Home-schooled kids need interaction, but not they could join the a youth group, a martial arts club, a band, or some other interest group. Learning math and geography with 29 other inmates doesn't strike me as great value in terms of social learning.
Schools do have some advantages though. They give kids with bad parents the opportunity to mix with kids with good parents (for your definition of "good" and "bad"), unless the schools end up segregated (US style). They provide a base-line level of education. And face it, if it weren't for the idea of "education" that schools were promoting, the home-schooled students wouldn't be pressured into learning any curricula. Most parents would just put off the hard stuff (i.e. math) for another year.
You could compare Pentium 4s to each other pretty reliably based on clock speed. Sure, the Northwoods were a bit faster than the Prescotts, and the Extreme Edition chips had a nice speed boost from the cache, but generally clockspeed made em' match up.
However, turbo boost / new architectures can give a 50% speed boost on tasks like x264 encoding when you're talking core 2 vs i5. The frequent changes necessitate new naming schemes.
That was the problem, I think. They were rubbing Moore's law in people's faces. Now, the i7 can always be $999, the i5 can always be $250, and the Pentium can be always be $100. People won't feel like idiots for lashing out on a marginally more powerful system, because their i7 will always have a superior sticker to the lowly Pentium.
Grrr... I wish Intel would go back to their system of giving new names to new chips then adding a MHz (and if that's not enough, maybe a cache size and number of cores) to distinguish them, rather than using a weird combination new names (for their top-tier chips) and old names (for their low-end gear).
I only just realized that Pentium no longer means "crappy NetBurst", but now means "low end C2D". And later this month, there will be "Pentiums" and even "Celerons" built on the same architecture as the i5. How do you let your friends know that the "Pentium" is either a worthless, power-hungry dinosaur; or a cheap version of the i5? Should people memorize the chip serial numbers? Because that seems to be the only way of figuring out what the chip is these days.
Funny, but my company did just mandate blaze orange shirts for all front line IT staff. I can't for the life of me figure out who thought that was a good idea.
Mine comes in Monday.
We can also wear Navy. I think I'm going to get an equal number of pairs of blaze orange and navy pants and alternate them daily.
Personally, I find it extremely condescending. I'm required to design and maintain hundreds of databases, several servers, write apps, troubleshoot network problems, manage million dollar projects, AND do desktop support for 2000 devices with 3 other IT people for $40K/year. And now this. No wonder I've thrown my hands up today and am now posting on slashdot.
Designed and maintained over 200 databases, including: * Customer whatsit thinghy, with 8,000 records, 30 fields, and 30 current users * three * other * highlights
Designed, set-up and maintained 7 servers, including: * Main NAS with 1.5T of data (including back-up to, network connections,...) * more * highlights
Produced a number of web applications, including * Some * highlights
Managed projects worth in excess of $2 million, including * Rollover to Windows 7 * Server upgrade program. * whatever
Supported over 2000 devices in a small team of 4 staff.
*Don't* go out of your way to mention your salary (unless asked), and if you do mention it, make sure they know that you consider your current salary inadequate.
IT staff aren't white collar workers. This is partly because it's a new discipline, and hasn't devolved into blue-collar workers (who do the real work, and don't get paid much) and white collar workers (who suck up all the resources, and organize the blue-collared workers to be more efficient), and "professionals" (who are like blue-collar workers, only their skills are too elusive to devalue) and partly because IT is too hard for management to divide an conquer (so far).
They say that before the 80s, management used to rise up through the ranks. Business schools used to focus on processes and capital spending (i.e. making better and cheaper widgets) rather than allocative efficiencies. But mega-corporations got so big and bloated that management had to learn how to allocate capital to the least inefficient parts of the organization. Managers became a type of internal financial analyst, whose job was to allocate their capital effectively, and raise more funds from their backers. All the bullshit of the stock-market, without the transparency and accountability that shares have - if the manager made a bum investement they could just talk their way into another portfolio.
