I believe he's referencing a paper whose subject was "Incompetent people fail to understand that they are incompetent, thus overestimate their skills." Hardly ground-breaking research.
No it isn't ground-breaking to know that ignorant people don't know they are ignorant; the authors of the paper quote Charles Darwin: "as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, 'ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge'."
What was ground-breaking was showing that people who weren't ignorant downplayed their skills; they "knew what they didn't know."
He makes the flawed assumption that college graduates make a better effort to continuously hone their skills than non-graduates - a claim with little to no evidence, at least none that he has shown.
The evidence is the college degree. It's a hoop to jump through; a painful, stupid hoop sometimes, but a hoop nonetheless. Get a science or engineering degree from a top-tier school and it says that, at the very least, you know how to work and to think. Skip that process and pretend that it doesn't have any value and it says volumes about you.
I trust in top-tier universities to separate wheat from the chaff because I don't know of any other process which is a better way to judge someone just starting out. Can you name one, or do your skills only lend themselves to criticism?
I still have a standing offer: will anyone have an architect without a degree design a house they would then live in?
This same problem faces universities trying to create a software engineering school that is teaching to an ever moving target.
And yet Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering can be taught. Amazing, that. I guess there haven't been any advances in those fields, either.
If Software Engineering has changed SO much in the last N years, why is "The Mythical Man-Month", written before most/. posters were even born, still considered the best book on Software Engineering ever written?
If anything, software engineering should be like an apprenticeship.
And I agree completely. As I said in my original post, a CS degree is NOT a Software Engineering degree, and it's training in Software Engineering which is needed. An apprenticeship should certainly be a part of the program.
So I think pretty much everyone (except you obviously) knows that they are not hiring geniuses
No, the problem isn't that you think you're hiring a genius, it's that the untrained ignoramous that you hire thinks of HIMSELF as a genius.
There was a well-publicized study in 1999 or 2000 on just this topic. The more someone knows about something, the less competent they tend to evaluate themselves. Conversely, the less someone knows about something, the more they think they are competent. This leads to wildly unrealistic self-evaluation.
I'd bet that the professional programmers who DON'T have degrees in CS tend to consider themselves better programmers than the degree holders. Draw your own conclusions.
IMO, formal training often reduces the ability to think creatively -- once you are taught "the right way", it's hard to break new ground.
Bah. Would you hire an architect to design a house for you without formal training? (I don't want to hear about Howard Roark; he's a fictional character in a poorly written book) Would you hire an untrained civil engineer to build a bridge for you?
There is no relationship between formal training and creativity. There IS a relationship between formal training and knowing what will work. Geniuses know how to push the limits on what will work and create new paradigms. Most untrained people in any field (and heck, most people in any field) are not geniuses, and the less people know, the more likely that they think they are geniuses. That's the real danger.
Question for you. If you rob a bank and are caught, will you be thrown in jail? Answer: yes, so why is it that the thought or imaginatory act, or in this case the depiction of it in 'cartoon' format is OK? It just doesn't make sense that we can't draw the line.
I can repeat your example with murders, other attacks, or, heck, how about something like describing an abortion in graphic detail on anti-abortion site? If abortion should be illegalized (which I'd guess you want, given your Bible thumping), should descriptions of it be illegal, too?
The real problem isn't a particular methodology like XP (which does have good ideas in it), it's the complete lack of professionalism in the software industry.
How many times have people heard of programmers with no degree working on or designing large-scale projects? It's insane. No one would hire an architect or mechanical engineer who didn't have at least a piece of paper from a college. But it happens all the time in software. The costs of the defective systems being turned out by untrained programmers is starting to matter.
Even a CS degree really isn't a sufficient solution to the problem. Software Engineering is NOT computer science, just as Chemical Engineering is not Chemistry. You need knowledge of the latter to do the former, but there is a different skill set which must be learned. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any school which is teaching it to potential software engineers. When they do, real software development can finally begin.
Note that I never said a word about electricity in any of the above; the only time when vendors start trying to sell people on "power efficient" is when they haven't any more compelling argument to make. I knew Corel Computers was in trouble when they spent much of their marketing material selling the fact that their machines were cheaper to run due to low power consumption.
