On developers never having access to production:

In many cases, developers are the only people who understand the full application, and in many cases are the only people who can actually troubleshoot a botched install or figure out why things aren't working right in production. Yes, you are suposed to have some kind of QA or staging environment and you are not supposed to deploy bad code, but sometimes things go sideways. In these cases, only a developer who knows the code and any integration issues will be able to figure out what went wrong. Acting like developers should *never* have access to production is a lot like saying "the mechanic should never have access to my car's engine, ever". It makes sense 99.9% of the time, but there is a .1% where your engine is broken and the mechanic can't fix it without getting under the hood. Yes, Mr. System Administrator you can change your oil, rotate tires, and even change wiper blades but fixing a spun road bearing or smoked transmission solenoid is flat out.

On Developers and Access Rights:

There are a lot of developers who don't understand the computer they are developing software on. Usually, they are very BAD developers. Take for instance, a webdev who doesn't know Apache. Instead of using built in tools like mod_rewrite, the developer will build their own tools to do what is built in to apache. Good developers know their platform, often at a level that is much deeper because they take time to read code or API and config documentation so they understand the toolbox they are working with. Often a single line of configuration is more powerful than 1000's of line of code. Developers need to be administrators on at least their developement environments... usually extended to staging there is a large difference in scale between development (a VM on my laptop) to staging (multiple servers) and production (hundreds of servers).

On installer driven software:

It doesn't matter if you use installshield, roll your own RPMs or use Salt, Chef or Puppet. Any way you go you should do everything you can to automate installation. When you automate you reduce the chance of human mistakes in installation process. If you do installation automation right, then a deploy to production can be triggered by anyone with appropriate authority or any automated process with appropriate authority. Having people sit at the console and install software manually should be a red flag that the software you are buying sucks or is incomplete.

In Enterprise-Grade software:

Installatioin should be automated to the maximum extent possible, using the appropriate operating system installation tools. Documentation for the upgrade and install should be clear enough that a non-developer can successfully install and test the installation. Install activity should be logged, so that if something does go wrong, it can be figured out later.

Even if they met all the requirement to bill as emergency band-aid application, you still feel it's fraudulent? You're not a fan of rule-of-law, are you

The intent of the emergency band-aid is to compensate for the difference in cost between the emergency room and a primary care physician's office. Very rarely would a primary care office meet the requirements of being an emergency room... but the descriptions of the procedure may be the same.

I'm actually a big fan of the rule of law. The problem with healthcare billing is that is too easy for care providers to deceive the payer.

An increase of 85% just scratches the surface.

If there are two legal, legitimate ways to code for a given procedure, why would a clinic not bill for the more expensive of the two? Medicare - not the hospitals - sets the reimbursement rates and defines the codes. If they didn't intend for the higher code to be billable, they should have written the definition so that it wasn't.

If a care provider is doing additional services with the only objective being getting paid more and not treating the patient, it is fraud - even if it just five percent extra.

The ones that really get me are where the care provider does a little creative coding:

Doctor applies band-aid to cut. Bills as primary care band-aid application. Is authorized $26.
Doctor applies band-aid to cut. Bills as emergency band-adi application. Is authorized $921.

The problem with all of this is that doctors are being paid for proceedures instead of being paid to make people better. If you pay for proceedures, there is a reverse incentive to make people well (or in other words, keeping people sick is good for business).

If that's what they're doing it's easily detectable.

If only someone was really looking... and there was the will to prosecute people for fraud.

Now, the Australian company you declined to work for, they seem like the kinds of scum who hospital administrators might hire to commit wholesale fraud. That obviously would give rise to increased billing rates. If there's still a sliver of justice in the world, they'll go to jail for falsifying records.

Both the company providing the service and people enriched by using that service need to be held accountable.

The issue is changing from an E&M to an intensive care E&M. Same procedure, higher payout. Same goes for taking a common tests that are bundled and breaking them into smaller component tests. A few wears ago I met with an Ausie founder of a startup that was talking about how revolutionary their software was that would optimize billing codes to ensure maximum revenue per procedure by basically scanning a billing batch and re-coding it using more lucrative codes for the same procedures. I waked on doing any development for them.

a) Call me back when the state supreme court rules. A county court ruling has a long way to go before it is anywhere near over, especially when there are many other court rulings in favor of the law.

b) Trying to recall a governor and having the governor stay is a faiure. No spin about it.

c) Protests are not credible evidence of anything other than the protestors being unhappy. Election > Protest.

... Because that worked so well in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, the result of the protests were:

* The teacher's union being flat out broken. The state won.
* A failed recall effort.
* A complete loss of support from many parent for the teachers. Demanding more money when people are struggling is never a hit.

I know it sounds maudlin, but it really did hurt to see PJ now doing, without realizing it, what Darl/Enderle/Didio/Florian did so many times in the past--I just couldn't stand to continue.

Nah, it just sounds looney because what you say is happening is not happening.

