IBM store systems used to have a topology similar to that. Back in the 1970s when your wiring installer was a phone guy, it made sense to have him point-to-point wire a network, just like he did with phones. IBM's answer to "offline" was for any device failing to receive the token to start sending an "I AM #7 AND MY UPSTREAM LINK IS DEAD" type packet, and turn on an "offline" light. Any register recieving the offline packet would simply forward it. A store person would see the offline light, go back to the main computer and ask it "who is sending the offline packet?" They'd walk out to #7, see if the wires were plugged in, then walk to #6 and check it out, then #5, etc., until they found the problem. Usually, some kid had yanked a wire, or someone kicked a plug partially out of the wall jack, and sometimes there was a hardware failure with the register. It always took a human a while to troubleshoot it, though.
We suffered through that just long enough to realize that it's completely non-maintainable. We ended up turning their ring topology into a sort-of star by buying devices called Autoshunts, which were banks of relays and detector circuits. We wired each register all the way back to the Autoshunt, rather than daisy chaining them. When a cash register went offline, the Autoshunt would drop that register's relay, preserving the loop for the other registers. (When token ring came around, the MAU performed a similar task.)
It was a clever hack. The Autoshunts did a good job keeping most registers on line, and reporting to the store person any offlines. But they were expensive, and with so many moving parts they failed often enough on their own. And they were fickle -- sometimes they'd recognize the offline token, sometimes they wouldn't.
In reality, the ring topology is a total pain to maintain. Self-healing technology makes it mostly workable, but it really adds a larger layer of complexity than you might imagine. The modern implementation of ethernet via star (hubs/switches) is far more flexible, and far simpler to maintain.
It's strictly a cost issue. If you have a 10-15 year old network consisting of a thousand nodes of token ring equipped machines, look at how much it will cost to replace them all with shiny new machines and shiny new cat 5e wiring.
Most places with even the largest investments switched out years ago. At some point the cost of maintaining TR exceeded the cost of reinstalling new network gear. These days, if there are any TR nodes left, they probably exist in isolation. When our company was upgrading the network, the first thing to go was the TR "backbone" network, which was replaced with ethernet, and they installed bridges to the workstation rings. Then, as different groups replaced desktop hardware the new network cabling was pulled at the same time.
The last to be switched were physically remote networks, serving buildings in other cities that housed no technical people. Even if their stuff was working, the cost of maintaining headquarters staff to deal with two different network topologies was higher than replacing their hardware.
The problem is it takes a large initial investment. Non-profit companies, charities, or other firms having a tough time in the current economy may not have the big pile of cash required to switch. It's easier to shell out $150 to replace a broken obsolete card every month than to pay $10,000 to have an office rewired.
The HDCP situation could go either way, depending on how it's handled. If they get modern, slick, smooth digital cable boxes with DVRs into the hands of the congresspersons, and everything just works, they won't think about reasons to block legislation.
However, if any of these congresspeople were early adopters of HDTVs that didn't buy the current version of HDCP, and they find out that their $10,000 plasma TVs are worthless for modern HDCP / HD-DVD / BLU-RAY, they're going to be pretty pissed off, and that can only help our cause. Another factor working to our advantage there is to be an early adopter requires cash, and most members of congress are fairly well off -- none of them are people anyone would consider impoverished.
"Here's to backlash -- may it strike deep into the wallet of a Republican member of Congress reviewing the DMCA."
An interesting artifact of digital imagery is that math can actually make up for some of the poor optics resulting from cheap manufacturing processes. Not that you'd necessarily want to ship products this way, but by comparing a picture to a reference image, some of the aberrations can be "undone" in software.
So you could still have a fairly crappy quality CCD and cheapo lens in the phone, but desktop software could be used later to "fix" the images you cared about.
And at that point, it all goes back to "megapixels megapixels megapixels."
Actually, we use "mission critical", but only because we mean it. If our software were to fail on a large scale, it would be bad for our company. Redundant data paths, communications paths and backup databases help, but our application has to run even when completely offline.
