Every innovative idea I've ever had at my company has been fought all the way, until it became standard operating procedure (which I now have to fight when I want to change something).

Whether it's electronics manufacture, or oil and gas extraction. There's only so far you can push any technology.

Oh, and by the way, there's no such thing as magic. No Santa. No Jesus. No Tooth Fairy. No infinite power supplies. No infinite computer resources. No infinite supply of money that everyone takes seriously.

Time to grow up kids.

...who wouldn't know a principal if it bit them in the ass and sang "Yankee Doodle." They will bend over with a smile the moment any government agency wants them to do anything and ask if they'd like anything else. Encryption. Feh. All PR, smoke and mirrors. This is an attempt to change public perception. Nothing more.

Or do the oil companies pay extra?

Here's the MBA worldview:

1) If it doesn't exist on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist.
2) You don't have to know the details of the business to run it.
3) Productivity is what we say it is.
4) Everything is measured in money. The physical world barely matters.

MBAs seem to share this worldview with those ever accurate, johny-on-the-spot folks commonly known as "economists." They know everything too.

But you have to design your system from the ground up for maintainability. You can't just "grow it." You absolutely can't just "record and go" and never have to code anything like the salespeople would have you believe. You have to abstract everything, using native code only as a last resort and you have to consciously write your tests in this abstracted code. Object maps are useful, but these too are a maintenance task and must be used with some caution.

You also have to be realistic. GUIs change, and you can, to some extent, update these change in your automated testing system programmatically, though in practice, it's rarely cost effective to do so. What you can't automate are behavior changes or complete redesigns. There is only so much automation can do.

Over and over and over. Yes, it seems right. Yes, it feels right. There's just that little matter of how it's failed at every place it's been tried. Used a Microsoft product lately?

There is certainly a time and a place to fire troublemakers and low performers, but forcing the firing even when there aren't any troublemakers or low performers is just a recipe for expensive turnover, lowered morale and the loss of long term institutional knowledge.

...Other than ossified government and environmentalist thinking.

There is NO technical reason to design or build modern day nuclear plants as idiotically unsafe as the ones from the 50s and 60s.

There is NO reason to NOT develop thorium plants which are inherently safer (As both the Chinese and Indians are doing).

And while renewables won't even come close to saving our bacon, I'd rather have them than nothing, which is looking more and more likely as we near the end of energy positive, affordable hydrocarbons.

The problems are not ones of safety. On the political side, nobody is willing to take risks on technology which they are frankly too stupid to understand. Ditto for techno-peasant environmentalists. We've effectively cock-blocked ourselves from solving this problem.

as just mean spirited, bureaucratic and bad tempered. Why else would we have been warned against landing?

when you have a captive audience and quality control is not exactly an important issue.

Making $5/hr when I live in a country with a cost structure designed for someone making $50/hr. Yeah, sure. How could I turn *that* offer down. And of course, only millenials matter for cybersecurity jobs. Can't hire those 50+ guys. No way. Even if there are lots of them looking for work.

In my career, I have:

1) Done Hardware IT (built desktops and modified servers)
2) Technical Support (Phone and desktop)
3) Technical Writing
4) Software coding and implementation
5) Software design and configuration
6) Budgeting and purchasing of IT equipment
7) Server Administration (VMWare)
8) Virtual machine creation, management and deployment.
9) Management of a software QA department

What this shows, other than the fact that I don't seem to be able to keep a job for very long, is that my psychology degree has served me well in ways I never expected.

I've also had to hire quite a number of CS graduates who drove me absolutely up a wall because they didn't seem to be able to *do* anything to completion. They were task oriented (Install the card) rather than goal oriented (Make sure the network on the computer is working well, the user can log in, see the directories they need to see, and everything is fast enough to matter). Someting I would have done automatically. I discovered that I had to ALWAYS explain the *goal* first, or I'd have to send them back to complete everything.

Developers may have experienced problems earlier and alerted Microsoft before it went live."
Duh, you think? Only a Microsoft exec would be dumb enough to think otherwise.

And that the machine doesn't. The hardest thing is understanding the human part of the system.

Most programmers miss the core fundamentals of humans, to whit:

1) Software is a coversation. BE POLITE.

2) Machines and software exist ONLY to serve humans. They have no other purpose. To the extent that they serve they are a success. When they don't, they're a fail.

3) Users (i.e. humans) anthropomorphize: Whether they know it or not, when users look at the computer, they don't see a machine, they see a little guy.

4) Computers are servants. Ultimate servants. You can yell at them, kill them, torture them, put Windows on them. They can't complain and merit no regard. They serve and are useful, or they go the way of Windows ME and Clippy.

So, connect the dots. The computer and it's software are the waiter. The waiter shows you a menu. You select something. You have a dialog with the waiter, narrowing down and specifying your order. You say OK when the waiter has it all down, and then you wait for your tasty order of data to arrive.

So imagine a waiter, who while you were ordering, continually interrupted you by telling you that the menu was updated, and did you want to look at a new one? Or a waiter who simply stood there after he took your order for a minute or two.... thinking. Or a waiter who decided to unexpectedly and without explanation, "refreshed" the table linens and silverware while you were trying to butter your bread, grabbing the bread, butter and knife from your hand. Or a waiter who simply told you you ordered wrong, refused to take your order and wouldn't suggest any alternative. Or a waiter who simply said, "Order not found." and just stood there like an infuriating idiot.

Except for some of Apple's offerings, this pretty much describes *every* user interface on the market today.

I have heard programmers in meetings explicitely tell me that it "doesn't matter what we put on the interface." I have seen dialogs that not even the original programmer understood after a few month's absence.

Programmers are experts at WHAT to do, but clueless as to WHY, and it shows.

Windows 8.x is back, and this time, it's personal.

Or it feels that way. I've been working with the Windows 8.1 RTM. Many more things seem to break on the Windows 8.1 RTM that did on Windows 8. Mayhem ensued. Kiss your SQLE 2005 goodbye if you haven't already. Change your Setup.exe's to Vista compatibility if you don't want them to take an hour to install. Other than that, no worries.