Ah, but power consumption is about to be a serious consideration in California. The cost of electricity has gone up by a factor of TEN. Right now, PG&E et al are not able to pass on this added cost, but sooner or later, it is going to be passed on. When the server farms see their power bills go up by a factor of 5 or 10, spending an extra $100 on a computer to save $1000 on electricity is going to be smart business.
And this is why I suggest that it would be good for Apple to make a rack-mount G3/G4 system, which could still be fanless. They could design a box which delivers the same performance, runs the same apps, and uses significantly less electricity, making the slight difference in cost go away in a matter of months.
Mac OS X is going to be the long-term key to this plan, but Linux/PPC isn't a bad place to start from. With Larry Ellison sitting on Apple's board, I would expect Oracle to be running on OS X within a year. That'll give you Oracle, Apache, and JDK 1.3 all on one box, which uses a lot less power.
This should be a no-brainer, since the power problem in Silicon Valley is going to get worse before it gets better; winter is the OFF season for power, and we're running out (yes, I know there are lots of power plants offline now, but the same principle applies)...
Using Crusoe strikes me as silly when there's another CPU out there which uses a heck of a lot less juice than x86: the PowerPC. Granted, it won't help the WinNT people, but for those running Linux servers in server farms, it's ideal. Low power, low heat (iMacs, iBooks, and Cubes don't even have fans), and a lot faster than Crusoe.
I've been waiting for Apple to start running ads in California trumpeting how much less power Macs use, compared to PCs. This might be a good place for Apple to start; G3/G4 rack-mount, anyone?
You might as well be a criminal. I figure that if you've already paid for the assumption that you're going to pirate, go ahead and do so. It's not like you're going to be able to repeal the law until you buy off more legislators than the recording industry has.
I wonder how long before blank paper is taxed; after all, you could copy a book onto it...
-jon
Re:...but will it keep up with the upgrades?
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Laser-equipped 747
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· Score: 2
So, the premise was good but because of a quirk in the input data, the neural net was incorrectly trained. This doesn't mean it can't be trained correctly, just that you have to provide good input data
And that's the problem: how do you provide good input data? How do you train the net? There's precious little research in extracting from a neural net exactly what rules it is using to make its decision. If you can't know what rules it is using, then you can't trust it's "opinions." It might have learned cloudy sky/clear sky or it might have learned good guy plane/bad guy plane. You won't know until it's too late.
If a terrorist or some "rogue nation" - the State Departments current euphemism of the month - really wanted to nail the states, they'd carry over a 15lb nuke in a backpack and take out half of LA.
Heck, put in on a boat in the harbor of any major coastal city, and you can make it a LOT bigger. Take out all of New York, or DC/Baltimore. You don't need any special knowledge or even much cleverness.
Robert Heinlein outlined just this possibility back in a short story in the 50's. Some Americans were hubric about nuclear attack, because it was thought that ICBMs were impossible and any aircraft would just be shot down.
Because Mac OS updates will trash non-apple drives.
Bzzzt!!!
I've been replacing hard drives in my Macs since 1993; I put a whopping 120MB hard drive in my SE/30 to replace the factory-installed 40MB.
A few years ago, I replaced the factory-installed 1GB hard drive in my PowerBook 1400 with a 3GB hard drive.
Sometime this year, I'll probably replace the 10GB hard drive in my iMac with an 80GB hard drive (or I'll use one of those recently announced ATA/100-to-FireWire cases).
Why would you buy RAM and hard disk from Apple? I can kinda understand getting the flat panel, as it is far prettier (and according to all the reviews I've seen, simply better) than all the other flat panels out there. But if you want to cut $4K off the price...
The operating system supports (sort of) two button mice, so its not really that limiting. Many applications don't support Apple's method of accessing the second mouse button (Microsoft, Netscape, ahem!) but that's not really Apple's fault -- if the developers don't want to use the system's services, that's their choice.
I'm not sure what you mean. I've been using my two-button wheel mouse with my iMac for a year. Right button is mapped (via USB Overdrive) to control-click. Works everywhere, including in MSIE and Netscape. The wheel just works beautifully in all apps (as a wheel, third mouse button, and clicked-up/clicked-down).
This might be due to the fact that USB Overdrive is without a doubt the coolest bit of shareware around. Now that Apple is in a licensing mood, it should be rolled into the Classic OS ASAP...
