You are so wrong, a company's board of directors would never falsely claim that illegal activity was, for example, "the unauthorized abuse be a few bad apples".
In a similar vein: Microsoft lawyers have announced that their monopoly is the result of a misguided SQA engineer who accidentially ran all of the Office Suite developlers out of business in the late 1980's, the Valdez spill was the fault of a recepionist at Exxon who was trying to impress her boyfriend, and the Monsanto PCB contamination in Georgia was the result of three disgruntled lunchroom attendents at the local plant who misshelved the baked beans.
If only those low-level employess wouldn't fuck up so often, the poor CEO's (who don't get paid nearly enuogh to reflect the huge responsibilities that rest on their shoulders) wouldn't have to spend so much time in front of congressional commitees.
It means the the basic score automatically assigned to your comment was greater than the score your comment deserved.
At least that's the way I use it.
It's not interesting enough to be flamebait. It's not "hot button" enough to be a troll. It may be vaguely on topic, and no one else has been dumb enough say it before so it probably isn't redundant. If I have mod points to spend on a comment like this I use "overrated", though I generally prefer to only moderate up.
I personally would moderate my comment as "offtopic" or "flamebait".
That is absolutly true. This is why Republican's want to end funding for family planning.
Nothing keeps wages lower than third-world countries with average family sizes in the dozens.
There are six billion uneducated, poor, and hungry people in the world who all want your job and, while they wait to for the factories to move to their villages, they are breeding another six billion uneducated, poor and hungry children that will want your children's jobs.
From roughly the same era. The first thing that popped into my mind:
Classroomotron!! Transforms from a huge flying robot into a computer classroom with 20 networked linux desktop computers (if they were Win boxes, Classroomotron would have to be a Decepticon.)
If I remember correctly, Classroomotron was added to the cartoon to meet the "x number of hours of educational television" requirement...
One thing that anyone hiring a contractor should realize is: THEY BID THEIR BEST and they ALWAYS bid their best.
Now you ask yourself, "How can they always bid their best people if their best people are already working on a different contract?"
Because, the best people are moved on to the new bid about as soon as the contractor can get away with it. That woman you describe is probably already working in the place of the person with the Comp. Sci. PhD that was originally bid for that position.
That is one reason why CMM is so valued by the government. They know that the people being bid aren't going to stay with the project so they hope, at the very least, some of the knowledge will be passed on to the "non-best" people before the best people are moved to a new project.
As I get older, I start to judge books by how thin they are. Who has the time to page through a thousand pages of verbose crap. I gained this bias after building an Access 97 application based on the "Access 97 Bible". 1500 pages!!! Who has the time?
It sounds like "UML in 24 hrs" (at about 300 pages) would be in my "only if there is nothing shorter" list. Luckily, it looks as if "UML Distilled" comes in under 200 pages so I think I'm going to start there.
This doesn't, of course, apply to Knuth or any pure reference book.
It's very difficult to find diesel cars in the U.S.. I think VW imports a few models, but aside from that I've only seen very large trucks (Ford F250 and larger and the Dodge and Chevy equivalents) with diesel engines. I'd love to get a light pickup with a diesel engine if I could find one.
Not to split hairs, but what you've described is not a crash. I'd call it sabotauge and place the responsibility squarely on your shoulders.
For all the literalists out there, the quote "If an application crashes, it's the developer's fault. Period. End of story. It is NEVER the user's fault" is the correct response to any developer including (especially) myself who says "well, no wonder it crashed, you weren't supposed to do 'x' you were supposed to do 'y'; I didn't program it to be able to do 'y'."
Part of being a good developer is anticipating and protecting against the "wrong" ways people are going to use your program. You protect against memory leaks and try to make sure all the files get closed if the user accidentially kicks the power cord out of the wall. In the absence of perfect programming (i.e. all software currently in existance) you try to get enough information to the user that he may try and recover from the error.
I also loved the cartoon. It was a reason to get up on a Saturday morning. Of the few episodes I saw, I thought the live action version was, for want of a better term, "mean spirited". It wasn't able to protray the true innocence of The Tick.
damn them envrowhackos if rush and me and turingmachine had our way we would round up those envirowhackos and take em out in the back of our pickup trucks and beat them with rubber hoses and stuff because the only thing those envirowhackos ever do is complain when i want to through my mcdonalds and burger king wrappers on the ground when did then become the king of me anyway those envriwhackos and feminazis just dont get it there is no way im going to stack up my beer cans and take them to no communist recycling center and if i want to hunt tigers i dont see why i shouldnt be able to hunt tigers my grandpap hunted tigers when he was a young man and its not fair that i cant hunt tigers as well i am sure glad that turingmachine brought up those damn envirowhackos because i needed to get some of this stuff off of my chest.
