Defer some of my compensation, fine, I lose it if I go to a competitor, but that is my right. You pay me fairly, and it might not happen.
Knowledge is what makes me valuable. It's in my head and mine. If you have trade secrets, I'll respect those. I'll agree to not use use specific ideas too, while they remain unpublished, as long as you write them down as part of the contract.
Nice and easy "at will" contract. If you want a mentat to own forever, there is a contract for that too, but it's rather expensive.
$50 for $200 is not extreme at all. Even after $100 of overhead at the client's firm, you still extract 1/6 of the value. That's much more than most Wall St traders.
People forget that capitalism is basically the people with capital (i.e. money) extracting all the profits because capital is scarce compared to labor. This hasn't been true for the last 30 years: capital is so damn cheap now that you can build a FedEx or a Google or a Microsoft fresh out of college. Now it's all about "intellectual capital" (i.e. people thinking) - the whole rise of the middle class was due to people needing enough strength and education to run machines, now you need the brains and education to use a computer to do stuff (a junior lawyer recently told me she bills $300+/hr to basically do Google searches.)
Sadly, this dooms 95% of the population to slowly leave the "middle class."
Maslow's first level is breathing, food, water, etc. His second level includes employment, health, and property.
He assumes you actually have a functional society before you start wondering about self-esteem and stuff.
Sure, he doesn't say we should build a social Utopia provided by a magically government. But, he would probably say that a Feudal system, for example, wouldn't even have his top two D-needs.
Um, no. Looking at overall cell phone subscriber rates and accident rates is a pretty silly way to examine correlation between cell phone use and accidents. That logic would lead us to believe that we should investigate the link between increased air travel and reduced mortality.
It's undeniable that cell phone usage distracts most drivers and increases danger. But so do myriad other things (eating a Whopper, smoking, smacking the kids around, having just one drink, etc.) and those are not singled out for prosecution.
So the inevitable conclusion is that it's not about safety, it's about taking advantage of the fear of new technology to generate revenue. And nobody respects that.
That conclusion is not inevitable at all.
Eating a whopper and smoking have a relatively small increase in risk (less than, say, the driver being 30 years old vs 60 years old.)
Smacking the kids around is an accepted part of living in society.
Drinking and driving is bad, so we put limits on it, but not absolute prohibitions. Even commercial pilots are not required to absolutely avoid alcohol.
Cellphone and driving is a big risk, and untrained people being out of voice contact while moving a ton of steel at 60 mph is not that big a deal. You can pull over if you really need to talk. This seems a pretty standard industrial safety rule/
Banning is a touch extreme. We taught our kids at a very young age that cars have special rules: the main one is that "quiet" means "immediately stop talking for one minute."
They thought the rule was stupid until they got to watch a near accident at 50 mph in realtime:)
It's more training than anything else. E.g. pilots learn to "aviate, navigate, communicate" in that priority order, cops learn to drive, then talk. Both roles need the person on the other end of the conversation to also be trained to expect pauses in the conversation. That is not the case when J6P is driving and having to deal with his wife talking on the phone about random stuff that is important to her.
Note that it's much safer when J6P's wife is talking to him while he's in the car: she can see him concentrating as the school bus pulls out while the fuel truck heads towards the closing railroad crossing. Then she stops talking. (That's why hands-free vs standard cell phones make virtually no difference in accident rates.)
No, just explain and they will typically understand. For example, my minor youporn issue was ignored by my current employer once I demonstrated that the whole goat thing was a result of misleading camera angles.
You tried to be amusing, but failed, so I'll not keep you long...
Good idea, wouldn't want you to keep your supermodel friends waiting...
We almost tripled our population in 50 years, so why hasn't the temperature tripled ? Of course, this is nonsensical, you'd argue, the temperature of the earth is not effected SOLELY by humans, there are any number of much larger, more important effects.
Temperature tripled? In Kelvin or some other units? Please consult a basic physics textbook, a logician, or a psychiatrist.
But yet, according to the GW crowd, humans have caused this disaster by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere ? Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
Wow, we climate guys didn't even consider these things. Thanks for pointing them out. This will just revolutionize the field.
So which is it ? Either human output of CO2 is a major factor in global climate, in which case my "population tripling" assertion above should be correct ?