I don't know if your mythical business communications classes exist anymore. I haven't seen enough clearly written communications lately to believe such advice was ever given!
I've recently read two really good books about corporate-speak. The first was "Death Sentences" by Don Watson, and the second was "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" by Laura Penny. Penny's book points out the pervasive use of bullshit in our culture -- how the lies are indeed being repeated by the liars so often that they don't even know when they're lying any more. It's fairly entertaining in a depressing sort of way; it points out a lot of problems in our society, but offers no real solutions. It has a very leftist slant -- I don't know if that's because the writer is leftist, or because the current administration happens to be right wing.
Watson's book, on the other hand, pleads for us to clean up our writing, and offers useful advice. Of the two, I'd highly recommend Death Sentences if you're interested in improving your own writing. I'd recommend Penny's book only if you'd rather explore the lies our culture seems to be built upon.
you're only interested in corrrelation, if its going to hold true in this case.
There's the problem. "If". Let's say the data mining came up with a correlation between French riots and immigration legislation with the sale of Peeps. Next Easter you're going to disappoint a lot of shoppers when you don't have Peeps available; and next fall when rioting and legislation happen to hit the news at the same time, you're going to have a lot of wasted Peeps on your store shelves.
You may say "Of course riots have nothing to do with sales of Peeps -- they're sold at Easter time." But that's only obvious to you, a human with a cultural frame of reference (knowledge of both Peeps and the American traditions surrounding Easter.) But it's not so obvious to the computer that has to cross reference increased sales of UPC "74189577234" with the 40 days prior to the first Sunday following the Paschal full moon. That's the only correlation that really counts here. The wrong correlation would lead you down the wrong path, and you might not ever find out until it's too late.
First of all, Walmart's response to last year's hurricanes was noble. They donated over a thousand trucks full of relief supplies, and I don't want to take anything away from that.
But that's not what I was talking about. I'm in the retail industry, and keep one eye facing Walmart (everyone in retail does.) The "beer and poptarts" story was one of those stories that circulated about the same time as the hurricane, so I can't quote exactly which source I got it from first (could have been at a departmental meeting or something.) However, a bit of googling turned up Hurricanes, Pop-Tarts, And Beer which is roughly the same information I heard earlier.
Now, unfortunately the linked story has no corroborating links on it, either. At this point it may still be a total fabrication, or it may not. Snopes has nothing on it, one way or the other.
But the story has plenty of credibility. WalMart always wants to deliver merchandise that people want to buy, and we know people in the path of disaster definitely go out and stock up. I suspect they were originally looking at their data trying to figure out how many flashlight batteries, bottles of water and cans of soup they should put on the trucks when they encountered the "beer and pop-tarts" data.
And by the way, while I love pop-tarts (mmmm...cinnamon), I haven't put one in a toaster in at least 20 years.
Many people refuse to believe it's not personal. And in most cases it is personal. It's long been known that repeat customers are the most profitable, by a wide margin. With nothing else to go on, go back to your previous customers. It doesn't take long for them to feel "picked on".
The other side is that some places use loyalty cards which actually advertise and use the loss of privacy as a selling point: "This is a personal promotion just for you, PHILIP J. FRY!"
Some people are comfortable giving it up, while others never want to. And while it seems like it's an absolute -- either you're mining for private information, or you're not -- the bigger problem is that while you might not be using personal information today, later analysis might turn personal. What if data mining goes back in time and a coupon prints up "SPECIAL -- CONDOMS FOR OUR BEST REPEAT CUSTOMERS AT TWO-FOR-ONE PRICES!" while your new wife is using your credit card at the checkout lane? Not a big selling point.
I have to wonder if data mining isn't the problem -- the real problem seems to be that there are few obvious problems data mining will solve.
Consider WalM*rt. When the 2005 hurricanes were predicted, they mined their sales data for previous hurricanes. They found that in the last hurricane people stocked up on beer, pop tarts and peanut butter, so they sent trucks full of that stuff to the stores in the path of the hurricanes. They made lots of sales, and provided a valuable service to the communities. Capitalism at its finest.