Seriously, don't you notice that their comments disparaging the jury (who spent 3 weeks listening all day to the details of this stuff, far more than any of us will ever know about it) sound like SCO or Oracle disparaging their respective juries???

Joke: Florian, is that you? Seriously: Groklaw's track record is very good on covering these sorts of trials. We'll see how it really plays out as the motions start flying next week. Groklaw's coverage is typical: here are the things that Samsung's lawyers might raise and here are the grounds for doing so. What is clear is that there is a lot more to go in this trial... and it is too early to pick a winner.

KDE's current version is outstanding. We could spend all year talking about history, but KDE4.8 works pretty well, and frankly is a great option over Unity, Gnome and some of the lightweight desktops if you value functionality over light weight. If you like lightweight, don't go with a desktop, go with a window manager.

Incidentally, you can tell someone who hasn't really used KDE by comments like "it lacks refinement" or "it isn't pretty" or "kde4 is slow". There's really not much I can say for people who say "I don't want to customize my desktop" as the default isn't bad and KDE's biggest feature is it's customization capability.

That said there are two components that need to be better explained and left to the user to decide if they want them: symantic desktop and Akonadi. Symantec desktop (nepomuk) is basically text search engine and tagging toolkit that lets you rate, comment on and tag files. The search engine works now, but for people with networked home directories, it is not the right answer. Akonadi is the backend for the personal information manager applications. If you are not going to use Kontact (the KDE outlook clone), Akonadi probably doesn't need to run. If you are using Kontact, Akonadi offloads sending/receiving so the front end applications can be light and fast.

I'm a python developer most of the time these days I use emacs, Wing, iPython, yEd (for charts and process diagrams) and do some documentation and proposals in LibreOffice. There are a few that have been part of KDE for a long time that make it especially nice:

* opens a terminal in many apps. Handy.
* KIO - allows you to open files pretty much anywhere without the need to mount drive. You get very used to being able to open and save files on all kinds of remote systems and services from the highly functional file save/open dialog.
* Dekstops and workspaces - multiple desktops and multiple dashboards. Most are an away.
* Plasma Desktop - You can pretty much customize it however you like. Want a start menu and panel ? OK. Want a mac like menubar? OK (xbar) MacOS like dock? OK. Mac style dashboard? Got it. Windows style widget bar, ok, you can do that. Want a quicksilver like launcher? (that's been there for almost a decade). Want files on your desktop? OK. Want remote files on your desktop? OK. Don't like the look? Change it.
* Konsole, the KDE terminal app just works. And has a ton of features with an easy to detach tabbed GUI and some pretty nice automation features.
* If you did a file manager shootout, it would probably finish Dolphin, Konqueror, Finder, MS Explorer, Kommander and everything else. KDE's file managers give you a lot of flexibility and outstanding integration with tools. Dolphin is designed for ease of use, Konqueror is an MS Explorer style kitchen sink and Kommander is a Norton Commander style app. All leverage KIO to be able to browse remote systems as if they are local and launch background tasks to move files around.
* Amarok - Music player. Very well done. Probably the best one out there short of iTunes...
* Kmail - A very well done feature rich mail client.

Is KDE perfect? No. KDE went through its rearchitecting four years ago, and has emerged to be very, very good.

Yet I constantly see people ruing how so many things are clunky and unusable because they're "designed by engineers."

Really, it doesn't matter if a designer, engineer, middle manager or janitor design something. What matters is the design. "Artistes" are responsible for millions of crap works that can barely sell at a garage sale or flea markets for every work worthy of being hung in a museum. The best user interface designers I've worked with have always been tweeners who fall between engineer and designer... and "artiste" universally never applies.

What is going on right now is silly - we're designing user interfaces based on users being inexperienced and stupid, which is now an edge case. Reality is that computers have been in common use for 25 years. That means the vast majority of users have at least 3-5 years of computer use experience. Today's users are smarter, are comfortable with mobile, desktop/laptop and all kinds of other user interfaces (i.e. ATMs, car dashboards, DVD Players, video games, etc). We should be taking advantage of this instead of designing for the 5% of users who are really confused.

The whole "dumb it down" movement is based on anecdotal evidence and reminds me of website redesigns that use a focus group instead of the last three years worth of web analytics and customer complaints. The result usually is a 10-20% drop in sales followed by rolling back to the old gui with round buttons instead of square or vice-versa.

Microsoft has sold 200 million licenses of word. Of that number, many were part of license programs that expire. For example, my company had a license that would renew each year, and would apply to only the current version of the Microsoft products. Another factor in the number of sales: old versions of office cannot open docx format files. A final factor is that many companies (and individuals) replace their PCs every 3-5 years and portions of old versions of Office typically don't work on newer MS operating systems. For example, Outlook 2000 would not work on Windows Vista.

All of the above issues are economic issues and tend to be more important to large scale buyers than largely cosmetic features like replacing a menu and tool bar with a ribbon. I'm glad you personally like the ribbon. Someone has to.