For real.

This was a stupid idea. Windows 8 is a trainwreck. No serious application should be aiming for microsoft app store approval. Turning windows into a walled garden is bad for windows and bad for the PC industry as a whole. If all you have is an app store (google play or iOS app store) app, fine whatever, porting it to windows walled garden isn't making it any worse. But taking a program from the open platform desktop into the walled garden of 'metro' is a monumentally bad idea.

Now the thing is, windows 8 isn't just bad because the store is a bad idea. It's bad because it glues two completely different interfaces together in a confusing manner. And how they fix that, with windows 9, may mean a completely rewrite of 'apps' or programs, or both. And until we know what that is going to require we shouldn't be throwing money at windows 8 projects.

Those are two very separate problems, one philosophical and industry related, and the other a very open ended technical question.

Imagine a conversation goes like this. (Imagine that this is a shop that does C development right now).

New guy: This project that needs doing. I could do it in C++, I could do it a lot faster than in C.

Old manager guy: If we do it in C++ it means we have to keep C++ capable people on around. Even if you stick around 10 years from now you might be out of practice coding.

New guy: Ok, but if we don't do it in C++ we're probably not going to get it done at all, because we don't have the resources to do it in C at all.

Old manager guy: If it means we lock ourselves into a future of more skills than we have, it's not worth doing, because we can't guarantee being able to support it, and I don't want our name on abandonware.

They'd both be right. And that would be why GNU still doesn't consider itself to have a stable release. If you demand everything be done exactly perfectly you'll never even finish one thing, and if you accept 'good enough' you can easily end up with bits of code clinging to life that you will eventually have to just rewrite.

I just was on a project where one of the other software guys took all of the function names of a MS windows package, and completely rewrote how quite a lot of them behaved (not just implemented the same API differently, he actually completely changed what the functions do), but that was about 10 years ago. Now, to try and update that code and use the new version of the actual MS api we had a nightmare of a time, trying to figure out what he changed, and why was actually really hard and wasted a lot of money. And yet, it meant he had a working piece of software out the door 10 years ago that kept him in business for 10 years.

Indeed.

Some of this is cultural too. A bunch of my friends work for a company that is owned by israelis (we're not in israel) and when the israelis come here they occasionally yell at customers and complain to customers that they're not behaving properly. And these are big corporate customers, cable companies and ISPs and that sort of thing. You just don't do that here. Ever. But that's the way they do business in Israel. Here if a customer asks for something you cannot do, you politely tell him that you don't think it's reasonable for the budget available, or that you can't do it. You don't complain that he's being impossible to deal with.

Yes and no, the person making a complain is a large part of this. If everything they ever do is complain then it becomes a signal to noise problem. If the person is particularly stupid it may just be them not knowing how to do something (which itself may reflect a training issue, or not). If the person rarely complains and has well thought out criticism then it can be helpful.

Even people who complain all the time *can* be useful. Ultimately it's everyones job to find problems and fix them or reduce their impact. But you need people who have some clue.

Absolutely, the gap though, between someone who is just immature, and someone who is a chronic complainer is hard to find, and if an employer has had a really bad experience in the past they tend to over compensate.

Indeed, it's very hard to weed out complainers in an HR process, but they are enormous drains on productivity, even one slip and you can be toxic to a potential employer if they are expressly trying to minimize problem employees.

  I've had to work with a few of those over the years, one who was an old codger that refused to use e-mail and demanded an office in an area only accessible via stairwell (not allowed because students (i.e. customers) with mobility issues could never get there), and refused to attend departmental meetings. Which usually were about 15 minutes of 'hey lab person, anything we need to know about broken equipment that might screw up our plans?' He was a constant waste of management time trying to get him to do his fucking job. Another is a younger person who had a fit at customers because of where they were standing, basically all she did was spend her days complaining about how everything that went wrong was someone else's fault (which, because she complained about everything that went wrong, even if it had nothing to do with her was true). She was a giant sap on everyone else's productivity listening to her, a huge sink in employee morale, and just a generally unpleasant person to have around.

The first guy didn't start out that way, apparently for 20 odd years before I got there he was very well regarded, and then he got sick and something rattled his brain. The other one if you caught her between fits seemed like she had a lot of useful ideas on how to improve things (which was sort of what was looked for in an employee). In HR some of her ideas were... impractical but you can't fault someone for not knowing departmental budgets and resources when they aren't actually in the process. When she was actually in the loop her ideas became even more wildly impractical as people told her no to the just impractical ones.

While not at the same place, both of those people will heavily influence future hiring decisions. Contracts will be much more restrictive to deal with the first, and anyone who even seems like they might be a complainer is just not going to be hired for a years, even if that sort of thing could be useful.

