I'm also in the Valley and I think the Valley is quite different from most of the US. Companies here tend to value truth, openness and competence. In other places, especially the East Coast, yes-men thrive.
I can't speak for the people you know, but Yahoo's search engine is better than Google's; it does a better job filtering out keyword spam. And Yahoo has a nice clean interface at search.yahoo.com.
You haven't had to call tech support in ten years...
That's not what I said. I said I hadn't had to call tech support for a piece of electronics. I've had to call ISP tech support, and had very good service because I picked my ISPs based on reviews. What kind of electronics are you buying that needs phone tech support?
...so therefore all these tech support centers are unnecessary???
I neither said nor implied that. What I did imply is that it's wrong to weave one's bad experiences with tech support into some generalized doom and gloom scenario. In any era, certain sectors of industry will suck.
And bad credit is all the consumers fault? Is that why the Fed is going to stop reporting a lot of the M3 statistics, like was announced a week or so ago??
I said nothing about bad credit. People who are drowning in debt usually have great credit. I don't know the M3. I do know lots of people who are fascinated by things they can buy, whether clothes, Tivos, ipods, or frequent expensive restaurant meals. Buying luxuries on credit is obviously not a path to wealth.
And you are assuming everyone who is at slashdot is a white collar IT worker in silicon valley??
I am speaking from what I know. My area and industry were hardest hit by the last recession and were the last to bounce back. California still has above average unemployment (5.2% vs 5.0%). So my experience does not confirm the doom and gloom scenario.
It's an openly made, legally authorized payment, to the government, not to an individual. Your statement makes me think you have no idea what real bribery is. When a country is infected with bribery, nothing works well. Every civil servant is out for himself.
Seems like a bunch of misplaced angst. Unemployment is low in the US. See figures. For good programmers in Silicon Valley, there are lots of jobs, which is a nice contrast after the recession.
I haven't needed to call tech support for any electronics in the last 10 years or so, nor have I found things to be generally crap - maybe I just research more than you before buying.
If people have a lot of credit card debt, that's usually their fault, and can't be blamed on outsourcing.
Trying to block globalization is just the classic error of protectionism - a recipe for bloat and inefficiency. The countries that are trying it are almost always doing worse than the U.S.
I think you've fallen victim to the relentless negativity of our media.
Los Angeles used to have a "Code 2 High" designation for most police calls, meaning no lights and siren. Your area probably has something like that. For many calls, it's better if the officers don't alert everyone to their presence.
If the police bend some traffic laws on that type of call, I file that under showing initiative for the greater good.
And yes, if you hit him you'd be in the wrong - not because he's a cop, but because you had the last clear chance to avoid the accident. At least that's the law in places I've lived.
But, I'm not wealthy, and any misjudgements I make may well ruin me when I swoop in to buy, vulture-like...Also, buying cheap is an easy game, if you're wealthy, because up or down, you're fine...
You seem to be saying that you've hit on a great way to make money, but it only works for billionaires. However, if you can turn 1 billion into 1.1 billion in the stock market, I think you can turn 10k into 11k with the same risk level. You seem to think that richer investors can afford more risk. That's not true. I'm kind of groping for words to illustrate the fallacy here.
Investment timeframe and size of investment are two orthogonal concepts. If you are 20 years old and saving for retirement, you invest in something that offers the right tradeoff of risk and long term gain over 40 years. But if you're planning to buy a house in 4 years, and just don't want your money sitting idle, you buy assets that are not likely to be in a dip four years from now. You will not get as good a risk/reward package as the long term investor. This logic applies whether you have 10k to invest or 10 billion.
Now, the concept that time will always rescue a bad investment is not true. A smart investor, big or small, will cut his losses rather than ride a bad investment all the way down. Have you ever looked at the "double down" system used by some gamblers? At first it sounds unbeatable - every time you lose, you double your bet. Eventually you must win, and N - (N/2 + N/4 +...) = 1. When you actually simulate it, you find that you can lose your entire stake by running out of money. Which might make you think that billionaires could always win. But it turns out that whatever size bet you start with, you're trading an X% chance of losing your entire stake for an X% gain if you don't lose.
