As a result, the official added, "we are not buying such off-the-shelf products in our most sensitive systems."
And for the rest, do they actually go through the code to make sure that there are no vulnerabilities, or do they just assume that if there were then they would have been already found?
No! It's very different. If you select people this way, it may work just fine, as it does in many companies. However, when you select decisions using democracy, you're, IMHO, pretty much fucked.
Doesn't anyone realize that people with healthy social lives (outside of work) write better code?
why?!?! my experience shows that if there is any relation at all (which I doubt), then it's the other way around. I had periods when I did and didn't have active social life (yes, I did it by choice), and I am pretty sure that when I completely shut it off and concentrated on work, I was more productive and wrote better code. I know many people who I would hate to go drink beer with, but, at the same time, would hire for any coding job any minute.
One of the most beautiful facts in economics is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Ken Arrow got his Nobel prize for it), which states that there is no voting system that would satisfy a set of simple and seemingly reasonable assumptions (see below).
Before you start proposing various systems, please, read this; e-mail me if you are interested. Please, mod this up - I am not karma whoring (couldn't care less); i'd just like people to actually know about this beautiful (and - surprise! - relevant) fact. Maybe some of you, like myself, will even switch to economics from coding:)
/* the text below is copied from some webpage, but the theorem and its proof can be found in pretty much any graduate microeconomics book, e.g. Mas-Colell-Whinston-Green */
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem was published in an essay called
A Difficulty in The Concept of Social Welfare.
It demonstrates a profound
and a priori lack of reliability of joint decision systems and a lack of
coherence of any notion such as the will of the people.
Let Prefersi(a,b) mean that person
i prefers a to b.
Let Prefers be some joint decision procedure that, thus,
generates either Prefers(a,b) or Prefers(b,a)
for any a, b in some decision set, Set.
Then Arrow's impossibility Theorem says that the following 5 reasonable
conditions on the joint preference relation Prefers
cannot all be met by any single decision process:
Prefers is independent of irrelevant alternatives
that is to say,
the ordering of any 2 items in Prefers is a
function only of their ordering with respect to
each other within each of the Prefersi.
Prefers is non-dictatorial
that is to say, Prefers is not necessarily identical to
Prefersi for some i.
Prefers is pareto-inclusive
that is to say,
Prefers will rank 2 elements of Set
in a particular order if all
Prefersi do.
Prefers is transitive.
Prefers is a complete ordering on Set.
A Brief Note on Consequences
Note that the first 3 conditions are different from the last 2.
The first 3 are what might be called the morality conditions.
They say that a joint decision system should respect the individual wills
of those elements of which it is composed.
The last 2 conditions are what might be called rationality conditions.
They say that a joint decision process should display consistent behaviour
(which is really what rational means.).
So what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says is that any joint decision process
which is in a reasonable sense democratic and respecting of individuality is
also irrational or if you prefer a less loaded term, unreliable.
It is likely to display behaviour where its decisions can be controlled by
control of its order of making of parts of decisions;
or where its behaviour does not respect the independence
(in ethics and metaphysics, it's called the freedom)
of its elements;
or where it is capable of ignoring the unanimous will of its elements.
In other words, you can't trust bureaucracy.
This, I think, if there is one,
is the reason why traditional state-run-enterprise socialism fails.
There are also
a great many other interesting consequences of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem,
many of them obtained when we abandon our instinctive prejudices regarding what
a decision system is,
and consequently what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is about.
Subj. For as long as I can remember (I left the country four years ago, and it may be different now) the Russian government did pretty much the same thing - they would set up stands with very cheap food, drinks, etc. next to the voting places, so lots of people came... (Before 1990s you only had once choice when you voted - funny, isn't it - so the only thing they cared about was to have enough people vote so that some sort of minimal percentage (25 or 50 - I don't remember) was reached).
