I've never written the same program twice. I can't give an estimate on the next program because I can't guess at what new and unique hurdles will appear. I might be pulled off different proejct before it even finishes (that's not at all a rare occurence), or the parts just don't work (not rare), or I'm being asked to be an expert on something I'm completely unfamiliar with, or a thousand other things that I can't predict. If it's a sprint and I'm supposed to do A, B, and C, I often end up doing E instead which stands for the Emergency task that popped up unexpectedly.
And you can;t' double or triple your estimate because you'll be called out for it. The estimate is only there to confirm the deadline that was created by management before they even asked for your estimate. We're given three months for a project that I think will take a year, most others acknowledge it will be at least 6 months, but management kept saying "it's a challenge but I think we can rise to it." (these are people who think giving 110% is to be taken literally)
I am not new at this at all, I'm double the age of some of the people I work with, but I am still bad at estimates. Not just with software, but I can't even estimate distances or heights or weights. I'm bad at juggling too, I can't speak Spanish, my piano skills are very rusty. Not everyone has skill $X; so you're good at estimating projects, other people are bad at it, so stop expecting people to be good at everything.
Sometimes there are plain bad companies. Not just a manager, but a large hierarchy of managers going up to the top. One company acquired by another was basically treated like crap the whole time. At one point the bosses cancelled one project completely because it missed the deadline, no extension allowed. Soon after a very similar product was proposed and so the designers started pulling out the documentation from the previous project. No, the bosses said they can't do that, the project had been cancelled and that this was a new project so therefore the design must start from scratch.
(no names here, but it starts with S and ends in iemens)
And the specs and plans are all irrelevant when there are external forces conspiring against them. Oops, the parts we need aren't available yet or have problems... Or for something actualy happening now, the partner is late and the product manager is sweating bullets and asking us if we can still meet the deadline in two weeks despite not having done any integration yet. I was on one project that was about 6 months late because it took 6 months to get legal to approve an NDA agreement with a chip maker, which wrecked my 6 month goals/bonus.
I've been programming for over thirty years, and I can't do estimates. At all.
Even when I think something is easy, it turns out to be hard if there's some snag I didn't foresee. If I think it's hard then I may find out it's not so bad after all because there are already tools to help put. Something that seems intellectually easy may take a long time because it involves a lot of tedious programming or detailed testing. Writing documentation takes me forever, I can not do that quickly at all unless someone wants a plain text file (which no one wants anymore). One big problem here is that I almost *never* program something that's been done a hundred times before, it's always something new, something that requires learning a new system, new hardware, something requiring reading through a lot of documents first, something with a huge amount of unknown variables, and so on. I also want to deliver something that works with minimal to no bug fixes required later, as opposed to shipping on time followed by a long sequence of updates.
Now certainly for some things I can say that I'll be done that night, because it's something really easy, like reverting a change, fixing up an obvious bug, and so on. But even then I occasionally hit a snag that's unpredicted.
The big problem is that the people who want the estimates don't understand this. And they come in all types. There's the person who thinks that a little bit of pressure makes people perform better (ya, you gave us someting to do in 3 months that needs 9 months). There's the person who thinks the estimates are accurate and golden and then sells the product before any work has begun. There's the person who thinks that your estimate means you will be working 100% of the time only on that single project and nothing else. There's the person who has a preconceived idea of how long it will take and considers that any longer estimate is "sandbagging". There are the people who will put me on two of the companies most important projects of all time, at the same time.
At one place, I gave an estimate of a simple task to be "two weeks after the main project finishes I will have the integration finished". So the sales rep wrote down a specific date based on that. The main project was late, but when that date arrived the sales guy comes up and asks me for my piece, which I had not started yet and could not start yet, then he panics because he's promised it to the customer (before even the product I am integrating with even exists). Ultimately I ended up with only two days to work on it.
I seriously wish that people would switch to a model where they announce a product after it is finished, and schedules are not based upon when the next conference or trade show is.
Not a new idea though. Not the absurd conversion to Christianity part, but the idea of how religion would apply to AI or intelligence from another planet. Ie, CS Lewis had a race of beings in his space trilogy who were free of original sin (and thus "conversion" would be irrelevant). So what if an AI had no "sin" or even an ability to sin, but which also had no concepts of a deity?
What would be the dividing line also between merely a machine that appeared to be intelligent versus one that actually was intelligent? Is there a religious Turing test here? And would such a truly intelligent machine even have a soul, if there was such a thing? To mash these complex questions and philosophical issues down to a notion that AI would need conversion is just dumb.
