experiencing some popularity for hard to define or reproduce reasons.
At this point, 2 guys who work for internet media companies purchased the twitter account from the russian spammer who operated it, in 2011, after it had shown up in a few non-internet specific publications. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to milk commercial value from it, and continued to sporadically post from it, claiming it was some sort of art project, though it's more likely that they just never capitalized it and tried to mimic the previous behavior.
The only reason you're hearing about it now, is because these accounts are now being used as part of an alternate reality 'game', like Halo's "I Love Bees" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees ), and so are being promoted widely for that reason. I would argue that it's a 'game' per se, but whatever.
Interestingly enough, it's claimed that this was all held in great secrecy until now, yet I note nearly simultaneous news releases from a large number of primarily internet-only media sites, not just now, but previously since 2011. As if they were all in on it. Most of the recent articles have some permutation of the claim that it's a well established meme, and that it's a "persistent mystery on the internet," almost as if they were given a press release and are just regurgitating text.
Personally speaking, I'm fairly well aware of memes, and I hadn't heard of this one. Perhaps it's just because I avoided twitter? In any case, it looks and feels like someone's trying to artificially force something to become viral when it's not really that appealing to begin with.
Hopefully though, my sleuthing has saved you from having to look this stuff up and perpetuate it, and you can continue to ignore it.
I see no reason that the 'same, simple function' needs to be restricted to a single mechanism. There may be advantages to that, but we should all be familiar with the troubles inherent in treating a language as a series of immutable building blocks. All the stats show; the fastest, most secure, most quickly written, and most maintainable code relies more on the programmer being comfortable with the language and allowed to write in their own style (both of which require experience), than it does which language you pick.(*)
So, just because most java developers have no concept of memory management, and most perl, ruby, and php programmers don't understand why they should avoid nested bubblesorts (or what a bubble sort is), that doesn't mean those languages are inherently bad. I don't discount C++ simply because you need to have memorized "Effective C++" and the sequel in order to avoid memory leaks and errors in even simple constructs. Frankly, I've seen horrors written in every language I'm proficient in, and I've seen graceful implementations in each as well. I've seen a clear and easy to follow object oriented design implemented in plain ole' C, and an incredibly clean Perl sysadmin suite that had exceptional plugin support and was naturally self-documenting.
In fact, the only time I can rely on getting something horrible is when there's some all-encompassing, 'do it my way' framework, and someone has to put in nasty hacks just to get the remaining 10% to work. I've learned to only trust non-intrusive libraries and frameworks, where it's obvious that you can simply override all behavior in a pinch, or pull it apart piecemeal, and prepare for nastiness in all other cases.
So I won't discount the language based on the code some people produce in it.
However, I will say that I personally dislike whimsical code. Damned hard to read, like someone put stereo instructions in haiku form. Pisses me off worse than hungarian notation (which is likely proof of brain damage).
(*) - or in other words, the entire python credo is wrong
I used to write finance software for a living, so I've actually been responsible for putting the hooks into systems that alert and in some cases silently block these transactions. There are actual federal regulations stating we need to do this, and this isn't a new thing - this predates modern banking. The difference is that more and more international names are landing on the list.
The funny thing is that most of this tracking is astoundingly, mind numbingly bad.
I have the most experience with banking (as opposed to credit card transactions), so here's a quick explanation that works: 1) The feds provide us a list, occasionally updated. Format is a plain text file with names of suspects, 1 per line, all caps. 2) We have to do an exact match - if the name of the sender or recipient exactly equals one of the lines, then we tag it, and it's up to the bank manager to deal with it from there. They authorize or not the transaction during the end of day clearing house, or alert the feds or whomever.
That's it. It's sort of like setting up a spam blocker for an explicit email address. It's hilariously trivial.
Now, once transactions go over a certain size, those are independently reported right to the federal reserve, so those may be subject to much more analysis, but evasion is as simple as keeping transfer size low and adding an extra letter to the recipient's name.
There are some caveats; transaction often have to bounce through many entities, but tracking this way is often very difficult since there's no guarantee which ACH a given transaction is bouncing through - each bank uses it's own set based on contracts and legal agreements between countries. Reconciling source and target becomes painful, to say the least.
To recap: 1) they've always done this, 2) they don't seem to be very good at real time tracking
It's not that we can't make the technology, it's that because it's not intrinsic to the actual inner workings of the device, it will always be possible to remove it - and it's likely that it'll be easier to do so than to either put it in or protect it from removal. After all, you can have the most complex lock in the world on your ignition, but if the car thief just pops the plastic case on the steering trunk open, they can hotwire it. Why would this be any different? It may very well defer casual theft, but in the long run, it will not deter dedicated thieves or likely be worth the additional trouble it produces for the legitimate user.
Like they say about computer security - if the attacker has physical access, it simply isn't secure - look at dvd encryption schemes.
In America, at least, a stick shift would probably be a more effective deterrent vs. car theft.
Ah, is it on a case-by-case basis, that's the trick.
One of the things noted by individuals in charge of hiring was that men tended to be more aggressive in negotiation of salaries and compensation, and women were less so. This created a feedback loop where the expectation was that a woman would accept a lower salary than a man with the same qualifications - and guess what? They were right. When women act like men, however, and indicate a focus on the salary,... ta-da... they're given the same offers, or in today's market, often better when it's a technology hire, for diversity purposes.
In that case, they ARE being treated differently for being women, at least initially. However, they have the opportunity to confirm or deny it, and most choose to confirm it. Reports show that salary has more to do with confidence and a willingness to accept (or not) the initial offer, and through no action of the hiring groups, this appears to be split on gender lines. Women appear less confident.
There's also the issue with the 'same qualifications'. Why aren't there as many women CEO's in the top dollar companies? Well, because those CEOs have qualifications that read something like "30-40 years unbroken chain of management, most of them running companies" whereas many female managers have a resume that reads "5-10 years management, 1-2 years off to have a kid, 1-3 years management, 1-2 years to have a kid, 10-20 years management". The number of male managers that pick business over family simply dwarfs the number of females that choose the same. When a board is going to pick someone to run their multibillion dollar business, do you pick the one who has clearly shown their children are a higher priority than their career, or the one who has turned those duties over to a significant other, nanny, or other in order to focus on work?
So, I agree with some of what you said - case by case is still the way to go, each person judged entirely on their own merits, and not based on the performance of their group as a whole. Saying that the wage disparity needs to be fixed (implying it is due primary to gender) is certainly not an example of going case-by-case, but rather, judging based on a top-level statistic without understanding the reasons behind it.
What it means to be a feminist appears to be pretty subjective. For some, it means stripping is bad, and for some it means stripping is good - and those are just the extreme cases.
In my personal awareness though, most of the self-proclaimed feminists are not looking for equal treatment. They're looking for special treatment to make up for the fact that they may not have received it in the past, while still holding on to all the gender-based attitudes and differences that are advantageous to them.
I'm not saying this attitude is abhorrent - it's what anyone would do, who would advocate for making their life worse, especially if they're already down a rung or two due to sexism? I'm just saying it skews the common meaning of the word 'feminist' away from concepts of equality, merit-based evaluations, and so on. I like to think that I believe in equality among genders, not equality where some are more 'equal' than others.