On the other hand, it might mean that people alert you to their problems while you are in the area, saving you walking around too much. That won't help your "resolved" count (stupid worthless metrics getting in the way of productivity...) but it might save you time, and make your service more responsive.
No, it's more like if somebody was hiding in your trunk (and jumping to rob people at intersections), could you also sneak into their trunk and wrestle him out?
I'm a big fan of environmental impact studies, but you make a good point in saying that they get screwed up.
It would be nice to have more data available on what areas are vulnerable (now), so the impact studies could be done faster. Instead, rare frogs are only getting noticed when somebody is already trying to build a road through their swamp.
It's nowhere near 90%. Maybe 60%. I think you are thinking of Laos...
Anyway, even in the cities, where people live pretty well, the median income (not mean, but median) is still about 500 to 1000 RMB / month (location dependent). 4k to 7k a year.
You can live OK on that, but middle class people don't aspire to own Mercedes, and make do with a Toyota sedan. They aspire to own a QQ car (a $5,000 Chinese compact), and make do with a scooter.
If your weakest programmer can't understand those bzeros (even after you've explained it in the review), then a few bzeros are the least of your worries.
Or that despite having more votes than men, it's somehow men's fault that we haven't had a female President and few female Senators. Subscribing to a lower set of standards is convenient when demanding reparations, but it's not the way to actually earn any sort of meaningful respect.
To assume that it's a "fault" that you haven't had a female president or that "meaningful respect" is a serious driver is very male-oriented thinking. Thing is, women aren't defective men, they're their own people with their own motivations. Only about 20% of women are motivated primarily by extrinsic factors such as pay and status, compared to about 60% of men (source: Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. Women are far more likely than men to be motivated by intrinsic factors such as feeling that their work is doing some good.That means that fewer women reach the top because most women would rather be doing something they enjoyed. (For what it's worth, women consistently score higher than similarly qualified men for job satisfaction -- Pinker again. There's more than one glass ceiling, but we don't notice the job-satisfaction one because we choose male-oriented measures of success.
There is another reason fewer women reach the top, though: although the average intelligence of men and women is about the same, the variance is significantly higher in men. So women are right: if somebody does something really dumb then it probably was a man. But the other side of that coin, which women tend not to like so much, if that if somebody does something really smart, that probably was a man too
And for those whose mouse is hovering on the "flamebait" button, remember that this is about averages. Nothing I've said means that a woman can't be stunningly intelligent and can't be driven by money and power -- just that they tend to be less extreme and more sensible.
Consider the evolutionary imperative. A man who takes lots of big risks and gains a lot of status can have a lot of extra offspring.
A high-achieving woman will reproduce less than a low achieving one, so why takes risks?
This will even out, with time (modern day Genghis Khans aren't siring their own clans any more), but it will take a while to sort itself out.
Because everyone knows that the problem with smartphones is while that they have way too many pixels, standardized input devices, video cards that can render billions of polygons a second, and a buttload of RAM; but you just can't run games like Crysis on your trendy Apple, or use PhotoShop on your home dev box / server.
"Clever", "obvious" and "maintainable" is always in the eye of the maintainer. If your goal is to write code that can be maintained by the next guy, there is one simple way to end all the arguments:
Have someone else read it.
Nobody has a clue whether their code is good or bad. Everyone's opinion of their own code (like their opinion of their own BO, looks, karaoke ability, sense of humor, and driving skills) is ridiculously overblown. Except for the people who lack confidence, and think that they suck no-matter how good they are.
If you want an unbiased opinion, get one. Code reviews are essential.
Of course, some companies don't have the time or resources to do code reviews. If that is the case, they should just stop pretending that they will ever write maintainable code, and just abandon coding standards completely.
I'd believe it. But whether it's doctors getting conned by vendors, or administrators (or IT) making decisions without the inputs of doctors the result is the same - useless and troublesome IT systems.
