Most "good" managers I've met are not good because of skills or training, but from simply being personable, intelligent, and able to solve problems (real world problems, generally very different from the types of problems programmers face). It takes a minimal amount of training to get a good manager, as long as you start with the right person, who possesses those innate abilities.
As someone who recently graduated from business school I have to disagree with respect to "minimal amount of training". The more formal training the better. Especially since the poster seems to indicate an executive angle not just tech management. The MBA stuff would really help out since it offers a good overall understanding of all the pieces of an organization. Business school and MBAs are not what most around here think, I was just as guilty. One of the things that made business school lots of fun for me was seeing just how ignorant and biased I had been with respect to management, marketing, etc.
Apple adapted their Mac word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications for the iPad. Personally I think they are pretty capable and a good user experience with an external keyboard at least. With the onscreen keyboard I would only suggest brief usage. YMMV.
Do the iPad word processing/spreadsheet and presentation apps compare favorably with the desktop Mac versions? I know that the Android versions don't come anywhere close to Windows desktop Office or Open/LibreOffice versions, which you can currently run with no trouble on a netbook.
I've used both the Mac and iPad versions (and OpenOffice as well), in my opinion the iPad versions compare favorably. However I'm not a features heavy sort of user. My needs are modest. Hell, I'd probably still be using Office 97 if I hadn't gone back to school in recent history.:-)
Re:Tables are a netbook competitor
on
Dell Ditches Netbooks
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think a tablet is a complementary product for desktops and laptops, and it is a competing product for netbooks. I also think this will eventually change. In the future I expect some tablet device to basically be somewhat similar to the CPU "box" of a desktop. When mobile it acts like a tablet, when at your desk in its dock its just the "CPU" with external storage, keyboard and display connecting to it. Not terribly different than connecting a laptop to a full sized keyboard and monitor when at your desk.
I think you're right in saying that a dockable tablet will eventually replace netooks. But I don't think we're there yet, because when "docked" with a keyboard, it still isn't as useful as a netbook or a notebook, if only because the tablet applications themselves aren't as powerful as their desktop equivalents or don't translate well to a desktop experience. When I'm out and about I don't see many tablets. I do, however, still see a lot of netbooks. Yes, there may be a lot of tablets used at home or in business, but that's not what I'm still seeing out in public.
Apple adapted their Mac word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications for the iPad. Personally I think they are pretty capable and a good user experience with an external keyboard at least. With the onscreen keyboard I would only suggest brief usage. YMMV.
To use Google services you have to agree to some type of terms. A contract with a minor is not enforceable in the U.S. Google has to have an adult involved somehow.
I doubt it. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing Acer continue with their Aspire One line either. They'd be just focusing on their Iconia tablet line.
When a bunch of vendors try to create/enter a new market, and then most of them change their minds, I think it is fair to say the market "died" to some degree. It may be more accurate to say that tablets killed the market. The iPad being the first demonstrable case of a tablet being effective competition to a netbook. Its hard to image a potential netbook customer not wondering if a tablet would be a better idea.
Personally I find an iPad with an external bluetooth keyboard to be quite capable at the simple word processing and spreadsheet tasks one might use a netbook for.
I think a tablet is a complementary product for desktops and laptops, and it is a competing product for netbooks. I also think this will eventually change. In the future I expect some tablet device to basically be somewhat similar to the CPU "box" of a desktop. When mobile it acts like a tablet, when at your desk in its dock its just the "CPU" with external storage, keyboard and display connecting to it. Not terribly different than connecting a laptop to a full sized keyboard and monitor when at your desk.
If BSD was licensed under the GPL then there would probably have been no interest in Linux (and thus no resources consumed on duplicating BSD under the GPL) because there would have been no need for it; it would mean that "GNU/BSD" would have had a more than ten year head start on where GNU/Linux is now.
Not really. BSD was ported to the PC as soon as practical. Its been argued that Linux only got ahead because of BSD getting tied up in an AT&T lawsuit. That lawsuit would have happened regardless of a BSD or GPL license. So maybe your GNU/BSD would have lagged with respect to progress as it was tied up in court.
