To add to this, I would also argue that robots and automation have often saved the jobs that remain, rather than replacing the jobs that have been lost. Without automation, many businesses would have moved manufacturing overseas (or contracted it out, or gone out of business), because they simply couldn't afford to compete with other companies (including foreign ones) that have taken steps to reduce their production costs.
Not that the people involved will see it this way, of course. When your plant is struggling and the managers replace half the workers with robots, those workers will see the robots as replacing the half that were laid off, not saving the half that could be kept.
Yeah, I'm with you on the no-tech solution bandwagon. Especially in a chorus, it's pretty easy to be close to somebody else, and if you feel the need, hide the tactile cues behind the row of people in front of you or your music. Though some people might question what the blind chorus member is doing holding a music folder.;-)
I was in a youth orchestra that had a blind member playing viola (or maybe it was second violin?) for a while. I never knew her, but from what I gathered, she'd learn and memorize all the music on her own before we started rehearsals. She was seated right in the middle of the orchestra - between violins and violas, and in front of the winds - so that she could hear everybody around her. I think for entrances and tempo changes, she'd rely on listening to the rest of the orchestra, or come in a little later if she had to. (Obviously, it's a little harder to have tactile communication in an orchestra, where everybody is using both hands for their instrument, and the strings tend to be spaced apart a bit so that their bows don't collide.)
The summary says: "It was the malware which affected as many Apple computers as the Conficker worm affected Windows PCs..." This is obviously inaccurately rewritten from what Krebs said, which is "...Flashback [was] roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs."
Those are not equivalent statements. The summary is equating raw numbers, while TFA is equating percentages.
Sorry, I just read that sentence and thought "no way in hell is that true." As confirmation, Wikipedia says Flashback hit 600,000 Macs, while Conficker infected between 9 and 15 million PCs.
Yeah, but if they encrypted the titles, how would you tell if an article was posted to every other news site several days earlier, versus, um,...whatever it is that Slashdot normally posts?
The problem is energy efficiency. In the past 5 years since it was first built, supercomputers have become far more energy-efficient. Roadrunner falls at 444 MFLOPS per Watt, while the current fastest supercomputer (and also a DOE project), Titan, is 2,143 MFLOPS per Watt. Roadrunner uses 2345 kW, and supporting equipment (cooling, backup power adds (on average) 80% more. Assume they get relatively cheap electricity (The Internets tell me the average price charged to industrial customers is 7/kWh), and that means that their electric bill is at least $295.50 PER HOUR. A computer with the same performance but Titan's efficiency would cost $61 per hour. That's the difference between your electric bill being $2.6 million per year and $500,000.
Assuming Titan's cost also scales ($60 million for 17 Petaflops -> ~$3.5 million for 1 Petaflop), then the payback for scrapping it and building a new computer is under 2 years. So yes, it IS saving money to scrap this one. They're not even replacing it with a new one (yet, anyway) - they're using one that was built in 2010.
And also, yes, you CAN use a computer to calculate how your nuclear arsenal is deteriorating. What makes you think they can't?
If you've reset your password or changed your security questions, they make you wait first. This prevents somebody from stealing your account, changing the password, and then turning on two-factor authentication preventing you from ever getting it back. As they also note in that article, if you use two-factor authentication, they become unable to reset your password. If you ever lose two of the three things needed to log in (your password, your verified device(s), and your recovery key), then you cannot make any changes to your account. (And if you lose all three, you can't even log in from an already-trusted device.)
My point has very little to do with who your female relatives are. Regardless of whether they can or can't handle it (and many of them shock their younger relatives by dishing it themselves), they hold a position of respect in many families and societies. It's how we perceive them and their elevated status that makes the difference in our behavior.
I'm a white male and am in situations where I am not in power all the time. The way the corporate world works puts engineers at the bottom of the org chart.
Yes, you or I as individuals are not in power much of the time. But as a class, we generally are. Tell me, if you follow the org chart all the way up to your CEO, how many women are there? For me, that answer is zero, and has always been zero despite several changes in where I fall on that org chart over the years. It was also zero at my last company. And maybe one at the company before it.
Except in Harlem at night, particularly if you chose to walk through the grounds of a housing project, you might actually run across persons who not only feel you do not belong in their neighborhood, but are perfectly willing to enforce their preferences with violence. And you will have no one who will back you up, during or after the fact. Comparing geeks to gangbangers is ridiculous.
And a woman attending a tech conference alone has who to back her up? Part of the problem is that there are almost zero other women there. (OK, I see PyCon was 20% female - far better than any of the conferences I've ever gone to, but still just a tiny minority. On the other hand, I can't see a single other person that is obviously identifiable as female in her photo.) Yes, it's a ridiculous comparison. But I think it can be really hard for us to understand this sort of feeling when we never experience it the way they do.
How they feel is largely up to them. If they're going to feel disrespected because someone somewhere made a dick joke, or unsafe because there's a lot of guys around, that's not something anyone needs to cater to.