The word "problematic" makes me see red, for some reason. To me, it's just a post-modernese code word for "double-plus ungood", but it sounds more balanced and rational to the lay reader.
While I'll agree with your stance that "reductionism" is not the solution to everything, I'd disagree that it's becoming "less an less likely". Recent advances in neural imaging have drawn neurology and psychology a lot closer together, rather than farther apart.
The point of quantification is not necessarily reductionism. It may be a way to unambiguously portray existing theories. The behavior of a quantification of a theory can shed some light on the assumptions behind the theory - whether it can work or not. Being able to codify a theory means that it is, at least, internally consistent. I'm sure that there is plenty of internally consistent sociological theories, and some of them might even converge on the way that real societies operate. Examining those theories through the lens of physics can hardly be a bad thing, can it?
Fair enough. But if you publish a work, shouldn't the code that was used by published as well?
Code hides things like "smoothing" factors, "adjustments", fudge factors, and bugs. Nobody uses perfect numerical methods, and the exact method is often glossed over. In a team effort, this can get really hairy.
Making the code itself available is the best and simplest solution.
Of course, modelers don't want to release their code as it's selling the farm.
Slashdot Mirror
"If it's old code it's good code" is a half-decent catchphrase. "No code is good code" is better. (Or less code, if you really must code).
Nah, you just need a bigger financial crisis, to make your assembly workers more competitive.
Home-schooled kids need interaction, but not they could join the a youth group, a martial arts club, a band, or some other interest group. Learning math and geography with 29 other inmates doesn't strike me as great value in terms of social learning.
Schools do have some advantages though. They give kids with bad parents the opportunity to mix with kids with good parents (for your definition of "good" and "bad"), unless the schools end up segregated (US style). They provide a base-line level of education. And face it, if it weren't for the idea of "education" that schools were promoting, the home-schooled students wouldn't be pressured into learning any curricula. Most parents would just put off the hard stuff (i.e. math) for another year.
You could compare Pentium 4s to each other pretty reliably based on clock speed. Sure, the Northwoods were a bit faster than the Prescotts, and the Extreme Edition chips had a nice speed boost from the cache, but generally clockspeed made em' match up.
However, turbo boost / new architectures can give a 50% speed boost on tasks like x264 encoding when you're talking core 2 vs i5. The frequent changes necessitate new naming schemes.
That was the problem, I think. They were rubbing Moore's law in people's faces. Now, the i7 can always be $999, the i5 can always be $250, and the Pentium can be always be $100. People won't feel like idiots for lashing out on a marginally more powerful system, because their i7 will always have a superior sticker to the lowly Pentium.
Grrr ... I wish Intel would go back to their system of giving new names to new chips then adding a MHz (and if that's not enough, maybe a cache size and number of cores) to distinguish them, rather than using a weird combination new names (for their top-tier chips) and old names (for their low-end gear).
I only just realized that Pentium no longer means "crappy NetBurst", but now means "low end C2D". And later this month, there will be "Pentiums" and even "Celerons" built on the same architecture as the i5. How do you let your friends know that the "Pentium" is either a worthless, power-hungry dinosaur; or a cheap version of the i5? Should people memorize the chip serial numbers? Because that seems to be the only way of figuring out what the chip is these days.
Just wait till they try to ban slashfic ...
Funny, but my company did just mandate blaze orange shirts for all front line IT staff. I can't for the life of me figure out who thought that was a good idea.
Mine comes in Monday.
We can also wear Navy. I think I'm going to get an equal number of pairs of blaze orange and navy pants and alternate them daily.
Personally, I find it extremely condescending. I'm required to design and maintain hundreds of databases, several servers, write apps, troubleshoot network problems, manage million dollar projects, AND do desktop support for 2000 devices with 3 other IT people for $40K/year. And now this. No wonder I've thrown my hands up today and am now posting on slashdot.
