pj

Before the feminist revolution, most families survived just fine on a single income, that of the father.

And they should be punished for not stopping.

Round abouts, when first introduced cause more accidents in america as well. Doesn't mean they aren't better.

American drivers need to be taught that yellow means stop. In this case, the judge is teaching us, "Hey, run the light, if they catch you, maybe you can weasel your way out of the ticket by blaming the system."

I hear your points and i understand the little guy against the state perspective, but it's like blaming the highway patrol in the speed trap because he hid his car so you couldn't see it and slow down before he saw you. You were speeding and you should have gotten a ticket. In this case, people in fact, did run the red light and they should be punished for it because it is more dangerous to try to make it through. Most people don't make it through, even if the yellow is 4.4 seconds.

In my experience, yellow lights are different times in lots of different cities. When I see one, I slow down, i don't speed up. Unless it's raining and I know I'll lose traction. Then I just go through.

We exist in a world with others, not only ourselves. We need to live like it.

If you see a yellow light you should stop. If you think the risk of running the light is worth it, suck it up and pay the ticket.

Everyone knows it is illegal to run a red light and everyone who does it is selfish and puts the lives of others at risk for their greed.

The problem is that people want to eat and they end up wanting more than they need. Controlling these urges is sometimes difficult. Especially if meals are high in sugar content. But we also like sugar.

The problem really is the curbing of desire.

I have been considering building my own home lately and while at the hardware store, i picked up a thick book of home plans. As I flipped through, I realized, this isn't a book of home plans, it's a catalog for plans that you can buy. So I thought, are they selling this? There's nothing in it of value, just pictures of more things that you have to buy later. I looked at the back and sure enough, the catalog itself cost $10 and they dont even have the prices of the home plans themselves. If you want the blue prints for the house, you have to pay MORE money and those cost $60 or more.

And so I started thinking of course, like any hacker would... I've been looking for examples of industries that give away the product of their work. Here was one in architecture and construction. Not only are the blue prints not free, but the catalog of things not free isn't even free. So it's like, two layers of not free in the same industry.

Can you imagine architects giving away their blue prints? Essentially, that's what source code is, it's a blue print for a product. It's an encapsulation of a lot of work, research and development, experimentation, and energy. If architects gave away the blue prints for homes, then architects would have trouble eating.

I know, people say, you can't pay for passion. If people are passionate about software, they'll do it for free. But I'm not so sure that's true. I think there are reasons other than money and passion about software to write software, popularity for example.

Here's the rub, every other popular industry gets money in exchange for their contribution. "If you're good at something, don't do it for free."

Of course I wonder, "Why am I so opposed to Open Source?" Am I insecure about my code? Am I delusional? If so many, seemingly rational people, are pro Open Source, why am I so closed?

It's a real debate inside my head. I don't think it's insecurity. I have no problem writing code that is open and viewable to people who pay me to write it. I would have no problem writing open source code for a company that was paying me to write the code. If it's their code, and they are paying me to write it for them, please, show it to the world -- better for me. I've written enterprise code that never got used outside the company and wished I had something to show people. "I built this badass system for nuclear plants, you should have seen it!" But of course they can't...

I'm just thinking of the logical conclusion... what are the long term consequences of FOSS? I think about incentives here. I think about comparisons between teachers and athletes for example. We say, "We should pay teachers like we pay athletes." I've actually considered being a teacher. Everyone tells me I would be a great one. I really love this stuff. But why should I encourage people to go into a field where I know they will have a tough time eating because there are too many people giving away free labor? How can engineers pay for food if no one is paying them?

Why is this so difficult for me to understand? I'm not stupid. I'm pretty smart. Why doesn't something that seems so obvious to so many other seemingly smart people not make sense to me?

Compare our industry to Medicine and Law. It's actually illegal for people who aren't doctors or lawyer to dispense medical advice or legal advice. These clever professions engineered these laws to protect their industry. Oh, I know lots will cringe at the thought of that. I know the thought is that stuff like this subsidizes crappy coders through artificial scarcity. I'm still not convinced the scarcity is actually scarce, because the production of the product depends on the consumption of scarce products, but I digress...

I think the debate about the flamewar over web programming being stupid is one ramification of this issue. Web programming isn't actually easy. It's easy to a point, just like carpentry is easy to a point and plumbing is easy to a point and electrical work is easy to a point. But it's also easy to be dangerous. It's easy to biuld homes that fall down and plumbing that starts leaking next year and wire a home to catch fire. If you don't have training and education and experience, it's easier to make mistakes.

