The field of complex agent behavior has had a well established and consistent terminology since it emerged as a branch of economic game theory in the 1960s. The primary problem is that most people on SlashDot don't check the math section for books, only the computer science section, and the mathematicians beat us to the punch by so many years that we had little afterwards to say.
John Nash is a good place to start reading, if you're interested.
I'm tired of listening to you base every part of this on pretending the burden of proof isn't on you, and watching you carefully edit out every explanation of why you asking me to prove or disprove your statement is couched in error. You're simply revealing your own ignorance, though it seems you're unable to see it, and hiding behind my having fun at your expense as a desperate smokescreen to pretend I didn't make the legitimate points that you simply ignored. There's a big difference between disabling someone's argument and ignoring it, and the arrogant "do your job" nonsense doesn't work when you're so obviously on the wrong side of that line.
Find someone else to haunt. You're not smart enough to spin this.
In your original post you claimed "this is the specific reason that Ecstasy was originally developed by Merck". In this post you claim "The original development premise for the chemical family was as an appetite suppressant", so it seems like you are contradicting yourself.
You're not very bright, are you? The original reason for the development of internal combustion was to provide a torque source to power automated tooling machines (initially lathes if I remember correctly.) However, once the utility of a driven axle was realized, smaller versions were developed to power automobiles.
Yes. The chemical family was developed as an appetite suppressant. One particular member of the family had very different effects. That member was redeveloped as a theraputic drug for recall therapy.
Things can have different intended uses than their historic predecessors.
However you keep saying "under that guise" - so are you saying that the real reasons for development are not the same as the stated reasons?
... no. I'm just saying that those were the stated reasons. You're struggling to read way too deeply into what was said in order to find something with which to take issue. If I had meant something like that I would have said it.
Everything I've seen says that the original development was to control bleeding from wounds, from Wikipedia (yes, not the most reliable source at all) - "At the time, MDMA was not known to be a drug in its own right; rather, it was patented as an intermediate chemical used in the synthesis of a hydrastinine (a drug intended to control bleeding from wounds)." Is that incorrect?
It is incorrect, yes. They didn't even spell hydrastantin correctly. Wikipedia is a large, interesting collection of mythology and supposition by people who really believe they know what they're talking about. Try using an actual reference work written by historians or doctors instead, next time.
Any time you feel the need to couch your source by saying "not the most reliable source," you know better and you shouldn't be using it.
I know this is Slashdot but there is no reason to be defensive or insulting.
You get what you gave. Take a look at the condescending attitude from which you preach the fictions you learned on the interwebs. You don't have the right person, you don't have the right year, you've got the name of the drug wrong, you've got the premise of the patent wrong, you've got the spelling of the wrong person's name wrong. There's nothing correct in here. I know this is Slashdot, but there is no reason to talk down to people about something you've apparently no knowledge of whatsoever.
I don't know all that much about this subject, nor have I claimed to
Telling someone they're wrong is the explicit supposition that you know more about the topic than they do, and as far as I can tell, you don't actually have any factoids correct. You can pretend to yourself that you didn't take the aggressive, overbearing and condescending tone that you took, but it's dishonest, and if you'd bother to look at the way you speak a week from now, you might begin to understand why people react to you in this fashion.
Believe it or not, it's offensive to have someone who doesn't know much about a subject tell you that you're wrong when you aren't.
But don't say things like "Please stop pretending to know things you don't. Crack a book."
Well, someone needs to get it through to you. You're being a jerk by telling people they're wrong when you have no idea what you're talking about. It's condescending, derisive, embarrassing, aggravating and full of all sorts of crap. You're posturing to look like the aggrieved victim here, but you aren't; I didn't talk to you, you talked to me. All you had to do was not pretend to know what you were talking about, and you wouldn't
RTFA. There are photographs. Just because the device doesn't do what's claimed doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Nearly every claim of a perpetual motion machine has been accompanied by a complicated device with a complicated explanation of what the inventor really wished it did. This is no different. The inventor goes into a long, specific explanation of his snake oil. It's really quite entertaining, and you shouldn't miss out on it just because you've jumped to the false conclusion that it isn't there.
You are claiming that things happen without us perceiving them. You are making a claim. Now prove it.
Why is it that people like you always have such difficulty with concepts like burden of proof? No, I'm just taking the same stance that basic common sense takes. You're the one who believes, in the way that a newborn does, that the world goes away when they stop looking.
Tell you what. Next time you want to cross the street, put on some earmuffs and a blindfold and just start walking. Either you're right, and humanity will be much improved by their ability to selectively experience reality, or the world will be much improved for not having to listen to you anymore.
For that matter, if you're willing to pretend that all things are sense dependant, then by definition nothing can ever be proven or disproven.
That's correct. As a result, reality is very much dependent on perception. Congratulations.
You mean you seriously can't see the problem there?... wow.
I live in the real world and the real world hasn't ever thrown me a curve ball. My eyes do not create reality
Again, prove it.
Do not demand of others that which you will not or cannot do yourself. The burden of proof is on the original statement, not the reactions you got, even if you just try to start over at the reaction and pretend that you didn't say something first.
Since I have no doubt that you will reply again without justifying your own statements, I'll warn you that should you choose again to reply making hypocritical demands based on logic a seventh grader would be embarrassed of, I'll simply ignore you. Don't ask me to justify my laughing at your claims; I really don't care if you believe me when I think you're a transparent moron. There's a reason the Skeptics died out.
Either justify your own claims, or shoo. I didn't make any of the claims you're now asking me to defend the derision of. This all originates at you, and the burden of proof is entirely on you. The lack of proof speaks badly of you. Stop demanding what you won't do, kid.
Yeah, the burden of proof is on the speaker. Occam's razor says that death isn't bound to observation. You're the one making the claim otherwise. You prove it. I cannot disprove a falsehood with no basis in reality. I also can't disprove that you're a Martian.
For that matter, if you're willing to pretend that all things are sense dependant, then by definition nothing can ever be proven or disproven. The ancient Greeks were sick to death of this nonsense when it was coming out of the mouths of the Skeptics.
