Thinking out loud here - some sort of probabilistic metric based on distance measured in time or number of patches / release cycles of the underlying kernel since the last project maintenance? I.e. the probability that 1 kernel patch will break a piece of software unless maintained is x; I'd expect that x rises by some non-linear function with the number of patches.
Agreed that the statue of limitations prevents his prosecution for felony child abuse.
However, his position as a judge should be held to a higher standard. While it may be too late to send this guy to jail, he has not business sitting on the bench. For that matter, he has no business being a lawyer either, but that's a different problem.
With respect to sample size, similar experiments have been repeated, admittedly in the field under uncontrolled circumstances, several million times over at least the last 5 decades, approximately 100% of the occasions the utility of function of quarters for beer money exceeded the utility function for quarters for laundry money among male college students
Is a bunch of people trying to hack on physics to bridge GR and QM. There are a couple different ways to do this. Strings are one, loop quantum gravity is another.
Right now, everyone is still in pre-release debugging, not even beta-testing. It's ALL VAPORWARE. Complicating things, as always is money - grants, funding, publication, as well as ego and rep - appointments, tenure, etc. The truth will out eventually - the theories WILL mature and develop; testable, falsifiable hypotheses will be formulated - patience, grasshopper.
What I'd like to know, now, is who's the "Home Brew Computing Club" of this mess and who is the "Bill Gates writing bitchy whiny letters complaining about shit"?
Witten and Greene I've heard of. String theory and string theoreticians are carrying the day (in political / "marketing" terms) in the academy. Who is losing and bitching? Apart from their economic incentive to bitch, should they be?
MS has to test stuff to make sure the fix doesn't make things worse. Decisions get made, people don't like the outcome. But recklessly announcing security holes is just dumb, and isn't helping anyone.
fail.
Excuse me. Corporations release crap products that cause problems and then refuse to man up and take responsibility for fixing them. Not exactly news, no.
But when corporations behave with the ethical and moral standards of petulant spoiled children - like Microsoft consistently, persistently does - then they have earned exactly what they get, including pretty much any and all guerilla tactics to smack them into behaving.
A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....
Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.
ERP Systems fail (and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just what I have seen myself)...because the sales pitch is to the board of directors and the implementation is at the user level....because I (financial analyst that I am) have a job to do. Your system helps or it doesn't, but I've got to get my job done.
The common theme here is that ERP implementations lack humility and respect for the existing business and the people who actually run it. In pursuit of relatively nebulous "strategic" advantages, an inflexible, underdocumented, undersupported system is shoved down everyone's throat.
A few years down the road what happens? The planning guy (me) and the accounting guy had EACH separately reimplemented Access databases to provide the information we need to do our jobs, despite the fact that a module exists in the ERP system to do exactly what we need to do.
Except that, of course, it's been configured in such a way that it doesn't do any such thing, and we can't change it. Hell it took me 3 months (not full time) grovelling through help screens to even understand it. No, there's no budget for training. Or user support. And changing things? Get in line.
It also is not "cheap" in terms of energy expended for the defensive team, and has a certain level of risk -- if the offense breaks the press and gets across halfcourt, the odds are pretty good they'll be able to get a quick and easy basket. It's a worthwhile strategy when used when necessary or as a non-routine variation that forces the other team to adapt. Do it all the time and the other team will adapt tactics (and personnel) to counter.
But these works are not works-for-hire and plaintiffs are not natural persons, so the entities suing are not necessarily the originators of the appropriate copyrights. They should be the assignees (that's what royalties are all about) but that's not the same thing and is NOT an unfair question to ask them to prove that they have the appropriate assignments of copyright from the original creators.
To file a motion to bar objections on something that hasn't been the subject of exhaustive motion and discovery practice?
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAL) you file a motion like that when the other side has been relentlessly arguing a point beyond all sense and reason and you are just trying to get them to knock it off and acknowledge - a la a request for admissions, that reality is what it is. Or perhaps you are asking the judge to compel them to acknowledge that reality is real.
