The statement was that the Note 4 hasn't eclipsed the iPhone nor is it out selling it. That statement is true.
It isn't really fair to just compare the Note 4 to the iPhone, since one of the primary benefit Samsung has going for it is options (although Apple closed this gap with the 6 and 6 plus). You need to compare the iPhone to the Note 4 and Galaxy S5/6, where the gap in sales is not nearly as large. And that is almost the only thing Apple has going for it is its better marketing / sales. That clearly would make me want to own Apple stock instead of Samsung stock, but it doesn't have anything to do with which phone I would want to buy.
The details about the Note 4 don't mean shit when the implementation on a whole is crap. Samsung is going to have to get away from Android and the fact that everything about it screams poor experience because its purpose is to basically steal information about the user to serve the user ads.
Those are all very subjective comparisons. I have only owned Galaxy Sx phones, not a Note, but the user experience has been great. I only know one person who switched from Apple to Samsung, but he greatly preferred the Samsung phone. Both your and my experience is very anecdotal though, and mostly meaningless.
You're one of those guys that thinks raw specs are all that matters for comparisons... which is why we all drive race cars to and from work and the store.
It has been about 2-3 years since most phone specs mattered (IMHO) for most phones. But there are significant spec advantages for the Note 4 compared to the iPhone 6 Plus. The screen is much better, 3x the RAM (usually not a deciding factor with high end phones, but seriously only 1 GB Apple?), much better back and front cameras, and expandable memory. It is striking that the iPhone 6 Plus is just so inferior to a product that was launching just a month later. But the biggest advantage the Note 4 has is its multitasking capabilities not its specs.
This only thing Apple has going for it is a larger user base, so apps such as Facetime can almost single-handedly keep customers staying with Apple.
How is a device that most people have never heard of "eclipsing" the iPhone. It's certainly not outselling it.
How do you figure that Samsung hasn't eclipsed the iPhone? They sell more phones each year by a wide margin (Samsung: 444 million vs Apple: 151 million in 2013), and are on par with Apple when you only count phones that are comparable with the iPhone (about a third of their sales).
When you look at the quality of the phone features, Samsung really has the iPhone beat. I was contemplating moving to the iPhone when they announced their larger models since I have an iPad and would like my phone and tablet to be within the same app ecosystem. But details about the Note 4 and rumors about the S6 make the iPhone look really bad.
Apple does have Samsung beat in marketing and brand awareness, which helps them have far more profit (for now). But with the inferior phones they have produced over the past couple years it is hard to see them continuing their dominance over the next decade. Their tablets are still the best though (IMHO).
Taxation is kind of hard to see for phone support, since it's a cost center, not a revenue center.
You just aren't being very creative. If you want a little bit of profit to be made overseas, create a subsidiary in India that charges your company for phone support. Make sure the price is high enough that your subsidiary is making a profit, and you have just shifted some profit overseas.
Shouldn't the diversity crusaders be making waves calling for more male enrollment in fashion?
No, because no one feels the lack of diversity in fashion affects the efficiency of our economy.
and short of forcing students into majors they don't like, you're never gonna get perfect diversity?
That may be your contention, but there is a great deal of disagreement around this. Many people believe that culture has a significant impact on the careers people pursue. Many people feel someone working as an engineer improves society more than someone working as a retail worker, and that it is worth the effort to help women meet their full potential. I will sure try to do this for my daughter.
The same could be said about pretty much everything. The things you like are incredibly boring and stupid to a lot of people.
Yes, but I'm sure that no one spends huge amounts of their tax dollars supporting his boring recreational activities...
National parks, PBS, National Endowment for the Arts, etc. There are plenty of was the government funds recreational activities.
According to Grantmakers in the Arts, public funding in the arts comes to about $1.14 billion per year. With the NFL receiving $146 million per year, the NFL is still getting a sizeable amount of money in comparison. But with about 1 in 3 Americans watching at least some football each year, football probably entertains at least as many people as the entire NEA funding does, so perhaps it is money well spent.
Toyota is very open about their processes - they give guided tours of their plants to their competitors. And where did you think those "TPS" reports came from in "Office Space?" "Toyota Production System." They also share methodologies with everyone, including their competitors, but that didn't stop them from becoming the #1 car manufacturer in the world.
If Toyota didn't settle with the Department of Justice for $1.2 billion earlier this year because of deliberately concealing vehicle safety issues, your statements would hold more water. Companies are so interested in keeping their problems secret they are willing to hide them even when it is against the law. So when hiding something is not against the law, the decision of whether to keep it hidden is far easier to make.
Food is also regulated by the FDA. You can search the same FDA database for "food bugs." Has that harmed the food industry?
Has is harmed them compared to what? The non-FDA regulated food items? This has no relation to a company whose competitors are not being forced to open their data, like food companies are. The sales and marketing teams wouldn't be nearly as upset if their competitors were forced to open their bug databases as well (like is the case with the FDA).