To put it another way, I don't believe anyone should receive preferential treatment due to their gender, not even to make up for non-preferential treatment from prior decades. For many, that means I'm not a feminist.
I'm not a 'feminine dude'. I wouldn't even say I'm a feminist, insofar as I expect that men and women should be treated the same, not given special treatment in order to play catch up, or whatever. However, that's not what I was pointing out.
The raw numbers say women outperform men in many cases where the stereotype and common knowledge AND anti-male politicking says they don't, but only when they are aligned with the same goals we use to measure success, primarily money.
This is actually a common trend; more women graduate college, they tend to be promoted faster, they do better in male-dominated fields such as stock trading and mathematics, make better managers, business owners, etc.
Really, all this leads up to a single inescapable fact: Since women are better than men in general at white-collar tasks, they should be the primary wage earners, and men should be required to lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids. It's a more efficient solution.
There have been lots of studies about this, and one of the most telling related self-employed/small business owners based on gender lines, where men and women had relatively equal qualifications. As self-employed individuals, this avoids the potential bias of a glass ceiling or other unfair discrimination. As you'd expect in today's environment, men outperformed women on average.
However, that's not all. The study included a metric to determine the goals of the individuals; money, etc and if you split it up your comparisons based on their goal focus, you found something interesting; men tended to focus on making money, and would sacrifice vacation, schedule, family, etc to do it, while women placed higher priority on a short commute, flexible schedules, family (including child-rearing), and so on. This is all expected stereotype, not at all interesting.
What was interesting is when matched to those women who made money their motivation, men were beaten handily. In fact, once paired with same-motivation/goal, women out performed men almost across the board, achieving a higher success rate, and in general, a higher level of subjective happiness across those metrics. The averages are just skewed because more men choose money than women, and we tend to use money as an objective measure of success.
The salient point to take from this is: Men and women have different goals and motivations, and that can affect both their career choice and their apparent success in a given field to an uninvolved observer. Trying to artificially adjust this rate will probably end badly, unless you change the definition of success. However, few businesses willing to hold an employee up as 'very successful' when their primary goals include child rearing and vacation time.
As an aside, this is also why there are so few female CEOs, especially of larger, higher dollar businesses. Many of those CEO's have unbroken strings of management reaching 30-40 or more years. On the other hand, many female managers have taken time off for children, family, etc. They're not being penalized, but simply put, one individual shows a greater dedication towards advancing the business than the other.... I'd like to link to the article, but it was in a business magazine, and I couldn't find a reference to it online
Look at the populations without internet access - they're also in the population of the world that actually has to worry about starving to death, about persistent government corruption, filled with often violent superstitions and beliefs, lack of access to either medical supplies or trained medical care, completely unaware of farming or grazing techniques that were in use in the 15'th century or living literally, on piles of garbage.
You're really going to worry that these folks will potentially be uplifted in order to sell them a coke? You think they would feel taken advantage of because they can now buy a coke?
Frankly, the way in which we have treated those in the underdeveloped countries should have been made criminal. We should have focused on education with the end goal of a self-sustaining culture. Instead of education, we've provided bibles. Instead of medical training, we've taught them that condoms are evil and vaccines are just tricks by white men to infect them with aids. Instead of expert guidance, GMO crops, fertilizer and pesticides, and machinery to cultivate crops, we've given them food packets. Instead of training them to be doctors, surgeons, nurses, mechanics, lawyers, programmers, architects, - anything really - we have made sure that their death rates go down - especially childbirth, that their average age increases, and we do it all with supplies and techniques that they cannot replicate, and provide them no salable or productive skills in the meanwhile.
What we have done is vastly inflated the problem - by themselves, a poor balance was established, but now we have a massive dependent population that lacks the skills and resources required to support themselves in a reasonable way. In effect, we have traded a few thousand lives for a few million and multiplied the net total suffering in the world.
Henry Ford came up with the idea that by paying good wages and providing other benefits, his workers could become his customers. This idea is nothing new. It's impressive that with the myopic focus in the economy today on quarterly or less results, that anyone can assume that this is really capitalistic grab for customers 2 or 3 generations down the road - that's miles adrift in a sea of absurdity - but even if it is, so what? If that's a motivation that results in these people living longer, healthier, productive, HAPPIER lives, should it matter that someone down the line also wants to make a buck?
Before you think too much, realize that if you're reading this, YOU are probably already in that 'exploited' group, if that's what you want to envision it as.
So organized door-to-door mass transit, reduces the environmental impact of rush hour, reduces roadway congestion in an already congested area, removing the need to drive the commute, your fellow passengers will be co-workers, so it's expected that they'll maintain a reasonable level of public decency, and you don't have to find and subsequently pay for parking, and it's not being paid for with taxes but as a perk to attract more workers - and somehow this is a class warfare thing?
This is just a capitalistic thing.
You wanna know how you can get on those luxury buses that ferry people from point A to a company's door? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can get those big salaries that are driving the gentrification of the worst parts of town, making them safe and livable for a family? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can end up a millionaire? Have an idea, work it, and sell it or start up a company to grow it.
This isn't a class barrier, it's a time, effort, skill, and experience thing. That's how our economic system works.
It does suck that an area becoming a better class of neighborhood results in raised rents, but that is literally the price to be paid. The good news is that the more affluent individuals are in an area, the better it is for everyone. It might not increase in equal measures, but it's been well documented - average pay goes up in those areas, following the trend for cost of living.
It's not like a downtown of a city is ever going to be static. It was different than it was 20 years ago, and 20 years before that, and so on. It's always changing, and there's not anything wrong with that. Besides, what comes to mind when I think of a successful anti-gentrification trend is Detroit.
Now we have had various ample proof that parts of the government are exceeding their power, that they are literally breaking laws, and even the checks and balances of our system do nothing to detect and correct, often times due to collusion or tacit approval. We have whistleblowers pointing out these abuses, and they're to be prosecuted, and while people may cheer for them and call them heroes, little else seems to be happening. There are more protests and support rallies for these folks in foreign lands than here in the US.
It's not even complex: Parts of the government have been knowingly breaking the laws that they themselves were supposed to protect and enforce, yet they have not been put in jail, or even brought to trial. Nothing appears like it will change.
I hate to sound all tin-foil-hat-infowars-crazy, but at the point where the government decides it doesn't have to follow the law, and can do anything it wants - without even a hand-waving distraction, it's not a democracy or republic - it's authoritarian leaning towards totalitarianism. Laws were broken. Someone, perhaps whole groups of someone, need to go to jail. Claiming that it's okay because a law is open to interpretation, without question, by a government body not privileged with the power of interpreting law, and then further masking it with secrecy in part to hide the legality is right out! That's not a senate committee issue. It's black and white - trial time. If the president says he knew and explicitly approved, it's also impeachment time, followed by jail time. This isn't getting a hummer in the oval office level stuff, this is beyond Nixon-level stuff.
People turned out in the thousands for the OWS, and they didn't even have a good argument, much less any sort of attempt at a solution. Where are the thousands for this?
Look at some of the old claims from the JIT camp. Theoretically, the JIT compiler could produce optimized code after examining the runtime in action; certain methods are triggered (via data, or user interaction) more often than others, and so should be optimized even at the cost of other methods which are infrequently executed.