No, the Network Servers from Apple ran AIX, IBM's Unix for PowerPCs. Apple did sell A/UX for a while, which is in many ways kinda similar to what Mac OS X is now: a Unix with a Mac L&F that can run Mac apps, too.
A/UX was never ported to PowerPC; it was 68K-only.
Consider this comparison: would a Linux user switch to Xenix (the Unix varient Microsoft created a while back) if it were suddenly updated and released?
If it let you run Win32 and Win16 apps, had a consistent user interface, provided the same stability as Linux, and cost around $100? Hell, yes. There wouldn't be a viable Linux user base left.
Look at the Apple Store http://store.apple.com/ where's the word "server" anywhere? Then look at the hardware. Where's the hardware RAID card? Where are the hot-swap drive bays? Where's the redundant power supply? Where's the rack mount case? Where's the ECC RAM? Where's the tape drive? Where's the clustering options?
You can find the word "server" if you click the "Power Macintosh G4" link. There's a little box with the words "Macintosh Server G4". Granted, it's not much more than a relabeled PowerMac G4, but you asked for it...
About 4 years ago, Apple did sell a real server server. It had all the redundant, fail-safe hardware. It ran AIX on PowerPC chips with a bit of a Mac-ified interface and AppleShare software. No one bought it, because when you think Unix server, you don't think Apple. And that's OK. Apple doesn't have to be all things for all people.
As a final note, I think it's pretty sad that you do not wish to think about your home computer. To expect everything to work and not know what your computer does and why it does it is just ignorance, and no one should desire that.
Do you own a car? A washing machine? A refrigerator? A microwave? A TV? A blender? Do you know how those things work? Do you want to spend time fixing the blender's motor or do you want to make a milkshake?
A computer is a tool. It does stuff for you. Making the tool hard to use doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.
You are so much smarter than all of us, I bow humbly in your presence. You are, indeed, the one true genius.
I'm glad you realized that.
Have you considered a TWR.com where we could all benefit from your genius? Oh wait, that was last year. never mind.
Well, I'm hoping that my acolytes, such as yourself, will fund such a site as a tribute to me. You can also sit in airports, tell people about my genius, sell flowers and turn over the proceeds to me.
Essentially another language with the same power as C/C++ but more nuisances.
Well, genius, all programming languages have exactly the same power; they are all Turing-complete.
C# has some nice syntactic sugar, actually. I don't know if it offers enough of a difference from Java to make it worthwhile to switch for non-Win32 programmers, but we'll see. Win32 C++ programmers will probably jump on the C# bandwagon relatively quickly.
Indeed, even Mac 'enthusiasts' are hard pressed to find good technical reasons for buying PowerPC. Had Moto been at 900MHz by now, then, well, maybe.
There's one excellent reason for choosing a Mac over Windows or Linux/x86: better ease of use. Using a Mac is easier than using a PC. (And yes, during the day I spend all my time working on NT, so I know whereof I speak.) The relatively small price delta between a Mac and a comparable PC is worth the the time and grief I am saved when working on my Mac.
Linux/PPC takes away that advantage, which is why I've never bothered to install it.
Um, maybe because Chuck D is a popular musician, and they're famous for being dumb as dirt?
Most "autobiographies" (really biographies written by an unnamed writer) by famous people are crap. Those that are (1) written by the person who gets credit on the front of the book and (2) worth reading are few and far between.
I can't believe the whining here. If you don't like the way the content is distributed, DON'T USE THE CONTENT. It's not like you really need TV (or pre-recorded, mass-produced music) to live. Make you own content. Heck, make your own TVs. Or live without TV and pick up one of those rectangular, paper-based things with words.
No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. No one owes you entertainment, or even distribution of entertainment. If enough people don't like how something is distributed AND don't use the aforementioned something, a new distribution channel will beat out the old, unpopular one.
Slashdot Mirror
No it isn't ground-breaking to know that ignorant people don't know they are ignorant; the authors of the paper quote Charles Darwin: "as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, 'ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge'."
What was ground-breaking was showing that people who weren't ignorant downplayed their skills; they "knew what they didn't know."