Head back to the 1930s, when Americans did those jobs for low pay and in horrible conditions. Some states even attempted to restrict Americans from other states from crossing their borders.
Or head back to the 70s, while there were a lot of illegal immigrants at the time there were also a lot of Americans doing similar jobs. Picking crops was not an unusual summer job for college students either. Certainly it was normal to get the minimum wage fast food worker job for American teenagers, though it seems to be extremely rare these days.
Some people may not see it this way, but I think the majority of the hispanic farm workers then who were trying to unionize were absolutely legal, probably with family in California for more generations than the whites accusing them of being illegal. Some farmers/ranchers hired undocumented workers because they disliked unions, while others just wanted the cheapest possible workers. It was a nasty time though with rampant racism across the board and on both sides.
Why is it a valid metric? For instance, a police department is in the business of crime prevention, not apprehensions after the fact. If the border patrol wanted to increase the number of apprehensions then they'd just need to put a few holes in the fence and monitor them carefully, waiting until someone is quite a ways across the border and then springing the trap; or they set up their own fake coyote service. Instead the border patrol is involved with deterrence, prevention, monitoring of legal crossings, etc.
Right, the border patrol is not about apprehending people primarily, but is more concerned with discouraging illegal crossings in the first place and monitoring the legal crossings.
They're simplified icons. They may not be great but they fit in with the look and feel. Why have a flat desktop style and then plop in some Windows 7 style icons that pop out and sparkle?
One problem I think is that I've not seen these icons used in context, that is an actual screenshot.
Some people say flat and boring, but why not say simplified and unobstrusive? I like simpler things and I don't want the desktop to distract for the actual stuff I'm doing. One of the flaws I think Windows 7 had was that it was a bit distracting at times, too much shiny, too many graphic tricks, etc. The flaw maybe with Microsoft is that they're copying too much from Apple's Yosemite style rather than trying to be unique, but if simplified is a good move for Apple then maybe it's a good move for Microsoft?
Not sure. It's hard to tell because I have not seen screenshots, only the icons in isolation. But if they already have a flat/boring look to the desktop then a flat/boring icon actually fits well. I've seen cases in the past where a good looking icon from a third party program can appear jarring because it doesn't fit in with the style, and I've seen this happen in Mac OS, Windows, and Linux (especially with Linux).
Myself, I like a flatter look. Maybe not absolutely flat, ala Yosemite, but a subdued approach such as Mavericks where content is considered more important than the UI elements. Once I shrunk the borders on Windows 8 I actually liked its desktop look. I think Windows 7 make a mistake in trying to make use of the video capabilities too much.
Neural Networks were the rage when I was in grad school at UCSD, and also genetic algorithms a bit later. A rage across many departments. They did some good work, though there was this attitude that only their favorite methods counted for anything and that more traditional AI was not worth discussing. But you should use all techniques if you can, otherwise it's like trying to build a circuit using only capacitors.
We used to have a "Natural Law Party" which was basically a very thin disguise over Transcendental Meditation. They would campaign on a platform of "proven" scientific techniques to reduce crime and recidivism through programs in prison, and other things like that. Eventually they got so few votes that they were dropped from the ballot in California.
Isn't a democracy about not caring what the MP or congress member believes as long as they all vote exactly as directed by party leadership? At least that's what all the modern democracies seem to be about.
However the UK often likes to deny that it's really European, as that would associate them with the continentals who bathe in a different manner. Similarly, I suspect a lot of Europeans would like to consider the UK as not really one of them, sort of like the crazy uncle who tells inappropriate jokes at family gatherings.
Actually I suspect if you grab a "typical" European and point out all the politicians and leaders in Europe who are just a goofy as American politicans and leaders, they'll have plenty of excuses why those people don't count. As in they're part of the racist party that no one pays attention to, unless there's an unexpected showing at an election in which case all right thinking Europeans go into a panic. Or they're from on of those warm climates like Greece or Spain which messes up the brain. Or they're from one of the "new" EU countries and not really European. Or many other excuses to maintain the fiction.
That's BS. Lots of nice people over 30 not married who would not mind being married. Sometimes the "for a reason" means they're shy and what's wrong with that? Or they don't meet traditional standards of attractiveness (and would you really want to encourage a daughter to be superficial in those respects?).