I see so many people without a background in programming write poorly architected code that performs like a dog and just breaks... it breaks because some wanabe hacker just jumped in and started hacking without knowing wtf (s)he was doing and it ends up costing the company paying for the work more money later on. And you can't blame the consumer. They don't know. They don't know if they give someone their credit card information whether or not that company actually gives a crap about security and if they do, they can actually implement good security protocols. And don't say open source helps with this, because plenty of open source products have huge security holes. I see people complaining all the time about XSS vulnerabilities in word press plugins and with something like that, I could easily write a keylogger that would send your credit card number typed into a wordpress hacked online store right to my database... Probably lots of .cn sites are already doing it...

Anyway, I'll stop ranting now...

The problem with Atwood is that his popularity on the web is an example of the stupidification of web programming. People who build web apps flock to him because he has become successful on the web, not because what he says is true, enlightening, or even beneficial to their success as a hacker.

The web is popular for wannabe's because they get exposure. They think they are hackers, but really they are just factory line workers assembling someone else's code.

In most forums I frequent, the majority of questions are from people asking how to get some FOSS project to work, not how to code some particular algorithm or do something hard. They don't do any research. One of the questions on stack overflow right now is if it's possible to find where sql server database files are stored. Seriously? If you can't do something like that, why are you trying to build a web app?? It's one of the most basic things in sql server.

I think at the moment, we're in a web programming bubble, fueled not by the love of money, or the love of programming, but the love of popularity. This love is shared by many because we all want to be loved.

Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following.

On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest and straight forward with an opinion -- a valid opinion and an astute observation of a topic that the real hackers are feeling inside.

Hacking is dying. It has taken an outsider, a liberal artsie fartsie to tell us the truth about it. To point out the absurdity.

I went to sxsw interactive this year and was appalled at what I saw. There were few hackers there. Most of them were socialites running around promoting their word press blog or django customization. These people didn't know anything about hacking. Perhaps it was the wrong venue, but the art and the culture and the expertise of real hacking is probably already dead.

It's too easy now. You don't have to love hacking to build something with computers. You don't have to have passion to build, you just throw some parts together, copy and paste some graphics and change the colors in photoshop to match a named swatch you found at colourlovers.

It's kind of sad.

This is a mathematical problem like poker. On one hand, it exposes the issue for attack by hackers who didn't know about it before. But it also makes systems in the future more secure. What is the probability that a malicious hacker has found this issue before you and is using it to attack java based systems? What is the probability that after you expose the issue, all the vulnerable systems will be patched with your suggestion?

I'm curious what other hackers think of this. I've found XSS vulnerabilities in sites and other security issues. What do you do when you find these? Do you notify the sites? Sometimes I notify the website of the issue, sometimes I don't. I struggle with the decision myself, but I don't think I'd ever go open with such a vulnerability without first being more determined about getting a response from those who can fix the issue before the hackers find it.

Imagine if this under dog hadn't gone through so much trouble. The software landscape would be quite different now.

With examination I see "Infected," left self third from the top. I notice IT and The Stand on the left shelf second from the bottom. Must be the Stephen King shelf. Lots of sci-fi on the shelf above that. Textbooks in the shelf on the right...

http://www.randsinrepose.com/assets/randsshelf.jpg

Do you recognize any other books?

Any good community has opinions on both sides.

The point I'm making is that they are control freaks, always have been and it's not new. They want absolute control over their brand.

I'm okay with that. It's their company. But I don't like their closed-ness, so I don't buy their closed products.

I actually did buy a macbook pro though, precisely because it was more open than a PC -- it'll run windows or mac OS and that I like.

I'm so tired of the ego-busters. These kinds of generalizations are so 2001. Look, some people do care. The people promoting it.

In this community, the same population of people are promoting blog posts that say no one cares about your website while also promoting blog posts that say, "Code doesn't matter, you have to market your website!"

Well, seriously. Which is it? Do you want people to market their website or keep their traps shut?

My opinion, I love hearing about people's creations. I love hearing about things that are new and vibrant and created by passionate people.

I don't see anything new or shocking in the behavior with the iPhone or ipod, either from Apple, or the user community who has purchased them.

Same song, new day...

There's a big difference betwen that an the broken links since the web began...

Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before they cause more damage to the future of the internet.

Then run through the code in your mind. Does it work? Pass in some variables.

Your mind can process information much faster than you can type it out. If you build the image of your code in your mind, you can map it out in a matter of minutes, but if you start coding without the image, you make more mistakes.

Some other commenters have said write it out or draw it out. This is a good idea if you can't keep it in your head. Do flow charts and state diagrams and things like that before you start coding.

Plus, regex is hard for a lot of people -- even programmers. Most developers copy/paste regex into their code, rather than write it.

And his other point, that it teaches you problem solving is important too. That's what software development is, solving problems. Learning a language won't help you solve problems.

You have to ask yourself, "what problem do you want to solve?"

The first thing I ask people when they want to start learning to program or build systems is: What kind of system do you want? You have to want a solution to a problem to really get good at programming. You have to create a problem and then solve it.