Data mining worked very well in this case. The issue was "here's an obvious problem, and a clever solution involving data mining."
The big problem is that people expect the same golden results from non-obvious situations. "Hey, sales are down in the Wisconsin stores, let's do some data mining to figure out what they'll buy" makes no sense. Data mining worked well in the case of an obvious trigger event, but data mining by itself didn't reveal the trigger. You can't predict hurricanes based on the sales of pop tarts and beer, for example.
But, can you ever correlate pop tart and beer sales to an external event? You might be able to go back and say "here's a strange case where pop tarts and beer sold out quickly, why did this happen?" If you can tie this to external events, you'd think you'd be better prepared to react to the same events in the future.
Maybe correlating sales to Google News is the next step? Republican scandal == lower white bread sales; French riots + Senate bickering over immigration control reform == higher 'Peeps' sales; etc.
p.
Or maybe it's always been a bad idea to equate correlation with causality.
That's probably part of the point of the contest -- to point out that malicious code such as they're suggesting already exists in the world.
Saying that this "helps the bad guys" (not that you did) misses the point. We know there are bad guys out there. This becomes an awareness campaign.
There are several documented cases of stuff like this happening. Both ATI and nVidia (the graphics card companies) added code to their drivers to cheat -- take "shortcuts" when certain benchmark programs were running -- so the reported frame-rate looked great, while the resulting graphics quality silently fell. Detroit Diesel and six other companies were fined millions of dollars for tuning their engine management code to recognize the operating conditions that were specified in the emissions test -- some combination of RPM, time and load -- and adjusted the timing for minimal emissions and fuel consumption under only those conditions. The rest of the time they optimized for maximum power. It was discovered only when they failed to certify their engines in Europe, where the test conditions were different.
Closer to open source, just a year or two ago an unknown person checked in a subtle change to the kernel source that would have granted root access in the case of a certain error condition. It was caught during a review.
These are real-world hacks. Denial doesn't solve the problem. Only awareness can help smoke them out.
i why, if you died in your car, were you clutching the tuner?
It's obvious. He was "driving the radio" instead of "driving the car." That's why he died. He should have been paying attention to the tanker truck instead of changing channels.
I meant he was the "very paranoid" member of the group. As far as phishing goes, the assumptions they gave at the top of the study invalidated me. It was something like "Imagine you received an email from ebay or one of these companies, and imagine you clicked on the link." They invalidated me right there. Even though I run Firefox, I'm still suspicious enough of a guaranteed fraudster that I won't expose my machine directly to their server.
When I do get an email that claims to be from some business I don't expect, I view the source of the email in a text editor, whois the domain names I find inside, traceroute them, wget their index.html page and check out their web servers, and then report them to the legitimate web site whenever possible. Some sites are great about providing "please forward phishing emails to our investigators at this address" links, while others seem designed to thwart all customers from ever actually contacting them.
Re:It's like P.T. Barnum said,
on
Why Phishing Works
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, these guys did nothing to make the web safer. They just tested methods for phishing, and identified the ones that worked best. A good example? Bank of the West and Bank of the West are two URLS, but only one of them leads to the real site. Even font makes a difference -- look at the slashdot [] link, and check out the link preview in the status bar. The difference is surprisingly hard to catch.
In the paper, one guy was very paranoid. He opened a second browser window, and typed the site name by hand, and did comparisons. Even he got one wrong. Phishing is a very, very hard problem to solve.
In the end, people may end up needing strong authentication tokens. When you go to the bank, you'll present your token so they know it's you. When you sign up for a new account, you'll get that account added to your token. And, when you hit a phishing web site, your token will light up and say "UNKNOWN WEB SITE".
And it could work both ways. If you use an ATM in a seedy bar, you could even ask your token to identify the legitimacy of the ATM.
The disadvantage, of course, is either a plethora of tokens (one per account) or every Tom, Dick and Harry shop wanting to use your token for marketing and tracking purposes.