It's also largely up to us. Have you ever tried telling a person with depression to not be sad? Or a gay man to not be attracted to men? It generally doesn't work very well. There are times that you can control your attitude, and there are times that your attitude controls you.
I'm not suggesting that there should be any catering going on here, I just think that women should have a reasonable expectation that we'll act like adults when we're in a professional environment. If you wouldn't say something in front of your mother, your grandmother, your 5-year-old child, your boss, and a whole crowd of strangers, there's probably a good chance that it's not something that you should say at work.
You don't see a problem with a person trying to establish a standard and punish another person for violating it, when she herself does not follow said standard? There's a related legal principle called "unclean hands"... sometimes "she did it too" does apply.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to apply the standard uniformly. However, I think it's bitter if you apply it uniformly not because it creates a better environment, but because you think that them doing it should make it OK for you too. It seems like many people's preferred outcome with this type of argument is not to have everybody follow the rules, but to have the rules removed because "everybody does it". This also presupposes that all women are offended by such comments, and all women make such comments. Neither is true - it's quite possible for one woman to make a comment to another woman that the second would interpret as inappropriate in a professional setting.
Naa, that's BS. Did you read her whole mock-heroic (though I think the 'mock' was unintentional) description of her rationale?
You may be right here; I only read the tweet. It was not the best option to add the pycon hashtag to publicly shame them, but it very well could have ended 20 minutes later when either she or the conference twitter account acknowledged that it had been dealt with. Instead, it was blown up into a much bigger issue. She may have had a part in that, but I doubt she had any significant amount of control by that time. Like all arguments on the internet, it seems to have become a flame war with the two distinct sides getting further from each other as the discussion ensues.
I've been watching a lot of Mad Men recently, and your first full paragraph sounds to me like something one of the incumbent males would say on that show, or in that era in general.
Part of the problem with this whole thing lies in the power dynamic. As white males (well, at least I am - and I suspect a large number of others here are too), we are rarely put in situations where we are not in power. We dominate government, corporate management, high-paying jobs, and just about every other thing that in some way confers or implies power.
On the other hand I imagine that some women in the tech industry feel about as comfortable as I would if I were walking through Harlem alone at night. I've been to developer conferences, and there can be 100 men to every woman. The speakers are men, the attendees are men, the organizers are men. At events like these, despite the professional atmosphere, women are likely to be pursued sexually - with so few women, this attention becomes very focused, and might seem nonstop to the women. Even if it comes from many different people, (who have no idea that she was just asked out two minutes ago, or ogled thirty seconds ago) it obviously can start feeling like you're a piece of meat for sale. The men, on the other hand, might only ask out a single woman the whole time (because that's the only one they interact with), and don't see what the problem is. Or they might make just a single sexual joke.
If you believe that women have a right to be in the workplace, then I think you should believe that they have a right to feel as safe and respected as we do, and that they should not have to endure a hostile workplace just because "we were here first" or "there's more of us".
The best thing we can do is be aware of what we're doing, and acknowledge that we can behave better. None of us are perfect (especially me, I love inappropriate jokes) - yes, women make these jokes too, and it's usually a lot easier for men to brush it off because they aren't subjected to it as often, and because we're still in the position of power. Also, "but mommy, she was doing it too!" didn't work when we were kids, and it doesn't work now either.
And, in this light, I agree with a common opinion that just about everybody behaved badly here - the men for making jokes in what should be a reasonably professional environment, the press for making a big deal about it (I was going to say that some of this was the woman's fault, but her tweet wasn't really seeking attention - just asking for help - so I feel like it's less her fault than others'), and the employers for not handling the situation in a way that would be more positive for those involved.
I've still seen ones that are broken; for example a temporary stoplight strung up on wires while an intersection was under construction (and several lanes were closed, etc.). I forget exactly what the fault I witnessed was; it occurred to me that it was probably a wiring fault - like the workers hooked up the wires to the lights incorrectly, or there was a short between the wires, for example. It was something like the yellow and red were illuminated at the same time. The other lights on that signal were fine, it was just the one that was faulty.
I don't know if these units get separate sensor signals hooked up (eg you get one signal to provide power to the green light, and another signal back so that you can see if the green light is being powered), or if it's just checking that the output from the main controller box is producing good outputs. But there are very few ways of doing this (short of a video-based system) that would be completely foolproof. For example, if the workers hook the green output for one direction to the green light of a different direction, the sensor has no idea that the wrong light is lit. But hopefully they'd catch this pretty easily......On the other hand, given how often I see the sensor loops in the pavement hooked up wrong, I'm surprised I don't see this sort of thing more often. For example, a car will stop in the left turn lane in one direction, passing over about 4 sensor loops on the way. Then the left turn signal cycles for a different direction first, before the correct left turn signal goes green. It's obvious that at least one of the four loops is wired correctly, and at least one is wired wrong.