Very often the reason people over thirty are divorced is because they rushed into a marriage when they were in their twenties. Being divorced does NOT mean you're a reject, it can mean that the other spouse was the idiot who went out and was cheating, or there was abuse in the marriage, or even that they both mutually and amicably agreed that things weren't working. While getting divorced can be sad it can also mean that the second marriage is done right because now there's experience with what went wrong and how to not repeat the mistakes.
You wouldn't tell someone to only hire people who've never been laid off from a job before or who have never left a job. That would be really stupid. There's some similarity to marriage here; does one skim over the resume quickly and hire the person because they seem to have a nice personality (which I have seen done), or do you actually try to figure out what the person is like before committing.
I wasn't necessarily referring to North Dakota, but something next to a port for easier shipping. Not even in the US necessarily.
Of course, we *already* have a pipeline from Canada tar sands down to Texas, the XL pipeline is about making on leg of it bigger. The issue is from the politics around it, the notion that we'll have lots of jobs (not likely to actually heppen) versus needing the standard environmental review..
I think he's only socialist in the sense that we have redefined that word over time. This was a rarer accusation in the past even against people even more to the left than Obama.
Yes, he has past associations with a religious figure who is harsh about American society. The same minister appeared at a White House prayer breakfast when Clinton was president and it didn't get the same level of vitriol as when it was Obama. Obama did resign his membership from the church after a speech that rev Wright gave.
For the Tea Party, I do see postings on social media from people or communities with "Tea Party" included as part of their names, and they do have these ridiculous conspiracy theories being put forward. The problem here I think is that early on the Tea Party did not tightly delineate what their beliefs or agendas were and so it attracted a far wider audience and ended up being a mixed bag of everything. So once it was just a group of lower-tax pro-reform people that ended being a group of anti-everything wingnuts, with strong views about immigration, foreign policy, social values, etc.
Talking points just make me angry, and sad. No one bothers to think anymore, on the right or left. Most don't even bother to get past the headline. I hate to say it, but I expect bouts of political violence in the US within a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never written the same program twice. I can't give an estimate on the next program because I can't guess at what new and unique hurdles will appear. I might be pulled off different proejct before it even finishes (that's not at all a rare occurence), or the parts just don't work (not rare), or I'm being asked to be an expert on something I'm completely unfamiliar with, or a thousand other things that I can't predict. If it's a sprint and I'm supposed to do A, B, and C, I often end up doing E instead which stands for the Emergency task that popped up unexpectedly.
And you can;t' double or triple your estimate because you'll be called out for it. The estimate is only there to confirm the deadline that was created by management before they even asked for your estimate. We're given three months for a project that I think will take a year, most others acknowledge it will be at least 6 months, but management kept saying "it's a challenge but I think we can rise to it." (these are people who think giving 110% is to be taken literally)
I am not new at this at all, I'm double the age of some of the people I work with, but I am still bad at estimates. Not just with software, but I can't even estimate distances or heights or weights. I'm bad at juggling too, I can't speak Spanish, my piano skills are very rusty. Not everyone has skill $X; so you're good at estimating projects, other people are bad at it, so stop expecting people to be good at everything.
This isn't abuse, this is new hire training. You want the sweat lodge next door.
Sometimes there are plain bad companies. Not just a manager, but a large hierarchy of managers going up to the top. One company acquired by another was basically treated like crap the whole time. At one point the bosses cancelled one project completely because it missed the deadline, no extension allowed. Soon after a very similar product was proposed and so the designers started pulling out the documentation from the previous project. No, the bosses said they can't do that, the project had been cancelled and that this was a new project so therefore the design must start from scratch.
(no names here, but it starts with S and ends in iemens)
And the specs and plans are all irrelevant when there are external forces conspiring against them. Oops, the parts we need aren't available yet or have problems... Or for something actualy happening now, the partner is late and the product manager is sweating bullets and asking us if we can still meet the deadline in two weeks despite not having done any integration yet. I was on one project that was about 6 months late because it took 6 months to get legal to approve an NDA agreement with a chip maker, which wrecked my 6 month goals/bonus.
I've been programming for over thirty years, and I can't do estimates. At all.
Even when I think something is easy, it turns out to be hard if there's some snag I didn't foresee. If I think it's hard then I may find out it's not so bad after all because there are already tools to help put. Something that seems intellectually easy may take a long time because it involves a lot of tedious programming or detailed testing. Writing documentation takes me forever, I can not do that quickly at all unless someone wants a plain text file (which no one wants anymore). One big problem here is that I almost *never* program something that's been done a hundred times before, it's always something new, something that requires learning a new system, new hardware, something requiring reading through a lot of documents first, something with a huge amount of unknown variables, and so on. I also want to deliver something that works with minimal to no bug fixes required later, as opposed to shipping on time followed by a long sequence of updates.