You go live in a barrel if you want. I don't care. I live in the real world and the real world hasn't ever thrown me a curve ball. My eyes do not create reality. Neither, for that matter, do yours, but at least I have the common sense to know it.
Beyond the evidence provided by your perceptions you still have no idea as to whether or not they exist.
Try again, son. Pay close attention to the second sentence in the post, "If you really want to try the schroedinger's cat falling in a forest line of things, make a robot do the beating. The coma victim will in fact die without being measured."
By the by, kind of the point I was making was that it doesn't actually matter if you know they exist, because they don't. People don't fail to die just because you're looking some other direction, kid. And really, don't waste my time with naïve misinterpretations of the measurement problem. It doesn't say that things don't occur until measured. It says that the positional locus of a single particle collapses when measured. That has nothing to do with whether the particle is actually there, and Schroedinger long regretted his cat example, because people managed to turn it into "the cat is both dead and alive," which isn't what the experiment means at all.
Your classes in Quantum Mechanics from the University of Star Trek: Voyager were lacking. I suggest you get through a physics book before you next attempt to discuss things. Quantum mechanical single particle position has literally no bearing on the macroscopic world, and macroscopic objects are not subject to positionality or location resolution issues. Welcome to the real world. Just because someone told you it works one way doesn't mean it really does, and the only reason you think Quantum Mechanics is simpler than people say it is is because you don't actually understand QM at all.
My mind experiment demonstrates two things: what it was meant to demonstrate, and your inability to keep up. Don't argue a post until you've finished reading at least the paragraph you're chafing against.
And you are familiar with this particular individual's skill level how?
Well, to be plain, what I actually said was that he shouldn't be claiming these things without evidence. That said, how can I tell he's a noob? It's a matter of impression. When you've hired enough people, you start to see behavioral and comprehensive patterns. You need a serious understanding of workflow and cooperation to become that level of productive, and in my opinion, looking at what the original poster said, it's clear that he has neither. You may choose to argue that if you wish, and unfortunately I expect you probably will, but this was an opinion, and your opinion of my opinion isn't actually interesting.
From your last post: "And when you start costing 30x as much, suddenly you'll be able to out-do 35 of them, right?" Sure sounds like you are thinking productivity scales linearly.
Or, maybe I'm just accusing original poster of lying to make himself look more important. Read what I said again. I'm not saying his skill level will climb. I'm saying his claimed skill level will climb. It's an enormous difference. All I'm looking at linearly is original poster's desperation to seem potent.
"Please don't read things into what I said then argue with those things. That's really ugly."
Don't argue with things you say that I read? Thats a bit of an audacious demand, don't you think?
You need to go down to Sylvan and enroll in a workshop to improve your reading comprehension skills. "Read into what was said" doesn't mean the same thing as "read what was said." Find a co-worker and ask for help understanding the quote, please. I've run out of patience. What I asked you to not do was to not argue with things I didn't say. Honestly, at least put in a little effort to understand what people say to you.
On the side, you should probably look up the word 'audacious.' You either accused me of being brave, recklessly brave, contemptuous of law, or original and unique. No, none of those apply to the thing you misread, whether or not considering the correct interpretation of what was actually said.
As a rule, using words you don't actually know is a great way to make yourself look stupid. Food for thought. It's only dumbing it down, so to speak, if you would have been correct otherwise. Try operating at your actual level; you may not be so effete as to trick yourself into thinking yourself eloquent, but at least you'll be saying what you're trying to say, and that'd be an improvement.
Seriously, why is anyone outside of Art Bell and George Noorey even giving this guy the time of day?
Because several times, legitimate scientists have said this, really believing what they were saying, and the resulting systems were frequently quite difficult to understand in terms of deciphering the flaw.
It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.
Now, like you, I think this guy is a snake oil shill, as opposed to someone making a legitimate error. Nonetheless, I find his device bizarrely fascinating specifically because I don't see his particular cheat just yet. And, as such, I'm glad to have exposure to the nonsense. It's fun.
Uh huh. And when you find that patent, and read it, lemme know. By the way, it doesn't say anything about bleeding except in the brain, and you've got the year wrong. You're looking for German Patent 274,350 (12/24/1912). Also, the person in the mid 1970s was Alexander Shuglin, not Leo Zaff. I suspect you mean Shuglin's third patient, Leo Zeff, who promoted what he was taught by Shuglin; his role in the history of Ecstasy has been wildly overstated by drug advocates, probably for the same reason that Bill Packard is seen as having founded Silicon Valley (Shuglin was a jerk and nobody wanted to credit him.)
The original development premise for the chemical family was as an appetite suppressant; under that guise Merck got as far as MDE. Then there was a fourteen year pause, until 1927 when the effects of the chemical were tested on rats to see whether they'd help deal with starvation by lowering the metabolism. Under that guise, the family was manipulated until methylsafrylamin was created, which is relatively close to what we now know as MDA. This actually increases the metabolism, but the psychological effects were noted, and the family was further explored, locating MDMA.
Please stop pretending to know things you don't. Crack a book.
There are quite a few substances which are already known to target memories. This just happens to be the first one which isn't somewhat poisonous. I don't know the underlying mechanism for this one, but several derivatives of hemlock reveal a toxin which is both highly polar and ferromagnetic. It's quite simply attracted to the cells of the brain that are currently in use; you tend to start losing what you're thinking about during the poison's course through the body. Read about the Roman Senate; that kind of toxin was blamed repeatedly for the change of several specific Senators' positions.
Now, granted, that particular substance does a lot of other damage to the body and brain too, but if you were to combine that kind of mechanism with a molecule dependent on some surface receptor on the parts of the brain responsible for memory storage...
We don't know jack about the brain, to be blunt.
Actually, most current brain medication was designed from scratch. We know quite a bit about the brain. There's a lot left to learn, but several antipsychotics in current use were put together by an engineer who wanted specific results. Don't confuse that you don't know jack about the brain with that the rest of us don't.