I take that this applies to any arbitrary compression ratio; if you were only trying to get 10:1 compression, you'd need fewer algorithms, but it would still be enough that the header to choose which one would eat up any savings. Thank your for the nice explaination.
That's true. However, there is the ability to store data externally in the real world applications.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that for ANY 1MB file there is an algorithm that can compress it to roughly 1/100th of it's original size. You do some research and find/build 256 algorithms to compress 1MB files. Your compressed file contains an additional 1 byte header explaining which algorithim was used.
In other words, there can be an overlap of 256 small files to the 1MB uncompressed equivalent, but you can recreate the correct uncompressed file using your header.
This is all theoretical, of course.... And, once again, I am not a mathemetician though I play one on TV.;)
I think the "clods around here" would claim that a patent system that allows "hyperlinks" and "one-click checkout" to be patented in the same way as "100:1 compression algorithms" needs to be fixed...
I've thought about this before, but I don't have the math background to know whether it's possible: can't the various techniques mentioned be used to convert the finite length data (remember we're always dealing with finite length data; even if it's a stream it can be broken into finite chunks) into a form that happens to have patterns that Huffman can take advantage of?
On the other hand, the 100:1 compression down to 1 bit argument seems to conclude that the press release is BS...
Your problem isn't the lack of degree. Here's your problem...
I'm no computer god by any means, but I've been around and always got excellent or outstanding reviews.
Modesty is a good thing but in this age of hyper-inflation in self-assessments, your comment is roughly the equivalent to "I'm useless, show me the door." Next time, try a comment like: "I am the best Software Engineer and Hardware Guru in the Universe. If you doubt me then you are obviously a know-nothing script kiddie."
Oh damn... did I leave the Cynicism Bot running again...
Not wishing to be outdone on by the RIAA, Microsoft's Marketing Department has licensed the same copy protection software for use with their flagship Windows XP and Office XP products.
"We will protect every sale and every CD using this technology," said Marketing Guru Ted Jones.
(Oh, come on, there needed to be one MS comment in this article...)
Look, try to jump out of your victim mentality for a second. I was referring specifically to the parents of children who are "troubled" in school but would not have been categorized as autistic ten years ago.
I think an interesting study would be a graph of severity of autism on one axis and parental income and education on the other axis. My uneducated guess would be that there would be comparable rates of _severe_ autism across income levels but there would be a suspicious jump in levels of _minor_ cases of autism in children of parents with the financial ability to pay for treatment for their children. Draw your own conclusions but Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is also correlated to parental education and income.
I'm willing to bet there is a similar graph that would apply to attention deficit disorder. OF COURSE there are are severely affected children who are strongly benefited by drugs and treatment, but for the borderline kids, the kids without extensive medical insurance are going to be labeled as "troubled" and the kids with medical insurance are going to be doped with Ritalin. In the long run, the poorer kids may be better off.
Finally, please don't think I don't have sympathy for the children and parents of children with autism whether severe or mild. But, you can't just play the sympathy card and stop all discussion on this, or any topic. Just because these statements don't apply to one case doesn't mean that they don't apply in others.
My concern is that there must be something different that makes some people better at certain skills. If no one was different there would be no one that was special (not in the new-age grade-school use of the term, but by the measure of their accomplishments.)
The Mike Tyson thing was a poor analogy. How about this? Would Van Gogh been an artist if Prozac had been available? Would Eistein discovered what he had discovered if he had spent his childhood under the care of "specialists" to treat his autism? Would Gore have invented the Internet if he had good people skills? (cheap shot, I'm sorry:-)
The point is that what makes some people "great" also, by definition, makes them different. It is unfortunate that the opposite doesn't necessarily hold true; being different isn't enough to make one "great". Tyson can go back to jail for all I care (IMO, the only useful pupnishment for rape is castration) but it doesn't change the fact that he was the "best" in a barbaric sport and something inside him made him the best...