Um, no, you are completely wrong. If all people in Burkina Faso were driving Escalades 50 miles a day, you would still be wrong.
Or human output of CO2 is NOT a major factor in global climate, and any trivial adjustments we make won't make a damn of difference.
You cannot have it both ways, you choose, okay ?
Ok, I'll choose the simplest explanation: you are a troll or a moron.
all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
My belief in science over, say, unicorns and fairies, does not mean I have perfect knowledge of the future.
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
It is usually easier to estimate and predict "large stuff" compared to "small stuff." This is why insurance companies exist, and why my toothbrush is in my bathroom rather than in Jakarta due to quantum effects.
And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!
Oh, it's important that I have $100 million. Curse you, science, for not giving me that. I don't give a fuck about molecules or forces, I want the money.
Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion... any fool with a college electrical certificate can tell you the more light bulbs are turned on, the bighter the room will be.
There is hope for you yet.
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Oh, this is the inverse Flying Spaghetti Monster pirates vs global warming theory.
Try correlating temperature against population, and guess what kind of slope the line has ?
Thanks for sharing that. It did get a bit chilly after the black death, and was damn cold in the USA after the Spanish Flu outbreak.
He didn't propose saying STFU to everyone without a degree in the field, he proposed saying STFU to idiots who take a "fair and balanced" approach (i.e. just assert all ideas, no matter how inane, are equally valid.)
No real programmer really likes their tools. That is the punchline.
My team started writing an IDE a couple of years ago. The rules were simple: we are writing this for our users, so we use it. We started with an open source product, hacked in the extensions we initially needed, and within a month the developers were using the IDE 90% of the time. Today, it's up to about 99% of the time.
If a developer ever claimed that he needed to go outside the IDE because XYZ was better, he got to integrate XYZ into the IDE.
1 million LOC later, you can sit down at anyone's desk and do useful work: everything is there in the IDE, all apps run out of it, all data is available. Pretty much the definition of an "integrated environment."
Global Average Temperature often fluctuates by over.2C year on year. This is more a question of weather than climate. Cherry-picking various number over short term periods is more a sales job that a serious data point (Wall St excels at doing this.)
Note that increasing CO2 and smog output may even lower temperatures in the short-term. Then the smog settles out, while the CO2 remains the gift that keeps on giving in terms of planetary warming.
Who knows what world leaders will do? Cheapest thing is probably just to beef up their militaries and shoot incoming refugees.
I've seen a couple of large scale real systems that are essentially functional+OO (i.e. conceptually monadic.) Admittedly, they are narrow domain (Wall St exotic derivatives stuff,) but it's about the only approach that seems to work if you have hundreds of programmers working together on a complex system.
Epicycles can largely be avoided if you design these types of systems well. An epicycle is a sign that a programmer is misunderstanding the model: his code doesn't work, and you swoop in with education to fix it.
An open mind, combined with an ability to think critically, is imperative for many programming projects. It doesn't matter much how you actually acquire these skills, but there are important unless you want to be a code-monkey forever.
I spend of a lot of time with two groups of programmers: one is an agile-type group, the other is classic IT. The 'white-collar' or 'blue-collar' distinction is not too bad in terms of how they do their jobs: the white collar guys take time to understand the problems they are solving, come up with good solutions, get consensus if needed, and then build them. The IT guys just try to implement whatever subtask they have been given: even if you point out the design as a whole is bad, they just want to get their little bit done.
Um, because they fly at night when optical flow techniques are useless? So they use "constant angle w.r.t. to the moon" navigation. Which worked great until humans added 10 billion artificial moons to the environment.
I'm claiming the example is absurd because it misses a major aspect of reality:
Prof: so shooter picks left or right, goalie picks left or right, we assume if picks match goalie always wins else he loses. So, it's 50/50. QED. Goro: so goalie goes and stands in front of the left goalpost. Now he always wins. So it's 100/0. Prof: it's a model, damnit, it's not useless. Would you like to hear my proof of why spherical chickens cannot fly?
The typical (though changing) datacenter has mixed hot and cold air - typically cold air pumped up from the bottom (?!? kind of fighting nature, there) then allowed to rise into the ceiling.
