If you have a river then you probably don't require a desalinisation plant.
If you have a river you probably don't require a pressure-retarded osmosis power generating plant, just using the kinetic energy of the river to turn turbines.
I've experienced multiple instances of the crap that goes on in the real world, and they're too similar for this not to be a systematic problem. If what these schools teaching isn't promoting this crap, it isn't giving people adequate tools and motivation to determine and eliminate the sources of it either.
Schools can give you tools but they can't make you use them once you graduate. Nor can schools give you motivation.
Let me try to summarize things in a completely different way. The popular perception of business school is about as accurate as the popular perception of software development. I'm guilty too, for years I had the typical engineer's attitude towards anything business and marketing related, and I had these thoughts reinforced by events at some jobs. However once I went to business school one of the things that made it so much fun was learning how wrong I was.
Have you considered the possibility that MBA teaching programs are like Computer Science students? Some teach the right things. And, some just take shortcuts, and once their students enter the real world, they arrange for businesses to create crap.
The problem with that theory is that I've experienced multiple CS and MBA programs teaching the right things, other CS and MBA students/grads I know had similar experiences. I don't know of any school promoting the crap that goes on in the real world. What I and others have witnessed is someone who was taught how to design and write maintainable and reliable code in school slap together some crap in order to move a 3x5 task card from the in-progress column to the implemented column. Sometimes doing so because their manager evaluates developers based on how fast those 3x5 task cards move, which is precisely the sort of thing you are taught *not* to do in business school. Dilbert is as popular with business school professors and students as it is with their computer science counterparts.
The problems seem to go beyond that. It is now being reported that major subsystems are not even implemented. The "plan" seems to have been to implement the "sign up" subsystem by October. Now we have learned that other subsystems were not to be implemented until Jan 2014. Ex:
"A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant fraction of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed... Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems.""
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101211556 [cnbc.com]
This "learning moment" for IT project management is going to be with us for a while.
Oh please - we already implemented it in the True West - CA and WA are way ahead of you.
So you are pointing out that some things can be better done at the state level? Who is making big government red state arguments in this discussion?:-)
Stop pushing your Big Government Red State solutions when Blue States have solutions that already work.
So directly quoting "a senior government IT" official testifying before Congress and characterizing the situation as a teachable moment for IT project management is a political statement in your opinion? Well, that is a interesting perspective you have there. Are you sure you know who is viewing things through a political lense in this conversation?
By now, most Americans have either heard or learned firsthand that the Healthcare.gov website doesn't work right.
The problems seem to go beyond that. It is now being reported that major subsystems are not even implemented. The "plan" seems to have been to implement the "sign up" subsystem by October. Now we have learned that other subsystems were not to be implemented until Jan 2014. Ex:
"A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant fraction of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed... Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems."" http://www.cnbc.com/id/101211556
This "learning moment" for IT project management is going to be with us for a while.
Worked for 10 years in IT support for a top-10 MBA school (thus posting anonymously). Can attest, in spite of my school's technical cred, that the MBA is mostly worthless. Two years (four semesters) is not enough time to truly learn anything. But the biggest problem is the idea that both students and employers buy into: that those four little semesters make one skilled to make executive decisions in any business, regardless of what it is.
You don't seem to really understand what an MBA is. A modern MBA program is NOT about becoming an expert in any particular field, its quite different from other graduate degrees in this respect. An MBA program is an OVERVIEW of the entire organization. Leadership, law, economics, strategy, product development, operations, information technology, accounting, marketing, etc. An MBA teaches you enough about the various parts of an organization so that you can see things from their perspective. So that you can better represent your actual area of expertise and experience when communicating with others coming from different areas, to better communicate, to be more persuasive, to better understand what they are asking you for, etc. 1/3 of my MBA class came from scientific and engineering backgrounds. They didn't stop being scientists and engineers, they just became scientists and engineers with some more tools in the toolbox.
The MBA does not qualify you to make executive decisions. However to make executive decisions you need to be able to see things from different perspectives, not simply the single perspective that your expertise and experience is based upon. That is the advantage of an MBA.
Furthermore, we were explicitly taught that a manager/executive must understand the product. This idea that a professional manager can manage any company regardless of product is a false meme. **If** ever widely believed that would have been long ago.
This boils down to accounting and finance, which is the only thing common to all businesses (except for contracts, but that's law - go back to school). Like a hammer to a nail, the MBA learns to address everything from the point of view of costs and profits
Seriously, that is so mistaken. We were taught exactly the opposite. That focusing exclusively on the numbers often dooms a company. At least at the school I went to, public university - ranked in top 50, and at the schools where other students I've interacted with were going.
But MBA schools pump out way too many graduates every year, including those who just coast through classes and expect that their degree will catapult them to a high salary.
Such ticket punchers exist in most degree programs. Its no different in computer science, even at the graduate level.
Plus there is another common problem. People are often taught how to do the right thing in school, both MBA and Computer Science, however when they get into the real world they do things differently. I think you are letting these people who take the shortcuts and do the wrong things mislead you as to what they were actually taught.
