Comment Re:It is just so horrible (Score 1) 306
Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
Q.E.D.
Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
Q.E.D.
I don't know how or where this "grow or die" idea began, but it's just plain wrong.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors. If I own a company (I'm a shareholder) and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow.
That's not true. The original idea was that investments would return dividends. It isn't necessary to grow to do that, just operate profitably. In the days when only the wealthy owned stocks, dividends and interest were primary income sources and only a few were speculators looking for share price growth.
Within the last century, we've lost track of that, becoming obsessed with get-rich-quick share price increases which are often completely unrelated to the profitability of an operation, and in fact, often owe more to a continuing dance of mergers acquisitions and divestitures than to actual product.
The human population of the Earth is expected to stabilize around 2050. The natural resources of the planet are finite. The Universe is not only a non-profit operation, it's running at a (entropy) loss. Only things like ideas are unlimited, and no matter how many ideas produce new products, there's only so many products any one person can purchase. So it might be worth considering how to succeed in a non-growth environment.
Yep, that's my typical work day. If Google were a billable service, I'd be in debt for a thousand years. I have to be an expert on a hundred subjects every week thanks the both the complexity and the rate of change of modern IT.
There are a very few open-source projects that are actually responsive to bug-fix and change requests. And not just open-source ones Commodore's Amiga team was pretty responsive as well. Most groups, as you have observed, will either ignore you or outright flame you.
>I know what you mean. It drives me nut's. It's defiantly not that hard too spell.
Fixed that for ya.
Hey, we didn't give you free reign to go all spelling-nazi. Did you loose your mind? Tow the line!
Well, I guess those courses they made me take in high school on critical thinking and logical fallacies were just a complete waste then.
I can't take what I was taught on the Evils of Communism to Wal-Mart, either.
It's not about the Americans being not "qualified" but that a E/CE/CS degree is irrelevant to IT. IT is, in the most general sense, best served by a logic and philosophy/psychology degree. Every problem is solved by a binary decision tree.
No it isn't, and that fallacy is behind a lof of modern-day disfunctionality - the idea that There Can Be Only One True Answer.
If you actually study formal logic, you'll discover that binary/boolean/Aristotelian logic is only one form of logic. There's another whole branch of symbolic logic dedicated to dealing with All/Some/None situtations.
As the Perl people like to say, "there's more than one way to do it". The real test of critical thinking isn't merely to come up with "the" answer, it's to consider multiple answers and determine which one is mostly likely to produce good results.
I can't speak for all certifications, but ones I've done (CCNA and CCNP in particular) put a heavy emphasis on troubleshooting.
That's why the Cisco certs are among the few rags that actually carry credibility. The vast majority of certs are memorize-and-regurgitate.
Money is speech?
You are seriously fucked.
Well, actually, it's the price of a louder megaphone.
But such subtleties are lost on the modern-day Supreme Court, which is less interested in preserving the balances of Government and more in their own peculiar interpretation of the Law of the Land.
Republics also support fragmented self-interests. Probably even more so than democracies.
The Founders made the US Government a Republic because they feared the tyranny of the majority would trample out the rights and interests of minorities. They made it a Democratic Republic because they also feared the tyranny of entrenched minorities. Checks and Balances were arguably the single most important consideration given to every facet of their governmental design.
Dollars are a measure of importance. If such an encrusted Pi were actually constructed, it would indeed be newsworthy.
Dollars are speech. Just ask the US Supreme Court.
The race to the bottom started long ago.
The destruction of the worker-employer bond even longer - back in the 1980s.
Tarrifs weren't primarily about environmental responsibility, although indirectly they worked in that direction by favoring local production with its more stringent environmental regulations. But Free Trade has pretty much killed that.
1950's Republicans would probably die of apoplexy. We gave Most Favored trade status to one of the world's biggest Communist countries.
If only there were organized groups of laborers that were able to band together to protect each others rights.
Socialisms! Evil! Burn the commie witch! Only corporations are allowed to work as bands to protect their rights!
Damn, I wish I'd known about that trick back then, that was exactly the problem I was having with mine. I've had a couple of 100$ all in one laserjets (both HP) since then. The one I've got now (I forget the model) is pretty decent, and obviously doesn't require its own nuclear reactor to print, but I do miss the reliability of that 30 pound monstrosity. I do, however, not miss the 5 degree increase in temperature around the thing when it was running though, lol
1KW is about right for one of the old-time laser printers. Warm-up power rush was a bitch and it was recommended not to put them on UPS's or lest they blow breakers.
I swore off HP devices. Most of the printer/scanner/whatever would still be working fine, but the paper traction would go all to hell and even new roller kits wouldn't fix them. Plus my scanner doesn't even offer replacement rollers for the duplexer part of the machine.
"I'm surprised a Logitech mouse was listed, as any I've had, the buttons died within months."
Wtf do you do with yours? Use a pneumatic hammer when you need to click?
My mice (Microsoft AND Logitech) get "Parkinson's Disease". After a while, they won't stay put on point. Not even the optical ones.
People talk about bug free code. It is a matter of won't, not a matter of can't.
Sometimes, there are products out there which can be considered "finished". Done as in no extra features needed, and there are no bugs to be found. Simple utilities like
The problem isn't the fact that secure or bug free software can't be made. It is that the procedures and processes to do this require resources, and most of the computer industry runs on the "it builds, ship it!" motto [1]. Unfortunately, with how the industry works, if a firm does do the policy of "we will ship it when we are ready", a competitor releasing an early beta of a similar utility will win the race/contracts. So, it is a race to the bottom.
[1]: The exception to this rule being malware, which is probably the most bug-free code written anywhere these days. It is lean, robust, does what it is purposed to do, and is constantly updated without a fuss.
Once upon a time, I read somewhere (Yourdon, possibly) that the number of bugs in a software product tends to remain constant once the product has reached stability. The number for IBM's OS/MVS mainframe operating system was somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000!
It's been likened to pressing on a balloon where when you squeeze one bump in, another pops out, because the process of fixing bugs itself introduces new bugs.
And OS/MVS is about the most critical software you could put on a mainframe. You can't just Ctrl-Alt-Delete a System/370. Or power it off and back on again. Mainframes are expensive, and expected to work virtually continually. Mainframe developers were expensive as well, since after a million dollars or so of hardware and software, paying programmers handsome salaries wasn't as big an issue back then. Plus there was no offshore race to the bottom where price trumped quality at the time. In fact, there wasn't even "perma-temping" yet.
Still, with all those resources on such an important product, they could only hold the bug count constant, not drive it down to zero.
Actually speaking of OS/MVS, there's a program (IEFBR14) whose sole purpose in life is to do nothing. There have been about 6 versions of this program so far, and several of them were bug fixes. More recently, it had to be upgraded to work properly on 64-bit architecture, but some of the bugs were hardware-independent.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