It tends to work much better with older and poorer voters, so it is more beneficial to the communist party, but, fortunately, it hasn't helped them much so far:)
When I first worked for a big financial company, I found out that the contract I signed warned that my boss could read my e-mail. I was slightly worried, went to him, and asked about it. He started to laugh and couldn't stop for like 5 minutes. I asked what was so funny, he said that if in addition to his 80-hour workweeks he were also spending any amount of time reading his employees e-mail instead of drinking beer or going home to his kids, he should've been shot for being an idiot...
So stop being so-o-o paranoid. Plus, you can always use yahoo or even your cell phone to send e-mail, so what the fuck is the big deal?
I used to make fun of all the failing dot-coms, until a couple of months ago my girlfriend told me about her boss at a start-up where she worked as an intern. This guy, the start-up's CEO and founder, committed suicide after the company went bankrupt. He had degrees from Berkeley and Harvard.
And while I think it is totally insance, it had a very sobering effect on me...
You might not believe it, but Economics is a science, or at least a part of Economics is - just do a google search on "experimental economics." Of course, I am biased - experimental econ is what I am going to spend the next five (maybe 50) years of my life on:)
I recently bought a laptop and, of course, it came with loads of preinstalled crap, unpartitioned, etc., etc. Naturally, my first intention was to reinstall Windows (I have to use it for a few reasons) from scratch and configure everything the way I want, dual-boot, etc. What do I see? The enclosed CD can only remap my HDD back to the factory setup. What did I have to do? Well, I went to a friend, burnt a copy of his Win2K CD, and installed it.
So now I am a "pirate", even though I paid for a copy of Windows... Hmmm, why don't I feel like a criminal? Should I?
Come on, they have their best lawyers working on other "problems," so this case was probably handled by a bunch of law-school interns. Or maybe they decided to lose this one just for a change, to "soften their image":)
After having this thought several times, I once decided to actually conduct an experiment on myself - I smoked one (1) joint around 10am and started coding.
When I looked at my code the next day, I basically saw several things:
a. The total amount of code was pretty reasonable, i.e. coding speed does not go down
b. There were a couple of pretty non-standard tricks that I don't normally use. Nothing especially creative, but quite interesting anyway
c. There was something very weird in my code - comments! And they were really funny. Too bad I had to remove them
d. Unfortunately, all exceptions were ignored:) I guess I was thinking along the lines of "who gives a shit". That was the only thing that had to be redone
Unfortunately, I quit before I could try out coding under the influence of other drugs (red bull, coffee, beer, and nicotine do not count), so it would be interesting to hear about other experiences. 'Shrooms, anyone?:)
I've done precisely that - spent a year working in the industry and now (well, in a month) go back to grad. school for the Ph.D. The nice thing about Ph.D. programs at good schools is that they usually pay you enough to live on, so whatever you save during your stint in the industry is your extra cash.
Now, suppose you get paid $75,000 (though your options can increase that number dramatically - go ORCL!). Subtract taxes - you're left with something like $50,000 (not sure, but all estimates here are rough; I don't think you can realistically avoid any significant amount from being taxed; all the 401k's and IRA's are very small per year, but accumulate over time). Subtract $20,000 for various expenses (housing, car, food, etc.) - so you're left with $30,000. Invest somewhere, and assuming this investment goes well you can have almost $10,000 per year extra in grad. school.... Which is nice.... If you also work during the summers while in grad. school, you can double that amount...
The real problem is that even during that one year you get really accustomed to the fucking-rich-yuppie (well, compared to grad. school anyway) lifestyle, and your expenses and desires go up, up, up... I don't know yet how hard it will be to go back to a more moderate lifestyle, but I think that with all the extra cash (see above) it shouldn't be a problem
Anyway, good luck (and maybe you'll join a great start-up and will retire by the time you go to grad. school)
You see, it's actually a very well thought-out marketing move - they get brand recognition right away and don't have to pay a single penny for all those commercials. Now all the people coming to CompUSA will see the box from Wasabi Systems, cheer up, say WAZZZZZZUP, and buy the product - who cares what's in it, it's all about image.