...while the wealthy play the waiting game, sitting on stocks and depressed properties, waiting for the ships to come in, the job market will collapse...
According to your earlier scenario, the wealthy are out of the market right now, but will buy heavily after a crash. Well, after a crash, buying heavily helps reinvigorate the market. After a crash, you hope there's someone who will buy heavily. So, a crash could hurt the job market, but the only help for the job market is investors having confidence and buying back in. So if you must imagine a gloomy scenario, say rather that the wealthy are heavily invested now, and will dump everything in a crash, causing the economy to bottom out.
Now here's the other doom and gloom scenario: you keep your money in the mattress, waiting for the crash that never comes, while the economy roars past you. The billionaires become multibillionaires because they follow basic investment advice, the kind that's in hundreds of books.
When the economy tanks in the next year or so, all that hoarded wealth will be released to purchase stock and real estate at greatly deflated prices. They'll make a bundle on our economic disaster...
Assuming that the "tanking" of the economy will be a recession/depression with lowered demand, what is the effect on such a recession of spending a great deal of hoarded wealth? Isn't this just the classical "shock absorber" effect of buying when things are cheap and selling when things are expensive?
And since you've figured out that one can "make a bundle" by buying cheap, why don't you apply your insight to the stock market? Follow a volatile stock, and when it "tanks" buy heavily. You should make a bundle, right?
Problem is, buying is an act of faith. Just because something tanked yesterday doesn't mean it's going up tomorrow - it might tank even more tomorrow.
Re:Backgrounds of the PHP developers.
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
I agree with your distinction between langauge design skills and programming skills. But maybe you missed an important point: the experts who have studied the field thoroughly don't always create useful stuff for the rest of us.
Remember Tanenbaum's comments on Linux? Well, Linux works well in tons of applications despite being completely unsatisfactory to one of the world's leading OS experts. Same for Perl and PHP. They're practical, but ugly.
If PHP didn't exist, most of the PHP apps wouldn't be beautifully written in C++. They just wouldn't be written at all, and the world would be poorer for it. Also, much of what's written in PHP will be thrown out within months of completion. Why pour time into "properly" writing something with a short lifespan?
I even went as far as rewriting the entire system with the most optimised PHP code possible...
Did you profile the system, before or after, to find out where the slowness was? If your code improvements made the system get faster, what made it get slower? Increasing traffic?
What makes you think that having transactions would improve performance? There are good reasons for wanting transactions, but performance is not one.
My best guess is that OSM is an attempt by several right-wing bloggers to band together so they can a) hire reporters (I think they have one guy in Lebanon) and b) sell ads without giving a cut to Google/Yahoo.
I disagree - they're not equal opportunity by any means. They do often attack conservative folly, but not as often as liberal. As for Team America (which was awesome) - the Team are unambiguously the heros of the movie, despite their clumsiness, overblown patriotism, and "very bad intelligence." Parker and Stone poke gentle fun at Red America. But the anti-American actors are portrayed as unredeemably foolish, spoiled and evil, and are violently killed.
Back to South Park: Looking at part of Season 5, C=conservative, L=liberal:
Scott Tenorman: C focuses on Cartman's evil nature; by implication, condemns his single-parent family.
It Hits the Fan: C Opposes widespread cursing.
Cripple Fight: ??
Super Best Friends: L Mocks religion
Terrance and Phillip: Behind The Blow: ??
Cartmanland: C Cartman's evil nature again, plus lessons in microeconomics.
Proper Condom Use: C Opposes sex ed.
Towelie: C Opposes pot.
Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants: ??
I see one Liberal and 5 Conservative. May be an unrepresentative sample.
I'd say a liberal in the US today is roughly one who believes:
Aggression by the US is never justified.
Aggression against the US is always justified. Well, not justified exactly, but "we must ask why they hate us."
Whenever the US disagrees with the UN or the EU or France, the US is wrong. The US must pass a "global test."
We are engaged in progress, which means moving away from traditional society towards an ideal society. Every part of traditional society, such as the nuclear family, religion, and respect for authority, is bad.