Current solutions to these usage patterns rely on profiling systems both prior to and during execution, and then a manual effort to understand and adapt the system - and I'm guessing most folks don't even do code profiling now a days, especially not on live systems.
So, why haven't we seen these runtime optimizing environments? Some small optimizations have been provided by certain runtimes, but they are optional and usually disabled by default, requiring human intervention to be enabled. At the heart though, it's a really hard problem to fix without a human-like understanding of the purposes of the executable, even with perfect knowledge of the system the code is currently running on.
Not only that, since many optimizations could end up being system-specific, and runtime developers don't have a focus on system-specific optimizations (in fact, quite the opposite, usually), there's not a lot of development in this direction.
Last, because the system lacks that human awareness, a given optimization has some chance that it will instead, result in a loss of efficiency, potentially even a critical one. So instead, a middle-of-the-road tact is used, and humans are relied upon to provide optimizations past that.
Like a monolithic, distributed, homogenous routing OS, theoretically a JIT runtime could provide massive increases in efficiency, but in practice, it's too hard to do, and be right. We see this problem all the time.... and that's assuming that you can get past the logistical problems of an 'intelligent' routing protocol that needs to know how your systems work (implying privacy and security concerns), as well as a necessary high adoption rate for the system to work to any real benefit.
My belief is that instead of a vast intelligent router app, we'll see more and more dumb, ad-hoc networks, and rely on a path-rich environment to provide somewhat inefficient, but 'efficient enough' routing. Autos would be a great target here, as their primary networking needs would be restricted to just those things geographically near them, making their routing requirements relatively low.
My wife used to work for a company called 'newsstand.com' that does this exact sort of thing.
I can't say that they treated their employees well, and they really embraced the whole 'outsource jobs' thing, but, yeah. They have some sort of secured reader, they manage your subscriptions, etc. You actually get an electronic version of the print version, reflowed and reformatted to properly fit a pdf reader, as opposed to a separate digital copy with less features or ads or whatever.
They're also used to dealing with publishers who can't spell IBM, though I don't know if they actually can help in those cases, at least it won't be a shock to them. So, if you or your IT staff are somehow mentally incapable, they can still handle you.
I have no idea of the pricing or anything, however.
Smart roads would fix a lot of the problems we have, with today's technology.
Delivering electricity would actually be a pretty futuristic concept compared to to-the-minute traffic analysis and management, silently collecting tolls, automatically alerting emergency crews in the case of accidents, telling driver-less cars the exact road terrain instead of relying purely on gps and cameras, and so on.
You could even set up the right arrangement of coils and such, and collect energy from passing cars to power it, just siphoning a bit off the magnetic fields (or a lot, if you want frictionless breaks in certain situations). They already do this for trains and such, so it's not a matter of "Can we?"... but no one seems to be trying to fix these otherwise hard problems this way? They spend millions of man hours trying to get a car that drives based on less clean data sources, which is a fun problem to solve, but why aren't the various industries coming together to pitch an all-in-one smart road?
I can understand the desire by many to attract more women into the CS/software dev field. I'm just not sure if the right way to do it is to emphasize one-gender-only programs. It seems to erode the basis of one of the more public goals; that women in the CS field be treated as equals with males in the CS field(*), while admittedly fulfilling other goals.
We already know how 'separate but equal' turns out.
I note above there's already a misogynistic note - even though it's just a joke - that some people are only interested if they're naked, so maybe there's a point anyway, at least in the short term.
Calling home every 24 hours, restricting games to accounts (even sharable), etc, these all required a lot of extra work to implement. As this is a commercial product, somewhere a manager has signed off on the cost of this effort, believing that this will increase profits, customer goodwill, or some other marketable resource.
Since these actually cripple existing functionality from a game-player perspective, make the product less attractive to game players, someone, somewhere must believe that some other 'customer' is going to pay more to make up the difference in lost sales, loyalty, and increased customer dissatisfaction.
It's not the retail stores, which are being cut out almost entirely - gamestop, best buy, walmart, or large rental agencies like gamefly, who's entire business model is inapplicable for xbox one games. If you can play your games at a friend's house without bringing the disc that means digital distribution for everything.
The only one that makes sense is the large game distributors, EA and their ilk.
I'd like to see the math that says EA & etc will make more money off this than will be lost. Seems like a risky gamble to alienate end customers in order to lock down a distribution channel.
The problem with all these things is not that they can't be done, but that each one of them individually exceeds the complexity of the simple mechanics of a gun, and none of them are endemic to it's functioning. This, in turn, implies that disabling those functions while retaining the gun-like features is relatively simple.
To put it another way, you can put a gps unit, friend or foe, operator ID broadcaster, fingerprint scanner, remote disable switch, etc on a car. There's nothing to stop someone who has physical access from just ripping them out though, as they're not required for the car to work.
The end result of this then is additional but relatively easily surmountable difficulty for those who wish to use the weapons illegally, while further restricting the usage by those who would have already been using it legally. End result: no significant impact.
You just can't legislate DRM on simple machines and expect it to have any real impact.
Perhaps in some science fiction world it'd be more realistic, when software functionality is somehow intrinsic to the operation of the device and making a new device from scratch is less effort than overriding an existing one. However, we're not on the bridge of the Enterprise yet.
Most of the anti-gun or gun-control measures being suggested appear to have little thought behind them. Assault weapons aren't involved with crime - they're just ~scary~. Massive restrictions on suppressor ownership didn't fix a non-existent assassination problem. So on with these trite changes that ignore the cultural or societal problems that are the root cause of gun issues such as safety and firearms crime. As the parent poster points out, what will this new functionality 'fix'?
This lack of foresight is endemic in gun debates, and we so often end up spending time, money, political capital and voter interest on or fighting non-functional 'solutions'. We appear to lack answers to even basic questions like "How much time and money is being spent to correct those few situations this technological fix claims value in?" or " Is this an efficient application of our resources?"
This is not a case of 'every little bit helps' - time and money are finite resources, and they should be spent where they achieve the best outcome. If you had a goal of reducing crimes involving handguns, spending on weapon modifications, regulations, certifications, and registrations may very well achieve your goal. It's not the only way to achieve it though - compare spending that money on education, which also has a statistical association with crime reduction. How about strengthening cultural value of marriage (single-parent homes produce more criminal children, committing more severe crimes, especially when the father is absent)?
The problem is most gun legislation right now is completely irrational. On one side we have those who are conditioned to be terrified of guns, and on the other, we have people who fear any regulation - even reasonable regulation - as a threat to their way of life, an unacceptable lockdown by big brother. Both scramble for facts, but the heart of both sides is driven by some irrational terror.
Is asking for a popular democracy to resort to fact-based reasoning too much of a stretch?
The author goes out of his way to paint free soda as a business requirement for employing developers, but that's patently ridiculous. Further, loss of free soda isn't going to be either a 'wake up call' or incite mass employee exoduses, regardless of the company. Company policies change all the time, and there's no way to predict the motivations so astutely from something that has so little impact on the bottom line. He may have been right in this case, but in my opinion, the author comes off as a self-entitled douche with a 'told-you-so' attitude based on a single personal experience and no understanding of the business motivations other than what he can assume.