And as someone who did research with a professor in requirements tracing for the FDA, I can tell you there is plenty that is kept secret in the food and medical industries even with FDA approval.
Whether an open bugs list helps this business is what this story is about - NOT "open source vs closed source".
You brought up the "open source vs closed source" debate by comparing this company who writes proprietary software with the behaviors of open source projects. My entire point was that you shouldn't be bringing up open source projects, so thank you for agreeing with me.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision.
First, if you bothered to read the summary, the decision has NOT been made. The bug tracker is still open to everyone.
It is impossible from the summary to know where the company currently stands on this. We only know what actions management has taken so far. Bureaucracy can move slow. He has already stopping actively publishing links to the Bugzilla database, and admits he believes the next step of closing open access to the database is coming soon. The sales/marketing team has made up their mind that the open database is bad, it's just that the higher ups haven't completely forced their hand yet.
Those are all open source projects
So what?
It is important because open source software lives with a different set of advantages / disadvantages as closed software. Open source benefits from having more people looking at / working on the code, but has the downside of making the code available to anyone. Close source benefits from being proprietary and being able to control how they appear to the public, but lose the extra manpower.
Let's take another real-world example - bugs in pharmaceuticals. The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System [fda.gov]. Anyone can post to it,...
Once again, you are looking at something completely different. Pharmaceuticals are regulated by the FDA, as even you point out. Government have (correctly IMHO) determined that the possibly damaging nature of these disclosures to the company is outweighed by the public benefit of knowing this information. If a government agency forced all ERP systems to publicly disclose their bug databases, then you would have an apt analogy.
So until there's proof, there's no valid reason to change current practice.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision. This is what you pay them for, and their opinions carry FAR more weight in this matter than your developers. They probably did seek the opinions of the development staff, since the poster said compromises have been made, but ultimately it is not up to the IT staff. And with the weak arguments used in the post, I can easily see why the sales and marketing teams are continuing to push back.
That one took only seconds to debunk [google.com]. The number one smartphone software in the world in terms of sales has a public searchable bug list., including open bugs. FreeBSD, which is the base of OSX and which Apple contributes heavily to, lets anyone browse all bug reports or just open ones [freebsd.org].
Those are all open source projects, which obviously have all bugs and even all software made public. Those are horrible examples; it is almost as if you agree with me and are purposely throwing out easily shot down arguments to bolster my case.
Bullcrap. Ask marketing to provide proof (not anecdotes - real proof) on the number of people who have switched away from the product because of the bug reports.
If you are asking for "real proof", that goes both ways. I doubt the software development team has any scientific studies showing a public development bug database works better than listing bug fixes in release notes. So both sides are just using their personal experience and generally accepted knowledge.
And truthfully, this is ONLY a marketing / sales issue. They are responsible for how the company communicates with its customers, not the developers. Either change their minds, convince the bosses to hire different people, or do what they say in this matter.
On top of this, I don't think the poster has a very good argument. Just look at this statement:
This had been appreciated by our support and developer community, as they can readily see what issues are addressed and what new features have been introduced.
You don't need to make your internal bug tracking software public to do this. You only have to provide release notes. You can go one step further and publish a roadmap if you feel that is helpful. But none of this requires you to "air your dirty laundry". The fact he tries validate his decision with facts that don't actually back him up just shows me he doesn't have a very good argument.
People know all software has bugs. Hasn't stopped Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Amazon, from doing business. If marketing doesn't know how to "feature" this openness - by emphasizing the responsiveness to users (not that it's open per se), then they're idiots.
If people are so knowledgeable about the fact all software has bugs, why do none of the huge companies you mention openly list their internal bug tracking data? They all have huge and experiences sales and marketing departments, and all of them feel it is not a good idea. Some cloud companies do publish very detailed uptime and maintenance reports, but that is because of how wary companies still are about trusting another company's uptime statistics. They still don't openly publish unfixed bugs; you need to go to someplace like StackExchange and blogs to find those.
I am confused. If they are testing the performance of ACID and BASE database systems, why did they use a data load that can easily fit on a single computer? The data size for both databases was under 150 GB which can easily sit on a single hard drive let alone a single server. Why would a BASE database have any edge over an ACID one for a data set that does not require distribution between multiple servers?
It is still important to see how much faster a more established DBMS is than a relative newcomer for smaller loads, but I still feel this comparison is a bit lacking.
My point is that studies have allowed for this pressure, and have been conducted only amongst women who have not disqualified themselves. If you compare only women without children to men, men still get paid more for the same jobs.
He wasn't just talking about childless women. If women without children choose lower paid professions, and put higher emphasis on things like work-life balance than men do. They also don't negotiate for salary as hard.
This has been allowed for in the various studies of the subject. Even among childless women there is a significant discrepancy in salaries for similar jobs. Though, from one article in the Economist, the discrepancy almost disappears for childless women not in any relationship.