It's not fighting nature, it's using it right. If you push cold air in from the top, it warms up, and wants to go back up. Push it in from the bottom, and it does its natural thing and wants to exit via your top exhaust.
Don't be shocked, the MIT article doesn't even get the simple example of game theory right:
One of the simplest examples is the penalty-kick game: In soccer, a penalty kick gives the offensive player a shot on goal with only the goalie defending. The goalie has so little reaction time that she has to guess which half of the goal to protect just as the ball is struck; the shooter tries to go the opposite way. In the game-theory version, the goalie always wins if both players pick the same half of the goal, and the shooter wins if they pick different halves. So each player has two strategies -- go left or go right -- and there are two outcomes -- kicker wins or goalie wins.
It's probably obvious that the best strategy for both players is to randomly go left or right with equal probability; that way, both will win about half the time.
Wrong. This model of a a real-world game ignores the fact that the goalie has an option: where he stands. MIT should stick to the prisoner's dilemma, sports are not their area of expertise:)
The best strategy is not random left/right. It is for the goalie to position himself off-center such that the shooter goes left or right with non-equal probabilities, and the goalie dives with non-equal probabilities.
Even with infinite acceleration, his minimum maximum speed is 2040 ft / 5280 ft/mile * (1 min/30sec) * 60 min/hr = 46.4 miles/hour. He had to be speeding, but not enough info to tell his precise maximum speed.
Well, that $50K includes the cost of the developer, plus associated costs of the auditors, lawyers, etc, that she will have to call on to get a project like this moving. So, knock off a chunk in chargebacks. Of the remaining money, figure a standard breakdown of 50% compensation to the dev and 50% overhead.
Doing the math, the dev is getting paid pretty well, but it isn't a code monkey job: it's analysis, implementation, presentation, making a business case, etc.
Actually, we don't call our developers "developers" because we don't want some stupid HR person to do a salary comparison and announce that we are overpaying them.
Yep, cashflow is a bitch: if I need to spend $25K to even look at the product, and they need $20M to run a demo datacenter, they need something like $100M in capital to avoid dying on the vine:(
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of trying to pick up attractive women when 50% of them turn you down?
Would you try more or less if the rate was, say, 75%?
The "I would work l less crowd" go home and play Xbox. The others might still try to get laid.
And those, sir, we never sign.
Defer some of my compensation, fine, I lose it if I go to a competitor, but that is my right. You pay me fairly, and it might not happen.
Knowledge is what makes me valuable. It's in my head and mine. If you have trade secrets, I'll respect those. I'll agree to not use use specific ideas too, while they remain unpublished, as long as you write them down as part of the contract.
Nice and easy "at will" contract. If you want a mentat to own forever, there is a contract for that too, but it's rather expensive.
$50 for $200 is not extreme at all. Even after $100 of overhead at the client's firm, you still extract 1/6 of the value. That's much more than most Wall St traders.
People forget that capitalism is basically the people with capital (i.e. money) extracting all the profits because capital is scarce compared to labor. This hasn't been true for the last 30 years: capital is so damn cheap now that you can build a FedEx or a Google or a Microsoft fresh out of college. Now it's all about "intellectual capital" (i.e. people thinking) - the whole rise of the middle class was due to people needing enough strength and education to run machines, now you need the brains and education to use a computer to do stuff (a junior lawyer recently told me she bills $300+/hr to basically do Google searches.)
Sadly, this dooms 95% of the population to slowly leave the "middle class."
Maslow's first level is breathing, food, water, etc. His second level includes employment, health, and property.
He assumes you actually have a functional society before you start wondering about self-esteem and stuff.
Sure, he doesn't say we should build a social Utopia provided by a magically government. But, he would probably say that a Feudal system, for example, wouldn't even have his top two D-needs.
Um, no. Looking at overall cell phone subscriber rates and accident rates is a pretty silly way to examine correlation between cell phone use and accidents. That logic would lead us to believe that we should investigate the link between increased air travel and reduced mortality.
It's undeniable that cell phone usage distracts most drivers and increases danger. But so do myriad other things (eating a Whopper, smoking, smacking the kids around, having just one drink, etc.) and those are not singled out for prosecution.