LSD has been out for decades now and we still don't have a clue just how that stuff works.
Actually, we've understood LSD for about a decade. Try keeping up with the literature if you're going to feign familiarity.
Yet we keep cranking out more pills for "mental" problems.
And most of them replace something older, and almost all of them are an improvement on what they're replacing. What, precisely, is your point?
Why do I also have the feeling that this pill would only suppress the traumatic experience instead of making people deal with and resolve it?
Probably because it's blatantly obvious that you can't resolve something you don't remember. Y'know, that whole common sense thing.
Instead of curing, we treat. Which is incidentally also more profitable, because a cured person is just that, cured. Doesn't need more medication.
People who argue based on assumptions are tiresome and boring. This is a permanent effect. Try reading about the pill before assuming it's a lifelong commitment; it isn't.
Also, I'm not sure if you knew this, but if the treatment isn't permanent, it's not a treatment. I realize the semantic difference you're trying to make, but perhaps you should spend some quality time with a dictionary. Treatments are permanent. That's why it's called "treated wood."
Treatment, though, can take months, years, decades or however long you want.
Wrong. It's not a treatment until the day it's successfully, permanently over.
It isn't. This is easily demonstrated by beating a coma victim to death. They won't perceive your actions, but they'll still die. If you really want to try the schroedinger's cat falling in a forest line of things, make a robot do the beating. The coma victim will in fact die without being measured.
and the basis of perception is memory
It isn't. There are a variety of individuals with brain injuries that impede or destroy memory. They can still perceive you, and remarkably, they're often still able to function to a degree in the real world.
are you changing your personal reality
There's no such thing as a personal reality. Put down the Led Zeppelin, and if you're well educated in Philosophy, climb out of the barrel. You can make all the solipsisms you want, and yes, it's particularly difficult for me to convince you that I exist, when you can just claim that every sense by which you're detecting me is faulty.
That said, this isn't The Matrix, and you can be affected without being aware of it. As the old saying goes, the bullet you don't hear is the one that killed you.
and in effect, changing who you are?
This... is a difficult point. On the one hand, yes, in many ways we are created and defined by our experiences. On the other hand, though, in many ways we aren't. Consider for example that thing that Ripley's Believe It or Not always does when they're out of material, where they find two twins who were seperated at birth, and point out how they wear the same kind of clothes and the same teeth are missing and their girlfriends both have the same weird deformities and whatever.
Are you removing part of who you are? Maybe. But, look, what about if you lose your fourth toe? You lost a little bit of who you are there, too, and you're a different person for it. Sure, it's a trivial tiny difference, but it is a difference. These things have a scale. I was changed as a person when I got my elbow injury. Not in a huge way, sure, but it's real. I stopped working out because the stress on my elbow is no longer safe. I used the scar to impress each of two different girls.
So, you remove a traumatic memory. Does that change a person? Sure. But, then, change isn't always a bad thing, and there's such a thing as changing back - or, at least, there may be now. Consider the case of someone coming back from a brief tour in war, with shell shock. They can't talk, they can't sleep, they scream every time there's a loud sound, and seeing a gun on TV leaves them crying for hours. Don't laugh; there are people who were wounded psychologically in just such a way.
Say you could remove those memories. Say that turns them back into (almost) who they were before the war. Is that a change? Yes. But maybe you might do better to think of it as a "change back." This drug is apparently thought of for trauma. Rarely is it the case that those changes caused by trauma are beneficial. I'm no psychologist, but can see the case for this maybe becoming an important tool in repairing serious psychological damage.
Is the only cure for trauma personal metamorphosis?
Of course not. People come back from trauma every day. That there are other ways, though, doesn't mean that this way isn't important. There are something like 30 ways to remove an ulcer. Half of them are in use today. One might expect there to be only one, but the human situation is complicated; sometimes you need to do it through the mouth, sometimes through the butt, sometimes with a remote control robot, sometimes by just opening the stomach.
Different situations need different solutions.
I can understand that there are people who are so traumatized by past events that they require medical attention but is effectively erasing those events from memory the best solution?
For those of you paying attention, this is the specific reason that Ecstasy was originally developed by Merck. Also, Ecstasy does a damned good job of it. Unfortunately, ecstasy also makes you feel good, which got it banned.
Yeah: this'll last. Legal for three months, maximum.
Yeah. And you know what that means? Virtually nothing, even if we choose to believe you. There are literally dozens of reasons that people on Team 1 might have a different production rate than Team 2, and it turns out that only some of them are about the engineers on that team. Bad specifications, bad communications, poor requirements documentation, poor access to the customer, and any number of other similar issues can affect teams extremely differently. Even being in a different building is enough to take these problems out of control in a way that would make naive programmers on the unaffected team think they were a whole lot better than they actually were.
On top of that, your manager obviously isn't very good; if he or she was, you wouldn't still be working with that particular group of offshores. I bring this up because the vast bulk of the problems an engineering team goes through are actually about the manager, and offshoring just makes those kinds of problems more difficult. There isn't a doubt in my mind that the productivity problems at the other end of the chain are about the manager in question.
But, back to what I was saying to you: one group of people is not enough experience for you to claim superproductivity. You don't have the knowledge. It could as easily be that the particular group of Indians in question are retarded, or more likely, that your manager is, and that it's killing the Indians' ability to work.
Frankly, when you say "I'm 20x the average programmer," the only people who believe you are other people like you. There are a bunch of phrases in business that tip their hat to this effect. The most telling in my opinion is "proximity breeds success; success breeds success." What that's about is that if you spend time with people, you'll end up achieving at their level.
There's a reason there's nobody onsite who's as productive as you are, and it's not because you're above average. It's that nobody who's above average wants to be dragged down to your level by your company.
Get a better employer, and you'll see your own productivity go up. Maybe then you'll get it.
Read what I said again. All I said was that the person speaking wasn't a high-productivity programmer. I never claimed there weren't differences between engineers.
In the Mythical Man Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_man_month) Brooks referenced a study that found a 10:1 difference in productivity between best and mediocre programmers on a team.
