Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Brandon J. Van Every ] on Tuesday 26 December 2006 22:44 \__
>
> >
> > Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> >> __/ [ Brandon J. Van Every ] on Tuesday 26 December 2006 20:35 \__
> >>
> >> > At any rate, I've been opposed to the business model of nightmare
> >> > coders throughout my so-called career. It's the main reason I never
> >> > got into the mainstream games industry. I think such treatment of the
> >> > worker is fundamentally inequitable, a nasty aspect of industrial
> >> > capitalism.
> >>
> >>
> >> I can't recall if the study that I have in mind was conducted in the UK
> >> alone, but it suggested that 90% (99%?) of people who work in IT dread the
> >> thought of coming to work and are nervous about their employment.
> >
> > Heh, I dread the thought of anything that's even called "IT" ! Maybe
> > I'm old school, but back in the day, that was parlance for "stupid
> > people who can't cut it in computer science and just push large chunks
> > of boring corporate data around." Now, as I've gotten older I've
> > realized that's a bit pejorative, but nevertheless, I find the problems
> > that "IT" tackles to be fairly dull.
>
>
> I'm coming from the same place... accepting the term due to persistence and
> acceptance through environment/peer pressure and habits. In the UK the term
> seems to be a convenient 'umbrella' of which development is just a subset.
> So even data entry and pushing papers around could count as IT-ish...
It may also be a sinister plot to devalue our wages as software
developers. "IT guys don't know how to build anything from scratch.
Let's call all you programmers 'IT' so that we can treat you more like
cheap disposable widgets." Such is my impression of mainstream job
hunting sites when they only have an 'IT' category at any rate.
> The tradeoff in many of these scenarios says that, on the one hand, you want
> to fit the most that you can on the dedicated processor/chip, but not allow
> vulnerable code to be embedded in hardware that can't be modified (gates
> versus flashing). That's one of the reason GPU makers dread the thought of
> open-sourcing their drivers and make them more O/S independent
> (plug-and-play for Linux, with simple API's and device drivers). Now, what
> if you had schematics and designs that are as transparent as Apache and thus
> open for peer review? Therein lies a competitive advantage, I think.
> Companies could then create sub-modules to mount over, as a branch, and
> refine the trunk to suit their own computational tasks. All the argument
> which apply to OSS can equally well apply to OSH (hardware) perhaps... it's
> not a thorough-y explored area, so maybe somebody can set an example... case
> study... role model... whatever.
It probably takes a specific market, focused on reliability, to realize
those benefits. The general marketplace can certainly stand the hacks
and bugs.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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