And this might be optimistic
on
Why Phishing Works
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The paper hints that the people selected for the study may not adequately represent the web-surfing public -- they may be "above average".
While I agree that the design work needs to be shared, I think both of them would be better served by writing unit test cases for each other and sharing the coding.
If they develop use cases, I'd suggest leading the novice through a story or two to show him or her how it's done. Then, split off the simplest use case, and let the novice tackle it on his or her own, while the expert works on another story. (During design, it helps if the expert arranges for a couple of simple use cases for this purpose, when possible.) The expert always needs to be there for the novice, but with any motiviation the novice will pick it up.
Ownership of the code is a good motivator for some people. To that end, I'd recommend against blanket refactoring, if possible. If the code passes unit tests, (and the original design work was solid) there would be no reason unless the novice specifically said something like "I know this code isn't great, is there a better way to do this?" Then, refactoring becomes a powerful teaching tool. But if the novice doesn't ask, there's probably no harm in leaving his or her sub-optimal code in place. Let them feel the pride of accomplishment, rather than slap them down with a refactoring. To a novice, an unasked-for refactoring may seem like programmereese for "nice try rookie, but a REAL programmer does it like this."
These three kids are sitting around talking about getting stuff for free. The first kid says "My dad's a doctor, so I can be sick for nothing." The second kid says "My dad's a teacher, so I can be smart for nothing." The third kid says "Well, my dad's a pastor, so I can be good for nothing."
A buddy of mine put it more succinctly than that. Here at work we can choose to wear either a collared shirt with a jacket or tie, or the uniform of our retail stores. Preferring not to be choked by the tie, he chose the latter. He refers to his uniform shirt as his "Tunic of Unpromotability +5"
And he's right. There's a detectable bias, even internally, against people not wearing the "professional" garb.
Here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, it has been split into four area codes: 612 (old), 763, 952 and 651. The area codes were specifically chosen to not match any existing local 3-digit exchanges in order to avoid that exact problem.
On a somewhat related note, I, too once had a number that was commonly misdialed. The old number was (not the 555, obviously) 612-555-3116. I started getting calls for people trying to order Twins tickets. I couldn't figure it out until I picked up one of those little pocket Twins schedules they used to hand out at gas stations. There, printed right on the cover, was "FOR TWINS TICKETS CALL 612-555-3116". They published the wrong number, and it was mine! For a few days, I had "Hi, leave your Visa number at the beep!" as my outgoing message, but I figured I might be asking for trouble.
Perhaps "unusual" would have been a better choice of words.
As soon as I saw the footmouse I looked to order one for my aunt. She has cerebral palsy, and has had very poor control of her hands and arms since birth. For the past 10 years she's been using a trackball with her feet, but she has to replace it annually because it gets so crud-filled. Yes, it's unpleasant to contemplate, but she has to do something that works for her.
But $315! That's a large chunk of change, and especially so considering I know how hard she is on household items in general. I'm going to have to think about this one.
I had a candy-bar-form-factor Sony Ericsson and my pants pocket accidentally dialed 911 because I failed to lock the keyboard.
The very next day I bought a RAZR, partly because I wanted a flip-phone to protect the keypad. So what did Motorola's brilliant effing engineers do? Why, they left the side buttons active even when it's closed. So now if my phone has slid along my belt, my seat belt picks some random ringing for me! Sometimes it turns the ringer off, sometimes it launches voice dialing (and thinks the rustling noise is me saying my son's name), or some other stupid action.
There isn't a single piece of the Motorola software in this phone that I've been impressed with yet. I get the feeling that they never actually look for user feedback on their products. They may not even usability test the products before they hit the market.
Slashdot Mirror
We suffered through that just long enough to realize that it's completely non-maintainable. We ended up turning their ring topology into a sort-of star by buying devices called Autoshunts, which were banks of relays and detector circuits. We wired each register all the way back to the Autoshunt, rather than daisy chaining them. When a cash register went offline, the Autoshunt would drop that register's relay, preserving the loop for the other registers. (When token ring came around, the MAU performed a similar task.)