I am an MBA and I agree with him comments to a degree. A lot of my classmates did not think. As a graduate myself I question how anyone thinks they can run a company entirely with numbers and figures - it just doesn't work. There is a personal aspect to things since humans are not machines (at least not yet;). I am of the belief that it is my job to manage people, and by that I mean shield them from the crap above so that they can do their job. Then again I am humble enough to know when I am over my head and ask the people that actually know their shit or have to deal with it on the daily basis.
And this is the sort of perspective I was taught to have in my MBA program. Focusing too much on the numbers is a bad idea. Not understanding or accommodating human behavior is a common cause in product or business failure. That treating your employees and business partners well is often important for success. That the people doing the actual work on the line often have the best information. Or to use a military analogy if you want to know what is going on in a unit you ask a sergeant not a captain.
Here is my perspective. MBAs are like Computer Science students. They are taught to do the right thing, its just that some take shortcuts once they enter the real world and create crap.
Elon is not the only genius who thinks an MBA is bogus and he's 100% correct; but we have to give FZ his due as he was way ahead of the curve on this thinking.
Actually both are wrong respect to recent MBAs, at least modern MBAs, can't speak for previous decades. However I used to share Elon's perspective, then I went to business school and learned how wrong I was.
M:... An MBA is a bad idea.
L: Why?
M: It teaches people all sorts of wrong things. L: What do you mean? M: They don't teach people to think in MBA schools. And the top MBA schools are the worst. Because they actually teach people that you must be special, and it causes people to close down their feedback loop and not rigorously examine when they are wrong.
I went to a state university ranked top 50 in the U.S. We were taught quite differently than Elon assumes. For example we were taught that to find out what is going on you actually need to go speak to the workers on the factory floor, or the engineers in their cubicles, the people doing the actual work. That these people offer the best information on how things really are. I don't recall being taught that we were "special".
Note Elon's use of "top MBA schools are the worst". I wonder if he really means certain old Ivy League schools, which in that case being "special" is not MBA specific.
"... When all decisions are based on an MBA's concept of numerical reality, you're in deep shit, because the only thing that can be judged as real is that which can be proved by a column of figures. And when all aesthetic decisions are turned over to these kinds of people, who use these criteria to make steering decisions for a company with no regard for people and no regard for what the product really is, and the only thing that matters is maximizing your profit, you have a problem. Because you can't have quality then; you cannot have excellence. Quality's expensive. I think most of these people that come from business schools have the desire to make sure everything is cheesy. That's what happens when you do things that way." - FZ
Accounting represents only a few classes in business school. Classes in product development and strategy in fact do emphasize excellence as a means of differentiating your product. The aesthetics of your product, the usability of your product, the overall user experience. Focusing only on costs is in fact offered as an example of how to ruin a product.
People who think business schools and MBAs are all about accounting have not been to business school, at least in recent decades.
A modern MBA program is NOT about accounting. Its NOT about becoming an expert in any particular field, its quite different from other graduate degrees in this respect. An MBA program is an OVERVIEW of the entire organization. Leadership, law, economics, strategy, product development, operations, information technology, accounting, marketing, etc. An MBA teaches you enough about the various parts of an organization so that you can see things from their perspective. So that you can better represent your actual area of expertise and experience when communicating with others coming from different areas, to better communicate, to be more persuasive, to better understand what they are asking you for, etc. 1/3 of my MBA class came from scientific and engineering backgrounds. They didn't stop being scientists and engineers, they just became scientists and engineers with some more tools in the toolbox.
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
I don't understand why open-floor layouts get a bad rap. I work in one now, and it's great. I never want to see the inside of another cube.
Perhaps you need to speak to an MBA, seriously. Typically one of the first classes that a person takes in business school is some sort of organization behavior class. This class typically deals with psychology and human behavior at the individual, small team and large organization levels. In this class you will learn that different people are sometimes more efficient in different environments, that there is no such thing as the best work environment. That what is best changes from person to person.
Some people will perform better in an open floor plan and others will perform better in individual offices. That a manager who forces a person to work in the environment their personality is not wired for is sabotaging that person. That no one solution fits all people.
A cable channel (don't remember which) apparently got the rights to run a marathon, they even showed the final episode(s) that never made it to broadcast TV. As fitting this show, no happy ending.
These may be dated. Don't solve a problem only in asm, solve it in C and asm. Compare the two again whenever a cpu architecture or a compiler has a major update. Plus you want the C so you can port the code to a different architecture. That said...
You might know your data is organized in a way that makes SIMD instructions helpful. Even if a compiler supports vectorization it will be somewhat limited in what it can do compared to the assembly programmer. A compiler may offer intrinsics but when doing so you are really programming at the assembly level not the C level, the intrinsics are pretty much a shorthand for inline assembly.
Wanting a function to return multiple values, trivial in assembly where multiple registers can be used. C requires memory variables.
Dealing with arithmetic overflow, trivial in assembly. Undefined in C.
Fixed point math where the source operands are of different sizes than the result of the operation, trivial in x86 assembly. C wants everything to be the same size.
There may be compiler specific extensions for some of these but they generally don't compare well with assembly.
So, what do people think. Are one time notifications regarding common mistakes acceptable?
