I wanted to ask you how many programmers you hired this year. The answer was "zero".
I don't suppose, just out of curiosity, you'd care to enlighten the world on the relevence of this fact? Apparently some aspect of hiring employees has changed within the last 12 months (versus the 12 months before that), and I would be interested to know what it is.
Actually, it's not that. It took me a long time to understand potentially why, but I noticed that programmers who started with EE majors ended up as better programmers than programmers with CS degrees (this is anecdotal, of course).
I think that EE majors are taught to think better than CS majors, because they usually get a lot more low-level knowledge. Whereas CS majors spend a lot more time on abstract concepts and only study the low-level concepts almost as an afterthought.
Your mileage may vary, but my point is that in my experience the EE majors are better thinkers and reasoners than CS majors.
This has been rehashed to death, but I think the point is that it either should be "Linux" as a collective term, or it should be "GNU/XFree86/KDE/Gnome/.../Linux" so that everyone gets credit. Obviously, the latter is absurd, which brings forth the absurdity of "GNU/Linux". If the advocates don't like Linux as a collective term, then let them come up with a new collective term, not devalue the old one in silly ways.
But the point is the advocacy. I've found that someone who brazenly pushes forth "GNU/Linux" is also going to tend to have a very political outlook, and very little of a practical outlook. "GNU/Linux" is clearly incredibly awkward as the name of an operating system, and is not going to enter the mainstream conciousness. Given this practical fact, why would anyone stubbornly insist that it should be used?
The fact that they refer to Linux as GNU/Linux gives them no credibility in my eyes.
I know many people are going to look at this as flamebait, but I am dead serious about this. I have yet to see one advocate who calls it GNU/Linux not be a wacko, and do more harm to the cause than good.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't some good programmers out there who have contributed code that happen to use the term. But the advocates all seem to be of the harmful variety.
Instead of asking me that, why don't you ask me whatever it is you really want to ask? [The answer for this year is "zero", but I have hired dozens of programmers in the past.]
Whatever your question really is, the point is not what I would be willing to hire. In fact, I'm biased slightly against programmers with C.S. degrees (although programmers with E.E. degrees tend to be golden). The point is how the rest of the world is going to judge someone with a non-accredited degree.
I would really feels sorry for someone who put a lot of time into getting one of these degrees.
If he thinks an unaccredited school's degree is going to be worth anything, he's smoking serious crack.
The regional accreditation system (see here for some information about accreditation) is not perfect, but there has to be some standard in place. Accreditation not only takes into account academic standards, but also financial standards to make sure the university is not going to go bankrupt.
Yes, you can get a degree from a non-accredited University. But where the rubber meets the road is when you try and get a more advanced degree (Masters or Doctorate) at a "real" university. That's when you find out your l33t degree is worth exactly zero.
Not to mention that when your employer looks at your degree, all they will see is a big red "non-accredited".
Bottom line, if he wants this thing to succeed, he better get regionally accredited or it is doomed to failure.
one only needs overall averages, and these one can get reasonable results for.
You have such faith in the miracle machines. Too bad this is totally wrong. Find me a reference for a model done, say, 4 years ago that correctly predicted the average temperature for last year. You can't.
There is even a better way -- to claim that there is some terrible threat to national security.
This is what amazes me. You will put blind faith into a computer simulation, but you will doubt the evidence of your own eyes. Or did you sleep as Saddam Hussein tried to take over the world's oil supply and build an arsenal of nuclear weapons?
there is evidence that many Florida votes did not get properly counted
Where? Tell me where one ballot was that was not counted that did not require a subjective opinion. Not only was every valid ballot counted, but a whole lot of invalid ones were counted. Gore should have lost by a lot more than he did, but he managed to manufacture a hell of a lot of phony votes.
...think about the difference between long-range changes that form climate and the momentary, hourly, daily changes of weather.
I think what you're saying is that there is a difference between predicting a set of balls falling through some pegs will fall in a bell-shape pattern (which can be predicted reliably), and predicting the path of a single ball (which can't), and I agree.
However, I'm not convinced that the difference between "weather prediction" and "climate prediction" follows this analogy. Both are dealing with the behavior of mass particle systems, just one is on a longer time scale than the other. If you go back to the ball-through-pegs analogy, you might say that the bell shape gets more accurate as time goes on, so a long-term climate prediction should be more accurate than a short-term prediction. However, is your local long-range forecast more accurate than the short-term forecast? Mine isn't, in fact, the opposite is true. The longer out you go, the less accurate it gets.
This shouldn't be surprising. We are dealing with an insanely complex, very little understood phenomenon.
There are more of them than you think. How about the people who worship the Great Oracle of Weather Prediction to "prove" global warming? I got into an argument on this very topic on this very site. It's incredible how much faith people put into weather simulations that try and predict the trends 50 years into the future, yet these models cannot predict the weather more than one day in advance.
I think in a lot of ways this guy is dead-on. The best way to get government grant money is to write a program that "proves" doomsday.
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I wanted to ask you how many programmers you hired this year. The answer was "zero".