It was a clever hack. The Autoshunts did a good job keeping most registers on line, and reporting to the store person any offlines. But they were expensive, and with so many moving parts they failed often enough on their own. And they were fickle -- sometimes they'd recognize the offline token, sometimes they wouldn't.
In reality, the ring topology is a total pain to maintain. Self-healing technology makes it mostly workable, but it really adds a larger layer of complexity than you might imagine. The modern implementation of ethernet via star (hubs/switches) is far more flexible, and far simpler to maintain.
Most places with even the largest investments switched out years ago. At some point the cost of maintaining TR exceeded the cost of reinstalling new network gear. These days, if there are any TR nodes left, they probably exist in isolation. When our company was upgrading the network, the first thing to go was the TR "backbone" network, which was replaced with ethernet, and they installed bridges to the workstation rings. Then, as different groups replaced desktop hardware the new network cabling was pulled at the same time.
The last to be switched were physically remote networks, serving buildings in other cities that housed no technical people. Even if their stuff was working, the cost of maintaining headquarters staff to deal with two different network topologies was higher than replacing their hardware.
The problem is it takes a large initial investment. Non-profit companies, charities, or other firms having a tough time in the current economy may not have the big pile of cash required to switch. It's easier to shell out $150 to replace a broken obsolete card every month than to pay $10,000 to have an office rewired.
However, if any of these congresspeople were early adopters of HDTVs that didn't buy the current version of HDCP, and they find out that their $10,000 plasma TVs are worthless for modern HDCP / HD-DVD / BLU-RAY, they're going to be pretty pissed off, and that can only help our cause. Another factor working to our advantage there is to be an early adopter requires cash, and most members of congress are fairly well off -- none of them are people anyone would consider impoverished.
"Here's to backlash -- may it strike deep into the wallet of a Republican member of Congress reviewing the DMCA."
I don't see nerds lining up to donate money for hardware testing that they will never get to own, however.
So you could still have a fairly crappy quality CCD and cheapo lens in the phone, but desktop software could be used later to "fix" the images you cared about.
And at that point, it all goes back to "megapixels megapixels megapixels."
I don't know if your mythical business communications classes exist anymore. I haven't seen enough clearly written communications lately to believe such advice was ever given!
I've recently read two really good books about corporate-speak. The first was "Death Sentences" by Don Watson, and the second was "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" by Laura Penny. Penny's book points out the pervasive use of bullshit in our culture -- how the lies are indeed being repeated by the liars so often that they don't even know when they're lying any more. It's fairly entertaining in a depressing sort of way; it points out a lot of problems in our society, but offers no real solutions. It has a very leftist slant -- I don't know if that's because the writer is leftist, or because the current administration happens to be right wing.
Watson's book, on the other hand, pleads for us to clean up our writing, and offers useful advice. Of the two, I'd highly recommend Death Sentences if you're interested in improving your own writing. I'd recommend Penny's book only if you'd rather explore the lies our culture seems to be built upon.
There's the problem. "If". Let's say the data mining came up with a correlation between French riots and immigration legislation with the sale of Peeps. Next Easter you're going to disappoint a lot of shoppers when you don't have Peeps available; and next fall when rioting and legislation happen to hit the news at the same time, you're going to have a lot of wasted Peeps on your store shelves.
You may say "Of course riots have nothing to do with sales of Peeps -- they're sold at Easter time." But that's only obvious to you, a human with a cultural frame of reference (knowledge of both Peeps and the American traditions surrounding Easter.) But it's not so obvious to the computer that has to cross reference increased sales of UPC "74189577234" with the 40 days prior to the first Sunday following the Paschal full moon. That's the only correlation that really counts here. The wrong correlation would lead you down the wrong path, and you might not ever find out until it's too late.
But that's not what I was talking about. I'm in the retail industry, and keep one eye facing Walmart (everyone in retail does.) The "beer and poptarts" story was one of those stories that circulated about the same time as the hurricane, so I can't quote exactly which source I got it from first (could have been at a departmental meeting or something.) However, a bit of googling turned up Hurricanes, Pop-Tarts, And Beer which is roughly the same information I heard earlier.