Notifications from a calculator app? No, I wouldn't find them acceptable, ever. Why not just pop up a "Did you know?" screen when they start up the app? Limit it to once a day, and be sure to include a "Don't show me these tips anymore" button. They've started the application, therefore they're more likely to pay attention to what you're saying than if you broadside them with a notification.
The notifications would be local notifications only generated when the app starts up and since the app is in the foreground the user immediately gets a dialog box. The advantage, I hope - I haven't experimented yet - notifications are just something on my look into list, is that the message would be available in notification center for further reference should the user find it useful.
I am not considering push notifications where an Apple server can send them at any time. Only local notifications that would be created when the app was running in the foreground. Would such behavior change your opinion? Thanks again for any feedback.
Even so we still have an "instruction set architecture" (ISA) in the modern x86 case. This ISA limits the underlying hardware architecture's (micro-ops) view of the software's intent. We still have the case where optimizing at the ISA level can also improve performance at the micro-op level. Furthermore understanding the underlying micro-op architecture can help to write more efficient code at the ISA or C level. This level is not documented
...and it can (and, I suspect, does) differ from one generation of x86 processor to another.
Yes, but while the percentage of improvement may have decreased the originally assembly language was still faster after three cpu generations. At least in the last major piece of assembly that I wrote. At each new cpu generation, and compiler upgrade, I would retest the c and asm implementations.
Even *if* the asm implementation had gotten slower than the c implementation after three cpu generations it may still have been the way to go. Apps are sometimes optimized for the minimum system requirements not the latest and greatest hardware.
80% of the emails that I receive from customers originate with the "Email Support" button that appears with the integrated manual in my calculator app.
Now under iOS I only create a URL that defines "to", "subject", etc fields and pass that off to the system mail app, so my app never needs to see your contacts or your emails.
Would you find a similar approach, launching the system email app with some fields pre configured, disagreeable under Android? I'm planning on doing an Android version in the near future and I'm curious. Thanks for any suggestions.
Your application looks interesting. Do you plan on bringing it to Android any time soon, or is it worth $220 for an iPod touch?
I am currently working on redoing the iOS user interface a bit and implementing a few user suggestions. After that I do plan on an Android version.
Regarding an iPod touch... I'm platform agnostic. Personally I tend to look for apps on iOS first but I definitely appreciate Android and have a few Android apps that literally are not allowed by Apple under iOS, "Wifi Analyzer" for example. That said the iPod touch is a pretty cool little device if you don't need cellular, gps, etc. I hope you have a lot more in mind beyond a calculator app though.:-) One thing that makes me a little reluctant about the touch is that the iPhone and iPad just got refreshed and moved to a new CPU, the touch is still using the previous generation CPU. There has been no announcement but I can't help but wonder when the touch will get refreshed and updated to the current CPU.
Why would you do this through notifications? I would think that something like 'Tip of the Day' when you open the app (that you could disable) would be much more appropriate.
To be clear these local notifications would be generated and displayed immediately while in the app as an alternative to the app simply putting up a dialog box. Since the app is in the foreground a dialog will be immediately shown but I think the message will also be available in the notification center for future reference. I think, but I could be mistaken. I am currently just displaying a dialog and I am just thinking about switching to a notification. If it turns out they aren't visible in notification center I probably would just stick with the current dialog box.
Unsolicited notifications are never acceptable and I have uninstalled every app that has ever bugged me with one. As the other reply asked, why not include this information as a "tip of the day" when the app is invoked, rather than shove it in the notification bar where important stuff goes? Why do I need to know something about your calculator at some random time when I'm not even using it?
Actually I am currently putting up a dialog box while in the app and not using the local notification system in iOS. However I am thinking about using the local notification system rather than a dialog box since it would seem a cleaner and more functional implementation. Note that this local notification would *not* be generated at some random time, it would be generated as you startup the calculator app. I would not be using push notifications.
Is using the local notification system while in the app really that different than putting up a dialog box?
I pretty much avoid apps with any kind of in-app purchasing. If you think your app is worth the price of all the extra bits, well then allow me to buy the whole thing. I'm not interested in being nickeled and dimed to death for extra levels, abilities or features.
I have two app, the full paid http://www.perpenso.com/calc/calc3.html app with various calculators built into a single app and a lite app where scientific (including fractions and complex numbers) is built-in but other modes such as statistics, business and hex are in-app purchases. The fully paid includes everything and there is no advertising and it is offered at a bundled price point, about 60% of the price of all the in-app purchases combined, equivalent to 3 of the available 5 in-apps. There are plenty of users who only purchase 1 or 2 of the in-apps.
The problem as a developer is that some users only discover the lite app. I mention the fully paid app in the lite app's description and that it may offer a cost savings, yet there are a noticeable number of users who purchase all 5 individual in-app purchases. I don't think all of these users are trying to be supportive, that most just did not notice the fully paid bundled app.
If I had done as you suggest and only offered the fully paid bundled version I may have lost many of the smaller sales. I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions. In the future I plan to again use this 2 app strategy of fully paid bundle priced and completely a-la-carte via in-app purchases. The difficulty seem to be in making potential users aware of both versions so that they can select the best fit.
I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all single app solution. Am I missing something?