No.

HR Is full of the prom queens and football captains who everyone loves but who have no idea what they're doing at actual work, so you put them in HR, so they have a career but never actually touch a customer project.

If you were to think of it from the other direction. Construct a list of (website) businesses not allowed to do business in israel, what would they be?

Illegal gambling (that may be all gambling, that may be gambling not under a state monopoly, I'm not sure).

Illegal weapons sales

People smuggling

Terrorism

Hostile state propaganda (Iranian news).

Child pornographers.

Etc.

They're aren't on the list because they're equivalent crimes, they're on the list because the government only has the authority to take the *one* action against them if they're based outside of the country: Ban them from domestic websites. And even that is of dubious capability.

Now the thing is, the Israeli government may not have a great problem with people smuggling, they may actually want people to see what the Iranian press is saying, they may have more effective border control on arms sales than blocking websites (since those are going to the palestinians who theoretically have their own internet anyway) and so on.

But Illegal gambling, child porn, they're both illegal. And the Israeli state can't do anything about them if it's hosted outside israel. And the Israeli user action is the problem (giving money to an unlicensed betting firm, acquiring/distributing child porn, or downloading copyrighted works without license), a casino in the US that takes israeli money is behaving legally for them, etc.

well as I say, they are, in how you access them and who is responsible for doing so.

Blocked is blocked, why is for the law to sort out itself.

Creating a list of places to go for illegal activity would seem counter productive. Especially since this would be basically a list for people in other countries to use as go to place for sources.

If israeli citizens are not allowed to invest on the NYSE then... sure it should be blocked if there's no public benefit to being able to see it (not taken down, wall street is operating legally within the US, that's the problem, the Israelis can't shut down a legally operating monaco gambling site but they can block access to it).

Well, the second time. The first time you fought a civil war over it, and then 100 years later *still* had to send in the army to get to the drinking fountains. So it didn't work very well.

Because they have always been there and in charge, and those swathes of the country are mostly worthless.

Indeed, and so perhaps we should go with what works, rather than charging in guns blazing. Clearly the UN did not bribe the right people, and clearly the US should avoid trying to use vaccinations as intelligence gathering tools.

Considering there are 200 million people in pakistan, and they have nukes, and there are only a few thousand cases of polio a year... your solution seems... cowboyish.

It's still part of routine vaccinations in the US, canada, china, japan etc. AFAIK. I know for sure you can't go to school here in ontario without polio vaccinations because my cousins children have a mother who thinks vaccines cause autism and was trying to not vaccinate them.

I never said helpless. I said not interested.

The chaos kills a lot of pakistani's, don't be under any illusion, they are in the midst of a war they don't really want to fight. And for the moment they're trying to not make it worse.

I actually made comparison for that reason specifically.

Is it worth starting a war over, or can you get what you want some other way? If the south had revolted against the army being used as an escort it would have been a big fight. The tribal areas in pakistan *are* fighting a war with the government already, this would just make it worse.

As I say, it will have to come to it eventually when the central government in pakistan wants control over their whole country (just like the US civil war!). Until then, it's better to try and stay out of the way and let the UN negotiate with the tribal chiefs independently.

No, the problem is that they're trying to compete with windows 8.

The best way to compete with windows 8 is let people try it.

That would be like sending in the army to end racism in the south so that you can hand out bottled water.

The civilized areas of pakistan don't particularly need the UN to go in an help people, they have hospitals and roads and all that stuff already. Yes, there are poor people who need help being vaccinated, but they in karachi for example this a detail management problem, and they in a broad sense need money.

In the tribal areas the pakistani central government is not welcome. At all. They've been basically in an uneasy soft war with the tribal areas since even the 1860's when it was all nominally british. The UN has, thus far, been able to go in, on its own, with the protection of being the UN, and do all of these things because people have been convinced (and convinced the tribal elders, even with bribes) that the UN guys are actually seriously trying to do good thing. If you send in the army you're starting a war about who is in control of the tribal areas. And quite frankly the central government doesn't care that much. Eventually yes, it may come to that, but right now the central government in pakistan has its own problems, and they'd rather stay out of the tribal areas. What they don't want, frankly what no one wants, is polio to spread from the tribal areas to the rest of pakistan or india.

Because being a quant is basically intellectual fraud. I could construct a derivative to trade of a hash function of the characters in your post, it would have no actual meaning.

Nor does being a quant have anything to do with actually doing science defensible published in journals. There is a strong case that academia is *too* focused on journals, and industry publications (like IBM technical papers, or programming guides, and other technical documents for big tech companies are not counted as 'publications' when trying to go into academia).