Lest we forget the truth of Democracies...

Eventually we elect a dictator. See Hitler.

To underscore this is a reference:

http://www.latimes.com/politic...

Law of Economics: Supply/Demand. In Virginia Beach, on the Tourist side of the area prices are way higher. Why? Because people are willing to pay the prices.

What we have to watch out for is the anomalies and the anti-societal prices. Meaning: Hurricane coming? Gas prices should not jump up 4 dollars a gallon. Predatory pricing is where Capitalism has to be reigned in just a little.

Here is a quandary: Some states/cities have no sales tax on food as the reasoning is: it is a basic necessity. Then people skip the Food Lion and go to Trader Joes and spend 3 times as much on a piece of fruit. Should these types of Taxes be equal and fair or should we tax premium products as they are not meeting the ideal here? If you dont want to pay for the taxes, go to the Piggly Wiggly. If you do, go to World Expensive Mart.

See Penn and Teller's BS episode on Hydroponics and other "Healthy Food" to see a pretty good demonstration of gouging.

I have had people pulled from trips after boarding for "Weight" reasons. This is not uncommon.

So add Overbooking, Weight, and other reasons... there are more than 0.008% of passengers being removed.

Make me wonder though. Lets say you bought a business class ticket to Hong Kong from the US. It costs 8 grand. So now the airline then pulls you off the flight due to "overbooking" and put you on another flight that gets to Hong Kong within 2 hours or so. They give you 675 bucks but they put you in COACH. So coach would be 1300 cost, so now the airline just made 6 grand and can overbook all the business/First class flights they wish to do so.

So they can? pull you from a higher class and put you in a lower class seat.

Yes, open spaces make it easy to monitor, but that works against HPEs. Being able to deep thought a project is how these things get accomplished. Read that it takes upwards of 50 minutes to get back to Deep thought (see previous slashdot articles on distracted employees) and a minimum of 5-15 minutes to get back in rhythm just because of an email, phone call, question.

Now imagine distractions 2-3 times an hour at minimum. It is amazing work gets done.

This sounds more like a Copying issue. File corruption gets involved during Raid/Copying from older disks to newer ones and so data gets corrupted.

Also, using large USB archive drives can corrupt the drive due to bad USB implementation, Drivers, WORK blocks, etc. I have one drive that works everywhere but put it in this one Laptop and half of it works.. half does not and writing at that stage would corrupt the drive.

Try something else to get your answer. Consider that a good developer can write a bubble sort decently enough, a Great developer leverages Industry Standard Coding and finishes faster with code from someone else that is free. Simply put, A great developer will have long since forgotten how to do a Bubble sort because the developer will use something like "sorted()" in python or other things. If need be, a great developer will resurrect the knowledge by leveraging the great books of knowledge (Google, Man, stackexchange, friends, etc). Computer Science half-life knowledge was at one time 18 months. A bubble sort is probably last used in CS 101, meaning even a 4 year CS grad should have better techniques to get a "sort" out. qsort() was always my favorite.

Asking basic coding library functions now is like asking the following:

if (x == 2) y = 3;
How does the if actually work? Show me the assembly code to do so.

Better question is: "You develop in Linux, according to your resume, how do you find out what commands can assist you in profiling your new code?"
Learn how they solve before you toss them for not knowing a useless bit of coding.. you are TRYING to get someone who can do your JOB, not show they did go to CS 101 years ago.

Sigh. This is how great developers see bad managers and avoid them.

1. Defect Rate: The more experience, quality developers are given the more complex tasks generally and actually generate a large amount of defects. Defects are also a case of amount of humanity involved in the area developed. More defects in HMI code because of more eyes. Defects are also based on testing, so if a code is rarely used or testing only cursory, defects are not found. This information can be found and highlighted in the FREE Debugging course from Andreas Zeller at udacity.com (Nope not shilling but found this course very informational).

2. Just because someone is an experienced developer does not mean they can estimate a job. One of the hardest things that developers are asked to do is SWAG a job. The numbers are generally way underestimated due to our human overestimation of time in future (look it up, I dont have the time. heh). These times get filtered back through contracts and customers and come back even less time. Exactly how many projects have you been on that actually made time/budget exactly as estimated? There is a reason developers work a lot of unpaid overtime.

3. Testing as you go along. Are you stating all developers should do Test Driven Development? Okay, then provide hard, frozen requirements up front. Oh wait, you are AGILE so that cant happen for larger items. Oh.. there we go.. inch pebbles.. I think the best estimate is down to 3-4 hour chunks of time. Okay, so I established that ETC is hard enough, now do it constantly in a changing requirements weekly. Wait, Im almost done here.. give me some time to finish... I thought I would be done before lunch.. but Im not done yet. Management responsibility is to manage the developer to help them and the management to make realistic time.. so "almost done" is not done.
- Is it Soup? That is what I heard from my bosses when I first started in the game. Is it Soup? 20 minutes from me being first assigned a task. No real concept of the entire task. You learn to answer "Shortly" and they stop asking. 2 weeks if they ask me now.. no matter what it is. They learned to give me real time to get a much better ETC out. One of my early ETC was "3 months" from spending 2 hours on the ETC. When given 3 days, the ETC was a year and it took... a year!