In any event, you don't file this cold on something that hasn't been a bone of contention. That's just painting a target on it, right?
Counsel for Ms Thomas: "Oh wait? you don't want me to ask about your copyright registrations? really? oh? Your Honor, I'd like to see proof that the parties are actual the valid holders of the copyrights at issue in this lawsuit."
Judge: "So ordered"
RIAA counsel: "How could a 7 foot Wookie live on Endor? That... does not make sense. I... do not make sense."
NY Country Lawyer: "Oh no, they're using the Chewbacca defense again!"
You're not wrong, but I think the author referenced in the original post and you are addressed different parts of the whole problem of financial markets. The willingness of financial services salespeople - mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc - to basically lie their asses off because there's so much money on the line is one problem.
"Quant" analysis of financial markets is, really, another, related problem. The same moral hazard of too much money to make cutting corners worth it exists, but the basic problem here is that many "quant" models are bullshit. Quantitive models for derivative securities can be realistically valued -- if and only if the risk of the underlying primary asset has been properly assessed (along with several other critical assumptions about the marketplace for the security -- but that's the JUDGMENTAL assumption fundamentally inherent in the models.)
Risk assessment is not actually that difficult -- insurance is built on the ability to do risk assessment. The real problem with the current financial problems were that NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE UNDERLYING PRIMARY ASSETS WERE and everyone operated on the belief that Nothing Could Ever Possibly Go Wrong (because no one could prove otherwise, because no one knew what the hell was actually going on).
This is and was every bit as monumentally stupid an assumption in the financial realm as it is engineering, computer programming, science, or any other real-world discipline.
I think what Wilmott is proposing is the development of models that are more reactive to real-world inputs, models that are much more Bayesian in nature in their ability to refine and revise their predictive nature based on actual events.
Admittedly without reading TFA, that sounds like his point - that what "quants" should be doing is developing good empirically good heuristic models rather than wanking over what are essentially hypothetical analytical ones based on complete SWAG parameters, where the parameters supplied by salesmen will invevitably be optimistic best case ones (and that's putting it charitably).
A piece of standard 25th century technology - the communicator - is sitting in your wallet, or, if you're geek enough, clipped to your belt. It doesn't have enough power to pump a signal to LEO...YET.... so the only golly-gee technology in that sucker is...the battery.
The politics gets dated, the style gets dated - what were passionate issues in the 60's don't translate so well to the opening years of the 21st century.
The reboot was necessary - if you want to tell tales about Kirk and Spock and keep telling new stories aobut the voyages of Enterprise and NOT have every character turn into Wesley Crusher - you're gonna have to allow some creative leeway to back up, refocus on the essential elements of what makes Star Trek worth watching, and begin again.
Wrath of Khan was the best of the movies by far because the emotions of the characters were so complexly developed.
highly readable non-technical tour of things like congruences, axiomatics, abstract algebra, topology and other elements of "real" mathematics, although as he rightly points out, he doesn't do much with analysis, because you really can't do much with analysis that isn't technical in nature.
The IT department at my company does a piss poor job at actual user support, in terms of user education, learning curve, office apps, etc.
You know, the things people actually USE on the computer.
So it falls to people like me to provide user support in my department to everyone - "Hey, I've got an Excel question..." is usually something I'm happy to help out with, since it only happens a couple times a week.
But if it happens several times a day, because no one knows what their spiffy new software does, I will go completely ape****. So, no, changing systems is not a good idea
I don't disagree that desktop support and network support are vastly different things, nor do I disagree that the IT staff should NOT be doing this stuff, simply because desktop stuff is a teaching / training issue more than anything else (until you get to hardcore automation stuff where the coding skills of the IT staff start to come into play).
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there. That's just the way the universe works, and they look like sulky and spoiled children if they refuse to accept responsibility for supporting what they shoved down everyone else's throats. That's how it plays to the rest of the world.
But there seems to be a lack of common sense involved that goes beyond even that...
