If you have a job that pays a living wage and your only beef is they require you to keep up your skills on your own time, consider yourself lucky. Suck it up and do your studying. Your certification will travel with you, should you choose to leave.
On the other hand, if they also have you working 50 hours plus on-call time 24/7 then they don't have a healthy sense of work/life balance and maybe they need to be told you're already giving them as much time as you're willing.
Of course, being a sci fi geek he wouldn't have an inflated opinion of himself and a problem with authority, would he? He wouldn't have, say, raised his voice and shoved an officer, and gotten belligerent when they tried to restrain him, right? Of course he didn't resist arrest, did he?
Just imagining the story as I might hear it from someone in fandom...something about just going to help some orphans when for no reason some officer yanks 'em out of their car and beats 'em up...
Was 1,176 a sample large enough to represent the the 40,000,000? I would assume not. You could assume so. The fact would still be that we would both be assuming.
This is almost as cliche in arguments of statistics as the car analogy is on slashdot, and it's the sign of a scoundrel. If you actually had a first year stat student's understanding of stats you'd know where the weaknesses actually are, and where all the rest of the smoke blown in this discussion goes laghably wrong.
So let's apply some first year stats to the issue.
First, the sample size. Whether it is numerically large enough to be useful is a matter not only of it's size but also the number of positive results. IOW, a sample size of 1176 is too small if you found 3 of what you're looking for, but if you found 136 (11.6% of 1176), you have plenty of samples. The question is then only whether you had a representative sample.
My next concern would be precision. Using data with three or four significant digits (136, 1176) to make conclusions to seven significant digits (11.56463%) is silly, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. The only number in all of this that is fishy is the 16.3% number. To get three significant digits they'd have to know the number of lying households to that precision. If they had another study that determined this number they might very well have a number to that precision, but I'm assuming they just guessed.
That's still not a problem. If you guess, you run your confidence interval through your formulae (here it's a simple product) to put a range on your results. If it's a from-your-ass guess you might put a 100% failure estimate on your low end (i.e. there might be no lying households at all) to arrive at a conservative range. Here, it looks like they used an estimate of 40%. They should have (and might have; I didn't RTFA) run the un-adjusted 11.6% through the formulae to get a conservative low-end range.
Anyway, the number they finally used was 7%. One significant digit. That doesn't imply the same precision as, say, 6.7% would. In fact, if their figure for the number of lying households really was accurate to one digit (i.e. 35-45%) then rounding their final result to one digit was the correct procedure. If it was just a guess they should have run the absolute low estimate (probably, zero lying households) through to get a range.
So, with actual first year stat knowledge it's possible to actually state what might be wrong with the study, and not resort to "any first year stat student" hand-waving. It's clear that the most-cited criticism (the sample size) is the result of ignorance and group think, not actual knowledge of statistics.
I don't have a TV, I don't make or receive telephone calls, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a video game console, I don't buy music, I don't read newspapers and I don't buy pornos because the Internet superseded all of that.
That you can get those things on your computer screen rather than a TV screen, a stereo, a phone, your local theater or your porch is unimpressive at best.
Not only that, but I owe my practically flawless English (I'm French) to chatting with Americans on AIM ever since I was 15
Is there no place in France you can find real, live, English-speaking people? I'd be more impressed if you had learned Japanese this way.
I also learnt my job mostly on the Internet...I'm a self-employed software dev
We have a theme here. We get it. You like your computer. Maybe if you didn't like it so much you'd have a better appreciation for what came before it.
my uncle after being divorced fell in love with a woman in South America (not Mark Sanford) he "met" on MSN
I have a friend with a Russian bride. He met her through the mail, talked to her on the phone and [gasp] visited her in Russia. Pre-internet, even.
If you think progress has slowed down then watch a 50 year old TV show and just
observe. Note every time you think how the characters could have used some bit
of technology that we take for granted to their advantage.
For instance?
Compare your 50-year-old TV show to one of 100 years ago. How do the differences of the past 50 years compare to 50 before that?
For one, there are no 100-year-old TV shows. Or radio programs. Most of your 100-years-ago actors didn't own an automobile. Or a telephone. Or a refrigerator. They may not have had electric lights or indoor plumbing.