As a developer I'd like to know a little more about notifications and what users consider acceptable. For example in one of my apps, http://www.perpenso.com/calc/calc3.html, I have some one time notifications regarding optional calculator modes. I may point out that historically calculators may do A or B, and that this app does A. The handful of notifications that I have are related to very common user errors.
So, what do people think. Are one time notifications regarding common mistakes acceptable?
I always liked assembly, I always like seeing things at the architectural level.
I'm not sure what level of "architecture" you are talking about. An assembly language usually reveals relatively little about the architecture underlying the CPUs that execute the code generated by the assembler.
That is a very modern x86 centric view. Even so we still have an "instruction set architecture" (ISA) in the modern x86 case. This ISA limits the underlying hardware architecture's (micro-ops) view of the software's intent. We still have the case where optimizing at the ISA level can also improve performance at the micro-op level. Furthermore understanding the underlying micro-op architecture can help to write more efficient code at the ISA or C level. This level is not documented but a little is known about it. More importantly the architecture of a CPU is not limited to the micro-ops. We still have caching and other things to consider.
The worst choice in C is to think you need to help the compiler optimize. Seriously, the compiler doesn't care at all whether you write x = x << 1; x += x; or x *= 2; it sees them all the same, so code the one that makes sense in context.
Historically helping the compiler, giving it hints, is in fact a good way to get superior code out of a compiler. For example consider 4x4 matrix multiplication. Do you use nested loops or just unroll it manually? Compilers tend not to fully unroll all the nested loops. The compiler may do better scheduling on fully unrolled non-looping code. Do you create temporary variables to preload a row or column, or do you just access each variable in memory directly? The former may generate better code on a RISC architecture and the later on a CISC architecture. These are the sort of things I think of when referring to helping the compiler, giving it hints. When that mythical smart compiler arrives that is able to figure out the preceding on its own, it will simply ignore your hints, the hints will do no harm. Until this mythical compiler arrives, the hints may help.
BTW, I agree with your sentiment in the context of the example you offer. Besides being useless, I've also seen people introduce bugs by making such "optimizations". Replaced the subexpression "x * 2" with "x << 1" in a larger expression and you may have changed the order of evaluation of the overall expression and are doing an erroneous calculation. "<<" has a different operator precedence that "*".
Let me start off by saying I started with assembly on the Apple II. I always liked assembly, I always like seeing things at the architectural level. I've written a bit of assembly over the years for various CPUs. Every once in a while I write some assembly code to better learn a new CPU and sometimes just for fun. Strange... yeah, I will admit that.
That said, I rarely use assembly in professional software development situations when targeting computers and mobile devices.
Before addressing your comment let me add one more thing. Learning assembly is important with respect to making you a better C programmer. I'm not talking about understanding the asm code you see in the debugger. I really am referring to writing C code. C code can be written in architecturally specific manners. The code is still portable, yet more efficient only on a specific architecture. Understanding the architecture and assembly language can allow you to write more efficient C code.
Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases,...
That is nothing new, this has been true for decades. You have to go back to Apple II and Commodore 64 days to find a timeframe where assembly was appropriate for general purpose software development. I'm referring to computers, not micro controllers and other such environments.
... modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for.
This is absolutely false. The key to writing good assembly code is not trying to out-compile the compiler, that is a newbie thing to do. The key is to leverage knowledge that can not be transmitted to the compiler, can not be expressed in C. This is where the real win is, this is where assembly can still beat C even after a couple of architectural upgrades.
I know for a fact that my C code is faster than my Assembly code... since the time I lost track of all CPU pipelining and stuff, while compilers only got better at optimizing. When they release version 1.0, it will probably have to be run on a emulator, perhaps in a quantum computer.
Some assembly code that I wrote was faster than C from current compilers over several major architectural changes of x86. The percentage by which they were faster decreased, yet after 3 architecture changes I was still 10% faster with the original assembly.
The key to writing good assembly code is not trying to out-compile the compiler, that is a newbie thing to do. The key is to leverage knowledge that can not be transmitted to the compiler, can not be expressed in C.
I've worked with current facial recognition systems and they're absolutely junk. They can match mug shots with perfect lighting but that's about all. It's a very long way to being able to pick people out of some crappy live video stream.
Mind, I worked with whatever's publicly available; maybe the various big brother agencies have better stuff; i wouldn't bet on it though.
A while ago I did a little research in computer vision. From the summary it seems like nothing more than moving a project from an academic project to a real world project.
In the academic world it is perfectly acceptable to use carefully selected or crafted inputs (facial images in this case) to develop and evaluate your algorithms. You may have separate date sets for development and evaluation, however careful selection or crafting is OK to simplify the project and avoid issues/variables outside of the project's scope. In your particular mugshot example this would be using images of good resolution and good/predictable lighting. Dealing with low resolution and bad lighting would be an issue left to the next thesis or research grant or for commercialization.
Working with mugshots may be a fluke, the inputs happen to be carefully crafted like one might do in academic research. So it was relatively simple to transition to this niche real world application.
Moving to a general real world solution using images and video of questionable quality is an enormous jump in the level of difficulty. Perhaps too difficult. It may not be possible to recognize an individual. It may only be possible to offer a somewhat generalized characterization that a person my fit into. At least with the haphazardly placed cameras typically found on the streets and in shops today. Some places use very good and carefully positioned cameras to get decent images for automated facial recognition. For example Las Vegas casinos.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a river then you probably don't require a desalinisation plant.