I'd hate to think that the mating of two smart people produces a disabled person.
How about a slightly different hypothesis. "Smart" parents are more likely to read worrisome news articles and apply the symptoms described to their children. Little Suzy is having trouble fitting in at school. Option one: some kids have trouble fitting in at times and fit in at other times. Option two: "Oh My GOD! Little Suzy has caught the Autism. Lets get some highly paid specialists to work on this."
This is OBVIOUSLY not the only answer. There are real diseases in this would that call out for understanding and treatment. However, I'm willing to bet that some of this "massive rise" in cases is related to the over-protectiveness of parents and (to be very cynical) the ability of those educated parents to pay for expensive specialists.
Agreed, I got a Bachelor's of Arts (apparently I am skilled at many different forms of art;). Most of my friends also have a BA of some kind (business, psychology, sociology [works as a waiter], english literature [works as a programmer]). One friend, however, is a painter and sculptor and got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts. There must be a distinction between Art and Fine Art; if you can't trust our intitutes of higher education get the terms right then who can you trust?
Anyway, I'm going to continue to call some of what I code "art" but I ain't gonna put on airs and call it "fine art" and I ain't gonna call myself an artist.
I personally don't want a cell phone. I don't want to recieve calls. I don't want to be another one of those mother-fuckers tooling along tapping on the phone like a drugged monkey while not using their turn signals and basically driving thousand pound machines while thinking about nothing but their next fucking hair appointment. However, I wouldn't mind having a phone in my truck for the next time I leave my lights on all day and I need a lift. Stuff one of these in the glove compartment and I'm set.
This is one conspiracy against the poor that I'm all for...
That may be true (though I bet that some of the monopoly money is going to VZW watever the laws say) but as a unfortunate customer, I certainly never signing up for a company with Verizon in the name.
Just bear in mind that VZW is betting the farm on voice still. Smart business plan, actually.
Based on their current customer support when it comes to voice telephony, I doubt they can succeed at anything. Does their "smart business plan" take into account the fact that anyone who have ever had to deal with them under their local monopolies woulnd't touch any of their other products with a ten foot pole?
OTOH, if the business plan has "change the name of the company so no one knows who they are" as a central tenent then they may be successful after all.
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You are so wrong, a company's board of directors would never falsely claim that illegal activity was, for example, "the unauthorized abuse be a few bad apples".
In a similar vein: Microsoft lawyers have announced that their monopoly is the result of a misguided SQA engineer who accidentially ran all of the Office Suite developlers out of business in the late 1980's, the Valdez spill was the fault of a recepionist at Exxon who was trying to impress her boyfriend, and the Monsanto PCB contamination in Georgia was the result of three disgruntled lunchroom attendents at the local plant who misshelved the baked beans.
If only those low-level employess wouldn't fuck up so often, the poor CEO's (who don't get paid nearly enuogh to reflect the huge responsibilities that rest on their shoulders) wouldn't have to spend so much time in front of congressional commitees.
"What does Overrated 1, Total 1 mean?"
It means the the basic score automatically assigned to your comment was greater than the score your comment deserved.
At least that's the way I use it.
It's not interesting enough to be flamebait. It's not "hot button" enough to be a troll. It may be vaguely on topic, and no one else has been dumb enough say it before so it probably isn't redundant. If I have mod points to spend on a comment like this I use "overrated", though I generally prefer to only moderate up.
I personally would moderate my comment as "offtopic" or "flamebait".
;-)
That is absolutly true. This is why Republican's want to end funding for family planning.
Nothing keeps wages lower than third-world countries with average family sizes in the dozens.
There are six billion uneducated, poor, and hungry people in the world who all want your job and, while they wait to for the factories to move to their villages, they are breeding another six billion uneducated, poor and hungry children that will want your children's jobs.
From roughly the same era. The first thing that popped into my mind:
Classroomotron!! Transforms from a huge flying robot into a computer classroom with 20 networked linux desktop computers (if they were Win boxes, Classroomotron would have to be a Decepticon.)
If I remember correctly, Classroomotron was added to the cartoon to meet the "x number of hours of educational television" requirement...
;-)
One thing that anyone hiring a contractor should realize is: THEY BID THEIR BEST and they ALWAYS bid their best.
Now you ask yourself, "How can they always bid their best people if their best people are already working on a different contract?"