There's this story: Our corporate office sent out a piece of financial reporting software we were required to use for planning and reporting. We had to install it on our computers. Now this was some years ago, pre-XP, whether it was win95 or 98 I can't remember, anyway, I dug into the documentation corporate provided, figured out what was needed, including edits to sys.ini and autoexec.bat and got up and running. There are 5 other people in the accounting department who needed this software, none of them remotely as computer sophisticated as I am, and I don't claim to be very sophisticated at all. I wrote up a HOWTO and walked it over to the IT department and explained that I expected that they didn't want everyone messing around with system configuration files, and here you go, these are the other folks who need installs....
"We don't support user applications," I was told. Well, I explained, I'm an accountant, and installing software and configuring system files isn't my job, either. So I'll pass this along to my colleagues and let them figure it out for themselves, too.
Phone started ringing off the hook in IT about 20 minutes later.
At the level of network infrastructure, I have no problem with this. Frankly, I don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of the network. I want it to work for me. I want to be able to call the IT org for help and trust they'll straighten things out when necessary.
However, IT does NOT know better than the rest of us about how to do OUR jobs and many IT policies impact them. For instance, our new security guy decided that some forms of iternet access were a Bad Thing - like e-commerce for those lazy thieving cube-dwellers out there. Too bad many of our suppliers have taken to electronic invoicing and our Accounts Payable department needs to download invoice documents via those same electronic commerce pathways you just blocked.
As another example, Excel may not be the greatest thing in the world, but if you're an accountant, for good or ill, you're stuck with it. It's a critically important tool to doing your job. So the day to push across that "latest" MS security update that's been sitting around since forever is NOT the first day of the fiscal month when every accountant in the company is under major deadline pressure to close the books and thereby knocking down everyone's computer for 2 hours.
Finally, if you a)hand me a computer system with Office on it; b)announce that you don't provide user support/help for Office, then you have no right to expect that I will do anything but regard you with suspicion. Office is what users use - it is how they interact with the computer and you've just announced you're blowing them off and yet you wonder why your users think you're a waste of time and a pain in the ass and that all IT policies are subject to workaround?
So, really, it cuts both ways.
A little common sense, a little communication, a little humility, a little training goes a long ways.
Which is why it took about exactly one encounter with Fairpoint customer dissservice for us to completely dump them as any kind of service provider whatsover and switch everything over to our cable provider.
In other words, if elected officials evade and avoid the means established to hold them accountable, (say by illegally conducting government business out of sight in a private email account) then they are assuming the risk that other, less formal means will be found to establish that accountability.
Sarah Palin got her email account hacked. She wasn't tarred and feathered or ridden out of town on a rail, or dragged out of her office and hung from the nearest tree by an angry mob.
Since Sarah doesn't think the rules apply to her, then why the hell should they apply to anyone else dealing with her?
Because I'm an accountant, whether I want to or not, I've had to become fairly expert in Excel. The "currency" data type from excel is supposed to prevent this. I don't believe it, and haven't tried it. Excel likes to do too much sneaky polymorphic data manipulation unless you nail absolutely everything to the floor for any reliance on data-typing IN THE SPREADSHEET to be reliable. VBA code might theoretically be different, but there are whole boatloads of other reasons why it's a dumb idea there.
However, wrapping your calculation in round() will solve your problem. As others have said, this is a floating-point thing, not an evil-Microsoft thing. Instead of your bare formula, use =round([formula],[digits 'o precision]). Hey presto, no more floating point problems.
He's at least got enough sense to know what kind of an audience Bruce Schneier has. There are still gaping holes in security and there are still questions he dodged, but at least the man had enough wit to attempt to be humanly funny about it.
And then he waved the bright shiny object for slashdot - how would YOU do it - how would you prevent the smuggling of liquid explosives onto an airplane given that you don't necessarily know the chemical signature(s) of the explosives...or their constituents?
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking out loud here - some sort of probabilistic metric based on distance measured in time or number of patches / release cycles of the underlying kernel since the last project maintenance? I.e. the probability that 1 kernel patch will break a piece of software unless maintained is x; I'd expect that x rises by some non-linear function with the number of patches.
