No es tan asi

Dice Clarin:

Según la ley europea, los bancos son los responsables de las inversiones de sus clientes y contra ellos los inversores damnificados atacarán judicialmente. Se espera una cadena de juicios multimillonarios cuando ya se habla del absoluto fracaso de los organismos de control en las grandes capitales financieras en medio de la crisis.

En Suiza, esto no es asi: ha habido varios damnificados, no solamente por el asunto Madoff, sino tambien por la quiebra de Lehmann Brothers, y la ley Suiza no responsabiliza a los bancos por sus clientes sino hasta un monto de 30’000 francos suizos. Estos bancos (el Credit Suisse y la UBS, pero tambien algunos bancos menores) proponen a sus clientes, de manera intempestiva y brutal, compensaciones por montos que varian entre el 20 y el 50% del monto originalmente invertido por sus clientes, y si aquellos no aceptan, el banco se reserva el derecho de no devolver nada de nada.

Ser banquero en Suiza es el mejor negocio posible: no solamente no tenes ninguna responsabilidad por tus clientes, sino que ademas, cuando te va mal, el gobierno te da 70 mil millones de francos suizos para que no te vayas al joraca. Feliz Navidad!

The Dirty Little Secret of iPhone Development

This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.

The dot-com boom of the 90′s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other languages, right now the vast majority of developers I know spend their time writing web applications, either public or in a private intranet, in J2EE, ASP.NET, Rails, PHP, you name it.

I have said before that writing web applications should be taken as seriously as writing desktop systems. Call me names if you want, but I’m a big fan of Joel’s Test.

However, after all this years, after the Chaos reports, after Peopleware, after the Mythical Man Month, people still treat quality as an afterthought. And also complain about how much software sucks, how expensive it is, and how late it arrives, by the way. Now that the iPhone SDK is widely available, that the App Store is selling more apps that we could have had imagined 6 months ago, many web agencies want to jump to native iPhone development contracts, which are hype and nice and pricey and whatnot. Which is only going to make things worse.

The dirty little secret in this story is this: iPhone development looks more like developing applications for a desktop operating system, and less, much less than web development. And I’m frightened to see some small shops (and even bigger ones), who never attained a real level of professionalism or quality in their software tasks, starting projects and realizing, later, when they are over budget and behind schedule, that this kind of applications requires a different mindset.

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