As a few of the posts mention elliptically, what you mean by "non-technical people" are actually dullards.
They are stupider than you which is why they are managers and they are definitely stupider then you if they can't choose the right product on their own. The very existence of your job illustrates that they realise they are stupider than you and hence need help choosing things. The final damning piece of evidence is that, after hiring you to help them make the decisions they are too dick witted to do on their own, they ignore your advice.
This puts the whole question onto a different footing: "How can I communicate with the stupid without giving them a lengthy training session to bring them up to my level of understanding?" It might sound harsh and a little bit arrogant but it's the truth. If you start off thinking that these people are anything other than totally random nonsense spouting idiots then you'll end up doing the wrong thing.
This means the first thing to ditch is logical reasoning. Nothing scares a dullard more than a carefully thought out, well researched, evidence based piece of research. I suggest finding out who their friends are, then making up some opinions and attributing them to these friends. Don't bother worrying about getting found out. Managers only have a 10minutes attention span so they won't follow it up.
Next: Draw a graph. It doesn't matter what of, just make it have a line that goes up at the end. This is known as the "hockey stick" and is something managers are trained to spot (and fund)
Next: Remove any word longer than 5 letters from your report.
Next: Find out your managers outside interests. This is probably golf and marital infidelity. Try to include allusions to these things in your report. Something like "This product is so good, its the Nick Faldo of paper shredders" (NB: I am not a golfer so please insert the name of a currently successful golfer to avoid embarrassment). Its more dangerous putting in references to the second activity.
Next: Buy him a donut. Dullards think firstly with their wallets, secondly with their stomachs.
Technology doesn't make you stupid, it just gives those already stupid the opportunity to make a whole range of new stupid mistakes.
These people would be just as stupid without their sat-navs, it's just we'd never hear of them (unless they got saucepans stuck on their heads, or something)
> Oh, it's your hardware, my code works fine, sod off.
This is usually a synonym for "you have not provided me with enough information to reproduce the problem". Remember, coders hate admitting they don't know something, even if it's because you haven't told it them.
> why the hell did you release it to the world?
Altruism. Sometimes code from a new project that doesn't actually work is easier to read/fix/reuse than code from some enormous open source behemoth. q.v. Panda and xpdf.
> All you're doing then is giving open source a black mark.
How is releasing code giving open source a black mark? Admittedly it confuses those who think that open source software should work, but that's a whole different story.
> coder or contributor who simply doesn't answer bug reports or emails
Talking as someone whose job used to include answering such emails: If the answer was obvious from the documentation or had been answered on the list already, then I'd ignore it. Sometimes when it looks like other people are acting like asshats, it might actually be you.
>> Yes, but this ignores one point. If you're encrypting your root filesystem, and you don't want to have to enter a password to simply boot the computer
WTF? You want security but you don't want to enter a password? You want to go swimming without getting wet?
I was really hoping this wasn't going to get to Slashdot. A puff peice for a rubbish company's lame attempt to join the 20th century that makes everyone concerned look like a total dick.
"download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits"
Goodness me! Thats almost as fast as the networks in Korea.... 10 years ago.
Those sort of transfer speeds really are making the UK a major player in internet use. I think we're upto 193rd in the world now and with the pace of network acceleration as it is, we should be over taking Eastern Samoa (192nd) sometime within the next decade.
The truth is, network connectivity in the UK is beyond a joke. The easiest way (outside university) to transfer more than a couple of meg is to sent a CD through the post. Even if you are "blessed" with a home wire that can go at more than 56k then you are still stuck with operators who put a ZX Spectrum at the other end and charge you through the nose.
And there's one obvious culprit for who sorry shebang. The same one who restricted the use of ISDN by exorbitant charging, the same one who wants to charge me 100 pounds to "install" a wire I can see already comes into my house, the same one who used to produce CDs that required a full reformat of the hard disk after use, the same one who sat on its fat arse collecting money when the rest of the world was installing better infrastructure. BT.