+1 more. If the company requires an employee to get some sort of training, certification, etc. then the company directly pays for all costs associated with it, and the employee can use work hours to study and attend classes. If the employee is driving the process by taking a class (even if the class is very useful - but has not been deemed a business requirement and thus they will not pay for it directly as above), then the employee can get reimbursed after the fact. And only if the employee passes/gets a B or better/etc.
Yes, the latter case is a company investment in the employee, but the employee is getting a benefit from it as well - a new skill that they can take with them to their next job, and the ability to move up within the current company to have an expanding role - and possibly better performance reviews and a salary increase.
As an aside, I once worked somewhere where we all had to take a couple exams to continue our jobs doing computer repair - the manufacturer started requiring that all technicians pass their exams. I think there were about four of us that had to train and then take the exams; three of us had no problems - we studied for an hour or two, took the exams, and passed on the first try. After all, it was an exam about what we were already doing every day. The fourth studied for probably 3 weeks straight, and failed about a half-dozen times at least. Of course, since it fell under the first category, this was all paid for by the employer. Granted, it also would've been a great time to just fire the guy for not knowing what he's supposed to already know, and being seemingly unable to learn it either. Unfortunately, he had previously successfully sued us for wrongful termination, and had settled for a token job in our group. So of course, no matter how terrible he was, he got to keep his job, because they didn't want to risk getting sued again.
And they've also demonstrated several times that even when they can't beat their competitors on technical merits, they can still use their monopolistic footprint to stomp all over them anyway.
Don't get me wrong; Intel has a huge R&D budget, which buys them a lot of progress when they decide to focus on something that somebody else is currently better than them at. But sometimes, they use that money to just undercut their competitors (eg by selling chips at a loss), so smaller companies have no hope of surviving. Either they sell at a loss too and go out of business; or they maintain their price, nobody buys their chips, and they go out of business. Because of this, they've been sued by numerous companies and governments, and fined or settled for billions of dollars multiple times.
Not true; as an example, consider the tool bag lost by an astronaut on an EVA in 2008. A grease gun leaked in her bag, and while cleaning up the grease, she lost her grip on the bag and it floated away - much the way you might lose grip on the spacecraft in the example above. (It was supposed to be tethered to her as well - either she forgot to tether it, or the clip in the bag failed.) If what you say were true, they'd have to worry about the tool bag returning to the ISS and possibly crashing into it - however they quickly determined that it posed no threat to the ISS, and it burned up in the atmosphere about 9 months later as its orbit decayed.
A week after it was lost, you could see it from the ground with binoculars, traveling several minutes ahead of the ISS, not with it.
That's why the astronauts have 3 tethers - and at least 2 have to be connected at all times. For example, if they're tethering to a rail on the outside of the ISS, and they need to move to the next rail to get to their destination, they unhook their tethers one at a time, always leaving the other 2 connected.
Export controls generally restrict just about anything related to a launch vehicle, satellite, spacecraft, or anything else related to space. NASA and other companies have to get licenses to export the technology to another (specific) country; so they can get a license to export it to Russia, Japan, the EU, and other ISS partners, but probably not to North Korea. But if you put it on the internet, everybody gets it.
It's actually closer to half the power in current process technology, I believe. Obviously, that's a big enough problem that many things are done to mitigate it; for example, turning off power to parts of a chip that aren't in use. Or reduce voltage and slow down the clocks. Or even better, just finishing up as much work as possible, turn off the power to the whole chip for some amount of time, then wake up and take care of whatever needs doing (and do this all much faster than a human would even notice - small fractions of a second). And, of course, the materials scientists are doing a lot on this front as well; typically, a design can choose from a number of different types of transistors that have different balances of leakage, speed, operating voltage, size, current drive capacity, etc. etc. etc.
I used to think the same way about kernel panics in an operating system - I thought there was no reason why the system should ever halt. And then I had an OS class, where it was pointed out that halting is a quite valid choice when encountering an error condition that indicates that something has gone fundamentally wrong. For example, if you have an allocation bitmap that tells you what parts of your disk is in use, and what parts are free, it has a checksum, and the checksum is incorrect. It may very well be that the safest thing to do in this case is halt, rather than risk a write making it to the disk and overwriting a block that is in use. The user can reboot, and that will probably be the best way to recover from the error. It might be possible to display an error message, however since the code to display such a message is not often used, it's likely still on the disk (it was either never loaded, or was loaded and then swapped out of RAM). So you might think it's safe to try to read the disk still - but you have to set some state somewhere saying that under no circumstances should you write anything while you try to load this code. But what's to say that whatever state you set is working? Obviously something is broken, your checksum was wrong! And for that matter, if you need to swap something else out to load this new code in, you can't, because you've decided that writes are now unsafe. For that matter, maybe the disk is acting up - maybe it'll interpret a read command as a write, or take some other completely bogus action. Or maybe what you think is your memory-mapped disk is now really the network card, because some CPU configuration registers picked up a bad value. Bottom line; there are definitely good reasons to just stop a program, OS, or whatever when you detect an error that should never happen.