Mega-giant civilization destroying hurricanes next. We're doomed.
Agreed that the statue of limitations prevents his prosecution for felony child abuse.
However, his position as a judge should be held to a higher standard. While it may be too late to send this guy to jail, he has not business sitting on the bench. For that matter, he has no business being a lawyer either, but that's a different problem.
With respect to sample size, similar experiments have been repeated, admittedly in the field under uncontrolled circumstances, several million times over at least the last 5 decades, approximately 100% of the occasions the utility of function of quarters for beer money exceeded the utility function for quarters for laundry money among male college students
Is a bunch of people trying to hack on physics to bridge GR and QM. There are a couple different ways to do this. Strings are one, loop quantum gravity is another.
Right now, everyone is still in pre-release debugging, not even beta-testing. It's ALL VAPORWARE. Complicating things, as always is money - grants, funding, publication, as well as ego and rep - appointments, tenure, etc. The truth will out eventually - the theories WILL mature and develop; testable, falsifiable hypotheses will be formulated - patience, grasshopper.
What I'd like to know, now, is who's the "Home Brew Computing Club" of this mess and who is the "Bill Gates writing bitchy whiny letters complaining about shit"?
Witten and Greene I've heard of. String theory and string theoreticians are carrying the day (in political / "marketing" terms) in the academy. Who is losing and bitching? Apart from their economic incentive to bitch, should they be?
MS has to test stuff to make sure the fix doesn't make things worse. Decisions get made, people don't like the outcome. But recklessly announcing security holes is just dumb, and isn't helping anyone.
fail.
Excuse me. Corporations release crap products that cause problems and then refuse to man up and take responsibility for fixing them. Not exactly news, no.
But when corporations behave with the ethical and moral standards of petulant spoiled children - like Microsoft consistently, persistently does - then they have earned exactly what they get, including pretty much any and all guerilla tactics to smack them into behaving.
is the color blaze orange with concentric circles on the back?
A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....
Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.
ERP Systems fail (and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just what I have seen myself) ...because the sales pitch is to the board of directors and the implementation is at the user level. ...because I (financial analyst that I am) have a job to do. Your system helps or it doesn't, but I've got to get my job done.
The common theme here is that ERP implementations lack humility and respect for the existing business and the people who actually run it. In pursuit of relatively nebulous "strategic" advantages, an inflexible, underdocumented, undersupported system is shoved down everyone's throat.
A few years down the road what happens? The planning guy (me) and the accounting guy had EACH separately reimplemented Access databases to provide the information we need to do our jobs, despite the fact that a module exists in the ERP system to do exactly what we need to do.
Except that, of course, it's been configured in such a way that it doesn't do any such thing, and we can't change it. Hell it took me 3 months (not full time) grovelling through help screens to even understand it. No, there's no budget for training. Or user support. And changing things? Get in line.
It also is not "cheap" in terms of energy expended for the defensive team, and has a certain level of risk -- if the offense breaks the press and gets across halfcourt, the odds are pretty good they'll be able to get a quick and easy basket. It's a worthwhile strategy when used when necessary or as a non-routine variation that forces the other team to adapt. Do it all the time and the other team will adapt tactics (and personnel) to counter.
But these works are not works-for-hire and plaintiffs are not natural persons, so the entities suing are not necessarily the originators of the appropriate copyrights. They should be the assignees (that's what royalties are all about) but that's not the same thing and is NOT an unfair question to ask them to prove that they have the appropriate assignments of copyright from the original creators.
To file a motion to bar objections on something that hasn't been the subject of exhaustive motion and discovery practice?
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAL) you file a motion like that when the other side has been relentlessly arguing a point beyond all sense and reason and you are just trying to get them to knock it off and acknowledge - a la a request for admissions, that reality is what it is. Or perhaps you are asking the judge to compel them to acknowledge that reality is real.
In any event, you don't file this cold on something that hasn't been a bone of contention. That's just painting a target on it, right?
Counsel for Ms Thomas: "Oh wait? you don't want me to ask about your copyright registrations? really? oh? Your Honor, I'd like to see proof that the parties are actual the valid holders of the copyrights at issue in this lawsuit."