He makes the flawed assumption that college graduates make a better effort to continuously hone their skills than non-graduates - a claim with little to no evidence, at least none that he has shown.
The evidence is the college degree. It's a hoop to jump through; a painful, stupid hoop sometimes, but a hoop nonetheless. Get a science or engineering degree from a top-tier school and it says that, at the very least, you know how to work and to think. Skip that process and pretend that it doesn't have any value and it says volumes about you.
I trust in top-tier universities to separate wheat from the chaff because I don't know of any other process which is a better way to judge someone just starting out. Can you name one, or do your skills only lend themselves to criticism?
I still have a standing offer: will anyone have an architect without a degree design a house they would then live in?
-jon
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html
-jon
And yet Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering can be taught. Amazing, that. I guess there haven't been any advances in those fields, either.
If Software Engineering has changed SO much in the last N years, why is "The Mythical Man-Month", written before most /. posters were even born, still considered the best book on Software Engineering ever written?
-jon
And I agree completely. As I said in my original post, a CS degree is NOT a Software Engineering degree, and it's training in Software Engineering which is needed. An apprenticeship should certainly be a part of the program.
So I think pretty much everyone (except you obviously) knows that they are not hiring geniuses
No, the problem isn't that you think you're hiring a genius, it's that the untrained ignoramous that you hire thinks of HIMSELF as a genius.
There was a well-publicized study in 1999 or 2000 on just this topic. The more someone knows about something, the less competent they tend to evaluate themselves. Conversely, the less someone knows about something, the more they think they are competent. This leads to wildly unrealistic self-evaluation.
I'd bet that the professional programmers who DON'T have degrees in CS tend to consider themselves better programmers than the degree holders. Draw your own conclusions.
-jon
Bah. Would you hire an architect to design a house for you without formal training? (I don't want to hear about Howard Roark; he's a fictional character in a poorly written book) Would you hire an untrained civil engineer to build a bridge for you?
There is no relationship between formal training and creativity. There IS a relationship between formal training and knowing what will work. Geniuses know how to push the limits on what will work and create new paradigms. Most untrained people in any field (and heck, most people in any field) are not geniuses, and the less people know, the more likely that they think they are geniuses. That's the real danger.
-jon
Question for you. If you rob a bank and are caught, will you be thrown in jail? Answer: yes, so why is it that the thought or imaginatory act, or in this case the depiction of it in 'cartoon' format is OK? It just doesn't make sense that we can't draw the line.
I can repeat your example with murders, other attacks, or, heck, how about something like describing an abortion in graphic detail on anti-abortion site? If abortion should be illegalized (which I'd guess you want, given your Bible thumping), should descriptions of it be illegal, too?
-jon
How many times have people heard of programmers with no degree working on or designing large-scale projects? It's insane. No one would hire an architect or mechanical engineer who didn't have at least a piece of paper from a college. But it happens all the time in software. The costs of the defective systems being turned out by untrained programmers is starting to matter.
Even a CS degree really isn't a sufficient solution to the problem. Software Engineering is NOT computer science, just as Chemical Engineering is not Chemistry. You need knowledge of the latter to do the former, but there is a different skill set which must be learned. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any school which is teaching it to potential software engineers. When they do, real software development can finally begin.
-jon
Ah, but power consumption is about to be a serious consideration in California. The cost of electricity has gone up by a factor of TEN. Right now, PG&E et al are not able to pass on this added cost, but sooner or later, it is going to be passed on. When the server farms see their power bills go up by a factor of 5 or 10, spending an extra $100 on a computer to save $1000 on electricity is going to be smart business.
-jon
Mac OS X is going to be the long-term key to this plan, but Linux/PPC isn't a bad place to start from. With Larry Ellison sitting on Apple's board, I would expect Oracle to be running on OS X within a year. That'll give you Oracle, Apache, and JDK 1.3 all on one box, which uses a lot less power.
This should be a no-brainer, since the power problem in Silicon Valley is going to get worse before it gets better; winter is the OFF season for power, and we're running out (yes, I know there are lots of power plants offline now, but the same principle applies)...
-jon
I've been waiting for Apple to start running ads in California trumpeting how much less power Macs use, compared to PCs. This might be a good place for Apple to start; G3/G4 rack-mount, anyone?