Because, the best people are moved on to the new bid about as soon as the contractor can get away with it. That woman you describe is probably already working in the place of the person with the Comp. Sci. PhD that was originally bid for that position.
That is one reason why CMM is so valued by the government. They know that the people being bid aren't going to stay with the project so they hope, at the very least, some of the knowledge will be passed on to the "non-best" people before the best people are moved to a new project.
As I get older, I start to judge books by how thin they are. Who has the time to page through a thousand pages of verbose crap. I gained this bias after building an Access 97 application based on the "Access 97 Bible". 1500 pages!!! Who has the time?
It sounds like "UML in 24 hrs" (at about 300 pages) would be in my "only if there is nothing shorter" list. Luckily, it looks as if "UML Distilled" comes in under 200 pages so I think I'm going to start there.
This doesn't, of course, apply to Knuth or any pure reference book.
It's very difficult to find diesel cars in the U.S.. I think VW imports a few models, but aside from that I've only seen very large trucks (Ford F250 and larger and the Dodge and Chevy equivalents) with diesel engines. I'd love to get a light pickup with a diesel engine if I could find one.
Not to split hairs, but what you've described is not a crash. I'd call it sabotauge and place the responsibility squarely on your shoulders.
For all the literalists out there, the quote "If an application crashes, it's the developer's fault. Period. End of story. It is NEVER the user's fault" is the correct response to any developer including (especially) myself who says "well, no wonder it crashed, you weren't supposed to do 'x' you were supposed to do 'y'; I didn't program it to be able to do 'y'."
Part of being a good developer is anticipating and protecting against the "wrong" ways people are going to use your program. You protect against memory leaks and try to make sure all the files get closed if the user accidentially kicks the power cord out of the wall. In the absence of perfect programming (i.e. all software currently in existance) you try to get enough information to the user that he may try and recover from the error.
I also loved the cartoon. It was a reason to get up on a Saturday morning. Of the few episodes I saw, I thought the live action version was, for want of a better term, "mean spirited". It wasn't able to protray the true innocence of The Tick.
damn them envrowhackos if rush and me and turingmachine had our way we would round up those envirowhackos and take em out in the back of our pickup trucks and beat them with rubber hoses and stuff because the only thing those envirowhackos ever do is complain when i want to through my mcdonalds and burger king wrappers on the ground when did then become the king of me anyway those envriwhackos and feminazis just dont get it there is no way im going to stack up my beer cans and take them to no communist recycling center and if i want to hunt tigers i dont see why i shouldnt be able to hunt tigers my grandpap hunted tigers when he was a young man and its not fair that i cant hunt tigers as well i am sure glad that turingmachine brought up those damn envirowhackos because i needed to get some of this stuff off of my chest.
;)
I take that this applies to any arbitrary compression ratio; if you were only trying to get 10:1 compression, you'd need fewer algorithms, but it would still be enough that the header to choose which one would eat up any savings. Thank your for the nice explaination.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that for ANY 1MB file there is an algorithm that can compress it to roughly 1/100th of it's original size. You do some research and find/build 256 algorithms to compress 1MB files. Your compressed file contains an additional 1 byte header explaining which algorithim was used.
In other words, there can be an overlap of 256 small files to the 1MB uncompressed equivalent, but you can recreate the correct uncompressed file using your header.
This is all theoretical, of course.... And, once again, I am not a mathemetician though I play one on TV. ;)
I think the "clods around here" would claim that a patent system that allows "hyperlinks" and "one-click checkout" to be patented in the same way as "100:1 compression algorithms" needs to be fixed...
I've thought about this before, but I don't have the math background to know whether it's possible: can't the various techniques mentioned be used to convert the finite length data (remember we're always dealing with finite length data; even if it's a stream it can be broken into finite chunks) into a form that happens to have patterns that Huffman can take advantage of?
On the other hand, the 100:1 compression down to 1 bit argument seems to conclude that the press release is BS...
Your problem isn't the lack of degree. Here's your problem...
Modesty is a good thing but in this age of hyper-inflation in self-assessments, your comment is roughly the equivalent to "I'm useless, show me the door." Next time, try a comment like: "I am the best Software Engineer and Hardware Guru in the Universe. If you doubt me then you are obviously a know-nothing script kiddie."
Oh damn... did I leave the Cynicism Bot running again...