And? I never said those programmers don't exist. I just said that the person making the statement wasn't one of them.
I think Gates stated that there was a 100:1 difference today - due to greater technology leverage. And Google is certainly banking on that as well.
Wait. Google has thousands of employees and dozens of simple web products, and you're holding them up as an example of productivity? Anyway, I'm really not interested in your ability to remember apocrypha used with literate license. RAND data shows that high end programmers reach about 22x productivity at a limit, and RAND data is based on the best programming outfits in the nation, so I'm quite happy to use that as the watermark I believe in.
Now please stop preaching. It's ugly and you're not teaching anything that everyone on SlashDot doesn't know. Look, I'm not black, but that doesn't mean black people don't exist. The grandparent poster isn't a superprogrammer. That doesn't mean they don't exist. Please dismount your soapbox with care; I wouldn't want you to trip on all those baseless assumptions scattered around your feet.
Given that there's a large correlation between experience and expertise, and given that it is difficult to find experience developers in India, China, etc
Er, no it isn't. Please stop guessing. You've never hired offshore workers.
then it isn't unreasonable to say that a given experienced programmer in country X is 20x as productive as a team of junior-college grads in country Y.
It's unreasonable to say that of any arbitrary people, no matter what baseless stereotypes you want to cobble together. You shouldn't be attempting to rank theoretical people. Rank individuals, sure, but when you start trying to put numbers to groups based on expectations, you become a racist.
Either run a study or shut your mouth. You need tens of thousands of people to get the kind of statistical basis for such a statement that would have you anything other than laughed out of a highschool science class. It's embarrassing to watch you talk. You don't know anywhere near as much about this as you think you do; you don't know anyone who's hired enough people. Chances are there are less than a hundred people in America who've hired enough people to make judgements like these from the hip.
Putting stereotypes and assumptions to racism doesn't stop it being racism, nor does it make grandparent poster any less transparently clueless. I was only pointing out that he was a moron. I stand by my evaluation - what he said was clueless.
In all cases it was the experience of the programmers more than any other single factor.
Then you know it has nothing to do with the country. Try doing the hiring yourself; it's actually dead easy to find experienced people in China and India. The problems you had were because your management cheaped out and hired the dregs.
Unless they're starting to move programming jobs to Africa for cost savings. Then we'll just start the whole cycle over again.
Humanity would be a much better species if stupidity and racism were painful. I mean, sure, they're painful to the people reading what you write. I mean to you.
By the by, maybe you should crack a history book. Africa has a proud history in computing. If you stop being a racist and start learning what you're talking about, you might find that in fact there are nine countries in Africa which have been well wired since the 80s. I'd tell you to go to Egypt, but I have no doubt you'd talk like this to the natives, and end up dead in an alleyway.
Its actually not that hard to believe one skilled worker is worth more than 20 unskilled ones
I know. I have several of them. I didn't say those people didn't exist, only that the original speaker wasn't one such person.
Productivity doesn't scale up just by hiring more workers. Look up the mythical man month for more details.
I never said it did. I've actually read TMM quite a few times, and Fred is a personal friend. Thanks kindly. Nothing I said is in contrast with his book in any way.
And if a number of them are particularly unskilled (which is what you are in danger of getting if you just outsource your project to the lowest bidder),
That's about lowest bidder, not about India. You'll get the same problem if you look for the lowest bidder in Chicago.
Please don't read things into what I said then argue with those things. That's really ugly.
When someone says, "I am as productive as 20 offshore workers," they do not necessarily believe that your average Indian technical professional has a bone stuck through his septum and likes to spend his time shouting at the moon.
Wow, and if I had actually said that, that might have been a worthwhile thing to say. The idea that I'm accusing him of believing such a thing by telling him he's full of crap until he's got evidence is startling and disappointing. I'm not accusing him of anything other than being full of crap. You don't need a bone through an arbitrary part of your body (or did you think the nasal septum was the only septum?) to be a racist jerk.
The chief benefits of having a local worker are that they can easily communicate with the rest of your organization because of physical presence, and having a common culture between the client, the employer and the employee leads to less miscommunication.
Those are all reasonable points. None of them lead to a single person being twenty times as productive as offshore counterparts. I realize that it's quite easy to recite the pablum you've heard about offshore workers. Here's some clue for you.
Almost everyone is terrible at describing projects. This was a famous problem until offshoring started; now everyone blames it on the language barrier, because they're unable (as normal) to face that they're the problem. This is typical in management. Used to be that workers could say "well look, the job spec you gave us is crap." Now, they're Indian, and people just assume it's about the language.
I've worked with six different outsourcing firms, all but one of which suffered all these moronic stereotypes. I had problems with none of the workers at any of the firms. Why? I don't speak Tamil. I'm a white guy from Pennsylvania.
It's because I know how to write a project spec.
Believe it or not, even the people on this side of the language barrier can be a problem. If and when you wake up to the idea that some of the problems you hear your buddy complaining about are actually his fault, maybe you'll start to see that there's a clear divide in outsourcing management: those managers that have zero problems, and those managers which have constant wall to wall problems.
Then look back in the history of those managers who can't handle Indians. Nine times out of ten, they had just as much difficulty with onsite workers, and their selective memories have let them forget the problems they caused, now that they have workers so thoroughly lambasted that nobody has the good sense to consider that in fact they don't cause every single problem in the entire project.
In a modern technology project, according to RAND data, offshored projects fail 78% of the time. That seems really high, until you realize that onshore projects fail 77% of the time.
Statistics > stereotypes. Take your two projects you've ever managed in your entire life, and blow them out your ass; the only difference between you and a racist from the 1950s is that the guy in the 1950s had the balls to face who he was and what he believed.
If you're going to say, "Well, these guys from halfway across the globe understand exactly what I'm saying," not so fast.
Why not so fast? They do. Not all your communications problems are about the language barrier.
Even a workplace has its own idiomatic expressions.
If your project specs contain idioms, then offshoring is the least of your problems.