If you have a river you probably don't require a pressure-retarded osmosis power generating plant, just using the kinetic energy of the river to turn turbines.
I've experienced multiple instances of the crap that goes on in the real world, and they're too similar for this not to be a systematic problem. If what these schools teaching isn't promoting this crap, it isn't giving people adequate tools and motivation to determine and eliminate the sources of it either.
Schools can give you tools but they can't make you use them once you graduate. Nor can schools give you motivation.
Let me try to summarize things in a completely different way. The popular perception of business school is about as accurate as the popular perception of software development. I'm guilty too, for years I had the typical engineer's attitude towards anything business and marketing related, and I had these thoughts reinforced by events at some jobs. However once I went to business school one of the things that made it so much fun was learning how wrong I was.
Have you considered the possibility that MBA teaching programs are like Computer Science students? Some teach the right things. And, some just take shortcuts, and once their students enter the real world, they arrange for businesses to create crap.
The problem with that theory is that I've experienced multiple CS and MBA programs teaching the right things, other CS and MBA students/grads I know had similar experiences. I don't know of any school promoting the crap that goes on in the real world. What I and others have witnessed is someone who was taught how to design and write maintainable and reliable code in school slap together some crap in order to move a 3x5 task card from the in-progress column to the implemented column. Sometimes doing so because their manager evaluates developers based on how fast those 3x5 task cards move, which is precisely the sort of thing you are taught *not* to do in business school. Dilbert is as popular with business school professors and students as it is with their computer science counterparts.
The problems seem to go beyond that. It is now being reported that major subsystems are not even implemented. The "plan" seems to have been to implement the "sign up" subsystem by October. Now we have learned that other subsystems were not to be implemented until Jan 2014. Ex:
... Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems.""
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101211556 [cnbc.com]
"A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant fraction of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed
This "learning moment" for IT project management is going to be with us for a while.
Oh please - we already implemented it in the True West - CA and WA are way ahead of you.
So you are pointing out that some things can be better done at the state level? Who is making big government red state arguments in this discussion? :-)
Stop pushing your Big Government Red State solutions when Blue States have solutions that already work.
So directly quoting "a senior government IT" official testifying before Congress and characterizing the situation as a teachable moment for IT project management is a political statement in your opinion? Well, that is a interesting perspective you have there. Are you sure you know who is viewing things through a political lense in this conversation?
By now, most Americans have either heard or learned firsthand that the Healthcare.gov website doesn't work right.
The problems seem to go beyond that. It is now being reported that major subsystems are not even implemented. The "plan" seems to have been to implement the "sign up" subsystem by October. Now we have learned that other subsystems were not to be implemented until Jan 2014. Ex:
... Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems.""
"A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant fraction of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101211556
This "learning moment" for IT project management is going to be with us for a while.
Worked for 10 years in IT support for a top-10 MBA school (thus posting anonymously). Can attest, in spite of my school's technical cred, that the MBA is mostly worthless. Two years (four semesters) is not enough time to truly learn anything. But the biggest problem is the idea that both students and employers buy into: that those four little semesters make one skilled to make executive decisions in any business, regardless of what it is.
You don't seem to really understand what an MBA is. A modern MBA program is NOT about becoming an expert in any particular field, its quite different from other graduate degrees in this respect. An MBA program is an OVERVIEW of the entire organization. Leadership, law, economics, strategy, product development, operations, information technology, accounting, marketing, etc. An MBA teaches you enough about the various parts of an organization so that you can see things from their perspective. So that you can better represent your actual area of expertise and experience when communicating with others coming from different areas, to better communicate, to be more persuasive, to better understand what they are asking you for, etc. 1/3 of my MBA class came from scientific and engineering backgrounds. They didn't stop being scientists and engineers, they just became scientists and engineers with some more tools in the toolbox.
The MBA does not qualify you to make executive decisions. However to make executive decisions you need to be able to see things from different perspectives, not simply the single perspective that your expertise and experience is based upon. That is the advantage of an MBA.
Furthermore, we were explicitly taught that a manager/executive must understand the product. This idea that a professional manager can manage any company regardless of product is a false meme. **If** ever widely believed that would have been long ago.
This boils down to accounting and finance, which is the only thing common to all businesses (except for contracts, but that's law - go back to school). Like a hammer to a nail, the MBA learns to address everything from the point of view of costs and profits
Seriously, that is so mistaken. We were taught exactly the opposite. That focusing exclusively on the numbers often dooms a company. At least at the school I went to, public university - ranked in top 50, and at the schools where other students I've interacted with were going.
But MBA schools pump out way too many graduates every year, including those who just coast through classes and expect that their degree will catapult them to a high salary.
Such ticket punchers exist in most degree programs. Its no different in computer science, even at the graduate level.
Plus there is another common problem. People are often taught how to do the right thing in school, both MBA and Computer Science, however when they get into the real world they do things differently. I think you are letting these people who take the shortcuts and do the wrong things mislead you as to what they were actually taught.