... you look at something like SunOS... Sun is a hardware company. Today a fair share of their hardware is sold with Linux on it. Ditto HP nee DEC. I kind of doubt that they would have written their own OS from scratch just because BSD was licensed under the GPL. They would either have paid AT&T to license Unix instead of getting BSD for free (with little major difference in result), or they would have just produced and distributed SunOS under the GPL -- they were in it to sell hardware, remember.
Licensing AT&T seems more plausible, as SGI did. Linux never seemed particularly interesting to Sun. It looked like they only went x86 and Linux as their business began to struggle. They tried to offer low end servers running Linux so as not to dilute the Solaris brand, and then tried upgrade these users to higher end hardware and Solaris. Sun didn't really embrace Linux beyond this, as their business struggled they tried to open Solaris under their own FOSS license. I'm not sure why a GPL'd BSD would have been any more attractive to them than Linux.
At that point the speculation starts to get pretty wild, because if Sun and DEC (and others) had worked together to create a single GPL'd GNU/BSD in the 1980s instead of separate forks,...
They could have done so with under the BSD license. I don't see why the GPL license would have discouraged forking.
Free software predates Berkley Unix. Berkley Unix itself came from AT&Ts open source version of Unix. Open source predates Unix, what AT&T did was not unusual. All through the 1950s and 60s distributing source was almost universal.
"Open source" in the FOSS sense is more than having access to the source code. My understanding is that AT&T licensed the software to pretty much anyone who asked. Over the years I've had access to the source code of various commercial proprietary libraries by getting the source code license rather than just the binary license. Doing so does not make this code FOSS, there needs to be the ability to redistribute the source among other things.
I get the sharing thing on an individual basis. Back in the days of CompuServe, BIX and various BBS' people would offer code to someone who was trying to figure something out, point out bugs when someone was stuck, etc. All without concern as to whether stuff was used in commercial or public settings. Just one programmer helping out another programmer.
BSD, as in Berkeley Standard Distribution, sure. The BSD license?
The two are highly intertwined. The license greatly facilitated the popularity of the distribution.
What harm do you imagine would have come if the GPL had existed when BSD first started and they had used it instead of the BSD license?
A significant incentive for companies not to use the distribution. No SunOS, no DEC Ultrix, no NextSTEP, no Mac OS X, etc built upon a solid foundation; we probably would have had more start from scratch OS's like Windows NT and Apple's Copland. Perhaps we would have had more proprietary networking if everyone, including Microsoft, was not able to simply lift (or derive from) the BSD network stack.
Desktop UNIX would not have made it to the average consumer, by now, as it has via Mac OS X.
everything has pros and cons, we can have something good for "economics" but bad for society as a whole
That is what happens with GPL and BSD
False. BSD has been incredibly good for society. UC Berkeley's sharing of their implementation of Unix is the very origin of the FOSS movement. BSD is where many original Linux developers learned how to do their thing. And where many Linux developers, to this day, find some pretty useful code.
Society generally benefits from the more open and more flexible approaches. Society usually does not benefit as much from the "this is the one and only true path" approach of the zealot.
Let things break. Let things prematurely wear out due to the extremely hostile environment, extreme temperature swings, etc. Let things fail to function as advertised by the manufacturer, or some environment issue that was overlooked because of our limited experience in space. Apollo 13 may be a little too extreme but do some research on the day to day maintenance and surprises of the Mir space station.
Look back to the original Alien movie (1979?). On the upper decks of the spacecraft Nostromo (?) officers were dealing with computers, navigation, communications, science, etc. On the lower decks a couple of guys were using wrenches to deal with the plumbing. I always thought that was a nice touch of realism. When we go to Mars the most important member of the crew will often be the mechanic.
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Its also a bogus comparison. Consoles don't have a constant stream of upgraded CPU, RAM and video cards. In comparison the hardware specs of consoles are static. So a game written in year 1 of the console's life has the same hardware requirements as a game written in year 5 of the console's life. If that year 5 game has better visuals it is only because the programmers have greater experience and skills with respect to getting every bit of performance out of that 5 year old hardware. This is quite different than the PC world where a game written 5 years later will have very different minimum system requirements and deliver better visuals because of more capable hardware.
The iOS dev tools are $599 but they come with a free computer.
Your joke ignores the fact that some already have a Mac, including man *nix oriented folks who find Mac OS X a nicer *nix environment. It also ignores the fact that iOS development only requires a very modest mac so a used one will do quite well. It also ignores the fact that a Mac can make a good Windows system so the effective cost may often be the difference between your next PC and a comparable Mac.