So the inevitable conclusion is that it's not about safety, it's about taking advantage of the fear of new technology to generate revenue. And nobody respects that.
That conclusion is not inevitable at all.
Eating a whopper and smoking have a relatively small increase in risk (less than, say, the driver being 30 years old vs 60 years old.)
Smacking the kids around is an accepted part of living in society.
Drinking and driving is bad, so we put limits on it, but not absolute prohibitions. Even commercial pilots are not required to absolutely avoid alcohol.
Cellphone and driving is a big risk, and untrained people being out of voice contact while moving a ton of steel at 60 mph is not that big a deal. You can pull over if you really need to talk. This seems a pretty standard industrial safety rule/
In my universe that person would blame the fire hydrant...
In my universe, 12 hot women pop up and assert they are my lover.
I love fire-hydrants.
Banning is a touch extreme. We taught our kids at a very young age that cars have special rules: the main one is that "quiet" means "immediately stop talking for one minute."
They thought the rule was stupid until they got to watch a near accident at 50 mph in realtime :)
It's more training than anything else. E.g. pilots learn to "aviate, navigate, communicate" in that priority order, cops learn to drive, then talk. Both roles need the person on the other end of the conversation to also be trained to expect pauses in the conversation. That is not the case when J6P is driving and having to deal with his wife talking on the phone about random stuff that is important to her.
Note that it's much safer when J6P's wife is talking to him while he's in the car: she can see him concentrating as the school bus pulls out while the fuel truck heads towards the closing railroad crossing. Then she stops talking. (That's why hands-free vs standard cell phones make virtually no difference in accident rates.)
No, just explain and they will typically understand. For example, my minor youporn issue was ignored by my current employer once I demonstrated that the whole goat thing was a result of misleading camera angles.
Your augment was rebutted in its entirety. There was no ad-hominem involved.
Pointing out that you are mentally deficient or socially defective was not part of my argument, just a statement of fact for your edification.
You tried to be amusing, but failed, so I'll not keep you long ...
Good idea, wouldn't want you to keep your supermodel friends waiting...
We almost tripled our population in 50 years, so why hasn't the temperature tripled ? Of course, this is nonsensical, you'd argue, the temperature of the earth is not effected SOLELY by humans, there are any number of much larger, more important effects.
Temperature tripled? In Kelvin or some other units? Please consult a basic physics textbook, a logician, or a psychiatrist.
But yet, according to the GW crowd, humans have caused this disaster by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere ? Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
Wow, we climate guys didn't even consider these things. Thanks for pointing them out. This will just revolutionize the field.
So which is it ? Either human output of CO2 is a major factor in global climate, in which case my "population tripling" assertion above should be correct ?
Um, no, you are completely wrong. If all people in Burkina Faso were driving Escalades 50 miles a day, you would still be wrong.
Or human output of CO2 is NOT a major factor in global climate, and any trivial adjustments we make won't make a damn of difference.
You cannot have it both ways, you choose, okay ?
Ok, I'll choose the simplest explanation: you are a troll or a moron.
all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
My belief in science over, say, unicorns and fairies, does not mean I have perfect knowledge of the future.
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
It is usually easier to estimate and predict "large stuff" compared to "small stuff." This is why insurance companies exist, and why my toothbrush is in my bathroom rather than in Jakarta due to quantum effects.
And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict ... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic ... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!
Oh, it's important that I have $100 million. Curse you, science, for not giving me that. I don't give a fuck about molecules or forces, I want the money.
Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion ... any fool with a college electrical certificate can tell you the more light bulbs are turned on, the bighter the room will be.
There is hope for you yet.
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion ... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Oh, this is the inverse Flying Spaghetti Monster pirates vs global warming theory.
Try correlating temperature against population, and guess what kind of slope the line has ?
Thanks for sharing that. It did get a bit chilly after the black death, and was damn cold in the USA after the Spanish Flu outbreak.
He didn't propose saying STFU to everyone without a degree in the field, he proposed saying STFU to idiots who take a "fair and balanced" approach (i.e. just assert all ideas, no matter how inane, are equally valid.)
No real programmer really likes their tools. That is the punchline.