(On a side note - I wonder if the "wasabi" commercial increased the demand for that particular japanese food item more than the demand for the beer:)
Great idea, but let's see how it will develop. First, you will get your initial.alt sites, parents will be able to turn it off for the kids, and everyone will be happy. Then, one day (very soon, btw.), someone will open an mp3.alt. Then someone will post DeCCS code on an.alt. Then.alt sites will begin to get sued for something else. Then... Well, you get the idea - it might be fine for a while, but pretty soon.alt sites will have to comply with all the standard crap just like everyone else.
You're right, they put approximately $20M into advertising; someone called the BWP an "ultimate experiment in mass marketing." Moreover, the $35,000 figure which everyone seems to know was obviously a part of this marketing campaign.
Even though marketing types are constant subjects of laughs in software industry, don't underestimate them - some are VERY good at what they do - remember the BWP every time you say something like "marketing people are dumb."
... which, however, doesn't disqualify the statement "I hate marketing people":)
People ARE stupid (I know I am)
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 1
What the hell are you talking about?! The guy's point was that nobody reads license agreement = people are stupid. Hell, when was the last time you read license agreement on software?!?! I know I read something like that only once, the very first time I installed something - so I AM stupid.
As for your logic, it looks like almost all of your statements are flawed.
1. You need a job to live. not really, not with all the welfare and shit
2. Most jobs require a collegiate level of education. almost no jobs require it. some professional training - yes, college - no (now, it probably helps to become a well-rounded person, or helps to advance faster, or whatever, but you really don't need a degree to work, even for a high pay. programming is the most obvious example; wall street is also true, though less obvious, etc. - and I am not even talking about McDonalds people)
3. That education is difficult to obtain. Bullshit. San Jose State accepts everyone, and only a retard can't pass it.
4. Therefore most of the jobs that people have are required to have people who are intelligent. Education does not imply intelligence (there is probably some correlation, but not causation)
Slashdot Mirror
It's time to start a new family of languages - Cb, Eiffelb... I guess Oracle and Sun should do that...
As a result, the official added, "we are not buying such off-the-shelf products in our most sensitive systems."
And for the rest, do they actually go through the code to make sure that there are no vulnerabilities, or do they just assume that if there were then they would have been already found?
So who has it right us or them?
:)
whoever makes the most money
No! It's very different. If you select people this way, it may work just fine, as it does in many companies. However, when you select decisions using democracy, you're, IMHO, pretty much fucked.
Doesn't anyone realize that people with healthy social lives (outside of work) write better code?
why?!?! my experience shows that if there is any relation at all (which I doubt), then it's the other way around. I had periods when I did and didn't have active social life (yes, I did it by choice), and I am pretty sure that when I completely shut it off and concentrated on work, I was more productive and wrote better code. I know many people who I would hate to go drink beer with, but, at the same time, would hire for any coding job any minute.
take a look at what's called "p-adic numbers". that's pretty much what you are looking for...
sqrt(2) is an algebraic number, and therefore there are certain patterns that it can not contain.
... instead of coding day and night, you will fall even further behind the schedule!!
Before you start proposing various systems, please, read this; e-mail me if you are interested. Please, mod this up - I am not karma whoring (couldn't care less); i'd just like people to actually know about this beautiful (and - surprise! - relevant) fact. Maybe some of you, like myself, will even switch to economics from coding
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem was published in an essay called A Difficulty in The Concept of Social Welfare. It demonstrates a profound and a priori lack of reliability of joint decision systems and a lack of coherence of any notion such as the will of the people.
Let Prefersi(a,b) mean that person i prefers a to b. Let Prefers be some joint decision procedure that, thus, generates either Prefers(a,b) or Prefers(b,a) for any a, b in some decision set, Set.
Then Arrow's impossibility Theorem says that the following 5 reasonable conditions on the joint preference relation Prefers cannot all be met by any single decision process:
- Prefers is independent of irrelevant alternatives
- Prefers is non-dictatorial
- Prefers is pareto-inclusive
- Prefers is transitive.
- Prefers is a complete ordering on Set.