I am an MBA and I agree with him comments to a degree. A lot of my classmates did not think. As a graduate myself I question how anyone thinks they can run a company entirely with numbers and figures - it just doesn't work. There is a personal aspect to things since humans are not machines (at least not yet ;). I am of the belief that it is my job to manage people, and by that I mean shield them from the crap above so that they can do their job. Then again I am humble enough to know when I am over my head and ask the people that actually know their shit or have to deal with it on the daily basis.
And this is the sort of perspective I was taught to have in my MBA program. Focusing too much on the numbers is a bad idea. Not understanding or accommodating human behavior is a common cause in product or business failure. That treating your employees and business partners well is often important for success. That the people doing the actual work on the line often have the best information. Or to use a military analogy if you want to know what is going on in a unit you ask a sergeant not a captain.
Here is my perspective. MBAs are like Computer Science students. They are taught to do the right thing, its just that some take shortcuts once they enter the real world and create crap.
Elon is not the only genius who thinks an MBA is bogus and he's 100% correct; but we have to give FZ his due as he was way ahead of the curve on this thinking.
Actually both are wrong respect to recent MBAs, at least modern MBAs, can't speak for previous decades. However I used to share Elon's perspective, then I went to business school and learned how wrong I was.
M: ... An MBA is a bad idea.
L: Why?
M: It teaches people all sorts of wrong things. L: What do you mean? M: They don't teach people to think in MBA schools. And the top MBA schools are the worst. Because they actually teach people that you must be special, and it causes people to close down their feedback loop and not rigorously examine when they are wrong.
I went to a state university ranked top 50 in the U.S. We were taught quite differently than Elon assumes. For example we were taught that to find out what is going on you actually need to go speak to the workers on the factory floor, or the engineers in their cubicles, the people doing the actual work. That these people offer the best information on how things really are. I don't recall being taught that we were "special".
Note Elon's use of "top MBA schools are the worst". I wonder if he really means certain old Ivy League schools, which in that case being "special" is not MBA specific.
"... When all decisions are based on an MBA's concept of numerical reality, you're in deep shit, because the only thing that can be judged as real is that which can be proved by a column of figures. And when all aesthetic decisions are turned over to these kinds of people, who use these criteria to make steering decisions for a company with no regard for people and no regard for what the product really is, and the only thing that matters is maximizing your profit, you have a problem. Because you can't have quality then; you cannot have excellence. Quality's expensive. I think most of these people that come from business schools have the desire to make sure everything is cheesy. That's what happens when you do things that way." - FZ
Accounting represents only a few classes in business school. Classes in product development and strategy in fact do emphasize excellence as a means of differentiating your product. The aesthetics of your product, the usability of your product, the overall user experience. Focusing only on costs is in fact offered as an example of how to ruin a product.
People who think business schools and MBAs are all about accounting have not been to business school, at least in recent decades.
A modern MBA program is NOT about accounting. Its NOT about becoming an expert in any particular field, its quite different from other graduate degrees in this respect. An MBA program is an OVERVIEW of the entire organization. Leadership, law, economics, strategy, product development, operations, information technology, accounting, marketing, etc. An MBA teaches you enough about the various parts of an organization so that you can see things from their perspective. So that you can better represent your actual area of expertise and experience when communicating with others coming from different areas, to better communicate, to be more persuasive, to better understand what they are asking you for, etc. 1/3 of my MBA class came from scientific and engineering backgrounds. They didn't stop being scientists and engineers, they just became scientists and engineers with some more tools in the toolbox.
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
I don't understand why open-floor layouts get a bad rap. I work in one now, and it's great. I never want to see the inside of another cube.
Perhaps you need to speak to an MBA, seriously. Typically one of the first classes that a person takes in business school is some sort of organization behavior class. This class typically deals with psychology and human behavior at the individual, small team and large organization levels. In this class you will learn that different people are sometimes more efficient in different environments, that there is no such thing as the best work environment. That what is best changes from person to person.
Some people will perform better in an open floor plan and others will perform better in individual offices. That a manager who forces a person to work in the environment their personality is not wired for is sabotaging that person. That no one solution fits all people.
A cable channel (don't remember which) apparently got the rights to run a marathon, they even showed the final episode(s) that never made it to broadcast TV. As fitting this show, no happy ending.
Watch out for Chiggie von Richthofen...
He's unrelated. 65 million year old Mexican rocks are still traveling to his home world.
That said, an amazingly good show for broadcast tv, of course it didn't last.
These may be dated. Don't solve a problem only in asm, solve it in C and asm. Compare the two again whenever a cpu architecture or a compiler has a major update. Plus you want the C so you can port the code to a different architecture. That said ...
You might know your data is organized in a way that makes SIMD instructions helpful. Even if a compiler supports vectorization it will be somewhat limited in what it can do compared to the assembly programmer. A compiler may offer intrinsics but when doing so you are really programming at the assembly level not the C level, the intrinsics are pretty much a shorthand for inline assembly.
Wanting a function to return multiple values, trivial in assembly where multiple registers can be used. C requires memory variables.
Dealing with arithmetic overflow, trivial in assembly. Undefined in C.
Fixed point math where the source operands are of different sizes than the result of the operation, trivial in x86 assembly. C wants everything to be the same size.
There may be compiler specific extensions for some of these but they generally don't compare well with assembly.