-jon
I wonder how long before blank paper is taxed; after all, you could copy a book onto it...
-jon
And that's the problem: how do you provide good input data? How do you train the net? There's precious little research in extracting from a neural net exactly what rules it is using to make its decision. If you can't know what rules it is using, then you can't trust it's "opinions." It might have learned cloudy sky/clear sky or it might have learned good guy plane/bad guy plane. You won't know until it's too late.
-jon
Heck, put in on a boat in the harbor of any major coastal city, and you can make it a LOT bigger. Take out all of New York, or DC/Baltimore. You don't need any special knowledge or even much cleverness.
Robert Heinlein outlined just this possibility back in a short story in the 50's. Some Americans were hubric about nuclear attack, because it was thought that ICBMs were impossible and any aircraft would just be shot down.
-jon
Bzzzt!!!
I've been replacing hard drives in my Macs since 1993; I put a whopping 120MB hard drive in my SE/30 to replace the factory-installed 40MB.
A few years ago, I replaced the factory-installed 1GB hard drive in my PowerBook 1400 with a 3GB hard drive.
Sometime this year, I'll probably replace the 10GB hard drive in my iMac with an 80GB hard drive (or I'll use one of those recently announced ATA/100-to-FireWire cases).
Spread your anti-Apple FUD somewhere else.
-jon
-jon
I'm not sure what you mean. I've been using my two-button wheel mouse with my iMac for a year. Right button is mapped (via USB Overdrive) to control-click. Works everywhere, including in MSIE and Netscape. The wheel just works beautifully in all apps (as a wheel, third mouse button, and clicked-up/clicked-down).
This might be due to the fact that USB Overdrive is without a doubt the coolest bit of shareware around. Now that Apple is in a licensing mood, it should be rolled into the Classic OS ASAP...
-jon
A/UX was never ported to PowerPC; it was 68K-only.
-jon
If it let you run Win32 and Win16 apps, had a consistent user interface, provided the same stability as Linux, and cost around $100? Hell, yes. There wouldn't be a viable Linux user base left.
-jon
You can find the word "server" if you click the "Power Macintosh G4" link. There's a little box with the words "Macintosh Server G4". Granted, it's not much more than a relabeled PowerMac G4, but you asked for it...
About 4 years ago, Apple did sell a real server server. It had all the redundant, fail-safe hardware. It ran AIX on PowerPC chips with a bit of a Mac-ified interface and AppleShare software. No one bought it, because when you think Unix server, you don't think Apple. And that's OK. Apple doesn't have to be all things for all people.
-jon
Do you own a car? A washing machine? A refrigerator? A microwave? A TV? A blender? Do you know how those things work? Do you want to spend time fixing the blender's motor or do you want to make a milkshake?
A computer is a tool. It does stuff for you. Making the tool hard to use doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.
-jon
I'm glad you realized that.
Have you considered a TWR.com where we could all benefit from your genius? Oh wait, that was last year. never mind.
Well, I'm hoping that my acolytes, such as yourself, will fund such a site as a tribute to me. You can also sit in airports, tell people about my genius, sell flowers and turn over the proceeds to me.
-jon
Well, genius, all programming languages have exactly the same power; they are all Turing-complete.
C# has some nice syntactic sugar, actually. I don't know if it offers enough of a difference from Java to make it worthwhile to switch for non-Win32 programmers, but we'll see. Win32 C++ programmers will probably jump on the C# bandwagon relatively quickly.
-jon
There's one excellent reason for choosing a Mac over Windows or Linux/x86: better ease of use. Using a Mac is easier than using a PC. (And yes, during the day I spend all my time working on NT, so I know whereof I speak.) The relatively small price delta between a Mac and a comparable PC is worth the the time and grief I am saved when working on my Mac.
Linux/PPC takes away that advantage, which is why I've never bothered to install it.
-jon
Most "autobiographies" (really biographies written by an unnamed writer) by famous people are crap. Those that are (1) written by the person who gets credit on the front of the book and (2) worth reading are few and far between.
-jon
No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. No one owes you entertainment, or even distribution of entertainment. If enough people don't like how something is distributed AND don't use the aforementioned something, a new distribution channel will beat out the old, unpopular one.
In short, grow up and quit your bitching.
-jon