Conflicts are generally caused by misunderstanding, or one of the combatants lacking money or education. Therefore it would be foolish to oppose violence with violence, or to punish those who initiate conflicts.
Anyone who belongs to a "victim group" should develop a sense of group identity and resentment, and constantly demand more from society. Everyone else should accomodate the demands.
Every woman has a "right to choose" - meaning a right to abortion.
Informed dissent from the above views simply doesn't exist. There is a tiny group of wealthy manipulators who pretend otherwise, purely for financial advantage. There is a much larger group of unfortunate dupes who vote against the liberal platform (which actually represents their interests) because the manipulators have hoodwinked them.
There's much more, but I think that's adequate to identify the genus.
I find South Park quite watchable, although (or because) it's often a thinly disguised swipe at liberals. But South Park is not on the same level as The Prisoner. The Prisoner is real art, and says something universal about man and civilization.
In case the producers of the new show are reading, here are my suggestions:
Add a sultry female co-star, #7. Initially, she and #6 suspect each other of being spies for #2. Develop inevitable romantic plot. She tends to bail out #6 when he screws up his plans. Optionally, wrap in black leather.
Use monumental, fascist-inspired sets with towering spires, grim tunnels and riveted doors. Light dramatically. Every footstep must echo loudly and every slamming door must sound like a dumpster being dropped by the garbage truck.
Make each #2 a caricature of utter, unsympathetic evil, ala Voldemort in Harry Potter. Optionally, monsterize #2's face with latex appliances.
Replace Rover with a hi-tech CGI robot that floats around firing laser beams.
Highlight #6's human side via friendships with other inmates. Feature sticky scenes of sentiment in which #6 exchanges a manly hug with his buddy before one of them heads off to near-certain death.
Use the show as a megaphone for the political issue du jour. Frex, have #2 refuse to sign the Kyoto treaty, whereupon the island becomes choked with pollution until #6 persuads him to sign. Of course, there must be a "vote fraud" episode.
Add montages with hip-hop and rock.
Replace the ironic distance of McGoohan with someone more meaty, sweaty, earthy and hunky. Let him bellow from the diaphragm, "Like, it's so lame being a number! I'm an individual!".
For all the political grandstanding people are putting in shows these days, I seriously doubt that a remake would be able to maintain enough aloofness as to preserve an elusive point.
Exactly. McGoohan was so zealously independent and iconoclastic that The Prisoner remains accessible to any individual feeling at odds with a totalist environment, whether that environment is liberal, conservative commercial or whatever. The TV makers of today couldn't resist mixing in their dislike of Bush, Christians, etc. That would prevent the new show from enjoying the wide-ranging and long-lasting appeal of the old.
Of course there's also the inevitable addition of sex, sticky sentimentality, bogus ethical dilemmas, and cheap laffs.
First of all, how many developers do you have? Few enough to fit in a conference room? How many languages? Do all the developers know all the languages, or are they fragmented into language communities?
The first step is to assess the current situation - what coding practices are currently in use? What do the developers want? Can you roughly group the existing codebase into various standards, plus a pile of incoherent crap? Is it worth while rewriting the crap portion to the new standards?
Second, decide what level of standardization you want to achieve. The more detailed your standards, the more difficult and risky. You will probably make some wrong decisions, and they will irritate developers now or in the future. However, if all your developers code in the same language, and several of you are experts, you may be able to write detailed standards and get it right.
Third, identify relevant references. If you're working with Perl, Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices is a good choice. In C++, Meyers' Effective C++ series is good.
In general, micro-standards will not be successful. Instead of trying to make everyone use the same indentation or something, you'll get the most bang for the buck by focusing on high level issues. For example:
Require at least one Wiki page for each piece of software; in addition to any docs on how to use the software, this is a page on how the software works internally.
Keep code units to a reasonable size, with a clear interface. Reduces chaos, and lets you rewrite one unit from scratch if it's written horribly.