I don't actully think the conclusion is in any doubt what so ever (mobile phones do not cause petrol stations to explode) but do think that using an entertainment program (i.e. Brainiac) as a basis for for any sort of deduction is flawed. Show me the peer reviewed papers and I'll be happy.
As regards the control, its a bit tricky for this experiment. You'd need a number of caravans full of petrol with no mobile phones near them, and observe them over time to see which ones spontaneously detonate. Alternativly, you could fuzz the experiment and look up "my caravan spontaneously detonated" statistics from the health and safety executive.
Goodness me! A single null result with no control! Ground breaking science!
In other news:
I drank a small sherry and didn't get drunk. Therefore alcohol is harmless. I left my front door open and didn't get burgled. Therefore burglary doesn't happen.
Storing information by modulating the Fourier (or Fresnel) modes of an image is not new.
That being said, the actual underlying science of this post might be intersting, if only I could get to it through the torrent of drivel in the summary.
e.g. "meaning that the secret image cannot be found in the watermarked image"
Then how do you extract it then?
Do you mean "the image cannot be extracted without the key"?
"Since the watermarked image contains no secret information" Que?
The Victorians wised up to the fact that if a man is given a target, there's a lot less piss on the floor. Urinals were manufactured with a picture of little blue bee on them.
"Why a bee?" I hear no-one ask.
The latin for bee is apis.
Re:hrm, somethings amiss, me thinks
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
It's Korean for penis.
Re:Finally, ABI stabilization. Now about optimizat
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
How about i686-pc-linux-gnu/libstdc++-v3/src/locale-inst.cc out of the gcc-3.2 source itself?
xgcc segfaults when trying to compile this on my Athlon XP 1800+. Without optimisation it works, but who wants a non-optimised libstdc++?
Sorry about that, but the whole toolbox is just too looney. No threading, Strange memory management and an almost unbelieveable mechanism for OS calls. I just never could manage to get it all sorted.
Luckily, as another reply mentions, the baton is now being carried by someone who knows far more about the whole kit and kaboodle than I did, and apparently has made a much better attempt.
As a point in my defence as a programmer, I did write the first version of the VNC driver for Mac On Linux, that actually *did* work.
What a fantatsic troll! It's got pseudo science, links to a real debate, paranoia and conspiracy.
In fact the only thing that gives it away is that it is total garbage.
"Pollution to solve Pollution", inspired! And all you suckers fell for it. For Shame.
The only way it could have been better was if it mentioned Hitler.
... or is there an amazing amount of American knee jerk going on here?
Almost all of the comments posted have been paranoid about evil politically biased scientists trying to turn the USA communist.
Remember kids, Green != Red. Let's try and keep balance here. Yes, the scientists may be wrong. But they may be right (That's the magic of science). We (as sensible fully functioning members of democracies) have a duty to review the evidence and make up our own minds. I, for one, am pretty convinced by the ice core evidence and the fact that here we've had the wildest winter I can remember for a long time.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life
Nice try but wrong. IIRC quite a few geological age boundaries are defined by mass extinctions which did kill off all higher life. Check this for more.
It's even worse then that. When I used to program the wacky things, holding the mouse button down prevented any "user level" programs getting any time. Which is why the clock used to stop when you were using menus or dragging windows. Which is why if you want to do anything complicated you have to start programming at interrupt level (yes, you read that right, I said inturrupt level).
Slashdot Mirror
Try writing a post without an analogy in it.
Try reading my post
As I'm sure they taught you in lawyer school, "proof by analogy is fraud".
Respond to my post rather than what you would like my post to say.
As a few of the posts mention elliptically, what you mean by "non-technical people" are actually dullards.