Now, unfortunately the linked story has no corroborating links on it, either. At this point it may still be a total fabrication, or it may not. Snopes has nothing on it, one way or the other.
But the story has plenty of credibility. WalMart always wants to deliver merchandise that people want to buy, and we know people in the path of disaster definitely go out and stock up. I suspect they were originally looking at their data trying to figure out how many flashlight batteries, bottles of water and cans of soup they should put on the trucks when they encountered the "beer and pop-tarts" data.
And by the way, while I love pop-tarts (mmmm...cinnamon), I haven't put one in a toaster in at least 20 years.
The other side is that some places use loyalty cards which actually advertise and use the loss of privacy as a selling point: "This is a personal promotion just for you, PHILIP J. FRY!"
Some people are comfortable giving it up, while others never want to. And while it seems like it's an absolute -- either you're mining for private information, or you're not -- the bigger problem is that while you might not be using personal information today, later analysis might turn personal. What if data mining goes back in time and a coupon prints up "SPECIAL -- CONDOMS FOR OUR BEST REPEAT CUSTOMERS AT TWO-FOR-ONE PRICES!" while your new wife is using your credit card at the checkout lane? Not a big selling point.
Consider WalM*rt. When the 2005 hurricanes were predicted, they mined their sales data for previous hurricanes. They found that in the last hurricane people stocked up on beer, pop tarts and peanut butter, so they sent trucks full of that stuff to the stores in the path of the hurricanes. They made lots of sales, and provided a valuable service to the communities. Capitalism at its finest.
Data mining worked very well in this case. The issue was "here's an obvious problem, and a clever solution involving data mining."
The big problem is that people expect the same golden results from non-obvious situations. "Hey, sales are down in the Wisconsin stores, let's do some data mining to figure out what they'll buy" makes no sense. Data mining worked well in the case of an obvious trigger event, but data mining by itself didn't reveal the trigger. You can't predict hurricanes based on the sales of pop tarts and beer, for example.
But, can you ever correlate pop tart and beer sales to an external event? You might be able to go back and say "here's a strange case where pop tarts and beer sold out quickly, why did this happen?" If you can tie this to external events, you'd think you'd be better prepared to react to the same events in the future.
Maybe correlating sales to Google News is the next step? Republican scandal == lower white bread sales; French riots + Senate bickering over immigration control reform == higher 'Peeps' sales; etc. p. Or maybe it's always been a bad idea to equate correlation with causality.
I dunno. The sound of it is something quite atrocious.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is reportedly extremely pleased by your post. You're a shoo-in to find the Beer Volcano in the afterlife.
Saying that this "helps the bad guys" (not that you did) misses the point. We know there are bad guys out there. This becomes an awareness campaign.
There are several documented cases of stuff like this happening. Both ATI and nVidia (the graphics card companies) added code to their drivers to cheat -- take "shortcuts" when certain benchmark programs were running -- so the reported frame-rate looked great, while the resulting graphics quality silently fell. Detroit Diesel and six other companies were fined millions of dollars for tuning their engine management code to recognize the operating conditions that were specified in the emissions test -- some combination of RPM, time and load -- and adjusted the timing for minimal emissions and fuel consumption under only those conditions. The rest of the time they optimized for maximum power. It was discovered only when they failed to certify their engines in Europe, where the test conditions were different.
Closer to open source, just a year or two ago an unknown person checked in a subtle change to the kernel source that would have granted root access in the case of a certain error condition. It was caught during a review.
These are real-world hacks. Denial doesn't solve the problem. Only awareness can help smoke them out.
It's obvious. He was "driving the radio" instead of "driving the car." That's why he died. He should have been paying attention to the tanker truck instead of changing channels.
Happens to a lot of people.