Require a peer code review of each code unit. Persuade the reviewers to read the code before the meeting so you get more than off-the-cuff comments. Experienced programmers may disagree about indentation, but they generally agree about things that really shouldn't be in your code. Comments from these reviews may crystallize into a de facto standard.
This article is long; I read up to the quote from Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC. Whiteacre said obvious and sensible things:
Google, Yahoo, etc. have to pay for transport. That money goes to the pipe owners.
If a cable TV company can offer phone services without paying the city a franchise fee, AT&T should be able to offer TV service without paying the city a franchise fee.
Somehow, Searls extracted some hideous meaning from these comments. He wants to ask Whiteacre a bunch of deep questions about the Net and freedom. I don't think Whiteacre could answer any of them; nor should he.
Why don't they apply this law to their corporate donors that ignore copyright law when they think they can. Most of them do it
Why does this bullshit get modded up? Give me some examples of these corporate donors "ignoring" copyright law - by which I assume you mean infringing.
On what do you base this claim besides your masochistic fantasies? There's certainly no shortage of "Criticising the government or protesting a war" - where are the unjust prosecutions of these critics and protesters?
I'd be more than willing to bet (which, by the way, is also illegal where I live) that more people are killed each year by excessive speed than by excessive downloading.
OK, so let's legalize everything that doesn't kill as many people per year as speeding. Shoplifting, fraud, embezzlement, larceny. Maybe even murder.
Or recognize that your test makes no sense, much like the opinion (expressed several times) that the US shouldn't crack down on copyright infringement until it catches Osama. We're capable of pursuing more than one objective at a time.
Don't blame this one on socialism. Read this.. American libel law's deviation from it's English parentage began before the American revolution, and well before socialism.
I think it's true to say that placing a greater burden on the libel plaintiff is consistent with the USA's high regard for freedom of speech.
That was my first inclination, too. But I read what seems to be the page in question, and her claims are mostly specific, minor and down-to-earth. The company's claim that she is "high-handed" didn't really ring true. Either she is lying about very specific events, like:
At 5:47 I spotted a high level of debris that has obviously been left uncleaned for a rather long time located at 586 Violet St.
or the company is improperly using a libel suit to silence a legitimate critic.
She is a bit overzealous, treating each drop of diesel spilled as a life-threatening calamity, but she appears to have the law on her side.
The ad was targeting commercial Unix, and asserting that it's expensive and inflexible compared to Wintel. In fact, the ad was right.
Intel/AMD is advancing much faster than proprietary RISC. PC-based servers deliver much better value. Don't use Windows where you can use Linux/BSD (slashdotters cheer); don't use Sun where you can use Windows (slashdotters boo).
So there's not really an "about face" in Unisys's later support of Linux - its a continued drive away from expensive, proprietary and inflexible systems.
The whole concept of "who has more to lose" is ridiculous anyway. No matter what the US or the UN do, people will find a way to keep the networks connected. Neither the US nor the EU is going to enact criminal penalties for connecting to the "other network", so businesses will just find a way to paper over the gap, just as they do with telephone systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also in the Valley and I think the Valley is quite different from most of the US. Companies here tend to value truth, openness and competence. In other places, especially the East Coast, yes-men thrive.
I can't speak for the people you know, but Yahoo's search engine is better than Google's; it does a better job filtering out keyword spam. And Yahoo has a nice clean interface at search.yahoo.com.
That's not what I said. I said I hadn't had to call tech support for a piece of electronics. I've had to call ISP tech support, and had very good service because I picked my ISPs based on reviews. What kind of electronics are you buying that needs phone tech support?
I neither said nor implied that. What I did imply is that it's wrong to weave one's bad experiences with tech support into some generalized doom and gloom scenario. In any era, certain sectors of industry will suck.
I said nothing about bad credit. People who are drowning in debt usually have great credit. I don't know the M3. I do know lots of people who are fascinated by things they can buy, whether clothes, Tivos, ipods, or frequent expensive restaurant meals. Buying luxuries on credit is obviously not a path to wealth.
I am speaking from what I know. My area and industry were hardest hit by the last recession and were the last to bounce back. California still has above average unemployment (5.2% vs 5.0%). So my experience does not confirm the doom and gloom scenario.