Time to answer call, time to resolve ticket, abandoned tickets (unresolved).
In business school it is a common theme in various classes that you get what you reward, not what you ask for, not what is necessarily best for the organization. Here is a highly relevant Dilbert cartoon illustrating this point, http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/.
The underlying problem is that metrics applied to humans leads to people working towards the metrics, not necessarily doing good work. It is a classic environment for unintended consequences. Its not even that the people are necessarily being opportunistic, there is also a certain amount of practicality. If you are being measured by some metric and keeping your job or getting a raise is dependent upon that metric you may quite rationally decide to act to that metric rather than what is necessarily in the best interest of customers.
Are you measured by resolved tickets? Then tickets will get resolved quickly. Not necessarily thoroughly, completely, or robustly resolved. Which leads to related followup tickets because of a minimal effort put into resolving the original ticket. I saw this in a programming environment where the tickets consisted of new features or bug fixes.
Are you measured by abandoned tickets? Then tickets will get resolved, even if they don't reasonably deserve to be considered resolved. You will get things unnecessarily classified as "unable to duplicate", "insufficient information", etc.
In these two examples, where is the difficulty of the task factored in? Not all task, tickets, are equivalent. Furthermore sometimes there are external dependencies, a part is being shipped, where is this factored in?
The metrics you offer are reminiscent of stats from call centers. There such metrics are a little more reasonable, not perfect but perhaps OK, given that the calls are somewhat equivalent in the amount of effort required, a small number of minutes not hours, and that they are randomly assigned. Over the period of say a month the large number of calls handled by any operator will resemble a normal curve with respect to effort required. For an IT organization the evaluation period may need to be some number of years to get to a normal curve with respect to effort required.
My understanding is that there have been about 15 billion download under iOS and 10 billion under Android. However the more important number is that under iOS 2/3 of those are paid apps while under Android only 1/3 are paid apps.
As a developer I plan to support both iOS and Android. I design things to separate UI and core code, and the later is written in a highly portable manner using C/C++ to make additional platforms easier to target. However things like the above tell me to target iOS first.
I understand the "walled garden" concerns many Android users have but from a developer's perspective an unfragmented distribution channel (a single app store) is also attractive.
The problem is that the people doing these things - metrics - don't know better. That's what they were taught in management school,...
Not really. Getting what you reward not what you ask for and unintended consequences are recurring themes in business school. Applying metrics to humans rather than machines is offered as a common way to get the preceding. Wally coding himself a minivan is popular in business school, not just geek circles.
That said, some students can show up, pass exams, and still do not learn.
Its not just the losers. Talented and rational technicians and engineers bend to the rules of the system too. Basically you get what you incentivize, what your reward. If you reward people for complying to some metric then they will generally comply. It does not matter what everyone agrees is right, it does matter if management says quality is important. If the metric decides whether you get to keep your job or get that raise then the metric is what the company gets regardless of what the company asks for or whether the company's goals are actually advanced.
Wrong as in libel, slander, etc. *Not* wrong as in unpopular, politically incorrect, challenging the powerful, etc. So... who decides the difference? That's the crux of the issue, in the final analysis.
The judges elected by voters, the judges appointed by the president and confirmed by congress,... all acting in accordance to the us constitution. In other words the same folks from pre-internet days.
TIMES HAVE CHANGED. I'm sick of all the morons ignoring the fact that Computers have indeed revolutionized the way we function to a large degree.
The judge appears to be doing no such thing. He seems to recognize people who were trained in journalism or who act according to professional journalistic standards, he is not requiring that they belong to a traditional media outlet.
What you need to think about is how MANY of the current laws need to be revised since we've entered the Information Age. Or, hell, let's conider EVERY SINGLE PERSON a publisher?! No... that's not what's really going on.
Actually many around here do seem to hold such an opinion, that any blogger claiming to be a journalist is a journalist.
I'm also a bit fuzzy as to how the laws regarding defamation need to be changed for the digital age. I don't see much difference between what a drunk says to a crowd in a pub and what that same drunk publishes via twitter.
From the article: "He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation."
So journalist or not she still would have been sued?
