This thread discussion of Sears as an example is really a bit of an outlier. Yes the retail apocalypse is hitting them hard and they are shutting down stores right and left. However, Sears primarily did this to themselves as the cause of their current woes started before this downturn. Their CEO read Atlas Shrugged and decided it was a perfect philosophy and restructured the entire company around its principals. One of the big things is that all departments were setup in competition with each other. There was no working together on anything--other departments might claim the precious bounty. Each department had to compete for budget, floor space, etc. Everything was a internal competition. The company has quickly self destructed as this policy impacted important decisions at all levels in which nothing was about the good of the whole--only the self. Doing this right before a massive retail downturn is like being in the middle of Ragnarok and standing around punching one's own own face.
Why would a buck invest 1000's of precious calories into building antlers? They are necessary for fighting off other bucks, but only required to be a modest size. Too big and they become a liability of their own. Of course, that huge rack out there on display is sure to get the does, so show off that prowess in calorie gathering and get the iPhone X!
The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it.
This is not what it states, it states that there is no general way (=algorithm) of knowing whether any arbitrary algorithm will halt or not, given a specific input, other than to run it. If this were always true, one would not have theorem provers that work on code and generate a judgement about halting. Theorem provers about code exist. If it were always false, then theorem provers would be perfect and we'd be able to tell if code matched specification perfectly, which is not true either. The truth is in the middle, it works sometimes, i.e. not always. Since a theorem prover is an algorithm, and if one asked of it the halting property of an arbitrary piece of code, it may get caught in an infinite loop and be unable to answer. That does not preclude a general theorem prover from generating useful results on code about halting behavior (or any other behavior), it just can't answer every question about every piece of code, when given any possible input.
There was a study done years ago that claimed that the chance of a project failing was proportional to it's size. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to it this morning. If this hypothesis is true, then blaming the failure on Agile is inappropriate, as the root cause of failure is the fact that the project was too big to manage. The usual approach when things go south, is to throw more money and developers at the project--rather than scaling it back.
A better approach would be, slowly merging welfare payment systems 2 into 1, like a single-elimination tournament. Yes, theoretically it would be more work, but the risk of failure is mitigated. For example, if there were 8 systems, there would be 4 merger projects--and one failed. You now have 5 systems to deal with merging, and 3 successful teams. Take the best two and merge 4 of the five into 2, etc. Big huge projects are to be avoided--humans just can't manage software development on that scale very well.
So, my car was broken into last night. The thief, ate my crackers, took the $2 in meter change, and left the 20 CD's stacked there. So the RIAA is pursuing CD duplication? Not even petty thieves see it worth their effort to steal them at this point. This is so anachronistic it proves how little they understand their own market.
So one day I discover that Sprint is my long distance carrier at $5/minute. I protest the "slam" to the FCC. The FCC rules that its a valid transfer, since it came from a website and they don't regulate those transfers.
I tell BellSouth and Sprint that I will only pay the fee my original carrier I had negociated (40c/minute to east europe), otherwise I will see them in court. I document every correspondence, record every phone call. Each time I send them another letter saying I'm not paying for a service I didn't ask for, I include a xerox of all previous letters and transcripts. The packets grow thicker and thicker.
My stance was simple, You can't make me pay for something for which I didn't agree too without a contract. The FCC was off base ruling that this was legit. Please produce a signed or verbal proof of a contract with Sprint. BellSouth kept trying to collect for sprint and this went on and on.
So I sent a letter that if something didn't happen I would file in court and we could resolve the situation there.
Then the call came, "Ahhh, Mr. Garbett, we've been reviewing your file. You are talking about challenging our arrangement with other service providers under contract law is this correct?"
"Yes"
"Well, you have to understand that's a delicate matter. No one has done that before. We make a lot of money off this arrangement. How does a year of free service sound?"
"Okay"
"So you agree to drop the matter, and we will credit you for a years service based on your history and drop the charge-- Do you agree to these terms."
"Yes"
And there it was, a year of free service. I've been waiting for several years since then for a large enough abuse of this system that a class action forms. I find it all mildly amusing.
Here in Tennessee they had some revenue short falls. The tax division was pressured to get creative. They decided to reinterpret an old law so they could tax computer consultants which had never been done. That wasn't so bad, it's just that they decided to do it retroactively and go after all the consultants for back taxes. A friend of mine got caught in the net, he had registered his business in Tennessee and followed all the local laws. Consultants who hadn't got missed in the sweep.
He went back and read the law carefully. It had a clause something to the effect of "configuration of existing software and hardware is excluded" and had more language implying that consulting was taxable only if it developed the entire system. He made an argument that writing in scripts (PHP, Ruby) was all configuration of an existing system. In fact, by extension all coding was just configuration since he didn't write the OS to begin with. He hired a lawyer and dared them to sue him in court. They backed away quietly, afraid of the challenge.