Yes, I'm looking for a way out.
http://jobs.stackoverflow.com/
http://jobs.serverfault.com/
Your resume should look like this:
Designed and maintained over 200 databases, including:
* Customer whatsit thinghy, with 8,000 records, 30 fields, and 30 current users
* three
* other
* highlights
Designed, set-up and maintained 7 servers, including: ...)
* Main NAS with 1.5T of data (including back-up to, network connections,
* more
* highlights
Produced a number of web applications, including
* Some
* highlights
Managed projects worth in excess of $2 million, including
* Rollover to Windows 7
* Server upgrade program.
* whatever
Supported over 2000 devices in a small team of 4 staff.
*Don't* go out of your way to mention your salary (unless asked), and if you do mention it, make sure they know that you consider your current salary inadequate.
"They're clearly trying to force you into a blue collar category."
Simply explain that you are a unique and special snowflake who defies uniform categorization.
There's a difference between 'unique' and 'not an interchangeable part'.
Yes, this sounds like a passive-aggressive fix employed by a gutless manager.
A passive-aggressive gutless manager? INCONCEIVABLE!
IT staff aren't white collar workers. This is partly because it's a new discipline, and hasn't devolved into blue-collar workers (who do the real work, and don't get paid much) and white collar workers (who suck up all the resources, and organize the blue-collared workers to be more efficient), and "professionals" (who are like blue-collar workers, only their skills are too elusive to devalue) and partly because IT is too hard for management to divide an conquer (so far).
They say that before the 80s, management used to rise up through the ranks. Business schools used to focus on processes and capital spending (i.e. making better and cheaper widgets) rather than allocative efficiencies. But mega-corporations got so big and bloated that management had to learn how to allocate capital to the least inefficient parts of the organization. Managers became a type of internal financial analyst, whose job was to allocate their capital effectively, and raise more funds from their backers. All the bullshit of the stock-market, without the transparency and accountability that shares have - if the manager made a bum investement they could just talk their way into another portfolio.
Wait, what was TFA about again?
On the other hand, it might mean that people alert you to their problems while you are in the area, saving you walking around too much. That won't help your "resolved" count (stupid worthless metrics getting in the way of productivity ...) but it might save you time, and make your service more responsive.
No, it's more like if somebody was hiding in your trunk (and jumping to rob people at intersections), could you also sneak into their trunk and wrestle him out?
I'm a big fan of environmental impact studies, but you make a good point in saying that they get screwed up.
It would be nice to have more data available on what areas are vulnerable (now), so the impact studies could be done faster. Instead, rare frogs are only getting noticed when somebody is already trying to build a road through their swamp.
It's nowhere near 90%. Maybe 60%. I think you are thinking of Laos...
Anyway, even in the cities, where people live pretty well, the median income (not mean, but median) is still about 500 to 1000 RMB / month (location dependent). 4k to 7k a year.
You can live OK on that, but middle class people don't aspire to own Mercedes, and make do with a Toyota sedan. They aspire to own a QQ car (a $5,000 Chinese compact), and make do with a scooter.
It's a horrible myth that L337SP33K is very secure. Special characters just aren't that great.
Try something like "the quick brown fox shat all over the lazy dog".
Or "twinkle twinkle like a rolling stone".
Or any other phrase that makes sense to your twisted and uniquely messed-up gray matter.
Plaintext is easier for a human to remember than quasi-random characters, and it will be just as secure.
If your weakest programmer can't understand those bzeros (even after you've explained it in the review), then a few bzeros are the least of your worries.
Or that despite having more votes than men, it's somehow men's fault that we haven't had a female President and few female Senators. Subscribing to a lower set of standards is convenient when demanding reparations, but it's not the way to actually earn any sort of meaningful respect.