From the slashdot reader comments: "If the government can define who is part of the press, and therefore gets First Amendment protections, then where does that place the freedom of the press?"
Note that the first amendment protects your right to publish. It does not necessarily make you immune from all repercussions of what your write. There is nothing unconstitutional about suing newspapers for liable, defamation, etc. There may be a different level of evidence required for a newspaper vs a private citizen though. The question seems to be if a blogger does *not* act according to professional journalistic standards does a blogger get treated as a journalist or a private citizen making a public statement.
From the article: "Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story."
Publishing does not necessarily make one a journalist. In the pre-internet era someone could write something and post it in a public forum (window, wall, light pole, etc), hand out their writing on the street, etc. Doing so did not make them a journalist. Simply being a blogger seems comparable. However if a blogger has had some training and acts like a journalistic professional then it seems the judge has left the door open to a blogger being recognized as a journalist.
... it's not even possible to buy American-made goods even if you wanted to. You're stuck buying shitty foreign products...
Try googling "Made in USA".
And when on a particular website see if "Made in USA" is one of the search filters: http://www.rei.com/search?search=Made+in+the+USA. Look at the categories and item counts on the left of this page.
I expect at some point my kids will be using them after I am dead.
much of my tools are of a similar build quality. I want to trust my tools not to break, at all under normal use, and not catastrophically under above max rating use.
I have my grandfather's household tools, keep in mind that in his day you did most of the maintenance and repairs of your home yourself so the collection is a little larger than one might guess. I have a granduncle's tools too and he was a carpenter. Unfortunately the wiring on his power tools are unsafe now but I also have his hand tools from the earlier part of his career. Too bad I flunked wood shop. If your stuff is built like the stuff from the 1940s and 50s it may make it well past your grandkids.
Slashdot Mirror
Most "good" managers I've met are not good because of skills or training, but from simply being personable, intelligent, and able to solve problems (real world problems, generally very different from the types of problems programmers face). It takes a minimal amount of training to get a good manager, as long as you start with the right person, who possesses those innate abilities.
As someone who recently graduated from business school I have to disagree with respect to "minimal amount of training". The more formal training the better. Especially since the poster seems to indicate an executive angle not just tech management. The MBA stuff would really help out since it offers a good overall understanding of all the pieces of an organization. Business school and MBAs are not what most around here think, I was just as guilty. One of the things that made business school lots of fun for me was seeing just how ignorant and biased I had been with respect to management, marketing, etc.
Apple adapted their Mac word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications for the iPad. Personally I think they are pretty capable and a good user experience with an external keyboard at least. With the onscreen keyboard I would only suggest brief usage. YMMV.
Do the iPad word processing/spreadsheet and presentation apps compare favorably with the desktop Mac versions? I know that the Android versions don't come anywhere close to Windows desktop Office or Open/LibreOffice versions, which you can currently run with no trouble on a netbook.
I've used both the Mac and iPad versions (and OpenOffice as well), in my opinion the iPad versions compare favorably. However I'm not a features heavy sort of user. My needs are modest. Hell, I'd probably still be using Office 97 if I hadn't gone back to school in recent history. :-)
FWIW, the apps are Words, Numbers and Keynote. http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/apps-by-apple/
I think a tablet is a complementary product for desktops and laptops, and it is a competing product for netbooks. I also think this will eventually change. In the future I expect some tablet device to basically be somewhat similar to the CPU "box" of a desktop. When mobile it acts like a tablet, when at your desk in its dock its just the "CPU" with external storage, keyboard and display connecting to it. Not terribly different than connecting a laptop to a full sized keyboard and monitor when at your desk.
I think you're right in saying that a dockable tablet will eventually replace netooks. But I don't think we're there yet, because when "docked" with a keyboard, it still isn't as useful as a netbook or a notebook, if only because the tablet applications themselves aren't as powerful as their desktop equivalents or don't translate well to a desktop experience. When I'm out and about I don't see many tablets. I do, however, still see a lot of netbooks. Yes, there may be a lot of tablets used at home or in business, but that's not what I'm still seeing out in public.
Apple adapted their Mac word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications for the iPad. Personally I think they are pretty capable and a good user experience with an external keyboard at least. With the onscreen keyboard I would only suggest brief usage. YMMV.