This is yet another example of an academic discovering how easy it is to generate press. Math can prove that a mathematical system is consistent, and within that system can prove properties that result in that system. There are several wonderful mathematical models that describe physical phenomena with incredible accuracy. However, these models do not prove these properties, they just expose some relationships and properties of our world that are not necessarily obvious, and are useful in planning, engineering etc.
The claims of "proof" of parallel universes is an abuse of the mathematical language.
His evidence list is a joke. First off if the social networking sites collapse, how bad will that be for the industry? Secondly, if the you-tube clones fail, how bad will that be? The rest of the evidence is really not much about collapse, just a bunch of bitches about likely project failures. The quote "the iPhone mania may be a bad sign of something" is priceless.
Summary:
John vents his spleen in a rambling manner, inflates the headline to something about industry collapse and slashdot reports it as news.
It said that "Swarm Theory" was being applied to business operations. I call bullshit. A computer model was run at night that provides the orders to all the drivers each morning. This flies in the face of the premise of swarm theory. If each driver were given a simple set of rules to follow for driving then it would be a direct application of swarm theory to operations. However, it's not swarm theory applied to operations, because each driver gets an order from corporate each morning. No local decision are made. It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.
Since when did Linux equal Philanthropic? Linus did it for fun and is still having fun. As long as they play by the license, trade organizations are natural part of business.
When 99% of the code is in C and 1% is in FORTRAN with an ugly interface it doesn't matter how wonderful FORTRAN is. Take any two different computer languages and put them in my original comment and it still makes sense. I wasn't disparaging FORTRAN, I was disparaging the approach.
I worked at a place and the founder wrote the core piece of code in FORTRAN. A 300 person company sprang up around it. 99% of the software for the company was written in C around the core piece in FORTRAN. If you so much as mentioned rewriting that last piece, it was a quick ticket to the unemployment line. If I were you, I'd stick with VB or work on your resume.
Strange part about the magic FORTRAN code-- it was a discrete Fourier transform. Business acumen beats good code when it comes to making money.
With that being said, Java EE 5 will make enterprise Java developer's lives much easier. EJBs, everyone's favorite whipping boy, are a lot easier to code now.
Bwuaah hah aha hahahaha. Let's see, we go from EJB's are evil to a lot easier to code now. Sure, after getting burned and poked in the fires of hell by Sun's concept of a business layer, just getting slow roasted on a spit is prefered.
Gradient descent searchs rarely find the minimum, expect in simple 1st or 2nd order curves. Analysis at a high level is *always* required for a project of any complexity. Extreme (or er. Agile for the PC) Programming neglects this basic fact.
Several of the facets of XP do however lend themselves to utilizing traits of human nature. Our current project mixes the two (old waterfall + XP), an analyst/architect making sure the big picture is covered doing a waterfall approach. A team of programmers working on the details and applying some of XP tenets to each area identified by the architect. It's going quite well so far. Each team is set loose on a fairly small, linear in complexity, piece of the project. The big picture has at least 8 major dimensions of complexity, and the architect gets to pull his hair out looking for solutions that cover them all or find ways to decouple them as much as possible.
Never disobey your boss on technical matters, even when he has no fucking clue what he's babbling about. That's how you get fired.
Generally when it comes to situations like this, I float a resume and get a new job. Voting with my feet. Let some other lacky take the brunt of the stupidity. Now that I look back, I've had a lot of jobs in the last decade. Hmmmm.
We're looking at using it on an electronic medical record (in mental health). For every client (50000+) that is a patient of a staff (1000+), they get an RSS chart feed. Events are filterable by type and access restrictions. Now there's no more whining, "I didn't know you did that with that patient."
Yeah, but enough @ssh*les show up and do it, I think management eventually gets the point. Even better, if people just boycott lying bastards in general, they'll go all out of business. Too many people just roll over and take what their given, and think it's okay. I for have made an @ss of myself on occasions where someone has taken advantage of me. Sure the clerk is the dumb stick who get its, but he's a representative of the company and the only one I am allowed to do business with.
Or one can go off and file class action suits. Personally I prefer to voice my opinion in such matters with the loudest fart possible, and not do business with such parties again.
Slashdot Mirror
This thread discussion of Sears as an example is really a bit of an outlier. Yes the retail apocalypse is hitting them hard and they are shutting down stores right and left. However, Sears primarily did this to themselves as the cause of their current woes started before this downturn. Their CEO read Atlas Shrugged and decided it was a perfect philosophy and restructured the entire company around its principals. One of the big things is that all departments were setup in competition with each other. There was no working together on anything--other departments might claim the precious bounty. Each department had to compete for budget, floor space, etc. Everything was a internal competition. The company has quickly self destructed as this policy impacted important decisions at all levels in which nothing was about the good of the whole--only the self. Doing this right before a massive retail downturn is like being in the middle of Ragnarok and standing around punching one's own own face.