That said, this case is not one of those good reasons.
This. In college, my roommate's best friend drove drunk for about 10-15 miles, before being pulled over in the downtown/campus area about 2 blocks from his apartment. My roommate and I saw the cops giving him the various field sobriety tests right in front of our dorm. About 3 or 4 hours later, we were woken by a call from the jail, wanting to release him to the custody of a responsible adult for the next 24 hours. My roommate signed for that responsibility, but took it quite seriously, and used it to make his best friend's day quite miserable. He worked hard to make sure his friend knew that it was incredibly stupid, and make it something that he'd never want to do again. He wouldn't let his friend go anywhere, not even to the bathroom alone ("You might sneak a drink in there!"). And to the best of my knowledge, he never did again; when he got piss drunk, he'd do it somewhere where he could crash within walking distance.
Sometimes it helps to have experiences that show one just how much it affects their abilities. I had a roommate in college who said he would absolutely never drink and drive because he had seen the detrimental effect intoxication had on his driving in Mario Kart, and he was way better at Mario Kart than at actual driving.
I think another problem is that there's probably not much reason for a business to be physically located close to a supercomputer. It would be just as easy to use it from out of the state, with the added benefit that your business can be located somewhere with a larger talent pool. Without that draw, there's not much reason for the state to sponsor such a project, since there's not likely to be a net positive gain for the taxpayers. For a country, it makes more sense to invest in a supercomputer, as there are higher barriers to people and data moving across international boundaries than across state borders. Of course, countries also generally have more use for supercomputers themselves.
Also, from looking at the stats, it's not a terribly efficient machine. It's currently at #185 on the Top500 list (not bad, for being fairly old), but it burns 861 kW. Only 286 of the Top500 systems list their power, and of those it comes in at #271 in terms of efficiency, or #241 in total power. So it's in the 63rd percentile speed-wise, but the 5th percentile in terms of efficiency. This is largely related to its age; the top 84 of 286 systems were all built in 2011 or 2012. I could imagine that having such a low efficiency makes it quite a bit harder to turn a profit. Especially when the most efficient machines on the list (including the fastest machine in the world) use 14-16 times less power for the same performance level.
This, and even the *book* is wrong half the time. Given the pressure to come out with a "new edition" every couple of years that many publishers and authors face, they re-write many parts of the books, including examples and problems. Often, it's clear that what the author wrote hasn't even been compiled before, as there are glaring syntax errors. (Obviously, some books are better at this than others.)
Most of the people I work with produce much better-looking code than a college student. Interns come in periodically and help prove that point; they write for ease of coding, not ease of reading or maintenance or reuse or anything nice like that. The code from more experienced people is by no means perfect, but they've at least seen both good examples and bad examples when they have to touch somebody else's code, and they tend to pick up a few of the good habits while dropping a few of the bad ones.
So what if productivity is higher? These are hourly figures - people are paid per hour of work, not per widget produced. If productivity goes up, they still work the same number of hours.
In an IT example, let's say experienced worker Alice writes a script that makes her job 10% faster - she can now produce 10% more websites, or fix 10% more computers, or administer 10% more servers, or 10% more whatever in the same time. The company may very well see fit to give her a nice raise, because she and all her coworkers are now producing 10% more output. She retires, and the company hires a new employee to replace her, Bob. Bob is producing 10% more output than they would have expected for an inexperienced new hire, thanks to Alice's script. Does that mean that Bob should therefore be paid 10% more? He's not working any harder than a new hire would have the year before - the tools are just better.
An increase in productivity for most companies means an increase in profit, nothing more. For any employees that are directly responsible for that increase in ways above and beyond what is expected of them in their normal duties, the company might provide a bonus or a raise. Beyond that, there's no reason that an increase in productivity should mean an increase in wages across the board.
Why is there an assumption that inflation-adjusted wages must rise, either in general (chart in parent) or in IT (article)? For an individual employee, sure, they should rise over time as they gain more experience. But for the population as a whole I'd expect it to stay constant; as employees get older they earn more, but some retire, and they are replaced by inexperienced workers just starting their careers, earning much less. Since the average experience of the workforce is remaining the same, why shouldn't the average wage remain the same?
What this seems to indicate more is that the supply and demand in the job market are fairly stable - thus wages are neither going up nor down.
I can see how some people would have that feeling. My paycheck roughly gets divided into thirds - 1/3 goes to taxes, 1/3 goes to retirement and other savings deducted directly from my paycheck, and 1/3 goes to my bank account, where it then pays for rent, a car payment, food, and a small amount of discretionary spending. Apart from the fact that I'm saving up for retirement, it feels very much like I have very little spare cash because I'm spending it all on my rent and groceries.
When I was a grad student, I was willing to live without a car, had no retirement savings, and paid much lower taxes, and thus lived on much less money. Honestly, no matter how much money you make, your expenses will generally balloon to match it, one way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
To add to this, I would also argue that robots and automation have often saved the jobs that remain, rather than replacing the jobs that have been lost. Without automation, many businesses would have moved manufacturing overseas (or contracted it out, or gone out of business), because they simply couldn't afford to compete with other companies (including foreign ones) that have taken steps to reduce their production costs.