Now certainly for some things I can say that I'll be done that night, because it's something really easy, like reverting a change, fixing up an obvious bug, and so on. But even then I occasionally hit a snag that's unpredicted.
The big problem is that the people who want the estimates don't understand this. And they come in all types. There's the person who thinks that a little bit of pressure makes people perform better (ya, you gave us someting to do in 3 months that needs 9 months). There's the person who thinks the estimates are accurate and golden and then sells the product before any work has begun. There's the person who thinks that your estimate means you will be working 100% of the time only on that single project and nothing else. There's the person who has a preconceived idea of how long it will take and considers that any longer estimate is "sandbagging". There are the people who will put me on two of the companies most important projects of all time, at the same time.
At one place, I gave an estimate of a simple task to be "two weeks after the main project finishes I will have the integration finished". So the sales rep wrote down a specific date based on that. The main project was late, but when that date arrived the sales guy comes up and asks me for my piece, which I had not started yet and could not start yet, then he panics because he's promised it to the customer (before even the product I am integrating with even exists). Ultimately I ended up with only two days to work on it.
I seriously wish that people would switch to a model where they announce a product after it is finished, and schedules are not based upon when the next conference or trade show is.
This is more like the difference between atheist and agnostic.
He was my God first and you're worshipping him incorrectly. Repent or die.
Not a new idea though. Not the absurd conversion to Christianity part, but the idea of how religion would apply to AI or intelligence from another planet. Ie, CS Lewis had a race of beings in his space trilogy who were free of original sin (and thus "conversion" would be irrelevant). So what if an AI had no "sin" or even an ability to sin, but which also had no concepts of a deity?
What would be the dividing line also between merely a machine that appeared to be intelligent versus one that actually was intelligent? Is there a religious Turing test here? And would such a truly intelligent machine even have a soul, if there was such a thing? To mash these complex questions and philosophical issues down to a notion that AI would need conversion is just dumb.
A lot of these games don't even need Steam. The big benefit of Valve or SteamOS here is in promoting the idea that Linux is viable for games.
Head back to the 1930s, when Americans did those jobs for low pay and in horrible conditions. Some states even attempted to restrict Americans from other states from crossing their borders.
Or head back to the 70s, while there were a lot of illegal immigrants at the time there were also a lot of Americans doing similar jobs. Picking crops was not an unusual summer job for college students either. Certainly it was normal to get the minimum wage fast food worker job for American teenagers, though it seems to be extremely rare these days.
Some people may not see it this way, but I think the majority of the hispanic farm workers then who were trying to unionize were absolutely legal, probably with family in California for more generations than the whites accusing them of being illegal. Some farmers/ranchers hired undocumented workers because they disliked unions, while others just wanted the cheapest possible workers. It was a nasty time though with rampant racism across the board and on both sides.
Why is it a valid metric? For instance, a police department is in the business of crime prevention, not apprehensions after the fact. If the border patrol wanted to increase the number of apprehensions then they'd just need to put a few holes in the fence and monitor them carefully, waiting until someone is quite a ways across the border and then springing the trap; or they set up their own fake coyote service. Instead the border patrol is involved with deterrence, prevention, monitoring of legal crossings, etc.
Right, the border patrol is not about apprehending people primarily, but is more concerned with discouraging illegal crossings in the first place and monitoring the legal crossings.
Don't forget the "customs" side of that group. There's a lot more to the department than just apprehending people.
They're simplified icons. They may not be great but they fit in with the look and feel. Why have a flat desktop style and then plop in some Windows 7 style icons that pop out and sparkle?
One problem I think is that I've not seen these icons used in context, that is an actual screenshot.
Some people say flat and boring, but why not say simplified and unobstrusive? I like simpler things and I don't want the desktop to distract for the actual stuff I'm doing. One of the flaws I think Windows 7 had was that it was a bit distracting at times, too much shiny, too many graphic tricks, etc. The flaw maybe with Microsoft is that they're copying too much from Apple's Yosemite style rather than trying to be unique, but if simplified is a good move for Apple then maybe it's a good move for Microsoft?