Why would a buck invest 1000's of precious calories into building antlers? They are necessary for fighting off other bucks, but only required to be a modest size. Too big and they become a liability of their own. Of course, that huge rack out there on display is sure to get the does, so show off that prowess in calorie gathering and get the iPhone X!
The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it.
This is not what it states, it states that there is no general way (=algorithm) of knowing whether any arbitrary algorithm will halt or not, given a specific input, other than to run it. If this were always true, one would not have theorem provers that work on code and generate a judgement about halting. Theorem provers about code exist. If it were always false, then theorem provers would be perfect and we'd be able to tell if code matched specification perfectly, which is not true either. The truth is in the middle, it works sometimes, i.e. not always. Since a theorem prover is an algorithm, and if one asked of it the halting property of an arbitrary piece of code, it may get caught in an infinite loop and be unable to answer. That does not preclude a general theorem prover from generating useful results on code about halting behavior (or any other behavior), it just can't answer every question about every piece of code, when given any possible input.
Omega = (\x.xx)(\x.xx)
There was a study done years ago that claimed that the chance of a project failing was proportional to it's size. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to it this morning. If this hypothesis is true, then blaming the failure on Agile is inappropriate, as the root cause of failure is the fact that the project was too big to manage. The usual approach when things go south, is to throw more money and developers at the project--rather than scaling it back. A better approach would be, slowly merging welfare payment systems 2 into 1, like a single-elimination tournament. Yes, theoretically it would be more work, but the risk of failure is mitigated. For example, if there were 8 systems, there would be 4 merger projects--and one failed. You now have 5 systems to deal with merging, and 3 successful teams. Take the best two and merge 4 of the five into 2, etc. Big huge projects are to be avoided--humans just can't manage software development on that scale very well.
So, my car was broken into last night. The thief, ate my crackers, took the $2 in meter change, and left the 20 CD's stacked there. So the RIAA is pursuing CD duplication? Not even petty thieves see it worth their effort to steal them at this point. This is so anachronistic it proves how little they understand their own market.
So one day I discover that Sprint is my long distance carrier at $5/minute. I protest the "slam" to the FCC. The FCC rules that its a valid transfer, since it came from a website and they don't regulate those transfers.
I tell BellSouth and Sprint that I will only pay the fee my original carrier I had negociated (40c/minute to east europe), otherwise I will see them in court. I document every correspondence, record every phone call. Each time I send them another letter saying I'm not paying for a service I didn't ask for, I include a xerox of all previous letters and transcripts. The packets grow thicker and thicker.
My stance was simple, You can't make me pay for something for which I didn't agree too without a contract. The FCC was off base ruling that this was legit. Please produce a signed or verbal proof of a contract with Sprint. BellSouth kept trying to collect for sprint and this went on and on.
So I sent a letter that if something didn't happen I would file in court and we could resolve the situation there.
Then the call came, "Ahhh, Mr. Garbett, we've been reviewing your file. You are talking about challenging our arrangement with other service providers under contract law is this correct?"
"Yes"
"Well, you have to understand that's a delicate matter. No one has done that before. We make a lot of money off this arrangement. How does a year of free service sound?"
"Okay"
"So you agree to drop the matter, and we will credit you for a years service based on your history and drop the charge-- Do you agree to these terms."
"Yes"
And there it was, a year of free service. I've been waiting for several years since then for a large enough abuse of this system that a class action forms. I find it all mildly amusing.
Here in Tennessee they had some revenue short falls. The tax division was pressured to get creative. They decided to reinterpret an old law so they could tax computer consultants which had never been done. That wasn't so bad, it's just that they decided to do it retroactively and go after all the consultants for back taxes. A friend of mine got caught in the net, he had registered his business in Tennessee and followed all the local laws. Consultants who hadn't got missed in the sweep.
He went back and read the law carefully. It had a clause something to the effect of "configuration of existing software and hardware is excluded" and had more language implying that consulting was taxable only if it developed the entire system. He made an argument that writing in scripts (PHP, Ruby) was all configuration of an existing system. In fact, by extension all coding was just configuration since he didn't write the OS to begin with. He hired a lawyer and dared them to sue him in court. They backed away quietly, afraid of the challenge.
This is yet another example of an academic discovering how easy it is to generate press. Math can prove that a mathematical system is consistent, and within that system can prove properties that result in that system. There are several wonderful mathematical models that describe physical phenomena with incredible accuracy. However, these models do not prove these properties, they just expose some relationships and properties of our world that are not necessarily obvious, and are useful in planning, engineering etc. The claims of "proof" of parallel universes is an abuse of the mathematical language.