Judge: "So ordered"
RIAA counsel: "How could a 7 foot Wookie live on Endor? That... does not make sense. I... do not make sense."
NY Country Lawyer: "Oh no, they're using the Chewbacca defense again!"
You're not wrong, but I think the author referenced in the original post and you are addressed different parts of the whole problem of financial markets. The willingness of financial services salespeople - mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc - to basically lie their asses off because there's so much money on the line is one problem.
"Quant" analysis of financial markets is, really, another, related problem. The same moral hazard of too much money to make cutting corners worth it exists, but the basic problem here is that many "quant" models are bullshit. Quantitive models for derivative securities can be realistically valued -- if and only if the risk of the underlying primary asset has been properly assessed (along with several other critical assumptions about the marketplace for the security -- but that's the JUDGMENTAL assumption fundamentally inherent in the models.)
Risk assessment is not actually that difficult -- insurance is built on the ability to do risk assessment. The real problem with the current financial problems were that NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE UNDERLYING PRIMARY ASSETS WERE and everyone operated on the belief that Nothing Could Ever Possibly Go Wrong (because no one could prove otherwise, because no one knew what the hell was actually going on).
This is and was every bit as monumentally stupid an assumption in the financial realm as it is engineering, computer programming, science, or any other real-world discipline.
I think what Wilmott is proposing is the development of models that are more reactive to real-world inputs, models that are much more Bayesian in nature in their ability to refine and revise their predictive nature based on actual events.
Admittedly without reading TFA, that sounds like his point - that what "quants" should be doing is developing good empirically good heuristic models rather than wanking over what are essentially hypothetical analytical ones based on complete SWAG parameters, where the parameters supplied by salesmen will invevitably be optimistic best case ones (and that's putting it charitably).
A piece of standard 25th century technology - the communicator - is sitting in your wallet, or, if you're geek enough, clipped to your belt. It doesn't have enough power to pump a signal to LEO...YET.... so the only golly-gee technology in that sucker is...the battery.
The politics gets dated, the style gets dated - what were passionate issues in the 60's don't translate so well to the opening years of the 21st century.
The reboot was necessary - if you want to tell tales about Kirk and Spock and keep telling new stories aobut the voyages of Enterprise and NOT have every character turn into Wesley Crusher - you're gonna have to allow some creative leeway to back up, refocus on the essential elements of what makes Star Trek worth watching, and begin again.
Wrath of Khan was the best of the movies by far because the emotions of the characters were so complexly developed.
by Ian Stewart
highly readable non-technical tour of things like congruences, axiomatics, abstract algebra, topology and other elements of "real" mathematics, although as he rightly points out, he doesn't do much with analysis, because you really can't do much with analysis that isn't technical in nature.
http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewart/dp/0486284247
The IT department at my company does a piss poor job at actual user support, in terms of user education, learning curve, office apps, etc.
You know, the things people actually USE on the computer.
So it falls to people like me to provide user support in my department to everyone - "Hey, I've got an Excel question..." is usually something I'm happy to help out with, since it only happens a couple times a week.
But if it happens several times a day, because no one knows what their spiffy new software does, I will go completely ape****. So, no, changing systems is not a good idea
Not sure what you can use to create a visualization, but the information you need is in the IMG.
I don't have a need to develop a visualization of the whole of our SAP implementation, just my little FI-CO corner of it, and that's a big enough pain
I don't disagree that desktop support and network support are vastly different things, nor do I disagree that the IT staff should NOT be doing this stuff, simply because desktop stuff is a teaching / training issue more than anything else (until you get to hardcore automation stuff where the coding skills of the IT staff start to come into play).
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there. That's just the way the universe works, and they look like sulky and spoiled children if they refuse to accept responsibility for supporting what they shoved down everyone else's throats. That's how it plays to the rest of the world.
But there seems to be a lack of common sense involved that goes beyond even that...