In fact, based on his recollection of the dialog, I suspect most of this article was a fabrication to justify his position. "Sipping soda helps keep me in rhythm while I code. It’s hard to explain–it’s like a part of my creative process." - said no one ever.
The importance is far overblown.
Perks are just that - perks. You don't need them to do your job, to enjoy your job, or to be productive. There are plenty of companies that do fine with little to no perks, and ones that do horribly with many. The further idea that developers themselves are some sort of unique breed of employee that needs a perk ration to perform at their best is pure hubris. An employee's job is not defined as collection of perks to either the employee or the employer. It's the work that defines it, and anyone not mature enough to come to grips with that is going to have problems in a corporate environment.
That being said, occasional perks can provide short term boosts in productivity or morale. Company parties, bringing pizza in, and so on. They are demonstrations of a company or manager's respect for an employee, and make an employee feel valued far beyond the monetary worth. They can be good investments.
However, you can't just keep showing up to say 'good job' every day, and expect it to keep having an impact. Any long term perk - like free coffee or soda - will eventually become the norm. They might encourage potential new employees, but the only way those perks affect morale is negatively - if it's taken away.
Personally, I always thought it was worse when perks were unevenly applied. This class of employee gets _x_, but no one else. Seems like a big morale killer if it's not doled out fairly, with an objective merit-based system.
Right now, people have jobs; they perform work in exchange for goods, services, and more often some type of currency. In turn, currency derives it's value increasingly not from the rarity of a linked specie, but from perceived worth. It's not invalid to say that the value of money is determined by how much it's worth - in terms of goods or services - thus you have things like A big mac index.
Here's the interesting thought in all this; what happens when the value of work effectively becomes zero? What happens on the way, when 20, 50, 80 percent unemployment is reached but society suffers no scarcity of services or goods thanks to robotic workers? When the effective value of work and the linked value of money become near zero not through hyperinflation, but out of lack of need? What happens when one country achieves that before others, especially since they're the likely candidate for top world power?
Personally, I think that we'll come up with another arbitrarily determined valuation system to peg individual worth to, like reputation or creative accomplishments; the desire to compare and compete and to have a discrete scale to measure is too ingrained into us to disappear just because the index we used is meaningless. I think that a vacation lifestyle would get boring after a few months, much less a lifetime, but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
In my experience as a programmer, what sets apart acceptable developers from great ones is the ability to teach themselves new languages, frameworks, libraries, and techniques. They're self-driven, and it shows. They don't 'learn faster' - they just learn more often. You take a person like that, and in a few months they can demonstrate value several times greater than a programmer with a decade of experience.
It seems like you've already shown that sort of initiative, so I'd say you're already well on your way.
Since the job market in the US for developers is currently incredible, I'd say you'll have both job security at your current position and in the near future if you want to jump ship. Also realize that the computer stars - the 'young kids' everyone was talking about when computer programming became a popular job - they're all in their early to middle 30's now, if not older.
Personally, I don't see much agism where I've worked. What I have seen is older people bunkering up - trying to make sure they always have a job on the one thing they know, not training others, not reaching beyond it, trying to force people to do things in old, proven inefficient ways, unwilling to change, etc. I've written someone out of a job before, by removing a completely unnecessary stack of bubble sorts (4 levels deep!) that cut the runtime of a mainframe process from 22 hours to 45 minutes. They didn't know what to do when it no longer took 1 person the whole day to cajole the process through safely.
Actually, I see CSS as it stands now as the sendmail problem. Trying to accomplish in markup what amounts to an if/then statement - much less flow control - is incredibly complex as the language is not well suited for it. At some point, it's easier to write a program to do it. In comparison to what a markup language would need to be to accomplish my daily goals while writing a webapp, a programming language would be more succinct without losing readability, explicit as opposed to derived, and easier to organize and thus maintain.
I can completely understand that this could be an intimidating step to non-programmers. If all one knows is dreamweaver and photoshop, I'm sure the published CSS hacks make up their bible, and the limitations are not even questioned. To a programmer though, using CSS to describe an application's look and feel is like banging on a nuclear reactor with a stone tomahawk.
I have used media queries, and they are a great addition that gets us another step closer, but they're not the end-all, be-all. Once all the mobile devices can settle down and give us consistent and sane implementations (like not downloading every image, even those outside of the @media block), we'll be even better off, but it's still not a solution to each of my issues. Providing for statement evaluation, flow control, variables, and so on will.
As someone who's actually written desktop apps, every time I write a webapp, I'm struck by the large number of unnecessary limitations - and I'm not talking about client-server interaction.
I keep wishing for something similar to the java layout managers. The gridbaglayout - for all it's potential initial complexity - would be a boon to web application developers. Allowing an element to intelligently define it's attributes based on introspecting neighboring elements is incredibly powerful. I've been able to replicate some the functionality it provides with non-generic javascript triggering on resize or orientation change, but it's a pain, even with media queries.
What I want to do is write one set of rules, once, for how a given element should display, and media queries ends up making me write multiple separate and distinct sets of rules, which makes it harder to maintain. Anyone who's sat down and refactored CSS and the related javascript associated with a website with multiple developers knows what I'm talking about. Heck, anyone who's sat down and written the CSS to include active tab highlighting (tab for current page or menu item is visually different than the rest) knows about the sort of things you need to do to both the page and the css to get it to work.
Looked at from another way: there's a whole series of problems relating to layout and positioning, using the current system. It is totally possible to work around it now, using increasingly complex css and javascript, and in the future, using additions to CSS markup that result in the markup language slowly accreting layers of complexity. We could also just skip to the end and add standard programming features to CSS, allow for backwards compatibility, and be there already. We -should- be there already. Instead, we have pages full of 'CSS tricks' for standard layouts like liquid three columns that rely on browser-specific features or HTML-modification like unnecessary element encapsulation in outer and inner divs.
Also, to you folks who are pants-on-the-head retarded, and think that html, css, and js equals an mvc, you are incredibly wrong. Javascript plus css is what defines the view, and that goes for all javascript outside of a few frameworks like Backbone that actually implement a real Controller pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a personal gripe about folks who think that 'developer' is code for 'guy who's expected to do everything in the project'. Outside of small projects, that's not how it should work in a healthy software development lifecycle.
Developers architect and write code, and some of the topics covered in that short editorial are relevant; use of AJAX necessitates good error handling on the front end, and synchronization of client and server side validations. Sure, they may have a broad skillset besides and understand databases, and graphical design, and so on, but there's no guarantee they're the ones meant to provide those skills.
For example, QA encompasses an incredibly large set of skills, familiarity with a wide range of products, and to be fair, seems to attract folks with a different life philosophy than those who identify themselves as developers. To talk about load testing - which itself is not a simple unit test to be added to a build - as a developer's responsibility, and ignore the vast, separate set of specialized knowledge and experience required to pull it off is ignorance. To include UX and UI design, and say these too are in the developers purview is equally misguided. (in fact, most developers are really, really bad at UI/UX, for some reason)
Not that a developer couldn't do those things, or will automatically lack the knowledge or skills, but those are separate roles and separate disciplines.