Regex is good at that because when you understand regex, it's easy to find problems that it solves. Imagine wanting to find all files on your computer that contain phone numbers or email addresses. Something like that is very useful and you can do it quite easily with regex.

Here's the deal. The web is the future. So for application domain -- the web is where it is at. And the web includes mobile. Mobile devices are web devices. The whole point of the web was to enable mobility in a standard protocol -- mobility of information, digestion of information and communication of information between any device, whether that device is a computer with a browser, or a cell phone, or a car, or a refrigerator.

So, that is the main issue. If you except that premise, the premise that the web is the future, then I can't help but recommend you learn technologies that are fundamental to the future of the web: the technologies that are part of almost any web application. Those technologies are: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL. XML is good too.

The problem here is that it is difficult to start in the web domain, because in order to really create anything of value, you have to learn more than one technology. HTML by itself is just a flat web page. To be awesome you have to create that HTML dynamically and in order to do that you have to learn a lower level language like .NET, PHP, Java, or an opinionated platform like Ruby on Rails, or mine: Qrimp.

Then, to use whatever programming language, or platform you choose, you also need to power it with a database, so you have to learn SQL. Then you need to make that web page do cool things in the browser, so you have to learn JavaScript.

So I would recommend, if you are going to start somewhere to program choose either SQL or JavaScript. You are going to need those, regardless of whether you ultimately go with Ruby on Rails, Qrimp, PHP, .NET or J2EE.

So, to narrow it down even more, go with JavaScript. It's a lot like Java, which is a lot like C# (.NET). Reasoning: Keep your doors open. Start with the broadest technology that can be applicable in the most places, then narrow yourself down toward rock-stardom in your niche.

That being said, SQL is part of almost any information system, even outside the web domain. It's also one of the most difficult to wrap your mind around, so go there. You can actually create HTML with SQL if you want to. Most veterans don't recommend it because you are mixing the presentation layer and the data layer, but the point remains...

If you look at this breakdown: http://demo.qrimp.com/TechJobsCharts You'll see that the most requested skill set among technology jobs are HTML and SQL -- for good reason -- the reasons I listed above.

Say you estimate the cost at $10,000 and they want you to make a change, you say, "Okay, but this change wasn't included in the $10,000 so we will have to estimate how much the change will cost and add it to the bill. If you want us to do that, let us know."

This is why you have to outline the requirements before you do a fixed bid.

Instead of saying it's going to take 4-6 more hours, you say it's going to cost $400-600 more dollars, assuming you estimate at $100/hr. If it really takes you 1 hour, then you still make $400-600, but it only takes an hour so your hourly rate just went from $100 an hour to at least $400 an hour.

If you're a highly productive programmer and use the right tools, then a fixed bid can come out in your favor if you estimate projects using the hourly rates and estimates that not so productive programmers use.

Say you are paying someone to demolish your concrete driveway. Would you pay someone with a jack hammer who can get the job done in an hour the same rate you'd pay someone with a sledgehammer, which will take 8 hours? The task is the same. The value of the completed project is the same.

But if the jack hammer owner charges a fix bid billed for half the hourly rate of the sledge hammer owner, he spends an hour and gets paid for four.

In a fixed bid contract, the jack hammer could charge 50% more than he would estimate the demolition (originally billed at half the hourly rate of the sledge of 4 hours) at 6 hours and still make more money and spend less time: 6x as much money and spend 1/8th as much time completing the job. If his estimate was way under actuals and it ends up taking him twice as long (2 hours) as he originally thought it would take, which was 1 hour, he still makes triple the hourly rate for two hours of work (6 hour billed estimate, 2 hours of work) than the guy with the sledge hammer!

The use of tools that accelerate task completion, in this case an 8x improvement (jack over sledge) enables the jackhammer operator to underestimate the labor times and still make more money at lower times to completion. Plus, the driveway owner gets his demolished driveway in 25% of the time that it would have taken with a sledgehammer and that is still at a project overrun of 100%!

But the world doesn't understand equations like this or really accept the value of advanced technologies. I use technology to build custom software products that are way more advanced than what typical developers use, so I can build them 10x faster and charge half the rate and still make more money!

I know a local case where a company is paying a guy to use Perl to build a data driven website using files -- instead of an SQL Database. he's been working on the website for over 5 months and it still isn't finished and it has already reached the maximum of its flexibility. It's already going to have to be re-architected to enable the features the client wants now. If the local company had gone with our company, which uses a flexible sql based infrastructure, then the project would have been completed in about 2 weeks and still have lots of flexibility to go! New features would be easy to add.

Now, the programmer is coming to us asking to use our technology to help him complete his project!

So, I love the current state of the software world. Frustrated customers paying too much for projects that typically fail are a great market segment.