Not that the people involved will see it this way, of course. When your plant is struggling and the managers replace half the workers with robots, those workers will see the robots as replacing the half that were laid off, not saving the half that could be kept.
You mean like this one?
I've also seen articles on various other similar robots, including for noodles and pizza.
Yeah, I'm with you on the no-tech solution bandwagon. Especially in a chorus, it's pretty easy to be close to somebody else, and if you feel the need, hide the tactile cues behind the row of people in front of you or your music. Though some people might question what the blind chorus member is doing holding a music folder. ;-)
I was in a youth orchestra that had a blind member playing viola (or maybe it was second violin?) for a while. I never knew her, but from what I gathered, she'd learn and memorize all the music on her own before we started rehearsals. She was seated right in the middle of the orchestra - between violins and violas, and in front of the winds - so that she could hear everybody around her. I think for entrances and tempo changes, she'd rely on listening to the rest of the orchestra, or come in a little later if she had to. (Obviously, it's a little harder to have tactile communication in an orchestra, where everybody is using both hands for their instrument, and the strings tend to be spaced apart a bit so that their bows don't collide.)
The summary says: "It was the malware which affected as many Apple computers as the Conficker worm affected Windows PCs..."
This is obviously inaccurately rewritten from what Krebs said, which is "...Flashback [was] roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs."
Those are not equivalent statements. The summary is equating raw numbers, while TFA is equating percentages.
Sorry, I just read that sentence and thought "no way in hell is that true." As confirmation, Wikipedia says Flashback hit 600,000 Macs, while Conficker infected between 9 and 15 million PCs.
Yeah, but if they encrypted the titles, how would you tell if an article was posted to every other news site several days earlier, versus, um, ...whatever it is that Slashdot normally posts?
Never mind.
The problem is energy efficiency. In the past 5 years since it was first built, supercomputers have become far more energy-efficient. Roadrunner falls at 444 MFLOPS per Watt, while the current fastest supercomputer (and also a DOE project), Titan, is 2,143 MFLOPS per Watt. Roadrunner uses 2345 kW, and supporting equipment (cooling, backup power adds (on average) 80% more. Assume they get relatively cheap electricity (The Internets tell me the average price charged to industrial customers is 7/kWh), and that means that their electric bill is at least $295.50 PER HOUR. A computer with the same performance but Titan's efficiency would cost $61 per hour. That's the difference between your electric bill being $2.6 million per year and $500,000.
Assuming Titan's cost also scales ($60 million for 17 Petaflops -> ~$3.5 million for 1 Petaflop), then the payback for scrapping it and building a new computer is under 2 years. So yes, it IS saving money to scrap this one. They're not even replacing it with a new one (yet, anyway) - they're using one that was built in 2010.
And also, yes, you CAN use a computer to calculate how your nuclear arsenal is deteriorating. What makes you think they can't?
See the next-to-last answer in the FAQ here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5570
If you've reset your password or changed your security questions, they make you wait first. This prevents somebody from stealing your account, changing the password, and then turning on two-factor authentication preventing you from ever getting it back. As they also note in that article, if you use two-factor authentication, they become unable to reset your password. If you ever lose two of the three things needed to log in (your password, your verified device(s), and your recovery key), then you cannot make any changes to your account. (And if you lose all three, you can't even log in from an already-trusted device.)
My point has very little to do with who your female relatives are. Regardless of whether they can or can't handle it (and many of them shock their younger relatives by dishing it themselves), they hold a position of respect in many families and societies. It's how we perceive them and their elevated status that makes the difference in our behavior.
I'm a white male and am in situations where I am not in power all the time. The way the corporate world works puts engineers at the bottom of the org chart.
Yes, you or I as individuals are not in power much of the time. But as a class, we generally are. Tell me, if you follow the org chart all the way up to your CEO, how many women are there? For me, that answer is zero, and has always been zero despite several changes in where I fall on that org chart over the years. It was also zero at my last company. And maybe one at the company before it.
Except in Harlem at night, particularly if you chose to walk through the grounds of a housing project, you might actually run across persons who not only feel you do not belong in their neighborhood, but are perfectly willing to enforce their preferences with violence. And you will have no one who will back you up, during or after the fact. Comparing geeks to gangbangers is ridiculous.
And a woman attending a tech conference alone has who to back her up? Part of the problem is that there are almost zero other women there. (OK, I see PyCon was 20% female - far better than any of the conferences I've ever gone to, but still just a tiny minority. On the other hand, I can't see a single other person that is obviously identifiable as female in her photo.) Yes, it's a ridiculous comparison. But I think it can be really hard for us to understand this sort of feeling when we never experience it the way they do.
How they feel is largely up to them. If they're going to feel disrespected because someone somewhere made a dick joke, or unsafe because there's a lot of guys around, that's not something anyone needs to cater to.