It's an openly made, legally authorized payment, to the government, not to an individual. Your statement makes me think you have no idea what real bribery is. When a country is infected with bribery, nothing works well. Every civil servant is out for himself.
Seems like a bunch of misplaced angst. Unemployment is low in the US. See figures. For good programmers in Silicon Valley, there are lots of jobs, which is a nice contrast after the recession.
I haven't needed to call tech support for any electronics in the last 10 years or so, nor have I found things to be generally crap - maybe I just research more than you before buying.
If people have a lot of credit card debt, that's usually their fault, and can't be blamed on outsourcing.
Trying to block globalization is just the classic error of protectionism - a recipe for bloat and inefficiency. The countries that are trying it are almost always doing worse than the U.S.
I think you've fallen victim to the relentless negativity of our media.
Los Angeles used to have a "Code 2 High" designation for most police calls, meaning no lights and siren. Your area probably has something like that. For many calls, it's better if the officers don't alert everyone to their presence.
If the police bend some traffic laws on that type of call, I file that under showing initiative for the greater good.
And yes, if you hit him you'd be in the wrong - not because he's a cop, but because you had the last clear chance to avoid the accident. At least that's the law in places I've lived.
You seem to be saying that you've hit on a great way to make money, but it only works for billionaires. However, if you can turn 1 billion into 1.1 billion in the stock market, I think you can turn 10k into 11k with the same risk level. You seem to think that richer investors can afford more risk. That's not true. I'm kind of groping for words to illustrate the fallacy here.
Investment timeframe and size of investment are two orthogonal concepts. If you are 20 years old and saving for retirement, you invest in something that offers the right tradeoff of risk and long term gain over 40 years. But if you're planning to buy a house in 4 years, and just don't want your money sitting idle, you buy assets that are not likely to be in a dip four years from now. You will not get as good a risk/reward package as the long term investor. This logic applies whether you have 10k to invest or 10 billion.
Now, the concept that time will always rescue a bad investment is not true. A smart investor, big or small, will cut his losses rather than ride a bad investment all the way down. Have you ever looked at the "double down" system used by some gamblers? At first it sounds unbeatable - every time you lose, you double your bet. Eventually you must win, and N - (N/2 + N/4 +
According to your earlier scenario, the wealthy are out of the market right now, but will buy heavily after a crash. Well, after a crash, buying heavily helps reinvigorate the market. After a crash, you hope there's someone who will buy heavily. So, a crash could hurt the job market, but the only help for the job market is investors having confidence and buying back in. So if you must imagine a gloomy scenario, say rather that the wealthy are heavily invested now, and will dump everything in a crash, causing the economy to bottom out.
Now here's the other doom and gloom scenario: you keep your money in the mattress, waiting for the crash that never comes, while the economy roars past you. The billionaires become multibillionaires because they follow basic investment advice, the kind that's in hundreds of books.
Assuming that the "tanking" of the economy will be a recession/depression with lowered demand, what is the effect on such a recession of spending a great deal of hoarded wealth? Isn't this just the classical "shock absorber" effect of buying when things are cheap and selling when things are expensive?
And since you've figured out that one can "make a bundle" by buying cheap, why don't you apply your insight to the stock market? Follow a volatile stock, and when it "tanks" buy heavily. You should make a bundle, right?
Problem is, buying is an act of faith. Just because something tanked yesterday doesn't mean it's going up tomorrow - it might tank even more tomorrow.
I agree with your distinction between langauge design skills and programming skills. But maybe you missed an important point: the experts who have studied the field thoroughly don't always create useful stuff for the rest of us.
Remember Tanenbaum's comments on Linux? Well, Linux works well in tons of applications despite being completely unsatisfactory to one of the world's leading OS experts. Same for Perl and PHP. They're practical, but ugly.
If PHP didn't exist, most of the PHP apps wouldn't be beautifully written in C++. They just wouldn't be written at all, and the world would be poorer for it. Also, much of what's written in PHP will be thrown out within months of completion. Why pour time into "properly" writing something with a short lifespan?