You got that from the slashdot summary and not from the course description (which says nothing at all about posting requirements or grading criteria), and got modded +5 for it. Talk about not thinking for yourselves...
This was supposed to be a funny suggestion, but then I thought it might be even funnier if I binged it and it really did turn up curious results, so I tried it, and...
Microsoft, you so disappoint me. Boring results. Nothing funny at all. You suck.
My neighbor (also a computer programmer) quizzed the same paperboy about the features provided by a newspaper.
What does being a programmer have to do with his opinion of the paper? Are you saying that makes him smart and clever and witty? That's what all coders seem to think of themselves, and now apparently other coders. It's kinda creepy.
My neighbor (also a CIO) quizzed the same coder about capabilities provided by the programming staff. "Does it work for $40 per day? Does it work Mumbai hours so I don't have to hear its voice? Does it treat the rest of the staff with respect? Does it keep its opinion to itself? Does it not pretend to know everything about everything? Does it not want want all IP to be cost-free while ironically collecting a salary creating IP?" And so on and so forth.
You know, if coding was all done in India, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss coders very much.
you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people
Which is pretty much as it was at least twenty years ago. The biggest change in that regard has been social, not technical: the 'net has become commercial so more is on offer and a great many more people find it useful.
In fact, to make it clear what part of your post I'm responding to I had to use knowledge most people don't possess (html), and had to correct two mistakes, forcing more attention to the act of posting than was necessary twenty years ago, so if you're going to tout this as technical progress I'd argue we've made negative progress.
Back when my primary computer was a Mac mini I had no cables on the floor, not even power cables, and even now I have very few. My computer desk is a table, and mounted to the wall underneath is a shelf with cable modem, router and the larger wall warts. Mounted to the underside of the table are two power strips. In my Mac-only days all the cables were tied to the underside of the table or the back legs of the table. Even the power cables from the wall didn't touch the floor. It was wonderful to be able to stretch my legs and never touch anything.
Now I have a PC on the floor. Ugh. Most of the cables are still off the floor, though.
If you don't know what the big deal is then you've probably never seen it. I still remember, thirty years later, seeing the night sky from a campground near Gettysburg, PA. Haven't seen it since, and I doubt if you can still see it from Gettysburg.
I think I'd have to travel an hour and a half to see it now. Maybe I should do that while those places still exist east of the Mississippi.
Nevermind. I just noticed that making a post like this will not only get you modded "flamebait", but also move your karma from "good" to "bad". My apologies for not posting the expected party line.
As far as some people are concerned, their computer consists of four parts: the monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive. The latter is the big case where they put CDs. It's the only component their software and other users regularly mention, so it's what they've come to know the box as.
> People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it. > They're doing it because they want more control and use out of > their media than Sony and others provide.
They're stealing stuff because they can. If getting "more control and use out of their media" involved a real chance of riding to the police station in handcuffs, they'd think the level of control they could get for the retail price was just fine.
> Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds > another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.
Whether there will be a big enough market for still faster computers is another thing altogether.
Where is this accelerating progress I keep hearing about?
Watching TV shows from the 60's one thing strikes me: life is almost exactly like it was 40 years ago. I can now order books without talking to anyone. Big deal. The telephone was a much bigger deal than the Internet, and it's more than 100 years old. Here's more progress: people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.
Progress is slowing, not accelerating, and in some respects we're making negative progress.
I predict there will be no economic incentive to make even computer progress (the star of the last half century) much beyond current levels. Ten years ago progress benefited anyone who wanted a computer. Now who does it benefit? A smaller and smaller number of people.
Ray's going to have to finance the singularity by himself.
The first multi-player play-by-mail game (probably Starweb) may not be considered persistent (it had victory conditions, and games ended), but persistent games followed. I played a game called Empyrian Challenge in the early to mid 80's. It was a large-scale, persistent game.
Playing by email was a logical extension. Playing in realtime was a logical extension. Adding 3D graphics was a logical extension (prior art: video games).