You must also consider the disparities in overall dialect and slang that accord to your region, and the fact that diagrams and bizarre hand-gestures often come into play when describing technical concepts.
Believe it or not, diagrams are pretty clear in any language. As far as hand gestures, well, I communicate on paper and in email, in documented and recorded ways, whether I'm
I will take the onshore guy who claims he can be 20x productive over 20 offshore resources any day of the week because, if he is passionate about technology and has the confidence to make that statement, which could be quickly determined, he is probably right.
Yeah, because there's no such thing as a passionate Indian. They're so different from us! (cough) One thing you'll learn with time is that people who have the confidence to make sweeping judgements are often doing so for reasons other than that they're correct.
You probably come from the school of thought that a new resource can only add productivity to a project.
I absolutely do not. Please try to speak for yourself instead of for others.
In your line of thinking, even if they are not very good, they will at least marginally increase productivity.
Horseshit. I believe no such thing. Do not speak for me.
In reality, most developers are net negative to project productivity and the median developer falls below zero.
I find it quite interesting that the people who believe the average developer is net negative are the same people who are willing to hire the dorks who claim to be 20x as powerful as people they'll never meet. I find it more interesting still that none of you can ever grasp that the reason you think most engineers are net negative is that you show a pattern of hiring the worst individuals available, based on that they make the same stupid racist judgements that you do. I have no doubt that you think based on experience that most engineers are a loss. What I do disagree with is why you had that experience. You think it's about the engineers. I think it's about the person hiring them.
There are certain people who no talented engineer will work for.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology.
I can't imagine how you could possibly come to this belief.
They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself.
Y'know, if you were to talk like this to someone's face, they'd probably knock you out. And rightfully so. It's shameful for you to speak this way of people you've never met based on the country they come from. I can't imagine you speaking this way in the real world; it's people like you who make internet anonymity problematic. I find you disgusting.
As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers
If you hire 20 scattershot programmers from anywhere, you're going to get 19 morons and one average guy. I'd tell you to try hiring 20 people from Kentucky, except given the way you talk about employees, I very seriously doubt you have the resources. I'm sorry that you confuse your correct observation of the stupidity and uselessness of the people you hire as endemic to a nation. It's actually because, as you've clearly demonstrated, you have no idea how to hire good people.
When you start hiring domestically, you're in for a raw shock. What you think is about India is actually about humanity. Until you change the way you look at hiring workers, you're not going to find talented people in any country.
As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers and incurring the managerial overhead will generally result in less overall project productivity than where you started, especially when you consider long term costs.
Management 101: project productivity and project costs are not related, and are frequently at odds. And frankly, if you think you've made a point about India by saying "I hired 20 people at random that I didn't know and they just wanted the job for the money," then I'm not sure how exactly to speak to you; you're so amazingly burdened by stereotypes, assumptions and the general flavor of be
And when you start costing 30x as much, suddenly you'll be able to out-do 35 of them, right?
One thing I've learned is that when someone starts saying they're better than programmers from (insert country here,) they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worth. I'm curious: given that among 20 programmers you'll have two or three successfully completed large projects, where are your fourty to sixty?... or, hell, even just where's your one big project? Anything? I mean, if you're worth 20 of them, surely you have something to show for all that enormous skill?
When you have some numbers to back up that you're actually worth 20 of them, let us know; until then, it's hollow dishonest bragging. The only people you're impressing are other people like you.
Sorry, that's $1200/y for a dedicated Pentium 4 3.06 with a gig of ram, an 80 gig hard drive, an IP address, any free OS (you pay extra for winders,) ten megabits of bandwidth guaranteed 99.99% available at all times and with a 99.99% uptime.
Sometimes I forget that other dedicated providers dust stuff under the rug.
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The field of complex agent behavior has had a well established and consistent terminology since it emerged as a branch of economic game theory in the 1960s. The primary problem is that most people on SlashDot don't check the math section for books, only the computer science section, and the mathematicians beat us to the punch by so many years that we had little afterwards to say.
John Nash is a good place to start reading, if you're interested.
I'm tired of listening to you base every part of this on pretending the burden of proof isn't on you, and watching you carefully edit out every explanation of why you asking me to prove or disprove your statement is couched in error. You're simply revealing your own ignorance, though it seems you're unable to see it, and hiding behind my having fun at your expense as a desperate smokescreen to pretend I didn't make the legitimate points that you simply ignored. There's a big difference between disabling someone's argument and ignoring it, and the arrogant "do your job" nonsense doesn't work when you're so obviously on the wrong side of that line.
Find someone else to haunt. You're not smart enough to spin this.
It's not a complicated sentence. Read carefully.
" Just because the device doesn't do what's claimed doesn't mean it doesn't exist. "
I shouldn't have to repeat myself over something that short.
You're not very bright, are you? The original reason for the development of internal combustion was to provide a torque source to power automated tooling machines (initially lathes if I remember correctly.) However, once the utility of a driven axle was realized, smaller versions were developed to power automobiles.
Yes. The chemical family was developed as an appetite suppressant. One particular member of the family had very different effects. That member was redeveloped as a theraputic drug for recall therapy.
Things can have different intended uses than their historic predecessors.
... no. I'm just saying that those were the stated reasons. You're struggling to read way too deeply into what was said in order to find something with which to take issue. If I had meant something like that I would have said it.
It is incorrect, yes. They didn't even spell hydrastantin correctly. Wikipedia is a large, interesting collection of mythology and supposition by people who really believe they know what they're talking about. Try using an actual reference work written by historians or doctors instead, next time.
Any time you feel the need to couch your source by saying "not the most reliable source," you know better and you shouldn't be using it.
You get what you gave. Take a look at the condescending attitude from which you preach the fictions you learned on the interwebs. You don't have the right person, you don't have the right year, you've got the name of the drug wrong, you've got the premise of the patent wrong, you've got the spelling of the wrong person's name wrong. There's nothing correct in here. I know this is Slashdot, but there is no reason to talk down to people about something you've apparently no knowledge of whatsoever.