So, what do people think. Are one time notifications regarding common mistakes acceptable?
Notifications from a calculator app? No, I wouldn't find them acceptable, ever. Why not just pop up a "Did you know?" screen when they start up the app? Limit it to once a day, and be sure to include a "Don't show me these tips anymore" button. They've started the application, therefore they're more likely to pay attention to what you're saying than if you broadside them with a notification.
The notifications would be local notifications only generated when the app starts up and since the app is in the foreground the user immediately gets a dialog box. The advantage, I hope - I haven't experimented yet - notifications are just something on my look into list, is that the message would be available in notification center for further reference should the user find it useful.
I am not considering push notifications where an Apple server can send them at any time. Only local notifications that would be created when the app was running in the foreground. Would such behavior change your opinion? Thanks again for any feedback.
Even so we still have an "instruction set architecture" (ISA) in the modern x86 case. This ISA limits the underlying hardware architecture's (micro-ops) view of the software's intent. We still have the case where optimizing at the ISA level can also improve performance at the micro-op level. Furthermore understanding the underlying micro-op architecture can help to write more efficient code at the ISA or C level. This level is not documented
...and it can (and, I suspect, does) differ from one generation of x86 processor to another.
Yes, but while the percentage of improvement may have decreased the originally assembly language was still faster after three cpu generations. At least in the last major piece of assembly that I wrote. At each new cpu generation, and compiler upgrade, I would retest the c and asm implementations.
Even *if* the asm implementation had gotten slower than the c implementation after three cpu generations it may still have been the way to go. Apps are sometimes optimized for the minimum system requirements not the latest and greatest hardware.
I can write my own email, thanks.
80% of the emails that I receive from customers originate with the "Email Support" button that appears with the integrated manual in my calculator app.
Now under iOS I only create a URL that defines "to", "subject", etc fields and pass that off to the system mail app, so my app never needs to see your contacts or your emails.
Would you find a similar approach, launching the system email app with some fields pre configured, disagreeable under Android? I'm planning on doing an Android version in the near future and I'm curious. Thanks for any suggestions.
Your application looks interesting. Do you plan on bringing it to Android any time soon, or is it worth $220 for an iPod touch?
I am currently working on redoing the iOS user interface a bit and implementing a few user suggestions. After that I do plan on an Android version.
... I'm platform agnostic. Personally I tend to look for apps on iOS first but I definitely appreciate Android and have a few Android apps that literally are not allowed by Apple under iOS, "Wifi Analyzer" for example. That said the iPod touch is a pretty cool little device if you don't need cellular, gps, etc. I hope you have a lot more in mind beyond a calculator app though. :-) One thing that makes me a little reluctant about the touch is that the iPhone and iPad just got refreshed and moved to a new CPU, the touch is still using the previous generation CPU. There has been no announcement but I can't help but wonder when the touch will get refreshed and updated to the current CPU.
Regarding an iPod touch
Why would you do this through notifications? I would think that something like 'Tip of the Day' when you open the app (that you could disable) would be much more appropriate.
To be clear these local notifications would be generated and displayed immediately while in the app as an alternative to the app simply putting up a dialog box. Since the app is in the foreground a dialog will be immediately shown but I think the message will also be available in the notification center for future reference. I think, but I could be mistaken. I am currently just displaying a dialog and I am just thinking about switching to a notification. If it turns out they aren't visible in notification center I probably would just stick with the current dialog box.
Unsolicited notifications are never acceptable and I have uninstalled every app that has ever bugged me with one. As the other reply asked, why not include this information as a "tip of the day" when the app is invoked, rather than shove it in the notification bar where important stuff goes? Why do I need to know something about your calculator at some random time when I'm not even using it?
Actually I am currently putting up a dialog box while in the app and not using the local notification system in iOS. However I am thinking about using the local notification system rather than a dialog box since it would seem a cleaner and more functional implementation. Note that this local notification would *not* be generated at some random time, it would be generated as you startup the calculator app. I would not be using push notifications.
Is using the local notification system while in the app really that different than putting up a dialog box?
I pretty much avoid apps with any kind of in-app purchasing. If you think your app is worth the price of all the extra bits, well then allow me to buy the whole thing. I'm not interested in being nickeled and dimed to death for extra levels, abilities or features.
I have two app, the full paid http://www.perpenso.com/calc/calc3.html app with various calculators built into a single app and a lite app where scientific (including fractions and complex numbers) is built-in but other modes such as statistics, business and hex are in-app purchases. The fully paid includes everything and there is no advertising and it is offered at a bundled price point, about 60% of the price of all the in-app purchases combined, equivalent to 3 of the available 5 in-apps. There are plenty of users who only purchase 1 or 2 of the in-apps.
The problem as a developer is that some users only discover the lite app. I mention the fully paid app in the lite app's description and that it may offer a cost savings, yet there are a noticeable number of users who purchase all 5 individual in-app purchases. I don't think all of these users are trying to be supportive, that most just did not notice the fully paid bundled app.
If I had done as you suggest and only offered the fully paid bundled version I may have lost many of the smaller sales. I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions. In the future I plan to again use this 2 app strategy of fully paid bundle priced and completely a-la-carte via in-app purchases. The difficulty seem to be in making potential users aware of both versions so that they can select the best fit.