Slashdot Mirror
Users can wipe their own phones remotely. Apple wouldn't need to know until he reported a missing prototype. And looky here...Gizmodo has it.
You don't think having to tell Apple he lost a prototype and having the thing show up on Gizmodo had already outed him?
If you have a job that pays a living wage and your only beef is they require you to keep up your skills on your own time, consider yourself lucky. Suck it up and do your studying. Your certification will travel with you, should you choose to leave.
On the other hand, if they also have you working 50 hours plus on-call time 24/7 then they don't have a healthy sense of work/life balance and maybe they need to be told you're already giving them as much time as you're willing.
Of course, being a sci fi geek he wouldn't have an inflated opinion of himself and a problem with authority, would he? He wouldn't have, say, raised his voice and shoved an officer, and gotten belligerent when they tried to restrain him, right? Of course he didn't resist arrest, did he?
Just imagining the story as I might hear it from someone in fandom...something about just going to help some orphans when for no reason some officer yanks 'em out of their car and beats 'em up...
It's already been done at Penguicon. Steve Jackson officiated and Eric Raymond was best man.
Assume nothing. Google is your friend.
Google: sample size
First result has all you need.
This is almost as cliche in arguments of statistics as the car analogy is on slashdot, and it's the sign of a scoundrel. If you actually had a first year stat student's understanding of stats you'd know where the weaknesses actually are, and where all the rest of the smoke blown in this discussion goes laghably wrong.
So let's apply some first year stats to the issue.
First, the sample size. Whether it is numerically large enough to be useful is a matter not only of it's size but also the number of positive results. IOW, a sample size of 1176 is too small if you found 3 of what you're looking for, but if you found 136 (11.6% of 1176), you have plenty of samples. The question is then only whether you had a representative sample.
My next concern would be precision. Using data with three or four significant digits (136, 1176) to make conclusions to seven significant digits (11.56463%) is silly, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. The only number in all of this that is fishy is the 16.3% number. To get three significant digits they'd have to know the number of lying households to that precision. If they had another study that determined this number they might very well have a number to that precision, but I'm assuming they just guessed.
That's still not a problem. If you guess, you run your confidence interval through your formulae (here it's a simple product) to put a range on your results. If it's a from-your-ass guess you might put a 100% failure estimate on your low end (i.e. there might be no lying households at all) to arrive at a conservative range. Here, it looks like they used an estimate of 40%. They should have (and might have; I didn't RTFA) run the un-adjusted 11.6% through the formulae to get a conservative low-end range.
Anyway, the number they finally used was 7%. One significant digit. That doesn't imply the same precision as, say, 6.7% would. In fact, if their figure for the number of lying households really was accurate to one digit (i.e. 35-45%) then rounding their final result to one digit was the correct procedure. If it was just a guess they should have run the absolute low estimate (probably, zero lying households) through to get a range.
So, with actual first year stat knowledge it's possible to actually state what might be wrong with the study, and not resort to "any first year stat student" hand-waving. It's clear that the most-cited criticism (the sample size) is the result of ignorance and group think, not actual knowledge of statistics.
That you can get those things on your computer screen rather than a TV screen, a stereo, a phone, your local theater or your porch is unimpressive at best.
Is there no place in France you can find real, live, English-speaking people? I'd be more impressed if you had learned Japanese this way.
We have a theme here. We get it. You like your computer. Maybe if you didn't like it so much you'd have a better appreciation for what came before it.
I have a friend with a Russian bride. He met her through the mail, talked to her on the phone and [gasp] visited her in Russia. Pre-internet, even.
For instance?
Compare your 50-year-old TV show to one of 100 years ago. How do the differences of the past 50 years compare to 50 before that?
For one, there are no 100-year-old TV shows. Or radio programs. Most of your 100-years-ago actors didn't own an automobile. Or a telephone. Or a refrigerator. They may not have had electric lights or indoor plumbing.
You got that from the slashdot summary and not from the course description (which says nothing at all about posting requirements or grading criteria), and got modded +5 for it. Talk about not thinking for yourselves...
This was supposed to be a funny suggestion, but then I thought it might be even funnier if I binged it and it really did turn up curious results, so I tried it, and...