My team started writing an IDE a couple of years ago. The rules were simple: we are writing this for our users, so we use it. We started with an open source product, hacked in the extensions we initially needed, and within a month the developers were using the IDE 90% of the time. Today, it's up to about 99% of the time.
If a developer ever claimed that he needed to go outside the IDE because XYZ was better, he got to integrate XYZ into the IDE.
1 million LOC later, you can sit down at anyone's desk and do useful work: everything is there in the IDE, all apps run out of it, all data is available. Pretty much the definition of an "integrated environment."
Global Average Temperature often fluctuates by over .2C year on year. This is more a question of weather than climate. Cherry-picking various number over short term periods is more a sales job that a serious data point (Wall St excels at doing this.)
Note that increasing CO2 and smog output may even lower temperatures in the short-term. Then the smog settles out, while the CO2 remains the gift that keeps on giving in terms of planetary warming.
Who knows what world leaders will do? Cheapest thing is probably just to beef up their militaries and shoot incoming refugees.
I've seen a couple of large scale real systems that are essentially functional+OO (i.e. conceptually monadic.) Admittedly, they are narrow domain (Wall St exotic derivatives stuff,) but it's about the only approach that seems to work if you have hundreds of programmers working together on a complex system.
Epicycles can largely be avoided if you design these types of systems well. An epicycle is a sign that a programmer is misunderstanding the model: his code doesn't work, and you swoop in with education to fix it.
An open mind, combined with an ability to think critically, is imperative for many programming projects. It doesn't matter much how you actually acquire these skills, but there are important unless you want to be a code-monkey forever.
I spend of a lot of time with two groups of programmers: one is an agile-type group, the other is classic IT. The 'white-collar' or 'blue-collar' distinction is not too bad in terms of how they do their jobs: the white collar guys take time to understand the problems they are solving, come up with good solutions, get consensus if needed, and then build them. The IT guys just try to implement whatever subtask they have been given: even if you point out the design as a whole is bad, they just want to get their little bit done.
Um, because they fly at night when optical flow techniques are useless? So they use "constant angle w.r.t. to the moon" navigation. Which worked great until humans added 10 billion artificial moons to the environment.
I'm claiming the example is absurd because it misses a major aspect of reality:
Prof: so shooter picks left or right, goalie picks left or right, we assume if picks match goalie always wins else he loses. So, it's 50/50. QED.
Goro: so goalie goes and stands in front of the left goalpost. Now he always wins. So it's 100/0.
Prof: it's a model, damnit, it's not useless. Would you like to hear my proof of why spherical chickens cannot fly?
The typical (though changing) datacenter has mixed hot and cold air - typically cold air pumped up from the bottom (?!? kind of fighting nature, there) then allowed to rise into the ceiling.
It's not fighting nature, it's using it right. If you push cold air in from the top, it warms up, and wants to go back up. Push it in from the bottom, and it does its natural thing and wants to exit via your top exhaust.
Don't be shocked, the MIT article doesn't even get the simple example of game theory right:
Wrong. This model of a a real-world game ignores the fact that the goalie has an option: where he stands. MIT should stick to the prisoner's dilemma, sports are not their area of expertise :)
The best strategy is not random left/right. It is for the goalie to position himself off-center such that the shooter goes left or right with non-equal probabilities, and the goalie dives with non-equal probabilities.
Even with infinite acceleration, his minimum maximum speed is 2040 ft / 5280 ft/mile * (1 min/30sec) * 60 min/hr = 46.4 miles/hour. He had to be speeding, but not enough info to tell his precise maximum speed.
Well, that $50K includes the cost of the developer, plus associated costs of the auditors, lawyers, etc, that she will have to call on to get a project like this moving. So, knock off a chunk in chargebacks. Of the remaining money, figure a standard breakdown of 50% compensation to the dev and 50% overhead.
Doing the math, the dev is getting paid pretty well, but it isn't a code monkey job: it's analysis, implementation, presentation, making a business case, etc.
Actually, we don't call our developers "developers" because we don't want some stupid HR person to do a salary comparison and announce that we are overpaying them.
Yep, cashflow is a bitch: if I need to spend $25K to even look at the product, and they need $20M to run a demo datacenter, they need something like $100M in capital to avoid dying on the vine :(