It's also largely up to us. Have you ever tried telling a person with depression to not be sad? Or a gay man to not be attracted to men? It generally doesn't work very well. There are times that you can control your attitude, and there are times that your attitude controls you.
I'm not suggesting that there should be any catering going on here, I just think that women should have a reasonable expectation that we'll act like adults when we're in a professional environment. If you wouldn't say something in front of your mother, your grandmother, your 5-year-old child, your boss, and a whole crowd of strangers, there's probably a good chance that it's not something that you should say at work.
You don't see a problem with a person trying to establish a standard and punish another person for violating it, when she herself does not follow said standard? There's a related legal principle called "unclean hands"... sometimes "she did it too" does apply.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to apply the standard uniformly. However, I think it's bitter if you apply it uniformly not because it creates a better environment, but because you think that them doing it should make it OK for you too. It seems like many people's preferred outcome with this type of argument is not to have everybody follow the rules, but to have the rules removed because "everybody does it". This also presupposes that all women are offended by such comments, and all women make such comments. Neither is true - it's quite possible for one woman to make a comment to another woman that the second would interpret as inappropriate in a professional setting.
Naa, that's BS. Did you read her whole mock-heroic (though I think the 'mock' was unintentional) description of her rationale?
You may be right here; I only read the tweet. It was not the best option to add the pycon hashtag to publicly shame them, but it very well could have ended 20 minutes later when either she or the conference twitter account acknowledged that it had been dealt with. Instead, it was blown up into a much bigger issue. She may have had a part in that, but I doubt she had any significant amount of control by that time. Like all arguments on the internet, it seems to have become a flame war with the two distinct sides getting further from each other as the discussion ensues.
I've been watching a lot of Mad Men recently, and your first full paragraph sounds to me like something one of the incumbent males would say on that show, or in that era in general.
Part of the problem with this whole thing lies in the power dynamic. As white males (well, at least I am - and I suspect a large number of others here are too), we are rarely put in situations where we are not in power. We dominate government, corporate management, high-paying jobs, and just about every other thing that in some way confers or implies power.
On the other hand I imagine that some women in the tech industry feel about as comfortable as I would if I were walking through Harlem alone at night. I've been to developer conferences, and there can be 100 men to every woman. The speakers are men, the attendees are men, the organizers are men. At events like these, despite the professional atmosphere, women are likely to be pursued sexually - with so few women, this attention becomes very focused, and might seem nonstop to the women. Even if it comes from many different people, (who have no idea that she was just asked out two minutes ago, or ogled thirty seconds ago) it obviously can start feeling like you're a piece of meat for sale. The men, on the other hand, might only ask out a single woman the whole time (because that's the only one they interact with), and don't see what the problem is. Or they might make just a single sexual joke.
If you believe that women have a right to be in the workplace, then I think you should believe that they have a right to feel as safe and respected as we do, and that they should not have to endure a hostile workplace just because "we were here first" or "there's more of us".
The best thing we can do is be aware of what we're doing, and acknowledge that we can behave better. None of us are perfect (especially me, I love inappropriate jokes) - yes, women make these jokes too, and it's usually a lot easier for men to brush it off because they aren't subjected to it as often, and because we're still in the position of power. Also, "but mommy, she was doing it too!" didn't work when we were kids, and it doesn't work now either.
And, in this light, I agree with a common opinion that just about everybody behaved badly here - the men for making jokes in what should be a reasonably professional environment, the press for making a big deal about it (I was going to say that some of this was the woman's fault, but her tweet wasn't really seeking attention - just asking for help - so I feel like it's less her fault than others'), and the employers for not handling the situation in a way that would be more positive for those involved.
I've still seen ones that are broken; for example a temporary stoplight strung up on wires while an intersection was under construction (and several lanes were closed, etc.). I forget exactly what the fault I witnessed was; it occurred to me that it was probably a wiring fault - like the workers hooked up the wires to the lights incorrectly, or there was a short between the wires, for example. It was something like the yellow and red were illuminated at the same time. The other lights on that signal were fine, it was just the one that was faulty.
I don't know if these units get separate sensor signals hooked up (eg you get one signal to provide power to the green light, and another signal back so that you can see if the green light is being powered), or if it's just checking that the output from the main controller box is producing good outputs. But there are very few ways of doing this (short of a video-based system) that would be completely foolproof. For example, if the workers hook the green output for one direction to the green light of a different direction, the sensor has no idea that the wrong light is lit. But hopefully they'd catch this pretty easily... ...On the other hand, given how often I see the sensor loops in the pavement hooked up wrong, I'm surprised I don't see this sort of thing more often. For example, a car will stop in the left turn lane in one direction, passing over about 4 sensor loops on the way. Then the left turn signal cycles for a different direction first, before the correct left turn signal goes green. It's obvious that at least one of the four loops is wired correctly, and at least one is wired wrong.