To use Google services you have to agree to some type of terms. A contract with a minor is not enforceable in the U.S. Google has to have an adult involved somehow.
iPad killed the netbook market.
I doubt it. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing Acer continue with their Aspire One line either. They'd be just focusing on their Iconia tablet line.
When a bunch of vendors try to create/enter a new market, and then most of them change their minds, I think it is fair to say the market "died" to some degree. It may be more accurate to say that tablets killed the market. The iPad being the first demonstrable case of a tablet being effective competition to a netbook. Its hard to image a potential netbook customer not wondering if a tablet would be a better idea.
Personally I find an iPad with an external bluetooth keyboard to be quite capable at the simple word processing and spreadsheet tasks one might use a netbook for.
I think a tablet is a complementary product for desktops and laptops, and it is a competing product for netbooks. I also think this will eventually change. In the future I expect some tablet device to basically be somewhat similar to the CPU "box" of a desktop. When mobile it acts like a tablet, when at your desk in its dock its just the "CPU" with external storage, keyboard and display connecting to it. Not terribly different than connecting a laptop to a full sized keyboard and monitor when at your desk.
If BSD was licensed under the GPL then there would probably have been no interest in Linux (and thus no resources consumed on duplicating BSD under the GPL) because there would have been no need for it; it would mean that "GNU/BSD" would have had a more than ten year head start on where GNU/Linux is now.
Not really. BSD was ported to the PC as soon as practical. Its been argued that Linux only got ahead because of BSD getting tied up in an AT&T lawsuit. That lawsuit would have happened regardless of a BSD or GPL license. So maybe your GNU/BSD would have lagged with respect to progress as it was tied up in court.
... you look at something like SunOS... Sun is a hardware company. Today a fair share of their hardware is sold with Linux on it. Ditto HP nee DEC. I kind of doubt that they would have written their own OS from scratch just because BSD was licensed under the GPL. They would either have paid AT&T to license Unix instead of getting BSD for free (with little major difference in result), or they would have just produced and distributed SunOS under the GPL -- they were in it to sell hardware, remember.
Licensing AT&T seems more plausible, as SGI did. Linux never seemed particularly interesting to Sun. It looked like they only went x86 and Linux as their business began to struggle. They tried to offer low end servers running Linux so as not to dilute the Solaris brand, and then tried upgrade these users to higher end hardware and Solaris. Sun didn't really embrace Linux beyond this, as their business struggled they tried to open Solaris under their own FOSS license. I'm not sure why a GPL'd BSD would have been any more attractive to them than Linux.
At that point the speculation starts to get pretty wild, because if Sun and DEC (and others) had worked together to create a single GPL'd GNU/BSD in the 1980s instead of separate forks, ...
They could have done so with under the BSD license. I don't see why the GPL license would have discouraged forking.
Free software predates Berkley Unix. Berkley Unix itself came from AT&Ts open source version of Unix. Open source predates Unix, what AT&T did was not unusual. All through the 1950s and 60s distributing source was almost universal.
"Open source" in the FOSS sense is more than having access to the source code. My understanding is that AT&T licensed the software to pretty much anyone who asked. Over the years I've had access to the source code of various commercial proprietary libraries by getting the source code license rather than just the binary license. Doing so does not make this code FOSS, there needs to be the ability to redistribute the source among other things.
I get the sharing thing on an individual basis. Back in the days of CompuServe, BIX and various BBS' people would offer code to someone who was trying to figure something out, point out bugs when someone was stuck, etc. All without concern as to whether stuff was used in commercial or public settings. Just one programmer helping out another programmer.
BSD has been incredibly good for society.
BSD, as in Berkeley Standard Distribution, sure. The BSD license?
The two are highly intertwined. The license greatly facilitated the popularity of the distribution.
What harm do you imagine would have come if the GPL had existed when BSD first started and they had used it instead of the BSD license?
A significant incentive for companies not to use the distribution. No SunOS, no DEC Ultrix, no NextSTEP, no Mac OS X, etc built upon a solid foundation; we probably would have had more start from scratch OS's like Windows NT and Apple's Copland. Perhaps we would have had more proprietary networking if everyone, including Microsoft, was not able to simply lift (or derive from) the BSD network stack.