So, tell a project manager that they should make sure the QA team does load testing, and tell the project manager that the UI/UX team needs to provide descriptive error messages when validation fails, and so on. Very little of this is important to someone who's currently wearing the 'developer' hat.
First, Horse_ebooks is a twitter feed.
This twitter feed started out as part of a network of spam twitter accounts to promote the (probably illegal) sale of ebooks from a russian seller. It often includes random lines of text from the ebooks that it's trying to spam/sell in an attempt to avoid being classified as spam. Basically, bayesian poisoning.
Some folks thought it was amusing because it would create odd non-sequiturs, and in the same way that people started posting zombo.com links, it perputated, though apparently only among folks with their heads way far up the twitter lower GI.
So, it was experiencing some popularity for hard to define or reproduce reasons.
At this point, 2 guys who work for internet media companies purchased the twitter account from the russian spammer who operated it, in 2011, after it had shown up in a few non-internet specific publications. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to milk commercial value from it, and continued to sporadically post from it, claiming it was some sort of art project, though it's more likely that they just never capitalized it and tried to mimic the previous behavior.
The only reason you're hearing about it now, is because these accounts are now being used as part of an alternate reality 'game', like Halo's "I Love Bees" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees ), and so are being promoted widely for that reason. I would argue that it's a 'game' per se, but whatever.
Interestingly enough, it's claimed that this was all held in great secrecy until now, yet I note nearly simultaneous news releases from a large number of primarily internet-only media sites, not just now, but previously since 2011. As if they were all in on it. Most of the recent articles have some permutation of the claim that it's a well established meme, and that it's a "persistent mystery on the internet," almost as if they were given a press release and are just regurgitating text.
Personally speaking, I'm fairly well aware of memes, and I hadn't heard of this one. Perhaps it's just because I avoided twitter? In any case, it looks and feels like someone's trying to artificially force something to become viral when it's not really that appealing to begin with.
Hopefully though, my sleuthing has saved you from having to look this stuff up and perpetuate it, and you can continue to ignore it.
I see no reason that the 'same, simple function' needs to be restricted to a single mechanism. There may be advantages to that, but we should all be familiar with the troubles inherent in treating a language as a series of immutable building blocks. All the stats show; the fastest, most secure, most quickly written, and most maintainable code relies more on the programmer being comfortable with the language and allowed to write in their own style (both of which require experience), than it does which language you pick.(*)
So, just because most java developers have no concept of memory management, and most perl, ruby, and php programmers don't understand why they should avoid nested bubblesorts (or what a bubble sort is), that doesn't mean those languages are inherently bad. I don't discount C++ simply because you need to have memorized "Effective C++" and the sequel in order to avoid memory leaks and errors in even simple constructs. Frankly, I've seen horrors written in every language I'm proficient in, and I've seen graceful implementations in each as well. I've seen a clear and easy to follow object oriented design implemented in plain ole' C, and an incredibly clean Perl sysadmin suite that had exceptional plugin support and was naturally self-documenting.
In fact, the only time I can rely on getting something horrible is when there's some all-encompassing, 'do it my way' framework, and someone has to put in nasty hacks just to get the remaining 10% to work. I've learned to only trust non-intrusive libraries and frameworks, where it's obvious that you can simply override all behavior in a pinch, or pull it apart piecemeal, and prepare for nastiness in all other cases.
So I won't discount the language based on the code some people produce in it.
However, I will say that I personally dislike whimsical code. Damned hard to read, like someone put stereo instructions in haiku form. Pisses me off worse than hungarian notation (which is likely proof of brain damage).
(*) - or in other words, the entire python credo is wrong
I used to write finance software for a living, so I've actually been responsible for putting the hooks into systems that alert and in some cases silently block these transactions. There are actual federal regulations stating we need to do this, and this isn't a new thing - this predates modern banking. The difference is that more and more international names are landing on the list.
The funny thing is that most of this tracking is astoundingly, mind numbingly bad.
I have the most experience with banking (as opposed to credit card transactions), so here's a quick explanation that works:
1) The feds provide us a list, occasionally updated. Format is a plain text file with names of suspects, 1 per line, all caps.
2) We have to do an exact match - if the name of the sender or recipient exactly equals one of the lines, then we tag it, and it's up to the bank manager to deal with it from there. They authorize or not the transaction during the end of day clearing house, or alert the feds or whomever.
That's it. It's sort of like setting up a spam blocker for an explicit email address. It's hilariously trivial.
Now, once transactions go over a certain size, those are independently reported right to the federal reserve, so those may be subject to much more analysis, but evasion is as simple as keeping transfer size low and adding an extra letter to the recipient's name.
There are some caveats; transaction often have to bounce through many entities, but tracking this way is often very difficult since there's no guarantee which ACH a given transaction is bouncing through - each bank uses it's own set based on contracts and legal agreements between countries. Reconciling source and target becomes painful, to say the least.
To recap: 1) they've always done this, 2) they don't seem to be very good at real time tracking
It's not that we can't make the technology, it's that because it's not intrinsic to the actual inner workings of the device, it will always be possible to remove it - and it's likely that it'll be easier to do so than to either put it in or protect it from removal. After all, you can have the most complex lock in the world on your ignition, but if the car thief just pops the plastic case on the steering trunk open, they can hotwire it. Why would this be any different? It may very well defer casual theft, but in the long run, it will not deter dedicated thieves or likely be worth the additional trouble it produces for the legitimate user.
Like they say about computer security - if the attacker has physical access, it simply isn't secure - look at dvd encryption schemes.
In America, at least, a stick shift would probably be a more effective deterrent vs. car theft.
Ah, is it on a case-by-case basis, that's the trick.
One of the things noted by individuals in charge of hiring was that men tended to be more aggressive in negotiation of salaries and compensation, and women were less so. This created a feedback loop where the expectation was that a woman would accept a lower salary than a man with the same qualifications - and guess what? They were right. When women act like men, however, and indicate a focus on the salary, ... ta-da ... they're given the same offers, or in today's market, often better when it's a technology hire, for diversity purposes.
In that case, they ARE being treated differently for being women, at least initially. However, they have the opportunity to confirm or deny it, and most choose to confirm it. Reports show that salary has more to do with confidence and a willingness to accept (or not) the initial offer, and through no action of the hiring groups, this appears to be split on gender lines. Women appear less confident.
There's also the issue with the 'same qualifications'. Why aren't there as many women CEO's in the top dollar companies? Well, because those CEOs have qualifications that read something like "30-40 years unbroken chain of management, most of them running companies" whereas many female managers have a resume that reads "5-10 years management, 1-2 years off to have a kid, 1-3 years management, 1-2 years to have a kid, 10-20 years management". The number of male managers that pick business over family simply dwarfs the number of females that choose the same. When a board is going to pick someone to run their multibillion dollar business, do you pick the one who has clearly shown their children are a higher priority than their career, or the one who has turned those duties over to a significant other, nanny, or other in order to focus on work?
So, I agree with some of what you said - case by case is still the way to go, each person judged entirely on their own merits, and not based on the performance of their group as a whole. Saying that the wage disparity needs to be fixed (implying it is due primary to gender) is certainly not an example of going case-by-case, but rather, judging based on a top-level statistic without understanding the reasons behind it.