Telling someone they're wrong is the explicit supposition that you know more about the topic than they do, and as far as I can tell, you don't actually have any factoids correct. You can pretend to yourself that you didn't take the aggressive, overbearing and condescending tone that you took, but it's dishonest, and if you'd bother to look at the way you speak a week from now, you might begin to understand why people react to you in this fashion.
Believe it or not, it's offensive to have someone who doesn't know much about a subject tell you that you're wrong when you aren't.
Well, someone needs to get it through to you. You're being a jerk by telling people they're wrong when you have no idea what you're talking about. It's condescending, derisive, embarrassing, aggravating and full of all sorts of crap. You're posturing to look like the aggrieved victim here, but you aren't; I didn't talk to you, you talked to me. All you had to do was not pretend to know what you were talking about, and you wouldn't
You are correct, I had named the wrong theory by accident. Thank you for catching my error.
Tell you what. Next time you want to cross the street, put on some earmuffs and a blindfold and just start walking. Either you're right, and humanity will be much improved by their ability to selectively experience reality, or the world will be much improved for not having to listen to you anymore.You mean you seriously can't see the problem there?
Since I have no doubt that you will reply again without justifying your own statements, I'll warn you that should you choose again to reply making hypocritical demands based on logic a seventh grader would be embarrassed of, I'll simply ignore you. Don't ask me to justify my laughing at your claims; I really don't care if you believe me when I think you're a transparent moron. There's a reason the Skeptics died out.
Either justify your own claims, or shoo. I didn't make any of the claims you're now asking me to defend the derision of. This all originates at you, and the burden of proof is entirely on you. The lack of proof speaks badly of you. Stop demanding what you won't do, kid.
Yeah, the burden of proof is on the speaker. Occam's razor says that death isn't bound to observation. You're the one making the claim otherwise. You prove it. I cannot disprove a falsehood with no basis in reality. I also can't disprove that you're a Martian.
For that matter, if you're willing to pretend that all things are sense dependant, then by definition nothing can ever be proven or disproven. The ancient Greeks were sick to death of this nonsense when it was coming out of the mouths of the Skeptics.
You go live in a barrel if you want. I don't care. I live in the real world and the real world hasn't ever thrown me a curve ball. My eyes do not create reality. Neither, for that matter, do yours, but at least I have the common sense to know it.
By the by, kind of the point I was making was that it doesn't actually matter if you know they exist, because they don't. People don't fail to die just because you're looking some other direction, kid. And really, don't waste my time with naïve misinterpretations of the measurement problem. It doesn't say that things don't occur until measured. It says that the positional locus of a single particle collapses when measured. That has nothing to do with whether the particle is actually there, and Schroedinger long regretted his cat example, because people managed to turn it into "the cat is both dead and alive," which isn't what the experiment means at all.
Your classes in Quantum Mechanics from the University of Star Trek: Voyager were lacking. I suggest you get through a physics book before you next attempt to discuss things. Quantum mechanical single particle position has literally no bearing on the macroscopic world, and macroscopic objects are not subject to positionality or location resolution issues. Welcome to the real world. Just because someone told you it works one way doesn't mean it really does, and the only reason you think Quantum Mechanics is simpler than people say it is is because you don't actually understand QM at all.
My mind experiment demonstrates two things: what it was meant to demonstrate, and your inability to keep up. Don't argue a post until you've finished reading at least the paragraph you're chafing against.
On the side, you should probably look up the word 'audacious.' You either accused me of being brave, recklessly brave, contemptuous of law, or original and unique. No, none of those apply to the thing you misread, whether or not considering the correct interpretation of what was actually said.
As a rule, using words you don't actually know is a great way to make yourself look stupid. Food for thought. It's only dumbing it down, so to speak, if you would have been correct otherwise. Try operating at your actual level; you may not be so effete as to trick yourself into thinking yourself eloquent, but at least you'll be saying what you're trying to say, and that'd be an improvement.
It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.
Now, like you, I think this guy is a snake oil shill, as opposed to someone making a legitimate error. Nonetheless, I find his device bizarrely fascinating specifically because I don't see his particular cheat just yet. And, as such, I'm glad to have exposure to the nonsense. It's fun.
Buhuhuhuhuhu. That's quality comedy. Friended.
Uh huh. And when you find that patent, and read it, lemme know. By the way, it doesn't say anything about bleeding except in the brain, and you've got the year wrong. You're looking for German Patent 274,350 (12/24/1912). Also, the person in the mid 1970s was Alexander Shuglin, not Leo Zaff. I suspect you mean Shuglin's third patient, Leo Zeff, who promoted what he was taught by Shuglin; his role in the history of Ecstasy has been wildly overstated by drug advocates, probably for the same reason that Bill Packard is seen as having founded Silicon Valley (Shuglin was a jerk and nobody wanted to credit him.)
The original development premise for the chemical family was as an appetite suppressant; under that guise Merck got as far as MDE. Then there was a fourteen year pause, until 1927 when the effects of the chemical were tested on rats to see whether they'd help deal with starvation by lowering the metabolism. Under that guise, the family was manipulated until methylsafrylamin was created, which is relatively close to what we now know as MDA. This actually increases the metabolism, but the psychological effects were noted, and the family was further explored, locating MDMA.
Please stop pretending to know things you don't. Crack a book.
Now, granted, that particular substance does a lot of other damage to the body and brain too, but if you were to combine that kind of mechanism with a molecule dependent on some surface receptor on the parts of the brain responsible for memory storage...Actually, most current brain medication was designed from scratch. We know quite a bit about the brain. There's a lot left to learn, but several antipsychotics in current use were put together by an engineer who wanted specific results. Don't confuse that you don't know jack about the brain with that the rest of us don't.Actually, we've understood LSD for about a decade. Try keeping up with the literature if you're going to feign familiarity.And most of them replace something older, and almost all of them are an improvement on what they're replacing. What, precisely, is your point?Probably because it's blatantly obvious that you can't resolve something you don't remember. Y'know, that whole common sense thing.People who argue based on assumptions are tiresome and boring. This is a permanent effect. Try reading about the pill before assuming it's a lifelong commitment; it isn't.