They are stupider than you which is why they are managers and they are definitely stupider then you if they can't choose the right product on their own. The very existence of your job illustrates that they realise they are stupider than you and hence need help choosing things. The final damning piece of evidence is that, after hiring you to help them make the decisions they are too dick witted to do on their own, they ignore your advice.
This puts the whole question onto a different footing: "How can I communicate with the stupid without giving them a lengthy training session to bring them up to my level of understanding?" It might sound harsh and a little bit arrogant but it's the truth. If you start off thinking that these people are anything other than totally random nonsense spouting idiots then you'll end up doing the wrong thing.
This means the first thing to ditch is logical reasoning. Nothing scares a dullard more than a carefully thought out, well researched, evidence based piece of research. I suggest finding out who their friends are, then making up some opinions and attributing them to these friends. Don't bother worrying about getting found out. Managers only have a 10minutes attention span so they won't follow it up.
Next: Draw a graph. It doesn't matter what of, just make it have a line that goes up at the end. This is known as the "hockey stick" and is something managers are trained to spot (and fund)
Next: Remove any word longer than 5 letters from your report.
Next: Find out your managers outside interests. This is probably golf and marital infidelity. Try to include allusions to these things in your report. Something like "This product is so good, its the Nick Faldo of paper shredders" (NB: I am not a golfer so please insert the name of a currently successful golfer to avoid embarrassment). Its more dangerous putting in references to the second activity.
Next: Buy him a donut. Dullards think firstly with their wallets, secondly with their stomachs.
Technology doesn't make you stupid, it just gives those already stupid the opportunity to make a whole range of new stupid mistakes.
These people would be just as stupid without their sat-navs, it's just we'd never hear of them (unless they got saucepans stuck on their heads, or something)
> Oh, it's your hardware, my code works fine, sod off.
This is usually a synonym for "you have not provided me with enough information to reproduce the problem". Remember, coders hate admitting they don't know something, even if it's because you haven't told it them.
> why the hell did you release it to the world?
Altruism. Sometimes code from a new project that doesn't actually work is easier to read/fix/reuse than code from some enormous open source behemoth. q.v. Panda and xpdf.
> All you're doing then is giving open source a black mark.
How is releasing code giving open source a black mark? Admittedly it confuses those who think that open source software should work, but that's a whole different story.
> coder or contributor who simply doesn't answer bug reports or emails
Talking as someone whose job used to include answering such emails: If the answer was obvious from the documentation or had been answered on the list already, then I'd ignore it. Sometimes when it looks like other people are acting like asshats, it might actually be you.
The Newton failed because it didn't work and needed its 4 (IIRC) AA batteries changed every couple of days.
The iPhone suffers from neither of these problems.
And just in case it hasn't come up yet, How many Newtons does it take to change a lightbulb? Axe! Mother hydrant umbrella monkey.
Which is why they're having to play this game. They have no-one who knows anything so they're trying to get geeks to do their jobs for them, for free.
There is only one thing to see here and it's this fantastic graph.
. gif
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/2007/alldec
Climate change is real and we should be worried. However, drawing arbitrary straight lines through random data is not going to convince anyone.
The magic number isn't "performance per clock" or "performance per watt" but "performance per unit of time spent writing the program".
x86 is still with us because its architecture fits the way that humans write code.
>> Nice of you to ignore the rest of my message.
As it is built on the fallacy I pointed out it is, by definition, fallacious.
Read the post by TheNetAvenger above if you want to work out what you are talking about.
>> Yes, but this ignores one point. If you're encrypting your root filesystem, and you don't want to have to enter a password to simply boot the computer
WTF? You want security but you don't want to enter a password? You want to go swimming without getting wet?
They're all rubbish and try to fleece me at every opportunity.
I could add more, and am interested in continuing the conversation but think that it should be moved off the board.
my id is
cim20
and my mail server is metropolis-data.co.uk. Email from yahoo, hotmail and aol will be ignored.
I was really hoping this wasn't going to get to Slashdot. A puff peice for a rubbish company's lame attempt to join the 20th century that makes everyone concerned look like a total dick.