What it means to be a feminist appears to be pretty subjective. For some, it means stripping is bad, and for some it means stripping is good - and those are just the extreme cases.
In my personal awareness though, most of the self-proclaimed feminists are not looking for equal treatment. They're looking for special treatment to make up for the fact that they may not have received it in the past, while still holding on to all the gender-based attitudes and differences that are advantageous to them.
I'm not saying this attitude is abhorrent - it's what anyone would do, who would advocate for making their life worse, especially if they're already down a rung or two due to sexism? I'm just saying it skews the common meaning of the word 'feminist' away from concepts of equality, merit-based evaluations, and so on. I like to think that I believe in equality among genders, not equality where some are more 'equal' than others.
To put it another way, I don't believe anyone should receive preferential treatment due to their gender, not even to make up for non-preferential treatment from prior decades. For many, that means I'm not a feminist.
I'm not a 'feminine dude'. I wouldn't even say I'm a feminist, insofar as I expect that men and women should be treated the same, not given special treatment in order to play catch up, or whatever. However, that's not what I was pointing out.
The raw numbers say women outperform men in many cases where the stereotype and common knowledge AND anti-male politicking says they don't, but only when they are aligned with the same goals we use to measure success, primarily money.
This is actually a common trend; more women graduate college, they tend to be promoted faster, they do better in male-dominated fields such as stock trading and mathematics, make better managers, business owners, etc.
Really, all this leads up to a single inescapable fact: Since women are better than men in general at white-collar tasks, they should be the primary wage earners, and men should be required to lounge at home watching tv and taking care of the kids. It's a more efficient solution.
There have been lots of studies about this, and one of the most telling related self-employed/small business owners based on gender lines, where men and women had relatively equal qualifications. As self-employed individuals, this avoids the potential bias of a glass ceiling or other unfair discrimination. As you'd expect in today's environment, men outperformed women on average.
However, that's not all. The study included a metric to determine the goals of the individuals; money, etc and if you split it up your comparisons based on their goal focus, you found something interesting; men tended to focus on making money, and would sacrifice vacation, schedule, family, etc to do it, while women placed higher priority on a short commute, flexible schedules, family (including child-rearing), and so on. This is all expected stereotype, not at all interesting.
What was interesting is when matched to those women who made money their motivation, men were beaten handily. In fact, once paired with same-motivation/goal, women out performed men almost across the board, achieving a higher success rate, and in general, a higher level of subjective happiness across those metrics. The averages are just skewed because more men choose money than women, and we tend to use money as an objective measure of success.
The salient point to take from this is: Men and women have different goals and motivations, and that can affect both their career choice and their apparent success in a given field to an uninvolved observer. Trying to artificially adjust this rate will probably end badly, unless you change the definition of success. However, few businesses willing to hold an employee up as 'very successful' when their primary goals include child rearing and vacation time.
As an aside, this is also why there are so few female CEOs, especially of larger, higher dollar businesses. Many of those CEO's have unbroken strings of management reaching 30-40 or more years. On the other hand, many female managers have taken time off for children, family, etc. They're not being penalized, but simply put, one individual shows a greater dedication towards advancing the business than the other. ... I'd like to link to the article, but it was in a business magazine, and I couldn't find a reference to it online
Look at the populations without internet access - they're also in the population of the world that actually has to worry about starving to death, about persistent government corruption, filled with often violent superstitions and beliefs, lack of access to either medical supplies or trained medical care, completely unaware of farming or grazing techniques that were in use in the 15'th century or living literally, on piles of garbage.
You're really going to worry that these folks will potentially be uplifted in order to sell them a coke? You think they would feel taken advantage of because they can now buy a coke?
Frankly, the way in which we have treated those in the underdeveloped countries should have been made criminal. We should have focused on education with the end goal of a self-sustaining culture. Instead of education, we've provided bibles. Instead of medical training, we've taught them that condoms are evil and vaccines are just tricks by white men to infect them with aids. Instead of expert guidance, GMO crops, fertilizer and pesticides, and machinery to cultivate crops, we've given them food packets. Instead of training them to be doctors, surgeons, nurses, mechanics, lawyers, programmers, architects, - anything really - we have made sure that their death rates go down - especially childbirth, that their average age increases, and we do it all with supplies and techniques that they cannot replicate, and provide them no salable or productive skills in the meanwhile.
What we have done is vastly inflated the problem - by themselves, a poor balance was established, but now we have a massive dependent population that lacks the skills and resources required to support themselves in a reasonable way. In effect, we have traded a few thousand lives for a few million and multiplied the net total suffering in the world.
Outside of fantastic natural resources (like oil, that'd help a lot!), the only realistic way to fix this problem is with abundant education, and right now, the easiest way to do that is via the internet. You don't even need real guidance. Sugata Mitra has shown that just plugging in a computer into a wall of a rural village results in children teaching themselves english and learning all on their own., and it continued when he gave them internet access.
Henry Ford came up with the idea that by paying good wages and providing other benefits, his workers could become his customers. This idea is nothing new. It's impressive that with the myopic focus in the economy today on quarterly or less results, that anyone can assume that this is really capitalistic grab for customers 2 or 3 generations down the road - that's miles adrift in a sea of absurdity - but even if it is, so what? If that's a motivation that results in these people living longer, healthier, productive, HAPPIER lives, should it matter that someone down the line also wants to make a buck?
Before you think too much, realize that if you're reading this, YOU are probably already in that 'exploited' group, if that's what you want to envision it as.
So organized door-to-door mass transit, reduces the environmental impact of rush hour, reduces roadway congestion in an already congested area, removing the need to drive the commute, your fellow passengers will be co-workers, so it's expected that they'll maintain a reasonable level of public decency, and you don't have to find and subsequently pay for parking, and it's not being paid for with taxes but as a perk to attract more workers - and somehow this is a class warfare thing?
This is just a capitalistic thing.
You wanna know how you can get on those luxury buses that ferry people from point A to a company's door? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can get those big salaries that are driving the gentrification of the worst parts of town, making them safe and livable for a family? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can end up a millionaire? Have an idea, work it, and sell it or start up a company to grow it.
This isn't a class barrier, it's a time, effort, skill, and experience thing. That's how our economic system works.
It does suck that an area becoming a better class of neighborhood results in raised rents, but that is literally the price to be paid. The good news is that the more affluent individuals are in an area, the better it is for everyone. It might not increase in equal measures, but it's been well documented - average pay goes up in those areas, following the trend for cost of living.
It's not like a downtown of a city is ever going to be static. It was different than it was 20 years ago, and 20 years before that, and so on. It's always changing, and there's not anything wrong with that. Besides, what comes to mind when I think of a successful anti-gentrification trend is Detroit.
You don't want to end up like them.
Now we have had various ample proof that parts of the government are exceeding their power, that they are literally breaking laws, and even the checks and balances of our system do nothing to detect and correct, often times due to collusion or tacit approval . We have whistleblowers pointing out these abuses, and they're to be prosecuted, and while people may cheer for them and call them heroes, little else seems to be happening. There are more protests and support rallies for these folks in foreign lands than here in the US.
It's not even complex: Parts of the government have been knowingly breaking the laws that they themselves were supposed to protect and enforce, yet they have not been put in jail, or even brought to trial. Nothing appears like it will change.