I don't suppose, just out of curiosity, you'd care to enlighten the world on the relevence of this fact? Apparently some aspect of hiring employees has changed within the last 12 months (versus the 12 months before that), and I would be interested to know what it is.
--
Actually, it's not that. It took me a long time to understand potentially why, but I noticed that programmers who started with EE majors ended up as better programmers than programmers with CS degrees (this is anecdotal, of course).
I think that EE majors are taught to think better than CS majors, because they usually get a lot more low-level knowledge. Whereas CS majors spend a lot more time on abstract concepts and only study the low-level concepts almost as an afterthought.
Your mileage may vary, but my point is that in my experience the EE majors are better thinkers and reasoners than CS majors.
--
This has been rehashed to death, but I think the point is that it either should be "Linux" as a collective term, or it should be "GNU/XFree86/KDE/Gnome/.../Linux" so that everyone gets credit. Obviously, the latter is absurd, which brings forth the absurdity of "GNU/Linux". If the advocates don't like Linux as a collective term, then let them come up with a new collective term, not devalue the old one in silly ways.
But the point is the advocacy. I've found that someone who brazenly pushes forth "GNU/Linux" is also going to tend to have a very political outlook, and very little of a practical outlook. "GNU/Linux" is clearly incredibly awkward as the name of an operating system, and is not going to enter the mainstream conciousness. Given this practical fact, why would anyone stubbornly insist that it should be used?
--
The fact that they refer to Linux as GNU/Linux gives them no credibility in my eyes.
I know many people are going to look at this as flamebait, but I am dead serious about this. I have yet to see one advocate who calls it GNU/Linux not be a wacko, and do more harm to the cause than good.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't some good programmers out there who have contributed code that happen to use the term. But the advocates all seem to be of the harmful variety.
--
How many people have you hired this year?
Instead of asking me that, why don't you ask me whatever it is you really want to ask? [The answer for this year is "zero", but I have hired dozens of programmers in the past.]
Whatever your question really is, the point is not what I would be willing to hire. In fact, I'm biased slightly against programmers with C.S. degrees (although programmers with E.E. degrees tend to be golden). The point is how the rest of the world is going to judge someone with a non-accredited degree.
I would really feels sorry for someone who put a lot of time into getting one of these degrees.
--
If he thinks an unaccredited school's degree is going to be worth anything, he's smoking serious crack.
The regional accreditation system (see here for some information about accreditation) is not perfect, but there has to be some standard in place. Accreditation not only takes into account academic standards, but also financial standards to make sure the university is not going to go bankrupt.
Yes, you can get a degree from a non-accredited University. But where the rubber meets the road is when you try and get a more advanced degree (Masters or Doctorate) at a "real" university. That's when you find out your l33t degree is worth exactly zero.
Not to mention that when your employer looks at your degree, all they will see is a big red "non-accredited".
Bottom line, if he wants this thing to succeed, he better get regionally accredited or it is doomed to failure.
--
one only needs overall averages, and these one can get reasonable results for.
You have such faith in the miracle machines. Too bad this is totally wrong. Find me a reference for a model done, say, 4 years ago that correctly predicted the average temperature for last year. You can't.
There is even a better way -- to claim that there is some terrible threat to national security.
This is what amazes me. You will put blind faith into a computer simulation, but you will doubt the evidence of your own eyes. Or did you sleep as Saddam Hussein tried to take over the world's oil supply and build an arsenal of nuclear weapons?
there is evidence that many Florida votes did not get properly counted
Where? Tell me where one ballot was that was not counted that did not require a subjective opinion. Not only was every valid ballot counted, but a whole lot of invalid ones were counted. Gore should have lost by a lot more than he did, but he managed to manufacture a hell of a lot of phony votes.
--
I think what you're saying is that there is a difference between predicting a set of balls falling through some pegs will fall in a bell-shape pattern (which can be predicted reliably), and predicting the path of a single ball (which can't), and I agree.
However, I'm not convinced that the difference between "weather prediction" and "climate prediction" follows this analogy. Both are dealing with the behavior of mass particle systems, just one is on a longer time scale than the other. If you go back to the ball-through-pegs analogy, you might say that the bell shape gets more accurate as time goes on, so a long-term climate prediction should be more accurate than a short-term prediction. However, is your local long-range forecast more accurate than the short-term forecast? Mine isn't, in fact, the opposite is true. The longer out you go, the less accurate it gets.
This shouldn't be surprising. We are dealing with an insanely complex, very little understood phenomenon.
--
Apparently it's only shocking to Katz and to other true believers of the one faith of computers©. Anybody involved with computers that has any semblance of sanity realizes that computers are not capable of solving every problem/question humanity has ever formulated.
There are more of them than you think. How about the people who worship the Great Oracle of Weather Prediction to "prove" global warming? I got into an argument on this very topic on this very site. It's incredible how much faith people put into weather simulations that try and predict the trends 50 years into the future, yet these models cannot predict the weather more than one day in advance.
I think in a lot of ways this guy is dead-on. The best way to get government grant money is to write a program that "proves" doomsday.
--