4. Development and constant need to have stuff explained. Verify they understand the first time. Language barriers exist constantly. Yes, this is a decent enough metric but if they can follow computer language logic, they are not dumb. I am at a place where it is expected for new developers to work 18-24 months before becomes productive. Still.. this is one that I can see if you want to cycle engineers to get better ones and do not have a large learning curve for your products.

5. This is general employee issue. Not specific to developers.

KLOC metrics and defect metrics are shown to have real faults when using them to judge a developer.

Things that managers (or leads, including myself) do that slow down/hurt development:
1. Not listen. Most of the time, as a lead, we know it all BUT we are NOT listening and not HEARING why some task will not come close to what we think will happen in the project.
2. Micro Manage. Start the task with a known stopping date and get buy in. Dont go every to them 4 times a day, put them in a fishbowl, look at your watch if they take a longer lunch or go to a doctor, and tell others you dont trust developers as they need to be lorded over (yes, had a manager do this). The developer will come to you when they realize they have issues or need help. You help them by resources, processes, talking, etc but If you then look at them like they are insane.. you will no longer have that trust and you will have way more "Surprises". Here is a metric: If a developer never needs help and has surprises on time and issues... if you are not micro managing them, this issue lies in the developer and they need help on personal time management skills at least. If you are micro managing, you should quit and find a new job.. you have destroyed your trust and your team will no longer be what it could be. They will hide from you, keep issues from you, and do less than they could because of your methods.
3. Stop going out on weekends when your Team is crunching for you. Your role as a manager is not just to give tasks, its to LEAD by example. If you want your team to push for a couple of weeks and you ask them to do so, YOU do it too. If you are stopping by on a Saturday to make sure they are working and you are not.. FIRE YOURSELF you are a micro manager and will crush your team. No one will want to follow you.
5. If you are really a hardass on defects, you generate an atmosphere of "I can't fail" which slows down development even more and products are not delivered. Look up "devopts". If a defect is found, we do not blame.. we know its human.. get the human out of it. Eventually, bugs are less and development is faster.
4. .. I can go on.. and on... but one thing that bugs me. How does the manager know more about the technical stuff than the developer? How does a LEAD, LEAD and inspire. "Be the Quarterback, not push the delivery quarter back."(c) - I am quoting me.

All of the above are designed to help you get a loyal team that will do things above and beyond to get a job done. It is in the best interest of a manager to get the loyalty and hard work due to it out of them. Then you can push them harder, and get more out of them. As one VP told me, we keep giving you 5 lb bag and 10lbs of crap and you guys deliver. Why? because we WANTED to work for the guy.

I hope they are not going for patent on the idea. I got prior art as I presented this same idea back in 1991 as a presentation to a class. This is rather simple idea as well, Authorized Vehicle Interruption System. The thing that was funny was no one I presented the idea to believed it would be allowed by governments because it could be hacked pretty easily as the RF frequencies are not encrypted.

Anyways, It is always fun to see an idea you had like 20+ years ago start to be implemented. I bet this idea has been around since the Car Radio has been invented. The idea is simple enough.

All well and good, but does the old employer have the rights to your basic skillset? If you are a developer and know C/C++ and learned some really neat skills and tricks that make you a master of the craft, does that mean you cannot code somewhere else?

John Cormack is one of the deep mind behind many of the developments including 3D engines and the like. It would be stupid to expect that he would not continue to develop new technologies and build on his knowledge and skillset. The question is, did he take actual product (code, documents) that belong to the old company, and apply them to his new job?

If say, you wrote a bubblesort routine that is 10 times faster but you wrote it. Can you make a better bubblesort at a newer company?

Alas, I have a 60 LG Plasma 3D TV that is really nice. However, finding a specific set of glasses for it (active) was hard. So I found and obtained 3 pair and got my 3D on with Guardians of the Galaxy (best 3D movie IMHO). However, the glasses required recharging constantly. The 3D movie experience was far and few between due to content and the 3D glasses were not used/made well and ended up DEAD. So now I have no way of looking at the 3D experience like I expected to be able to do for years.

On a side note, a friend has Passive 3D TV and it seemed a bit less... quality. It could be the LCD/LED aspect since I still love Plasma as 600hz rate is better than 120hz but Plasma is harder to maintain supposedly.

I ran a BBS for 9 years and it was great. Eventually, the internet overtook such programming fun for me and I switched to programming a MUD for 18 years.

Door games I wish were actually still around:
SI Droids
Tradewars.
Quizzors Mountain
Power Struggle

Those games may have been text based, but they did consume a lot of time and brain power.

Also, the additional fun part of that time was:
Which was better transmission method? Better BBS software? Best way to use your 1200baud modem? Zmodem, Qmodem? How to get long distance the cheapest PCLink.. etc

The invention of viruses, anti-viruses, ZIP vs ARC, etc. A lot of innovation from small groups.

!Member Berries galore here!

Lets go even further. Some of the best code I have seen is by people who have never gone to college. Some of the worst code as well.

Environment equals quality. If the environment does not encourage quality, then quality will not be the output. No matter if you are an A student, PHD, a high school student, etc. If the environment is put together fast and quick, and expects fast and quick... that is what the output would be.

Check your local city/town council. Ours has "deals" with the cable company put in place that prevents Verizon from coming into our city. The deals were to get the cable company to lay wires, even though they would have done so anyways. A 500k population city will get cable without these deals yet our council did them. We still got it later than other cities next to us and they have Verizon option. Call it political madness.