I hate to sound all tin-foil-hat-infowars-crazy, but at the point where the government decides it doesn't have to follow the law, and can do anything it wants - without even a hand-waving distraction, it's not a democracy or republic - it's authoritarian leaning towards totalitarianism. Laws were broken. Someone, perhaps whole groups of someone, need to go to jail. Claiming that it's okay because a law is open to interpretation, without question, by a government body not privileged with the power of interpreting law, and then further masking it with secrecy in part to hide the legality is right out! That's not a senate committee issue. It's black and white - trial time. If the president says he knew and explicitly approved, it's also impeachment time, followed by jail time. This isn't getting a hummer in the oval office level stuff, this is beyond Nixon-level stuff.
People turned out in the thousands for the OWS, and they didn't even have a good argument, much less any sort of attempt at a solution. Where are the thousands for this?
Look at some of the old claims from the JIT camp. Theoretically, the JIT compiler could produce optimized code after examining the runtime in action; certain methods are triggered (via data, or user interaction) more often than others, and so should be optimized even at the cost of other methods which are infrequently executed.
Current solutions to these usage patterns rely on profiling systems both prior to and during execution, and then a manual effort to understand and adapt the system - and I'm guessing most folks don't even do code profiling now a days, especially not on live systems.
So, why haven't we seen these runtime optimizing environments? Some small optimizations have been provided by certain runtimes, but they are optional and usually disabled by default, requiring human intervention to be enabled. At the heart though, it's a really hard problem to fix without a human-like understanding of the purposes of the executable, even with perfect knowledge of the system the code is currently running on.
Not only that, since many optimizations could end up being system-specific, and runtime developers don't have a focus on system-specific optimizations (in fact, quite the opposite, usually), there's not a lot of development in this direction.
Last, because the system lacks that human awareness, a given optimization has some chance that it will instead, result in a loss of efficiency, potentially even a critical one. So instead, a middle-of-the-road tact is used, and humans are relied upon to provide optimizations past that.
Like a monolithic, distributed, homogenous routing OS, theoretically a JIT runtime could provide massive increases in efficiency, but in practice, it's too hard to do, and be right. We see this problem all the time. ... and that's assuming that you can get past the logistical problems of an 'intelligent' routing protocol that needs to know how your systems work (implying privacy and security concerns), as well as a necessary high adoption rate for the system to work to any real benefit.
My belief is that instead of a vast intelligent router app, we'll see more and more dumb, ad-hoc networks, and rely on a path-rich environment to provide somewhat inefficient, but 'efficient enough' routing. Autos would be a great target here, as their primary networking needs would be restricted to just those things geographically near them, making their routing requirements relatively low.
My wife used to work for a company called 'newsstand.com' that does this exact sort of thing.
I can't say that they treated their employees well, and they really embraced the whole 'outsource jobs' thing, but, yeah. They have some sort of secured reader, they manage your subscriptions, etc. You actually get an electronic version of the print version, reflowed and reformatted to properly fit a pdf reader, as opposed to a separate digital copy with less features or ads or whatever.
They're also used to dealing with publishers who can't spell IBM, though I don't know if they actually can help in those cases, at least it won't be a shock to them. So, if you or your IT staff are somehow mentally incapable, they can still handle you.
I have no idea of the pricing or anything, however.
then the problem is how do we get smart roads?
Smart roads would fix a lot of the problems we have, with today's technology.
Delivering electricity would actually be a pretty futuristic concept compared to to-the-minute traffic analysis and management, silently collecting tolls, automatically alerting emergency crews in the case of accidents, telling driver-less cars the exact road terrain instead of relying purely on gps and cameras, and so on.
You could even set up the right arrangement of coils and such, and collect energy from passing cars to power it, just siphoning a bit off the magnetic fields (or a lot, if you want frictionless breaks in certain situations). They already do this for trains and such, so it's not a matter of "Can we?" ... but no one seems to be trying to fix these otherwise hard problems this way? They spend millions of man hours trying to get a car that drives based on less clean data sources, which is a fun problem to solve, but why aren't the various industries coming together to pitch an all-in-one smart road?
I can understand the desire by many to attract more women into the CS/software dev field. I'm just not sure if the right way to do it is to emphasize one-gender-only programs. It seems to erode the basis of one of the more public goals; that women in the CS field be treated as equals with males in the CS field(*), while admittedly fulfilling other goals.
We already know how 'separate but equal' turns out.
I note above there's already a misogynistic note - even though it's just a joke - that some people are only interested if they're naked, so maybe there's a point anyway, at least in the short term.
Calling home every 24 hours, restricting games to accounts (even sharable), etc, these all required a lot of extra work to implement. As this is a commercial product, somewhere a manager has signed off on the cost of this effort, believing that this will increase profits, customer goodwill, or some other marketable resource.
Since these actually cripple existing functionality from a game-player perspective, make the product less attractive to game players, someone, somewhere must believe that some other 'customer' is going to pay more to make up the difference in lost sales, loyalty, and increased customer dissatisfaction.
It's not the retail stores, which are being cut out almost entirely - gamestop, best buy, walmart, or large rental agencies like gamefly, who's entire business model is inapplicable for xbox one games. If you can play your games at a friend's house without bringing the disc that means digital distribution for everything.
The only one that makes sense is the large game distributors, EA and their ilk.
I'd like to see the math that says EA & etc will make more money off this than will be lost. Seems like a risky gamble to alienate end customers in order to lock down a distribution channel.
The problem with all these things is not that they can't be done, but that each one of them individually exceeds the complexity of the simple mechanics of a gun, and none of them are endemic to it's functioning. This, in turn, implies that disabling those functions while retaining the gun-like features is relatively simple.
To put it another way, you can put a gps unit, friend or foe, operator ID broadcaster, fingerprint scanner, remote disable switch, etc on a car. There's nothing to stop someone who has physical access from just ripping them out though, as they're not required for the car to work.
The end result of this then is additional but relatively easily surmountable difficulty for those who wish to use the weapons illegally, while further restricting the usage by those who would have already been using it legally. End result: no significant impact.
You just can't legislate DRM on simple machines and expect it to have any real impact.
Perhaps in some science fiction world it'd be more realistic, when software functionality is somehow intrinsic to the operation of the device and making a new device from scratch is less effort than overriding an existing one. However, we're not on the bridge of the Enterprise yet.
Most of the anti-gun or gun-control measures being suggested appear to have little thought behind them. Assault weapons aren't involved with crime - they're just ~scary~. Massive restrictions on suppressor ownership didn't fix a non-existent assassination problem. So on with these trite changes that ignore the cultural or societal problems that are the root cause of gun issues such as safety and firearms crime. As the parent poster points out, what will this new functionality 'fix'?
This lack of foresight is endemic in gun debates, and we so often end up spending time, money, political capital and voter interest on or fighting non-functional 'solutions'. We appear to lack answers to even basic questions like "How much time and money is being spent to correct those few situations this technological fix claims value in?" or " Is this an efficient application of our resources?"