When I do get an email that claims to be from some business I don't expect, I view the source of the email in a text editor, whois the domain names I find inside, traceroute them, wget their index.html page and check out their web servers, and then report them to the legitimate web site whenever possible. Some sites are great about providing "please forward phishing emails to our investigators at this address" links, while others seem designed to thwart all customers from ever actually contacting them.
Actually, these guys did nothing to make the web safer. They just tested methods for phishing, and identified the ones that worked best. A good example? Bank of the West and Bank of the West are two URLS, but only one of them leads to the real site. Even font makes a difference -- look at the slashdot [] link, and check out the link preview in the status bar. The difference is surprisingly hard to catch.
In the end, people may end up needing strong authentication tokens. When you go to the bank, you'll present your token so they know it's you. When you sign up for a new account, you'll get that account added to your token. And, when you hit a phishing web site, your token will light up and say "UNKNOWN WEB SITE".
And it could work both ways. If you use an ATM in a seedy bar, you could even ask your token to identify the legitimacy of the ATM.
The disadvantage, of course, is either a plethora of tokens (one per account) or every Tom, Dick and Harry shop wanting to use your token for marketing and tracking purposes.
Humanity is doomed.
If they develop use cases, I'd suggest leading the novice through a story or two to show him or her how it's done. Then, split off the simplest use case, and let the novice tackle it on his or her own, while the expert works on another story. (During design, it helps if the expert arranges for a couple of simple use cases for this purpose, when possible.) The expert always needs to be there for the novice, but with any motiviation the novice will pick it up.
Ownership of the code is a good motivator for some people. To that end, I'd recommend against blanket refactoring, if possible. If the code passes unit tests, (and the original design work was solid) there would be no reason unless the novice specifically said something like "I know this code isn't great, is there a better way to do this?" Then, refactoring becomes a powerful teaching tool. But if the novice doesn't ask, there's probably no harm in leaving his or her sub-optimal code in place. Let them feel the pride of accomplishment, rather than slap them down with a refactoring. To a novice, an unasked-for refactoring may seem like programmereese for "nice try rookie, but a REAL programmer does it like this."
These three kids are sitting around talking about getting stuff for free. The first kid says "My dad's a doctor, so I can be sick for nothing." The second kid says "My dad's a teacher, so I can be smart for nothing." The third kid says "Well, my dad's a pastor, so I can be good for nothing."
Well, it was funny when I first heard it.
And he's right. There's a detectable bias, even internally, against people not wearing the "professional" garb.
On a somewhat related note, I, too once had a number that was commonly misdialed. The old number was (not the 555, obviously) 612-555-3116. I started getting calls for people trying to order Twins tickets. I couldn't figure it out until I picked up one of those little pocket Twins schedules they used to hand out at gas stations. There, printed right on the cover, was "FOR TWINS TICKETS CALL 612-555-3116". They published the wrong number, and it was mine! For a few days, I had "Hi, leave your Visa number at the beep!" as my outgoing message, but I figured I might be asking for trouble.
As soon as I saw the footmouse I looked to order one for my aunt. She has cerebral palsy, and has had very poor control of her hands and arms since birth. For the past 10 years she's been using a trackball with her feet, but she has to replace it annually because it gets so crud-filled. Yes, it's unpleasant to contemplate, but she has to do something that works for her.
But $315! That's a large chunk of change, and especially so considering I know how hard she is on household items in general. I'm going to have to think about this one.
Maybe you don't want to go straight into testing Lion Taming. Perhaps you should work at it by testing careers in steps, say, via Banking.
The very next day I bought a RAZR, partly because I wanted a flip-phone to protect the keypad. So what did Motorola's brilliant effing engineers do? Why, they left the side buttons active even when it's closed. So now if my phone has slid along my belt, my seat belt picks some random ringing for me! Sometimes it turns the ringer off, sometimes it launches voice dialing (and thinks the rustling noise is me saying my son's name), or some other stupid action.
There isn't a single piece of the Motorola software in this phone that I've been impressed with yet. I get the feeling that they never actually look for user feedback on their products. They may not even usability test the products before they hit the market.