A Brief Note on Consequencesthat is to say, the ordering of any 2 items in Prefers is a function only of their ordering with respect to each other within each of the Prefersi.
that is to say, Prefers is not necessarily identical to Prefersi for some i.
that is to say, Prefers will rank 2 elements of Set in a particular order if all Prefersi do.
Note that the first 3 conditions are different from the last 2. The first 3 are what might be called the morality conditions. They say that a joint decision system should respect the individual wills of those elements of which it is composed. The last 2 conditions are what might be called rationality conditions. They say that a joint decision process should display consistent behaviour (which is really what rational means.).
So what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says is that any joint decision process which is in a reasonable sense democratic and respecting of individuality is also irrational or if you prefer a less loaded term, unreliable. It is likely to display behaviour where its decisions can be controlled by control of its order of making of parts of decisions; or where its behaviour does not respect the independence (in ethics and metaphysics, it's called the freedom) of its elements; or where it is capable of ignoring the unanimous will of its elements.
In other words, you can't trust bureaucracy. This, I think, if there is one, is the reason why traditional state-run-enterprise socialism fails. There are also a great many other interesting consequences of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, many of them obtained when we abandon our instinctive prejudices regarding what a decision system is, and consequently what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is about.
Subj. For as long as I can remember (I left the country four years ago, and it may be different now) the Russian government did pretty much the same thing - they would set up stands with very cheap food, drinks, etc. next to the voting places, so lots of people came... (Before 1990s you only had once choice when you voted - funny, isn't it - so the only thing they cared about was to have enough people vote so that some sort of minimal percentage (25 or 50 - I don't remember) was reached).
:)
It tends to work much better with older and poorer voters, so it is more beneficial to the communist party, but, fortunately, it hasn't helped them much so far
When I first worked for a big financial company, I found out that the contract I signed warned that my boss could read my e-mail. I was slightly worried, went to him, and asked about it. He started to laugh and couldn't stop for like 5 minutes. I asked what was so funny, he said that if in addition to his 80-hour workweeks he were also spending any amount of time reading his employees e-mail instead of drinking beer or going home to his kids, he should've been shot for being an idiot...
So stop being so-o-o paranoid. Plus, you can always use yahoo or even your cell phone to send e-mail, so what the fuck is the big deal?
I used to make fun of all the failing dot-coms, until a couple of months ago my girlfriend told me about her boss at a start-up where she worked as an intern. This guy, the start-up's CEO and founder, committed suicide after the company went bankrupt. He had degrees from Berkeley and Harvard. And while I think it is totally insance, it had a very sobering effect on me...
Man, this is such a cool idea! You can be surrounded by porn scenes during the whole day!! Should we allow sound, too?
http://hedweb.com/hedab.htm
You might not believe it, but Economics is a science, or at least a part of Economics is - just do a google search on "experimental economics." Of course, I am biased - experimental econ is what I am going to spend the next five (maybe 50) years of my life on :)
I recently bought a laptop and, of course, it came with loads of preinstalled crap, unpartitioned, etc., etc. Naturally, my first intention was to reinstall Windows (I have to use it for a few reasons) from scratch and configure everything the way I want, dual-boot, etc. What do I see? The enclosed CD can only remap my HDD back to the factory setup. What did I have to do? Well, I went to a friend, burnt a copy of his Win2K CD, and installed it.
So now I am a "pirate", even though I paid for a copy of Windows... Hmmm, why don't I feel like a criminal? Should I?
Come on, they have their best lawyers working on other "problems," so this case was probably handled by a bunch of law-school interns. Or maybe they decided to lose this one just for a change, to "soften their image" :)
After having this thought several times, I once decided to actually conduct an experiment on myself - I smoked one (1) joint around 10am and started coding.