To assume that it's a "fault" that you haven't had a female president or that "meaningful respect" is a serious driver is very male-oriented thinking. Thing is, women aren't defective men, they're their own people with their own motivations. Only about 20% of women are motivated primarily by extrinsic factors such as pay and status, compared to about 60% of men (source: Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. Women are far more likely than men to be motivated by intrinsic factors such as feeling that their work is doing some good.That means that fewer women reach the top because most women would rather be doing something they enjoyed. (For what it's worth, women consistently score higher than similarly qualified men for job satisfaction -- Pinker again. There's more than one glass ceiling, but we don't notice the job-satisfaction one because we choose male-oriented measures of success.
There is another reason fewer women reach the top, though: although the average intelligence of men and women is about the same, the variance is significantly higher in men. So women are right: if somebody does something really dumb then it probably was a man. But the other side of that coin, which women tend not to like so much, if that if somebody does something really smart, that probably was a man too
And for those whose mouse is hovering on the "flamebait" button, remember that this is about averages. Nothing I've said means that a woman can't be stunningly intelligent and can't be driven by money and power -- just that they tend to be less extreme and more sensible.
Consider the evolutionary imperative. A man who takes lots of big risks and gains a lot of status can have a lot of extra offspring.
A high-achieving woman will reproduce less than a low achieving one, so why takes risks?
This will even out, with time (modern day Genghis Khans aren't siring their own clans any more), but it will take a while to sort itself out.
Ah you young'uns. I'm going upstairs to get my imagination out of the attic!
(Yes, that's the best I could do)
Ha. We crowd-source our imaginations. Why think for ourselves, when we can share our brilliance in real time, peer to peer, in under 140 cha
No, really, why?
Because everyone knows that the problem with smartphones is while that they have way too many pixels, standardized input devices, video cards that can render billions of polygons a second, and a buttload of RAM; but you just can't run games like Crysis on your trendy Apple, or use PhotoShop on your home dev box / server.
"Clever", "obvious" and "maintainable" is always in the eye of the maintainer. If your goal is to write code that can be maintained by the next guy, there is one simple way to end all the arguments:
Have someone else read it.
Nobody has a clue whether their code is good or bad. Everyone's opinion of their own code (like their opinion of their own BO, looks, karaoke ability, sense of humor, and driving skills) is ridiculously overblown. Except for the people who lack confidence, and think that they suck no-matter how good they are.
If you want an unbiased opinion, get one. Code reviews are essential.
Of course, some companies don't have the time or resources to do code reviews. If that is the case, they should just stop pretending that they will ever write maintainable code, and just abandon coding standards completely.
But what if it's in XML? It would inter-operate then.
Or better still, a binary blob wrapped in XML. That would really make it easy to use!
I'd believe it. But whether it's doctors getting conned by vendors, or administrators (or IT) making decisions without the inputs of doctors the result is the same - useless and troublesome IT systems.
The word "problematic" makes me see red, for some reason. To me, it's just a post-modernese code word for "double-plus ungood", but it sounds more balanced and rational to the lay reader.
While I'll agree with your stance that "reductionism" is not the solution to everything, I'd disagree that it's becoming "less an less likely". Recent advances in neural imaging have drawn neurology and psychology a lot closer together, rather than farther apart.
The point of quantification is not necessarily reductionism. It may be a way to unambiguously portray existing theories. The behavior of a quantification of a theory can shed some light on the assumptions behind the theory - whether it can work or not. Being able to codify a theory means that it is, at least, internally consistent. I'm sure that there is plenty of internally consistent sociological theories, and some of them might even converge on the way that real societies operate. Examining those theories through the lens of physics can hardly be a bad thing, can it?
Fair enough. But if you publish a work, shouldn't the code that was used by published as well?
Code hides things like "smoothing" factors, "adjustments", fudge factors, and bugs. Nobody uses perfect numerical methods, and the exact method is often glossed over. In a team effort, this can get really hairy.
Making the code itself available is the best and simplest solution.
Of course, modelers don't want to release their code as it's selling the farm.
Yes, but China's GDP is based on making stuff. That's a bit more carbon-intensive than bond-trading.