FCC, FTC do something to big business. Ha. Ha Ha, BwwwwaaahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHA!!!>SLAP<
And now back to reality.
One place I worked at just put epoxy in all USB ports. Then they bought 200 signature capture pads, that work on USB. Heh.
His evidence list is a joke. First off if the social networking sites collapse, how bad will that be for the industry? Secondly, if the you-tube clones fail, how bad will that be? The rest of the evidence is really not much about collapse, just a bunch of bitches about likely project failures. The quote "the iPhone mania may be a bad sign of something" is priceless.
Summary:
John vents his spleen in a rambling manner, inflates the headline to something about industry collapse and slashdot reports it as news.
It said that "Swarm Theory" was being applied to business operations. I call bullshit. A computer model was run at night that provides the orders to all the drivers each morning. This flies in the face of the premise of swarm theory. If each driver were given a simple set of rules to follow for driving then it would be a direct application of swarm theory to operations. However, it's not swarm theory applied to operations, because each driver gets an order from corporate each morning. No local decision are made. It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.
Since when did Linux equal Philanthropic? Linus did it for fun and is still having fun. As long as they play by the license, trade organizations are natural part of business.
A friend of mine when presented with the option to join a startup asked for the title of 'Eyes and Ears'. Now that looked sweet on a business card.
Let me get this straight, using a string instead of point structure isn't an underlying conceptual idea?
When 99% of the code is in C and 1% is in FORTRAN with an ugly interface it doesn't matter how wonderful FORTRAN is. Take any two different computer languages and put them in my original comment and it still makes sense. I wasn't disparaging FORTRAN, I was disparaging the approach.
I worked at a place and the founder wrote the core piece of code in FORTRAN. A 300 person company sprang up around it. 99% of the software for the company was written in C around the core piece in FORTRAN. If you so much as mentioned rewriting that last piece, it was a quick ticket to the unemployment line. If I were you, I'd stick with VB or work on your resume. Strange part about the magic FORTRAN code-- it was a discrete Fourier transform. Business acumen beats good code when it comes to making money.
With that being said, Java EE 5 will make enterprise Java developer's lives much easier. EJBs, everyone's favorite whipping boy, are a lot easier to code now.
Bwuaah hah aha hahahaha. Let's see, we go from EJB's are evil to a lot easier to code now. Sure, after getting burned and poked in the fires of hell by Sun's concept of a business layer, just getting slow roasted on a spit is prefered.
Gradient descent searchs rarely find the minimum, expect in simple 1st or 2nd order curves. Analysis at a high level is *always* required for a project of any complexity. Extreme (or er. Agile for the PC) Programming neglects this basic fact.
Several of the facets of XP do however lend themselves to utilizing traits of human nature. Our current project mixes the two (old waterfall + XP), an analyst/architect making sure the big picture is covered doing a waterfall approach. A team of programmers working on the details and applying some of XP tenets to each area identified by the architect. It's going quite well so far. Each team is set loose on a fairly small, linear in complexity, piece of the project. The big picture has at least 8 major dimensions of complexity, and the architect gets to pull his hair out looking for solutions that cover them all or find ways to decouple them as much as possible.
Never disobey your boss on technical matters, even when he has no fucking clue what he's babbling about. That's how you get fired.
Generally when it comes to situations like this, I float a resume and get a new job. Voting with my feet. Let some other lacky take the brunt of the stupidity. Now that I look back, I've had a lot of jobs in the last decade. Hmmmm.
Damn! I've been going to these Linux User Groups for sometime and noboby passed the hookah to me. Stingy bastards.
We're looking at using it on an electronic medical record (in mental health). For every client (50000+) that is a patient of a staff (1000+), they get an RSS chart feed. Events are filterable by type and access restrictions. Now there's no more whining, "I didn't know you did that with that patient."
RSS Rocks!
Design Pattern: Really Bad Movie
Definition: A movie with little to no redeeming value. Usually follows a formula or pattern of another successful movie.
Participants:
Samples:
And here I thought pyrofusion was what happened to a slashdotted CPU...
Yeah, but enough @ssh*les show up and do it, I think management eventually gets the point. Even better, if people just boycott lying bastards in general, they'll go all out of business. Too many people just roll over and take what their given, and think it's okay. I for have made an @ss of myself on occasions where someone has taken advantage of me. Sure the clerk is the dumb stick who get its, but he's a representative of the company and the only one I am allowed to do business with. Or one can go off and file class action suits. Personally I prefer to voice my opinion in such matters with the loudest fart possible, and not do business with such parties again.