This is not a case of 'every little bit helps' - time and money are finite resources, and they should be spent where they achieve the best outcome. If you had a goal of reducing crimes involving handguns, spending on weapon modifications, regulations, certifications, and registrations may very well achieve your goal. It's not the only way to achieve it though - compare spending that money on education, which also has a statistical association with crime reduction. How about strengthening cultural value of marriage (single-parent homes produce more criminal children, committing more severe crimes, especially when the father is absent)?
The problem is most gun legislation right now is completely irrational. On one side we have those who are conditioned to be terrified of guns, and on the other, we have people who fear any regulation - even reasonable regulation - as a threat to their way of life, an unacceptable lockdown by big brother. Both scramble for facts, but the heart of both sides is driven by some irrational terror.
Is asking for a popular democracy to resort to fact-based reasoning too much of a stretch?
The author goes out of his way to paint free soda as a business requirement for employing developers, but that's patently ridiculous. Further, loss of free soda isn't going to be either a 'wake up call' or incite mass employee exoduses, regardless of the company. Company policies change all the time, and there's no way to predict the motivations so astutely from something that has so little impact on the bottom line. He may have been right in this case, but in my opinion, the author comes off as a self-entitled douche with a 'told-you-so' attitude based on a single personal experience and no understanding of the business motivations other than what he can assume.
In fact, based on his recollection of the dialog, I suspect most of this article was a fabrication to justify his position. "Sipping soda helps keep me in rhythm while I code. It’s hard to explain–it’s like a part of my creative process." - said no one ever.
The importance is far overblown.
Perks are just that - perks. You don't need them to do your job, to enjoy your job, or to be productive. There are plenty of companies that do fine with little to no perks, and ones that do horribly with many. The further idea that developers themselves are some sort of unique breed of employee that needs a perk ration to perform at their best is pure hubris. An employee's job is not defined as collection of perks to either the employee or the employer. It's the work that defines it, and anyone not mature enough to come to grips with that is going to have problems in a corporate environment.
That being said, occasional perks can provide short term boosts in productivity or morale. Company parties, bringing pizza in, and so on. They are demonstrations of a company or manager's respect for an employee, and make an employee feel valued far beyond the monetary worth. They can be good investments.
However, you can't just keep showing up to say 'good job' every day, and expect it to keep having an impact. Any long term perk - like free coffee or soda - will eventually become the norm. They might encourage potential new employees, but the only way those perks affect morale is negatively - if it's taken away.
Personally, I always thought it was worse when perks were unevenly applied. This class of employee gets _x_, but no one else. Seems like a big morale killer if it's not doled out fairly, with an objective merit-based system.
Right now, people have jobs; they perform work in exchange for goods, services, and more often some type of currency.
In turn, currency derives it's value increasingly not from the rarity of a linked specie, but from perceived worth. It's not invalid to say that the value of money is determined by how much it's worth - in terms of goods or services - thus you have things like A big mac index.
Here's the interesting thought in all this; what happens when the value of work effectively becomes zero? What happens on the way, when 20, 50, 80 percent unemployment is reached but society suffers no scarcity of services or goods thanks to robotic workers? When the effective value of work and the linked value of money become near zero not through hyperinflation, but out of lack of need? What happens when one country achieves that before others, especially since they're the likely candidate for top world power?
Personally, I think that we'll come up with another arbitrarily determined valuation system to peg individual worth to, like reputation or creative accomplishments; the desire to compare and compete and to have a discrete scale to measure is too ingrained into us to disappear just because the index we used is meaningless. I think that a vacation lifestyle would get boring after a few months, much less a lifetime, but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
What do you folks think?
In my experience as a programmer, what sets apart acceptable developers from great ones is the ability to teach themselves new languages, frameworks, libraries, and techniques. They're self-driven, and it shows. They don't 'learn faster' - they just learn more often. You take a person like that, and in a few months they can demonstrate value several times greater than a programmer with a decade of experience.
It seems like you've already shown that sort of initiative, so I'd say you're already well on your way.
Since the job market in the US for developers is currently incredible, I'd say you'll have both job security at your current position and in the near future if you want to jump ship. Also realize that the computer stars - the 'young kids' everyone was talking about when computer programming became a popular job - they're all in their early to middle 30's now, if not older.
Personally, I don't see much agism where I've worked. What I have seen is older people bunkering up - trying to make sure they always have a job on the one thing they know, not training others, not reaching beyond it, trying to force people to do things in old, proven inefficient ways, unwilling to change, etc. I've written someone out of a job before, by removing a completely unnecessary stack of bubble sorts (4 levels deep!) that cut the runtime of a mainframe process from 22 hours to 45 minutes. They didn't know what to do when it no longer took 1 person the whole day to cajole the process through safely.
So, don't do that, and you should be fine.
Actually, I see CSS as it stands now as the sendmail problem. Trying to accomplish in markup what amounts to an if/then statement - much less flow control - is incredibly complex as the language is not well suited for it. At some point, it's easier to write a program to do it. In comparison to what a markup language would need to be to accomplish my daily goals while writing a webapp, a programming language would be more succinct without losing readability, explicit as opposed to derived, and easier to organize and thus maintain.
I can completely understand that this could be an intimidating step to non-programmers. If all one knows is dreamweaver and photoshop, I'm sure the published CSS hacks make up their bible, and the limitations are not even questioned. To a programmer though, using CSS to describe an application's look and feel is like banging on a nuclear reactor with a stone tomahawk.
I have used media queries, and they are a great addition that gets us another step closer, but they're not the end-all, be-all. Once all the mobile devices can settle down and give us consistent and sane implementations (like not downloading every image, even those outside of the @media block), we'll be even better off, but it's still not a solution to each of my issues. Providing for statement evaluation, flow control, variables, and so on will.
As someone who's actually written desktop apps, every time I write a webapp, I'm struck by the large number of unnecessary limitations - and I'm not talking about client-server interaction.
I keep wishing for something similar to the java layout managers. The gridbaglayout - for all it's potential initial complexity - would be a boon to web application developers. Allowing an element to intelligently define it's attributes based on introspecting neighboring elements is incredibly powerful. I've been able to replicate some the functionality it provides with non-generic javascript triggering on resize or orientation change, but it's a pain, even with media queries.
What I want to do is write one set of rules, once, for how a given element should display, and media queries ends up making me write multiple separate and distinct sets of rules, which makes it harder to maintain. Anyone who's sat down and refactored CSS and the related javascript associated with a website with multiple developers knows what I'm talking about. Heck, anyone who's sat down and written the CSS to include active tab highlighting (tab for current page or menu item is visually different than the rest) knows about the sort of things you need to do to both the page and the css to get it to work.
Looked at from another way: there's a whole series of problems relating to layout and positioning, using the current system. It is totally possible to work around it now, using increasingly complex css and javascript, and in the future, using additions to CSS markup that result in the markup language slowly accreting layers of complexity. We could also just skip to the end and add standard programming features to CSS, allow for backwards compatibility, and be there already. We -should- be there already. Instead, we have pages full of 'CSS tricks' for standard layouts like liquid three columns that rely on browser-specific features or HTML-modification like unnecessary element encapsulation in outer and inner divs.
Also, to you folks who are pants-on-the-head retarded, and think that html, css, and js equals an mvc, you are incredibly wrong. Javascript plus css is what defines the view, and that goes for all javascript outside of a few frameworks like Backbone that actually implement a real Controller pattern.