Desktop UNIX would not have made it to the average consumer, by now, as it has via Mac OS X.
everything has pros and cons, we can have something good for "economics" but bad for society as a whole
That is what happens with GPL and BSD
False. BSD has been incredibly good for society. UC Berkeley's sharing of their implementation of Unix is the very origin of the FOSS movement. BSD is where many original Linux developers learned how to do their thing. And where many Linux developers, to this day, find some pretty useful code.
Society generally benefits from the more open and more flexible approaches. Society usually does not benefit as much from the "this is the one and only true path" approach of the zealot.
I would like to give believability to the story
Let things break. Let things prematurely wear out due to the extremely hostile environment, extreme temperature swings, etc. Let things fail to function as advertised by the manufacturer, or some environment issue that was overlooked because of our limited experience in space. Apollo 13 may be a little too extreme but do some research on the day to day maintenance and surprises of the Mir space station.
Look back to the original Alien movie (1979?). On the upper decks of the spacecraft Nostromo (?) officers were dealing with computers, navigation, communications, science, etc. On the lower decks a couple of guys were using wrenches to deal with the plumbing. I always thought that was a nice touch of realism. When we go to Mars the most important member of the crew will often be the mechanic.
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Its also a bogus comparison. Consoles don't have a constant stream of upgraded CPU, RAM and video cards. In comparison the hardware specs of consoles are static. So a game written in year 1 of the console's life has the same hardware requirements as a game written in year 5 of the console's life. If that year 5 game has better visuals it is only because the programmers have greater experience and skills with respect to getting every bit of performance out of that 5 year old hardware. This is quite different than the PC world where a game written 5 years later will have very different minimum system requirements and deliver better visuals because of more capable hardware.
The iOS dev tools are $599 but they come with a free computer.
Your joke ignores the fact that some already have a Mac, including man *nix oriented folks who find Mac OS X a nicer *nix environment. It also ignores the fact that iOS development only requires a very modest mac so a used one will do quite well. It also ignores the fact that a Mac can make a good Windows system so the effective cost may often be the difference between your next PC and a comparable Mac.
To think, not so long ago, my siblings and I were all lobbing lawn darts at each other, yet we all lived and didn't even lose an eye.
Of course only those of us nimble enough to dodge are here to make and read these lawn dart posts. :-)
Time to answer call, time to resolve ticket, abandoned tickets (unresolved).
In business school it is a common theme in various classes that you get what you reward, not what you ask for, not what is necessarily best for the organization. Here is a highly relevant Dilbert cartoon illustrating this point, http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/.
The underlying problem is that metrics applied to humans leads to people working towards the metrics, not necessarily doing good work. It is a classic environment for unintended consequences. Its not even that the people are necessarily being opportunistic, there is also a certain amount of practicality. If you are being measured by some metric and keeping your job or getting a raise is dependent upon that metric you may quite rationally decide to act to that metric rather than what is necessarily in the best interest of customers.
Are you measured by resolved tickets? Then tickets will get resolved quickly. Not necessarily thoroughly, completely, or robustly resolved. Which leads to related followup tickets because of a minimal effort put into resolving the original ticket. I saw this in a programming environment where the tickets consisted of new features or bug fixes.
Are you measured by abandoned tickets? Then tickets will get resolved, even if they don't reasonably deserve to be considered resolved. You will get things unnecessarily classified as "unable to duplicate", "insufficient information", etc.
In these two examples, where is the difficulty of the task factored in? Not all task, tickets, are equivalent. Furthermore sometimes there are external dependencies, a part is being shipped, where is this factored in?
The metrics you offer are reminiscent of stats from call centers. There such metrics are a little more reasonable, not perfect but perhaps OK, given that the calls are somewhat equivalent in the amount of effort required, a small number of minutes not hours, and that they are randomly assigned. Over the period of say a month the large number of calls handled by any operator will resemble a normal curve with respect to effort required. For an IT organization the evaluation period may need to be some number of years to get to a normal curve with respect to effort required.
My understanding is that there have been about 15 billion download under iOS and 10 billion under Android. However the more important number is that under iOS 2/3 of those are paid apps while under Android only 1/3 are paid apps.
As a developer I plan to support both iOS and Android. I design things to separate UI and core code, and the later is written in a highly portable manner using C/C++ to make additional platforms easier to target. However things like the above tell me to target iOS first.