.... 10 years ago.
"download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits"
Goodness me! Thats almost as fast as the networks in Korea
Those sort of transfer speeds really are making the UK a major player in internet use. I think we're upto 193rd in the world now and with the pace of network acceleration as it is, we should be over taking Eastern Samoa (192nd) sometime within the next decade.
The truth is, network connectivity in the UK is beyond a joke. The easiest way (outside university) to transfer more than a couple of meg is to sent a CD through the post. Even if you are "blessed" with a home wire that can go at more than 56k then you are still stuck with operators who put a ZX Spectrum at the other end and charge you through the nose.
And there's one obvious culprit for who sorry shebang. The same one who restricted the use of ISDN by exorbitant charging, the same one who wants to charge me 100 pounds to "install" a wire I can see already comes into my house, the same one who used to produce CDs that required a full reformat of the hard disk after use, the same one who sat on its fat arse collecting money when the rest of the world was installing better infrastructure. BT.
I don't actully think the conclusion is in any doubt what so ever (mobile phones do not cause petrol stations to explode) but do think that using an entertainment program (i.e. Brainiac) as a basis for for any sort of deduction is flawed. Show me the peer reviewed papers and I'll be happy.
As regards the control, its a bit tricky for this experiment. You'd need a number of caravans full of petrol with no mobile phones near them, and observe them over time to see which ones spontaneously detonate. Alternativly, you could fuzz the experiment and look up "my caravan spontaneously detonated" statistics from the health and safety executive.
Goodness me! A single null result with no control! Ground breaking science!
In other news:
I drank a small sherry and didn't get drunk. Therefore alcohol is harmless.
I left my front door open and didn't get burgled. Therefore burglary doesn't happen.
(etc...)
Storing information by modulating the Fourier (or Fresnel) modes of an image is not new.
That being said, the actual underlying science of this post might be intersting, if only I could get to it through the torrent of drivel in the summary.
e.g. "meaning that the secret image cannot be found in the watermarked image"
Then how do you extract it then?
Do you mean "the image cannot be extracted without the key"?
"Since the watermarked image contains no secret information" Que?
and not a new idea.
The Victorians wised up to the fact that if a man is given a target, there's a lot less piss on the floor. Urinals were manufactured with a picture of little blue bee on them.
"Why a bee?" I hear no-one ask.
The latin for bee is apis.
It's Korean for penis.
How about i686-pc-linux-gnu/libstdc++-v3/src/locale-inst.cc out of the gcc-3.2 source itself?
xgcc segfaults when trying to compile this on my Athlon XP 1800+. Without optimisation it works, but who wants a non-optimised libstdc++?
Sorry about that, but the whole toolbox is just too looney. No threading, Strange memory management and an almost unbelieveable mechanism for OS calls. I just never could manage to get it all sorted.
Luckily, as another reply mentions, the baton is now being carried by someone who knows far more about the whole kit and kaboodle than I did, and apparently has made a much better attempt.
As a point in my defence as a programmer, I did write the first version of the VNC driver for Mac On Linux, that actually *did* work.
"Pollution to solve Pollution", inspired! And all you suckers fell for it. For Shame.
The only way it could have been better was if it mentioned Hitler.
-------------------------------------------
Almost all of the comments posted have been paranoid about evil politically biased scientists trying to turn the USA communist.
Remember kids, Green != Red. Let's try and keep balance here. Yes, the scientists may be wrong. But they may be right (That's the magic of science). We (as sensible fully functioning members of democracies) have a duty to review the evidence and make up our own minds. I, for one, am pretty convinced by the ice core evidence and the fact that here we've had the wildest winter I can remember for a long time.
-------------------------------------------
Nice try but wrong. IIRC quite a few geological age boundaries are defined by mass extinctions which did kill off all higher life. Check this for more.
-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------