Also, I'm not sure if you knew this, but if the treatment isn't permanent, it's not a treatment. I realize the semantic difference you're trying to make, but perhaps you should spend some quality time with a dictionary. Treatments are permanent. That's why it's called "treated wood."Wrong. It's not a treatment until the day it's successfully, permanently over.
It isn't. This is easily demonstrated by beating a coma victim to death. They won't perceive your actions, but they'll still die. If you really want to try the schroedinger's cat falling in a forest line of things, make a robot do the beating. The coma victim will in fact die without being measured.
It isn't. There are a variety of individuals with brain injuries that impede or destroy memory. They can still perceive you, and remarkably, they're often still able to function to a degree in the real world.
There's no such thing as a personal reality. Put down the Led Zeppelin, and if you're well educated in Philosophy, climb out of the barrel. You can make all the solipsisms you want, and yes, it's particularly difficult for me to convince you that I exist, when you can just claim that every sense by which you're detecting me is faulty.
That said, this isn't The Matrix, and you can be affected without being aware of it. As the old saying goes, the bullet you don't hear is the one that killed you.
This ... is a difficult point. On the one hand, yes, in many ways we are created and defined by our experiences. On the other hand, though, in many ways we aren't. Consider for example that thing that Ripley's Believe It or Not always does when they're out of material, where they find two twins who were seperated at birth, and point out how they wear the same kind of clothes and the same teeth are missing and their girlfriends both have the same weird deformities and whatever.
Are you removing part of who you are? Maybe. But, look, what about if you lose your fourth toe? You lost a little bit of who you are there, too, and you're a different person for it. Sure, it's a trivial tiny difference, but it is a difference. These things have a scale. I was changed as a person when I got my elbow injury. Not in a huge way, sure, but it's real. I stopped working out because the stress on my elbow is no longer safe. I used the scar to impress each of two different girls.
So, you remove a traumatic memory. Does that change a person? Sure. But, then, change isn't always a bad thing, and there's such a thing as changing back - or, at least, there may be now. Consider the case of someone coming back from a brief tour in war, with shell shock. They can't talk, they can't sleep, they scream every time there's a loud sound, and seeing a gun on TV leaves them crying for hours. Don't laugh; there are people who were wounded psychologically in just such a way.
Say you could remove those memories. Say that turns them back into (almost) who they were before the war. Is that a change? Yes. But maybe you might do better to think of it as a "change back." This drug is apparently thought of for trauma. Rarely is it the case that those changes caused by trauma are beneficial. I'm no psychologist, but can see the case for this maybe becoming an important tool in repairing serious psychological damage.
Of course not. People come back from trauma every day. That there are other ways, though, doesn't mean that this way isn't important. There are something like 30 ways to remove an ulcer. Half of them are in use today. One might expect there to be only one, but the human situation is complicated; sometimes you need to do it through the mouth, sometimes through the butt, sometimes with a remote control robot, sometimes by just opening the stomach.
Different situations need different solutions.
For those of you paying attention, this is the specific reason that Ecstasy was originally developed by Merck. Also, Ecstasy does a damned good job of it. Unfortunately, ecstasy also makes you feel good, which got it banned.
Yeah: this'll last. Legal for three months, maximum.
Yeah. And you know what that means? Virtually nothing, even if we choose to believe you. There are literally dozens of reasons that people on Team 1 might have a different production rate than Team 2, and it turns out that only some of them are about the engineers on that team. Bad specifications, bad communications, poor requirements documentation, poor access to the customer, and any number of other similar issues can affect teams extremely differently. Even being in a different building is enough to take these problems out of control in a way that would make naive programmers on the unaffected team think they were a whole lot better than they actually were.
On top of that, your manager obviously isn't very good; if he or she was, you wouldn't still be working with that particular group of offshores. I bring this up because the vast bulk of the problems an engineering team goes through are actually about the manager, and offshoring just makes those kinds of problems more difficult. There isn't a doubt in my mind that the productivity problems at the other end of the chain are about the manager in question.
But, back to what I was saying to you: one group of people is not enough experience for you to claim superproductivity. You don't have the knowledge. It could as easily be that the particular group of Indians in question are retarded, or more likely, that your manager is, and that it's killing the Indians' ability to work.
Frankly, when you say "I'm 20x the average programmer," the only people who believe you are other people like you. There are a bunch of phrases in business that tip their hat to this effect. The most telling in my opinion is "proximity breeds success; success breeds success." What that's about is that if you spend time with people, you'll end up achieving at their level.
There's a reason there's nobody onsite who's as productive as you are, and it's not because you're above average. It's that nobody who's above average wants to be dragged down to your level by your company.
Get a better employer, and you'll see your own productivity go up. Maybe then you'll get it.
Read what I said again. All I said was that the person speaking wasn't a high-productivity programmer. I never claimed there weren't differences between engineers.
God, this gets old.
Now please stop preaching. It's ugly and you're not teaching anything that everyone on SlashDot doesn't know. Look, I'm not black, but that doesn't mean black people don't exist. The grandparent poster isn't a superprogrammer. That doesn't mean they don't exist. Please dismount your soapbox with care; I wouldn't want you to trip on all those baseless assumptions scattered around your feet.Er, no it isn't. Please stop guessing. You've never hired offshore workers.It's unreasonable to say that of any arbitrary people, no matter what baseless stereotypes you want to cobble together. You shouldn't be attempting to rank theoretical people. Rank individuals, sure, but when you start trying to put numbers to groups based on expectations, you become a racist.
Either run a study or shut your mouth. You need tens of thousands of people to get the kind of statistical basis for such a statement that would have you anything other than laughed out of a highschool science class. It's embarrassing to watch you talk. You don't know anywhere near as much about this as you think you do; you don't know anyone who's hired enough people. Chances are there are less than a hundred people in America who've hired enough people to make judgements like these from the hip.