+1 more. If the company requires an employee to get some sort of training, certification, etc. then the company directly pays for all costs associated with it, and the employee can use work hours to study and attend classes. If the employee is driving the process by taking a class (even if the class is very useful - but has not been deemed a business requirement and thus they will not pay for it directly as above), then the employee can get reimbursed after the fact. And only if the employee passes/gets a B or better/etc.
Yes, the latter case is a company investment in the employee, but the employee is getting a benefit from it as well - a new skill that they can take with them to their next job, and the ability to move up within the current company to have an expanding role - and possibly better performance reviews and a salary increase.
As an aside, I once worked somewhere where we all had to take a couple exams to continue our jobs doing computer repair - the manufacturer started requiring that all technicians pass their exams. I think there were about four of us that had to train and then take the exams; three of us had no problems - we studied for an hour or two, took the exams, and passed on the first try. After all, it was an exam about what we were already doing every day. The fourth studied for probably 3 weeks straight, and failed about a half-dozen times at least. Of course, since it fell under the first category, this was all paid for by the employer. Granted, it also would've been a great time to just fire the guy for not knowing what he's supposed to already know, and being seemingly unable to learn it either. Unfortunately, he had previously successfully sued us for wrongful termination, and had settled for a token job in our group. So of course, no matter how terrible he was, he got to keep his job, because they didn't want to risk getting sued again.
And they've also demonstrated several times that even when they can't beat their competitors on technical merits, they can still use their monopolistic footprint to stomp all over them anyway.
Don't get me wrong; Intel has a huge R&D budget, which buys them a lot of progress when they decide to focus on something that somebody else is currently better than them at. But sometimes, they use that money to just undercut their competitors (eg by selling chips at a loss), so smaller companies have no hope of surviving. Either they sell at a loss too and go out of business; or they maintain their price, nobody buys their chips, and they go out of business. Because of this, they've been sued by numerous companies and governments, and fined or settled for billions of dollars multiple times.
Not true; as an example, consider the tool bag lost by an astronaut on an EVA in 2008. A grease gun leaked in her bag, and while cleaning up the grease, she lost her grip on the bag and it floated away - much the way you might lose grip on the spacecraft in the example above. (It was supposed to be tethered to her as well - either she forgot to tether it, or the clip in the bag failed.) If what you say were true, they'd have to worry about the tool bag returning to the ISS and possibly crashing into it - however they quickly determined that it posed no threat to the ISS, and it burned up in the atmosphere about 9 months later as its orbit decayed.
A week after it was lost, you could see it from the ground with binoculars, traveling several minutes ahead of the ISS, not with it.
That's why the astronauts have 3 tethers - and at least 2 have to be connected at all times. For example, if they're tethering to a rail on the outside of the ISS, and they need to move to the next rail to get to their destination, they unhook their tethers one at a time, always leaving the other 2 connected.
Export controls generally restrict just about anything related to a launch vehicle, satellite, spacecraft, or anything else related to space. NASA and other companies have to get licenses to export the technology to another (specific) country; so they can get a license to export it to Russia, Japan, the EU, and other ISS partners, but probably not to North Korea. But if you put it on the internet, everybody gets it.
It's actually closer to half the power in current process technology, I believe. Obviously, that's a big enough problem that many things are done to mitigate it; for example, turning off power to parts of a chip that aren't in use. Or reduce voltage and slow down the clocks. Or even better, just finishing up as much work as possible, turn off the power to the whole chip for some amount of time, then wake up and take care of whatever needs doing (and do this all much faster than a human would even notice - small fractions of a second). And, of course, the materials scientists are doing a lot on this front as well; typically, a design can choose from a number of different types of transistors that have different balances of leakage, speed, operating voltage, size, current drive capacity, etc. etc. etc.
I used to think the same way about kernel panics in an operating system - I thought there was no reason why the system should ever halt. And then I had an OS class, where it was pointed out that halting is a quite valid choice when encountering an error condition that indicates that something has gone fundamentally wrong. For example, if you have an allocation bitmap that tells you what parts of your disk is in use, and what parts are free, it has a checksum, and the checksum is incorrect. It may very well be that the safest thing to do in this case is halt, rather than risk a write making it to the disk and overwriting a block that is in use. The user can reboot, and that will probably be the best way to recover from the error. It might be possible to display an error message, however since the code to display such a message is not often used, it's likely still on the disk (it was either never loaded, or was loaded and then swapped out of RAM). So you might think it's safe to try to read the disk still - but you have to set some state somewhere saying that under no circumstances should you write anything while you try to load this code. But what's to say that whatever state you set is working? Obviously something is broken, your checksum was wrong! And for that matter, if you need to swap something else out to load this new code in, you can't, because you've decided that writes are now unsafe. For that matter, maybe the disk is acting up - maybe it'll interpret a read command as a write, or take some other completely bogus action. Or maybe what you think is your memory-mapped disk is now really the network card, because some CPU configuration registers picked up a bad value. Bottom line; there are definitely good reasons to just stop a program, OS, or whatever when you detect an error that should never happen.