I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all single app solution. Am I missing something?
As a developer I'd like to know a little more about notifications and what users consider acceptable. For example in one of my apps, http://www.perpenso.com/calc/calc3.html, I have some one time notifications regarding optional calculator modes. I may point out that historically calculators may do A or B, and that this app does A. The handful of notifications that I have are related to very common user errors.
So, what do people think. Are one time notifications regarding common mistakes acceptable?
I'm not sure what level of "architecture" you are talking about. An assembly language usually reveals relatively little about the architecture underlying the CPUs that execute the code generated by the assembler.
That is a very modern x86 centric view. Even so we still have an "instruction set architecture" (ISA) in the modern x86 case. This ISA limits the underlying hardware architecture's (micro-ops) view of the software's intent. We still have the case where optimizing at the ISA level can also improve performance at the micro-op level. Furthermore understanding the underlying micro-op architecture can help to write more efficient code at the ISA or C level. This level is not documented but a little is known about it. More importantly the architecture of a CPU is not limited to the micro-ops. We still have caching and other things to consider.
The worst choice in C is to think you need to help the compiler optimize. Seriously, the compiler doesn't care at all whether you write x = x << 1; x += x; or x *= 2; it sees them all the same, so code the one that makes sense in context.
Historically helping the compiler, giving it hints, is in fact a good way to get superior code out of a compiler. For example consider 4x4 matrix multiplication. Do you use nested loops or just unroll it manually? Compilers tend not to fully unroll all the nested loops. The compiler may do better scheduling on fully unrolled non-looping code. Do you create temporary variables to preload a row or column, or do you just access each variable in memory directly? The former may generate better code on a RISC architecture and the later on a CISC architecture. These are the sort of things I think of when referring to helping the compiler, giving it hints. When that mythical smart compiler arrives that is able to figure out the preceding on its own, it will simply ignore your hints, the hints will do no harm. Until this mythical compiler arrives, the hints may help.
BTW, I agree with your sentiment in the context of the example you offer. Besides being useless, I've also seen people introduce bugs by making such "optimizations". Replaced the subexpression "x * 2" with "x << 1" in a larger expression and you may have changed the order of evaluation of the overall expression and are doing an erroneous calculation. "<<" has a different operator precedence that "*".
That said, I rarely use assembly in professional software development situations when targeting computers and mobile devices. Before addressing your comment let me add one more thing. Learning assembly is important with respect to making you a better C programmer. I'm not talking about understanding the asm code you see in the debugger. I really am referring to writing C code. C code can be written in architecturally specific manners. The code is still portable, yet more efficient only on a specific architecture. Understanding the architecture and assembly language can allow you to write more efficient C code.
Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, ...
That is nothing new, this has been true for decades. You have to go back to Apple II and Commodore 64 days to find a timeframe where assembly was appropriate for general purpose software development. I'm referring to computers, not micro controllers and other such environments.
... modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for.
This is absolutely false. The key to writing good assembly code is not trying to out-compile the compiler, that is a newbie thing to do. The key is to leverage knowledge that can not be transmitted to the compiler, can not be expressed in C. This is where the real win is, this is where assembly can still beat C even after a couple of architectural upgrades.
I know for a fact that my C code is faster than my Assembly code... since the time I lost track of all CPU pipelining and stuff, while compilers only got better at optimizing. When they release version 1.0, it will probably have to be run on a emulator, perhaps in a quantum computer.
Some assembly code that I wrote was faster than C from current compilers over several major architectural changes of x86. The percentage by which they were faster decreased, yet after 3 architecture changes I was still 10% faster with the original assembly.
The key to writing good assembly code is not trying to out-compile the compiler, that is a newbie thing to do. The key is to leverage knowledge that can not be transmitted to the compiler, can not be expressed in C.
I've worked with current facial recognition systems and they're absolutely junk. They can match mug shots with perfect lighting but that's about all. It's a very long way to being able to pick people out of some crappy live video stream. Mind, I worked with whatever's publicly available; maybe the various big brother agencies have better stuff; i wouldn't bet on it though.
A while ago I did a little research in computer vision. From the summary it seems like nothing more than moving a project from an academic project to a real world project.
In the academic world it is perfectly acceptable to use carefully selected or crafted inputs (facial images in this case) to develop and evaluate your algorithms. You may have separate date sets for development and evaluation, however careful selection or crafting is OK to simplify the project and avoid issues/variables outside of the project's scope. In your particular mugshot example this would be using images of good resolution and good/predictable lighting. Dealing with low resolution and bad lighting would be an issue left to the next thesis or research grant or for commercialization.
Working with mugshots may be a fluke, the inputs happen to be carefully crafted like one might do in academic research. So it was relatively simple to transition to this niche real world application.
Moving to a general real world solution using images and video of questionable quality is an enormous jump in the level of difficulty. Perhaps too difficult. It may not be possible to recognize an individual. It may only be possible to offer a somewhat generalized characterization that a person my fit into. At least with the haphazardly placed cameras typically found on the streets and in shops today. Some places use very good and carefully positioned cameras to get decent images for automated facial recognition. For example Las Vegas casinos.