Not sure. It's hard to tell because I have not seen screenshots, only the icons in isolation. But if they already have a flat/boring look to the desktop then a flat/boring icon actually fits well. I've seen cases in the past where a good looking icon from a third party program can appear jarring because it doesn't fit in with the style, and I've seen this happen in Mac OS, Windows, and Linux (especially with Linux).
Myself, I like a flatter look. Maybe not absolutely flat, ala Yosemite, but a subdued approach such as Mavericks where content is considered more important than the UI elements. Once I shrunk the borders on Windows 8 I actually liked its desktop look. I think Windows 7 make a mistake in trying to make use of the video capabilities too much.
Neural Networks were the rage when I was in grad school at UCSD, and also genetic algorithms a bit later. A rage across many departments. They did some good work, though there was this attitude that only their favorite methods counted for anything and that more traditional AI was not worth discussing. But you should use all techniques if you can, otherwise it's like trying to build a circuit using only capacitors.
I didn't think there was an "official" platform of the tea party, or an official organization.
We used to have a "Natural Law Party" which was basically a very thin disguise over Transcendental Meditation. They would campaign on a platform of "proven" scientific techniques to reduce crime and recidivism through programs in prison, and other things like that. Eventually they got so few votes that they were dropped from the ballot in California.
Isn't a democracy about not caring what the MP or congress member believes as long as they all vote exactly as directed by party leadership? At least that's what all the modern democracies seem to be about.
However the UK often likes to deny that it's really European, as that would associate them with the continentals who bathe in a different manner. Similarly, I suspect a lot of Europeans would like to consider the UK as not really one of them, sort of like the crazy uncle who tells inappropriate jokes at family gatherings.
Actually I suspect if you grab a "typical" European and point out all the politicians and leaders in Europe who are just a goofy as American politicans and leaders, they'll have plenty of excuses why those people don't count. As in they're part of the racist party that no one pays attention to, unless there's an unexpected showing at an election in which case all right thinking Europeans go into a panic. Or they're from on of those warm climates like Greece or Spain which messes up the brain. Or they're from one of the "new" EU countries and not really European. Or many other excuses to maintain the fiction.
Right. His not being Labour was probably important and outweighed the consideration that he was an utter loon.
That's BS. Lots of nice people over 30 not married who would not mind being married. Sometimes the "for a reason" means they're shy and what's wrong with that? Or they don't meet traditional standards of attractiveness (and would you really want to encourage a daughter to be superficial in those respects?).
Very often the reason people over thirty are divorced is because they rushed into a marriage when they were in their twenties. Being divorced does NOT mean you're a reject, it can mean that the other spouse was the idiot who went out and was cheating, or there was abuse in the marriage, or even that they both mutually and amicably agreed that things weren't working. While getting divorced can be sad it can also mean that the second marriage is done right because now there's experience with what went wrong and how to not repeat the mistakes.
You wouldn't tell someone to only hire people who've never been laid off from a job before or who have never left a job. That would be really stupid. There's some similarity to marriage here; does one skim over the resume quickly and hire the person because they seem to have a nice personality (which I have seen done), or do you actually try to figure out what the person is like before committing.
I wasn't necessarily referring to North Dakota, but something next to a port for easier shipping. Not even in the US necessarily.
Of course, we *already* have a pipeline from Canada tar sands down to Texas, the XL pipeline is about making on leg of it bigger. The issue is from the politics around it, the notion that we'll have lots of jobs (not likely to actually heppen) versus needing the standard environmental review..
I think he's only socialist in the sense that we have redefined that word over time. This was a rarer accusation in the past even against people even more to the left than Obama.
Yes, he has past associations with a religious figure who is harsh about American society. The same minister appeared at a White House prayer breakfast when Clinton was president and it didn't get the same level of vitriol as when it was Obama. Obama did resign his membership from the church after a speech that rev Wright gave.
For the Tea Party, I do see postings on social media from people or communities with "Tea Party" included as part of their names, and they do have these ridiculous conspiracy theories being put forward. The problem here I think is that early on the Tea Party did not tightly delineate what their beliefs or agendas were and so it attracted a far wider audience and ended up being a mixed bag of everything. So once it was just a group of lower-tax pro-reform people that ended being a group of anti-everything wingnuts, with strong views about immigration, foreign policy, social values, etc.
Talking points just make me angry, and sad. No one bothers to think anymore, on the right or left. Most don't even bother to get past the headline. I hate to say it, but I expect bouts of political violence in the US within a decade.