Well that settles it. If it didn't offend someone than what's the point of seeing it? ;)
In a related story.
Redmond, WA (reuters)
Not wishing to be outdone on by the RIAA, Microsoft's Marketing Department has licensed the same copy protection software for use with their flagship Windows XP and Office XP products.
"We will protect every sale and every CD using this technology," said Marketing Guru Ted Jones.
(Oh, come on, there needed to be one MS comment in this article...)
Look, try to jump out of your victim mentality for a second. I was referring specifically to the parents of children who are "troubled" in school but would not have been categorized as autistic ten years ago.
I think an interesting study would be a graph of severity of autism on one axis and parental income and education on the other axis. My uneducated guess would be that there would be comparable rates of _severe_ autism across income levels but there would be a suspicious jump in levels of _minor_ cases of autism in children of parents with the financial ability to pay for treatment for their children. Draw your own conclusions but Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is also correlated to parental education and income.
I'm willing to bet there is a similar graph that would apply to attention deficit disorder. OF COURSE there are are severely affected children who are strongly benefited by drugs and treatment, but for the borderline kids, the kids without extensive medical insurance are going to be labeled as "troubled" and the kids with medical insurance are going to be doped with Ritalin. In the long run, the poorer kids may be better off.
Finally, please don't think I don't have sympathy for the children and parents of children with autism whether severe or mild. But, you can't just play the sympathy card and stop all discussion on this, or any topic. Just because these statements don't apply to one case doesn't mean that they don't apply in others.
My concern is that there must be something different that makes some people better at certain skills. If no one was different there would be no one that was special (not in the new-age grade-school use of the term, but by the measure of their accomplishments.)
The Mike Tyson thing was a poor analogy. How about this? Would Van Gogh been an artist if Prozac had been available? Would Eistein discovered what he had discovered if he had spent his childhood under the care of "specialists" to treat his autism? Would Gore have invented the Internet if he had good people skills? (cheap shot, I'm sorry :-)
The point is that what makes some people "great" also, by definition, makes them different. It is unfortunate that the opposite doesn't necessarily hold true; being different isn't enough to make one "great". Tyson can go back to jail for all I care (IMO, the only useful pupnishment for rape is castration) but it doesn't change the fact that he was the "best" in a barbaric sport and something inside him made him the best...
How about a slightly different hypothesis. "Smart" parents are more likely to read worrisome news articles and apply the symptoms described to their children. Little Suzy is having trouble fitting in at school. Option one: some kids have trouble fitting in at times and fit in at other times. Option two: "Oh My GOD! Little Suzy has caught the Autism. Lets get some highly paid specialists to work on this."
This is OBVIOUSLY not the only answer. There are real diseases in this would that call out for understanding and treatment. However, I'm willing to bet that some of this "massive rise" in cases is related to the over-protectiveness of parents and (to be very cynical) the ability of those educated parents to pay for expensive specialists.
Agreed, I got a Bachelor's of Arts (apparently I am skilled at many different forms of art ;). Most of my friends also have a BA of some kind (business, psychology, sociology [works as a waiter], english literature [works as a programmer]). One friend, however, is a painter and sculptor and got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts. There must be a distinction between Art and Fine Art; if you can't trust our intitutes of higher education get the terms right then who can you trust?
Anyway, I'm going to continue to call some of what I code "art" but I ain't gonna put on airs and call it "fine art" and I ain't gonna call myself an artist.
I personally don't want a cell phone. I don't want to recieve calls. I don't want to be another one of those mother-fuckers tooling along tapping on the phone like a drugged monkey while not using their turn signals and basically driving thousand pound machines while thinking about nothing but their next fucking hair appointment. However, I wouldn't mind having a phone in my truck for the next time I leave my lights on all day and I need a lift. Stuff one of these in the glove compartment and I'm set.
This is one conspiracy against the poor that I'm all for...
That may be true (though I bet that some of the monopoly money is going to VZW watever the laws say) but as a unfortunate customer, I certainly never signing up for a company with Verizon in the name.
Based on their current customer support when it comes to voice telephony, I doubt they can succeed at anything. Does their "smart business plan" take into account the fact that anyone who have ever had to deal with them under their local monopolies woulnd't touch any of their other products with a ten foot pole?
OTOH, if the business plan has "change the name of the company so no one knows who they are" as a central tenent then they may be successful after all.