Did you profile the system, before or after, to find out where the slowness was? If your code improvements made the system get faster, what made it get slower? Increasing traffic?
What makes you think that having transactions would improve performance? There are good reasons for wanting transactions, but performance is not one.
My best guess is that OSM is an attempt by several right-wing bloggers to band together so they can a) hire reporters (I think they have one guy in Lebanon) and b) sell ads without giving a cut to Google/Yahoo.
Back to South Park: Looking at part of Season 5, C=conservative, L=liberal:
I see one Liberal and 5 Conservative. May be an unrepresentative sample.
There's much more, but I think that's adequate to identify the genus.
I find South Park quite watchable, although (or because) it's often a thinly disguised swipe at liberals. But South Park is not on the same level as The Prisoner. The Prisoner is real art, and says something universal about man and civilization.
Exactly. McGoohan was so zealously independent and iconoclastic that The Prisoner remains accessible to any individual feeling at odds with a totalist environment, whether that environment is liberal, conservative commercial or whatever. The TV makers of today couldn't resist mixing in their dislike of Bush, Christians, etc. That would prevent the new show from enjoying the wide-ranging and long-lasting appeal of the old.
Of course there's also the inevitable addition of sex, sticky sentimentality, bogus ethical dilemmas, and cheap laffs.
The first step is to assess the current situation - what coding practices are currently in use? What do the developers want? Can you roughly group the existing codebase into various standards, plus a pile of incoherent crap? Is it worth while rewriting the crap portion to the new standards?
Second, decide what level of standardization you want to achieve. The more detailed your standards, the more difficult and risky. You will probably make some wrong decisions, and they will irritate developers now or in the future. However, if all your developers code in the same language, and several of you are experts, you may be able to write detailed standards and get it right.
Third, identify relevant references. If you're working with Perl, Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices is a good choice. In C++, Meyers' Effective C++ series is good.
In general, micro-standards will not be successful. Instead of trying to make everyone use the same indentation or something, you'll get the most bang for the buck by focusing on high level issues. For example:
Good luck.
Somehow, Searls extracted some hideous meaning from these comments. He wants to ask Whiteacre a bunch of deep questions about the Net and freedom. I don't think Whiteacre could answer any of them; nor should he.
Why does this bullshit get modded up? Give me some examples of these corporate donors "ignoring" copyright law - by which I assume you mean infringing.
On what do you base this claim besides your masochistic fantasies? There's certainly no shortage of "Criticising the government or protesting a war" - where are the unjust prosecutions of these critics and protesters?
OK, so let's legalize everything that doesn't kill as many people per year as speeding. Shoplifting, fraud, embezzlement, larceny. Maybe even murder.
Or recognize that your test makes no sense, much like the opinion (expressed several times) that the US shouldn't crack down on copyright infringement until it catches Osama. We're capable of pursuing more than one objective at a time.
Don't blame this one on socialism. Read this.. American libel law's deviation from it's English parentage began before the American revolution, and well before socialism.
I think it's true to say that placing a greater burden on the libel plaintiff is consistent with the USA's high regard for freedom of speech.
or the company is improperly using a libel suit to silence a legitimate critic.
She is a bit overzealous, treating each drop of diesel spilled as a life-threatening calamity, but she appears to have the law on her side.
The ad was targeting commercial Unix, and asserting that it's expensive and inflexible compared to Wintel. In fact, the ad was right.
Intel/AMD is advancing much faster than proprietary RISC. PC-based servers deliver much better value. Don't use Windows where you can use Linux/BSD (slashdotters cheer); don't use Sun where you can use Windows (slashdotters boo).
So there's not really an "about face" in Unisys's later support of Linux - its a continued drive away from expensive, proprietary and inflexible systems.
The whole concept of "who has more to lose" is ridiculous anyway. No matter what the US or the UN do, people will find a way to keep the networks connected. Neither the US nor the EU is going to enact criminal penalties for connecting to the "other network", so businesses will just find a way to paper over the gap, just as they do with telephone systems.