That said, this case is not one of those good reasons.
This. In college, my roommate's best friend drove drunk for about 10-15 miles, before being pulled over in the downtown/campus area about 2 blocks from his apartment. My roommate and I saw the cops giving him the various field sobriety tests right in front of our dorm. About 3 or 4 hours later, we were woken by a call from the jail, wanting to release him to the custody of a responsible adult for the next 24 hours. My roommate signed for that responsibility, but took it quite seriously, and used it to make his best friend's day quite miserable. He worked hard to make sure his friend knew that it was incredibly stupid, and make it something that he'd never want to do again. He wouldn't let his friend go anywhere, not even to the bathroom alone ("You might sneak a drink in there!"). And to the best of my knowledge, he never did again; when he got piss drunk, he'd do it somewhere where he could crash within walking distance.
Sometimes it helps to have experiences that show one just how much it affects their abilities. I had a roommate in college who said he would absolutely never drink and drive because he had seen the detrimental effect intoxication had on his driving in Mario Kart, and he was way better at Mario Kart than at actual driving.
I think another problem is that there's probably not much reason for a business to be physically located close to a supercomputer. It would be just as easy to use it from out of the state, with the added benefit that your business can be located somewhere with a larger talent pool. Without that draw, there's not much reason for the state to sponsor such a project, since there's not likely to be a net positive gain for the taxpayers. For a country, it makes more sense to invest in a supercomputer, as there are higher barriers to people and data moving across international boundaries than across state borders. Of course, countries also generally have more use for supercomputers themselves.
Also, from looking at the stats, it's not a terribly efficient machine. It's currently at #185 on the Top500 list (not bad, for being fairly old), but it burns 861 kW. Only 286 of the Top500 systems list their power, and of those it comes in at #271 in terms of efficiency, or #241 in total power. So it's in the 63rd percentile speed-wise, but the 5th percentile in terms of efficiency. This is largely related to its age; the top 84 of 286 systems were all built in 2011 or 2012. I could imagine that having such a low efficiency makes it quite a bit harder to turn a profit. Especially when the most efficient machines on the list (including the fastest machine in the world) use 14-16 times less power for the same performance level.
This, and even the *book* is wrong half the time. Given the pressure to come out with a "new edition" every couple of years that many publishers and authors face, they re-write many parts of the books, including examples and problems. Often, it's clear that what the author wrote hasn't even been compiled before, as there are glaring syntax errors. (Obviously, some books are better at this than others.)
Most of the people I work with produce much better-looking code than a college student. Interns come in periodically and help prove that point; they write for ease of coding, not ease of reading or maintenance or reuse or anything nice like that. The code from more experienced people is by no means perfect, but they've at least seen both good examples and bad examples when they have to touch somebody else's code, and they tend to pick up a few of the good habits while dropping a few of the bad ones.
So what if productivity is higher? These are hourly figures - people are paid per hour of work, not per widget produced. If productivity goes up, they still work the same number of hours.
In an IT example, let's say experienced worker Alice writes a script that makes her job 10% faster - she can now produce 10% more websites, or fix 10% more computers, or administer 10% more servers, or 10% more whatever in the same time. The company may very well see fit to give her a nice raise, because she and all her coworkers are now producing 10% more output. She retires, and the company hires a new employee to replace her, Bob. Bob is producing 10% more output than they would have expected for an inexperienced new hire, thanks to Alice's script. Does that mean that Bob should therefore be paid 10% more? He's not working any harder than a new hire would have the year before - the tools are just better.
An increase in productivity for most companies means an increase in profit, nothing more. For any employees that are directly responsible for that increase in ways above and beyond what is expected of them in their normal duties, the company might provide a bonus or a raise. Beyond that, there's no reason that an increase in productivity should mean an increase in wages across the board.
Why is there an assumption that inflation-adjusted wages must rise, either in general (chart in parent) or in IT (article)? For an individual employee, sure, they should rise over time as they gain more experience. But for the population as a whole I'd expect it to stay constant; as employees get older they earn more, but some retire, and they are replaced by inexperienced workers just starting their careers, earning much less. Since the average experience of the workforce is remaining the same, why shouldn't the average wage remain the same?
What this seems to indicate more is that the supply and demand in the job market are fairly stable - thus wages are neither going up nor down.
I can see how some people would have that feeling. My paycheck roughly gets divided into thirds - 1/3 goes to taxes, 1/3 goes to retirement and other savings deducted directly from my paycheck, and 1/3 goes to my bank account, where it then pays for rent, a car payment, food, and a small amount of discretionary spending. Apart from the fact that I'm saving up for retirement, it feels very much like I have very little spare cash because I'm spending it all on my rent and groceries.
When I was a grad student, I was willing to live without a car, had no retirement savings, and paid much lower taxes, and thus lived on much less money. Honestly, no matter how much money you make, your expenses will generally balloon to match it, one way or another.