Putting stereotypes and assumptions to racism doesn't stop it being racism, nor does it make grandparent poster any less transparently clueless. I was only pointing out that he was a moron. I stand by my evaluation - what he said was clueless.Then you know it has nothing to do with the country. Try doing the hiring yourself; it's actually dead easy to find experienced people in China and India. The problems you had were because your management cheaped out and hired the dregs.Humanity would be a much better species if stupidity and racism were painful. I mean, sure, they're painful to the people reading what you write. I mean to you.
By the by, maybe you should crack a history book. Africa has a proud history in computing. If you stop being a racist and start learning what you're talking about, you might find that in fact there are nine countries in Africa which have been well wired since the 80s. I'd tell you to go to Egypt, but I have no doubt you'd talk like this to the natives, and end up dead in an alleyway.
So yeah, go to Egypt.
Please don't read things into what I said then argue with those things. That's really ugly.
... damnit. You're right. :D
Wow, and if I had actually said that, that might have been a worthwhile thing to say. The idea that I'm accusing him of believing such a thing by telling him he's full of crap until he's got evidence is startling and disappointing. I'm not accusing him of anything other than being full of crap. You don't need a bone through an arbitrary part of your body (or did you think the nasal septum was the only septum?) to be a racist jerk.
Those are all reasonable points. None of them lead to a single person being twenty times as productive as offshore counterparts. I realize that it's quite easy to recite the pablum you've heard about offshore workers. Here's some clue for you.
Almost everyone is terrible at describing projects. This was a famous problem until offshoring started; now everyone blames it on the language barrier, because they're unable (as normal) to face that they're the problem. This is typical in management. Used to be that workers could say "well look, the job spec you gave us is crap." Now, they're Indian, and people just assume it's about the language.
I've worked with six different outsourcing firms, all but one of which suffered all these moronic stereotypes. I had problems with none of the workers at any of the firms. Why? I don't speak Tamil. I'm a white guy from Pennsylvania.
It's because I know how to write a project spec.
Believe it or not, even the people on this side of the language barrier can be a problem. If and when you wake up to the idea that some of the problems you hear your buddy complaining about are actually his fault, maybe you'll start to see that there's a clear divide in outsourcing management: those managers that have zero problems, and those managers which have constant wall to wall problems.
Then look back in the history of those managers who can't handle Indians. Nine times out of ten, they had just as much difficulty with onsite workers, and their selective memories have let them forget the problems they caused, now that they have workers so thoroughly lambasted that nobody has the good sense to consider that in fact they don't cause every single problem in the entire project.
In a modern technology project, according to RAND data, offshored projects fail 78% of the time. That seems really high, until you realize that onshore projects fail 77% of the time.
Statistics > stereotypes. Take your two projects you've ever managed in your entire life, and blow them out your ass; the only difference between you and a racist from the 1950s is that the guy in the 1950s had the balls to face who he was and what he believed.
Why not so fast? They do . Not all your communications problems are about the language barrier.
If your project specs contain idioms, then offshoring is the least of your problems.
Believe it or not, diagrams are pretty clear in any language. As far as hand gestures, well, I communicate on paper and in email, in documented and recorded ways, whether I'm
Yeah, because there's no such thing as a passionate Indian. They're so different from us! (cough) One thing you'll learn with time is that people who have the confidence to make sweeping judgements are often doing so for reasons other than that they're correct.
I absolutely do not. Please try to speak for yourself instead of for others.
Horseshit. I believe no such thing. Do not speak for me.
I find it quite interesting that the people who believe the average developer is net negative are the same people who are willing to hire the dorks who claim to be 20x as powerful as people they'll never meet. I find it more interesting still that none of you can ever grasp that the reason you think most engineers are net negative is that you show a pattern of hiring the worst individuals available, based on that they make the same stupid racist judgements that you do. I have no doubt that you think based on experience that most engineers are a loss. What I do disagree with is why you had that experience. You think it's about the engineers. I think it's about the person hiring them.
There are certain people who no talented engineer will work for.
I can't imagine how you could possibly come to this belief.
Y'know, if you were to talk like this to someone's face, they'd probably knock you out. And rightfully so. It's shameful for you to speak this way of people you've never met based on the country they come from. I can't imagine you speaking this way in the real world; it's people like you who make internet anonymity problematic. I find you disgusting.
If you hire 20 scattershot programmers from anywhere, you're going to get 19 morons and one average guy. I'd tell you to try hiring 20 people from Kentucky, except given the way you talk about employees, I very seriously doubt you have the resources. I'm sorry that you confuse your correct observation of the stupidity and uselessness of the people you hire as endemic to a nation. It's actually because, as you've clearly demonstrated, you have no idea how to hire good people.
When you start hiring domestically, you're in for a raw shock. What you think is about India is actually about humanity. Until you change the way you look at hiring workers, you're not going to find talented people in any country.
Management 101: project productivity and project costs are not related, and are frequently at odds. And frankly, if you think you've made a point about India by saying "I hired 20 people at random that I didn't know and they just wanted the job for the money," then I'm not sure how exactly to speak to you; you're so amazingly burdened by stereotypes, assumptions and the general flavor of be
And when you start costing 30x as much, suddenly you'll be able to out-do 35 of them, right?
... or, hell, even just where's your one big project? Anything? I mean, if you're worth 20 of them, surely you have something to show for all that enormous skill?
One thing I've learned is that when someone starts saying they're better than programmers from (insert country here,) they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worth. I'm curious: given that among 20 programmers you'll have two or three successfully completed large projects, where are your fourty to sixty?
When you have some numbers to back up that you're actually worth 20 of them, let us know; until then, it's hollow dishonest bragging. The only people you're impressing are other people like you.
Sorry, that's $1200/y for a dedicated Pentium 4 3.06 with a gig of ram, an 80 gig hard drive, an IP address, any free OS (you pay extra for winders,) ten megabits of bandwidth guaranteed 99.99% available at all times and with a 99.99% uptime.
Sometimes I forget that other dedicated providers dust stuff under the rug.