There's this story: Our corporate office sent out a piece of financial reporting software we were required to use for planning and reporting. We had to install it on our computers. Now this was some years ago, pre-XP, whether it was win95 or 98 I can't remember, anyway, I dug into the documentation corporate provided, figured out what was needed, including edits to sys.ini and autoexec.bat and got up and running. There are 5 other people in the accounting department who needed this software, none of them remotely as computer sophisticated as I am, and I don't claim to be very sophisticated at all. I wrote up a HOWTO and walked it over to the IT department and explained that I expected that they didn't want everyone messing around with system configuration files, and here you go, these are the other folks who need installs....
"We don't support user applications," I was told. Well, I explained, I'm an accountant, and installing software and configuring system files isn't my job, either. So I'll pass this along to my colleagues and let them figure it out for themselves, too.
Phone started ringing off the hook in IT about 20 minutes later.
At the level of network infrastructure, I have no problem with this. Frankly, I don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of the network. I want it to work for me. I want to be able to call the IT org for help and trust they'll straighten things out when necessary.
However, IT does NOT know better than the rest of us about how to do OUR jobs and many IT policies impact them. For instance, our new security guy decided that some forms of iternet access were a Bad Thing - like e-commerce for those lazy thieving cube-dwellers out there. Too bad many of our suppliers have taken to electronic invoicing and our Accounts Payable department needs to download invoice documents via those same electronic commerce pathways you just blocked.
As another example, Excel may not be the greatest thing in the world, but if you're an accountant, for good or ill, you're stuck with it. It's a critically important tool to doing your job. So the day to push across that "latest" MS security update that's been sitting around since forever is NOT the first day of the fiscal month when every accountant in the company is under major deadline pressure to close the books and thereby knocking down everyone's computer for 2 hours.
Finally, if you a)hand me a computer system with Office on it; b)announce that you don't provide user support/help for Office, then you have no right to expect that I will do anything but regard you with suspicion. Office is what users use - it is how they interact with the computer and you've just announced you're blowing them off and yet you wonder why your users think you're a waste of time and a pain in the ass and that all IT policies are subject to workaround?
So, really, it cuts both ways.
A little common sense, a little communication, a little humility, a little training goes a long ways.
...pretty much, yeah.
Which is why it took about exactly one encounter with Fairpoint customer dissservice for us to completely dump them as any kind of service provider whatsover and switch everything over to our cable provider.
The asymmetry of power.
In other words, if elected officials evade and avoid the means established to hold them accountable, (say by illegally conducting government business out of sight in a private email account) then they are assuming the risk that other, less formal means will be found to establish that accountability.
Sarah Palin got her email account hacked. She wasn't tarred and feathered or ridden out of town on a rail, or dragged out of her office and hung from the nearest tree by an angry mob.
Since Sarah doesn't think the rules apply to her, then why the hell should they apply to anyone else dealing with her?
...do they have the XCaliber code?...
I tell you, boy, nothing like a chat room session that crashed every 45 minutes.
Who am I kidding? Those crashes are probably the only reason I graduated....
Because I'm an accountant, whether I want to or not, I've had to become fairly expert in Excel. The "currency" data type from excel is supposed to prevent this. I don't believe it, and haven't tried it. Excel likes to do too much sneaky polymorphic data manipulation unless you nail absolutely everything to the floor for any reliance on data-typing IN THE SPREADSHEET to be reliable. VBA code might theoretically be different, but there are whole boatloads of other reasons why it's a dumb idea there.
However, wrapping your calculation in round() will solve your problem. As others have said, this is a floating-point thing, not an evil-Microsoft thing. Instead of your bare formula, use =round([formula],[digits 'o precision]). Hey presto, no more floating point problems.
He's at least got enough sense to know what kind of an audience Bruce Schneier has. There are still gaping holes in security and there are still questions he dodged, but at least the man had enough wit to attempt to be humanly funny about it.
And then he waved the bright shiny object for slashdot - how would YOU do it - how would you prevent the smuggling of liquid explosives onto an airplane given that you don't necessarily know the chemical signature(s) of the explosives...or their constituents?