:) I guess I was thinking along the lines of "who gives a shit". That was the only thing that had to be redone
:)
When I looked at my code the next day, I basically saw several things:
a. The total amount of code was pretty reasonable, i.e. coding speed does not go down
b. There were a couple of pretty non-standard tricks that I don't normally use. Nothing especially creative, but quite interesting anyway
c. There was something very weird in my code - comments! And they were really funny. Too bad I had to remove them
d. Unfortunately, all exceptions were ignored
Unfortunately, I quit before I could try out coding under the influence of other drugs (red bull, coffee, beer, and nicotine do not count), so it would be interesting to hear about other experiences. 'Shrooms, anyone?
HBS __requires__ you to have a laptop - you need to bring it with you to your finals, and then type and print answers rather than write.
So yes, I DO need a laptop (or else I have to drop out...)
I've done precisely that - spent a year working in the industry and now (well, in a month) go back to grad. school for the Ph.D. The nice thing about Ph.D. programs at good schools is that they usually pay you enough to live on, so whatever you save during your stint in the industry is your extra cash.
Now, suppose you get paid $75,000 (though your options can increase that number dramatically - go ORCL!). Subtract taxes - you're left with something like $50,000 (not sure, but all estimates here are rough; I don't think you can realistically avoid any significant amount from being taxed; all the 401k's and IRA's are very small per year, but accumulate over time). Subtract $20,000 for various expenses (housing, car, food, etc.) - so you're left with $30,000. Invest somewhere, and assuming this investment goes well you can have almost $10,000 per year extra in grad. school.... Which is nice.... If you also work during the summers while in grad. school, you can double that amount...
The real problem is that even during that one year you get really accustomed to the fucking-rich-yuppie (well, compared to grad. school anyway) lifestyle, and your expenses and desires go up, up, up... I don't know yet how hard it will be to go back to a more moderate lifestyle, but I think that with all the extra cash (see above) it shouldn't be a problem
Anyway, good luck (and maybe you'll join a great start-up and will retire by the time you go to grad. school)
Go here.
You see, it's actually a very well thought-out marketing move - they get brand recognition right away and don't have to pay a single penny for all those commercials. Now all the people coming to CompUSA will see the box from Wasabi Systems, cheer up, say WAZZZZZZUP, and buy the product - who cares what's in it, it's all about image.
:)
(On a side note - I wonder if the "wasabi" commercial increased the demand for that particular japanese food item more than the demand for the beer
Great idea, but let's see how it will develop. First, you will get your initial .alt sites, parents will be able to turn it off for the kids, and everyone will be happy. Then, one day (very soon, btw.), someone will open an mp3 .alt. Then someone will post DeCCS code on an .alt. Then .alt sites will begin to get sued for something else. Then... Well, you get the idea - it might be fine for a while, but pretty soon .alt sites will have to comply with all the standard crap just like everyone else.
You're right, they put approximately $20M into advertising; someone called the BWP an "ultimate experiment in mass marketing." Moreover, the $35,000 figure which everyone seems to know was obviously a part of this marketing campaign.
:)
Even though marketing types are constant subjects of laughs in software industry, don't underestimate them - some are VERY good at what they do - remember the BWP every time you say something like "marketing people are dumb."
... which, however, doesn't disqualify the statement "I hate marketing people"
What the hell are you talking about?! The guy's point was that nobody reads license agreement = people are stupid. Hell, when was the last time you read license agreement on software?!?! I know I read something like that only once, the very first time I installed something - so I AM stupid.
As for your logic, it looks like almost all of your statements are flawed.
1. You need a job to live.
not really, not with all the welfare and shit
2. Most jobs require a collegiate level of education.
almost no jobs require it. some professional training - yes, college - no (now, it probably helps to become a well-rounded person, or helps to advance faster, or whatever, but you really don't need a degree to work, even for a high pay. programming is the most obvious example; wall street is also true, though less obvious, etc. - and I am not even talking about McDonalds people)
3. That education is difficult to obtain.
Bullshit. San Jose State accepts everyone, and only a retard can't pass it.
4. Therefore most of the jobs that people have are required to have people who are intelligent.
Education does not imply intelligence (there is probably some correlation, but not causation)
5. Most people are intelligent.
Yeah, right...