Microsoft, you so disappoint me. Boring results. Nothing funny at all. You suck.
Sigh.
What does being a programmer have to do with his opinion of the paper? Are you saying that makes him smart and clever and witty? That's what all coders seem to think of themselves, and now apparently other coders. It's kinda creepy.
My neighbor (also a CIO) quizzed the same coder about capabilities provided by the programming staff. "Does it work for $40 per day? Does it work Mumbai hours so I don't have to hear its voice? Does it treat the rest of the staff with respect? Does it keep its opinion to itself? Does it not pretend to know everything about everything? Does it not want want all IP to be cost-free while ironically collecting a salary creating IP?" And so on and so forth.
You know, if coding was all done in India, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss coders very much.
you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people
Which is pretty much as it was at least twenty years ago. The biggest change in that regard has been social, not technical: the 'net has become commercial so more is on offer and a great many more people find it useful.
In fact, to make it clear what part of your post I'm responding to I had to use knowledge most people don't possess (html), and had to correct two mistakes, forcing more attention to the act of posting than was necessary twenty years ago, so if you're going to tout this as technical progress I'd argue we've made negative progress.
Back when my primary computer was a Mac mini I had no cables on the floor, not even power cables, and even now I have very few. My computer desk is a table, and mounted to the wall underneath is a shelf with cable modem, router and the larger wall warts. Mounted to the underside of the table are two power strips. In my Mac-only days all the cables were tied to the underside of the table or the back legs of the table. Even the power cables from the wall didn't touch the floor. It was wonderful to be able to stretch my legs and never touch anything.
Now I have a PC on the floor. Ugh. Most of the cables are still off the floor, though.
The lowest bracket available to me is 6000 miles/yr, but I only drive 1500.
Open source is like a box of chocolates. I'm not sure why...I just wanted to say that. It's what I thought of when I read the story.
If you don't know what the big deal is then you've probably never seen it. I still remember, thirty years later, seeing the night sky from a campground near Gettysburg, PA. Haven't seen it since, and I doubt if you can still see it from Gettysburg.
I think I'd have to travel an hour and a half to see it now. Maybe I should do that while those places still exist east of the Mississippi.
Nevermind. I just noticed that making a post like this will not only get you modded "flamebait", but also move your karma from "good" to "bad". My apologies for not posting the expected party line.
As far as some people are concerned, their computer consists of four parts: the monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive. The latter is the big case where they put CDs. It's the only component their software and other users regularly mention, so it's what they've come to know the box as.
> People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it.
> They're doing it because they want more control and use out of
> their media than Sony and others provide.
They're stealing stuff because they can. If getting "more control and use out of their media" involved a real chance of riding to the police station in handcuffs, they'd think the level of control they could get for the retail price was just fine.
> Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds
> another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.
Whether there will be a big enough market for still faster computers is another thing altogether.
Where is this accelerating progress I keep hearing about?
Watching TV shows from the 60's one thing strikes me: life is almost exactly like it was 40 years ago. I can now order books without talking to anyone. Big deal. The telephone was a much bigger deal than the Internet, and it's more than 100 years old. Here's more progress: people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.
Progress is slowing, not accelerating, and in some respects we're making negative progress.
I predict there will be no economic incentive to make even computer progress (the star of the last half century) much beyond current levels. Ten years ago progress benefited anyone who wanted a computer. Now who does it benefit? A smaller and smaller number of people.
Ray's going to have to finance the singularity by himself.
So, slashdot is more in tune with the universe than I thought.
I've seen a little of that in the post I just read.
There's still prior art to be had, but it's not quite so easy to find it.
Persistent virtual worlds have existed since the 70's. They had a snail mail interface.
Flying Buffalo
The first multi-player play-by-mail game (probably Starweb) may not be considered persistent (it had victory conditions, and games ended), but persistent games followed. I played a game called Empyrian Challenge in the early to mid 80's. It was a large-scale, persistent game.
Playing by email was a logical extension. Playing in realtime was a logical extension. Adding 3D graphics was a logical extension (prior art: video games).