I understand the "walled garden" concerns many Android users have but from a developer's perspective an unfragmented distribution channel (a single app store) is also attractive.
The problem is that the people doing these things - metrics - don't know better. That's what they were taught in management school, ...
Not really. Getting what you reward not what you ask for and unintended consequences are recurring themes in business school. Applying metrics to humans rather than machines is offered as a common way to get the preceding. Wally coding himself a minivan is popular in business school, not just geek circles.
That said, some students can show up, pass exams, and still do not learn.
Typo: it does *not* matter if management says quality is important
Its not just the losers. Talented and rational technicians and engineers bend to the rules of the system too. Basically you get what you incentivize, what your reward. If you reward people for complying to some metric then they will generally comply. It does not matter what everyone agrees is right, it does matter if management says quality is important. If the metric decides whether you get to keep your job or get that raise then the metric is what the company gets regardless of what the company asks for or whether the company's goals are actually advanced.
Wrong as in libel, slander, etc. *Not* wrong as in unpopular, politically incorrect, challenging the powerful, etc. So... who decides the difference? That's the crux of the issue, in the final analysis.
The judges elected by voters, the judges appointed by the president and confirmed by congress, ... all acting in accordance to the us constitution. In other words the same folks from pre-internet days.
TIMES HAVE CHANGED. I'm sick of all the morons ignoring the fact that Computers have indeed revolutionized the way we function to a large degree.
The judge appears to be doing no such thing. He seems to recognize people who were trained in journalism or who act according to professional journalistic standards, he is not requiring that they belong to a traditional media outlet.
What you need to think about is how MANY of the current laws need to be revised since we've entered the Information Age. Or, hell, let's conider EVERY SINGLE PERSON a publisher?! No... that's not what's really going on.
Actually many around here do seem to hold such an opinion, that any blogger claiming to be a journalist is a journalist.
I'm also a bit fuzzy as to how the laws regarding defamation need to be changed for the digital age. I don't see much difference between what a drunk says to a crowd in a pub and what that same drunk publishes via twitter.
Note that the first amendment protects your right to publish. It does not necessarily make you immune from all repercussions of what your write.
Hmm...so I have the right to say anything, but if I say the wrong thing, I could face punishment for doing so?
Wrong as in libel, slander, etc. *Not* wrong as in unpopular, politically incorrect, challenging the powerful, etc.
What's next ...
Your virtual character is virtually arrested and gets a virtual trial in a virtual hague.
From the article: "He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation."
So journalist or not she still would have been sued?
From the slashdot reader comments: "If the government can define who is part of the press, and therefore gets First Amendment protections, then where does that place the freedom of the press?"
Note that the first amendment protects your right to publish. It does not necessarily make you immune from all repercussions of what your write. There is nothing unconstitutional about suing newspapers for liable, defamation, etc. There may be a different level of evidence required for a newspaper vs a private citizen though. The question seems to be if a blogger does *not* act according to professional journalistic standards does a blogger get treated as a journalist or a private citizen making a public statement.
From the article: "Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story."
Publishing does not necessarily make one a journalist. In the pre-internet era someone could write something and post it in a public forum (window, wall, light pole, etc), hand out their writing on the street, etc. Doing so did not make them a journalist. Simply being a blogger seems comparable. However if a blogger has had some training and acts like a journalistic professional then it seems the judge has left the door open to a blogger being recognized as a journalist.
... it's not even possible to buy American-made goods even if you wanted to. You're stuck buying shitty foreign products ...
Try googling "Made in USA".
And when on a particular website see if "Made in USA" is one of the search filters: http://www.rei.com/search?search=Made+in+the+USA. Look at the categories and item counts on the left of this page.
I expect at some point my kids will be using them after I am dead. much of my tools are of a similar build quality. I want to trust my tools not to break, at all under normal use, and not catastrophically under above max rating use.
I have my grandfather's household tools, keep in mind that in his day you did most of the maintenance and repairs of your home yourself so the collection is a little larger than one might guess. I have a granduncle's tools too and he was a carpenter. Unfortunately the wiring on his power tools are unsafe now but I also have his hand tools from the earlier part of his career. Too bad I flunked wood shop. If your stuff is built like the stuff from the 1940s and 50s it may make it well past your grandkids.