Looking at only childless women is clearly not enough to remove all non-discriminatory factors that create the mythical gender pay gap. An American Association of University Women study and US Department of Labor research put the pay gap at 6.6% and 5.9% respectively. And they admit they could not adjust for some of the biggest elephants in the room, such as the lack of salary negotiation among women or women giving higher priority to their family than their career (they only adjusted for industry and education, not job position).
My wife is a good example of both phenomena. When she was offered her previous job the salary was about $58k. With negotiation she raised that to $69k. Studies show that women don't negotiate for salary as much as men, and if my wife was like the over 4 in 5 women who don't negotate salary her pay would have been 16% less.
On the other hand, I went back to school to improve my career while she held off on her MBA to have our children. It was a decision she made because she wanted to, but it will likely cost her tens of thousands if not possibly hundreds of thousands in lost wages. On top of the lack of an MBA (which honestly may not cost her any wages), she spends more time raising kids than I do because we both know my career is now the breadwinning one. I now make 70% more than I did 5 years ago while she makes about 25% more. And I am not objectively smarter or more determined than my wife, we just went down different paths.
On top of this, she even fits another gender stereotype by cleaning more than I do. I do far more cleaning than I did as a bachelor, but she needs to have an immaculate house. While I am reading journals, writing side projects, or just learning a new technology, she is tidying up the house. If she was willing to live in a house that didn't always look like it was being staged to sell, like I am, she would be able to spend more time on her career.
Nonsense. People understood the world before long science was invented, and very little of our useful understanding of the world comes from science. Most of it comes from direct experience or the experience passed on to us by others.
Nonsense. People may not always use science deliberately, but using direct experience along with inductive and deductive reasoning is the bedrock of scientific discovery. The scientific method is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is also not the only method in which people perform scientific studies.
Science exists because people invented it.
Correction: people discovered science. Inventing things is engineering; learning the concepts and natural laws that allow us to invent things is science.
[Science] does not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the sole mechanism for understanding the world.
Yes it does. Without logical arguments there is no verifiable way to ensure you know anything. Under circumstances where too much is unknown you can use very weak arguments, but they must still be backed up by some form of logical reasoning.
Even belief in God uses deductive and inductive reasoning. It is just very flaky reasoning that allows the believer to make no meaningful predictions.
Well, "God" or "Gods" being, by definition, supernatural entities (emphasis on the super in that term) are beyond the purview of science.
You can't just define something as being beyond the purview of science, and then argue that is why it is outside the purview of science.
Supernatural is not a useful term in this argument. Its definition is simply anything that is considered outside the laws of nature. It doesn't mean it is outside the laws of the natural world, because in reality nothing can be. We find things that are outside our current understanding of the "natural world" quite often, and then they become part of the natural world. Electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics all come to mind.
If we found evidence that some entity could break the laws of thermodynamics, it would not be supernatural. We would simply change the laws of thermodynamics to adjust for this new information.
Why are you right, and he wrong? Why are you right and the many sciences that believe in God are wrong about that?
How is what Feynman said and what I said at odds?
He says science cannot disprove the existence of God. Almost every atheist would agree with that. No one can disprove any claim which does not make falsifiable statements, and scientists are no different.
He also says someone can be a scientist and religious at the same time. That is obviously true because more than 0% of scientists are religious.
My contention is only that there are no questions that religion can answer that science cannot answer. The only time science and religion are truly at odds is when religion makes a claim that science already has a much more reasonable answer for. One example is contemplating the meaning of the universe.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
I personally see no problem with this statement. I would only disagree if Hamlet had said "Than can be dreamt of in your philosophy."
But personally I'd prefer a higher wage and leave out the modern over-hyped version of a flee-market we now call a "conference" It's a waste of my time and often costs 10% of my sallary for me to attend. Wouldn't you prefer a 10% raise?...and I literally tell my management that. I wont waist your money, so don't waste my time. Pay me more and I wont leave.
The main reason why it makes more sense for your employer to pay for a conference instead of giving a raise is that the trip is tax deductible and you do not have to pay taxes on it either. The average real corporate tax rate is 12.1%, so that $10k conference only costs a profitable company about $8800. If they gave you the $8800 directly, after state, federal, FICA, and employment taxes that probably comes down to just under $5k.
So if you were to pay for the conference yourself, it would literally cost twice as much as if your company pays for it directly. And if you would rather have $5k than attend a $10k conference then the conference is clearly not worth it (either because the conference is worthless or you aren't ambitiousness enough to get much from it).
Please explain how science can explain its own existence,
Science can easily explain its own existence. Science exists because it is the only process of understanding the world in a way that can provide useful results. Or at least the only way we have found so far.
or why any given set of scientific axioms exist in the specific manner that they do?
They exist in the way that they do because that is where the evidence leads us. And basic human psychology shows any attempt to place desire or intent onto a scientific axiom is just anthropomorphism.
"Why?" is still a valid question; and science says we lack the tools to gather evidence of "why?".
"Why" is not always a valid question. When you ask "why is the universe here" the first thing to notice is you are giving human intent to something that has no intent. It is like asking "why does my shirt want to be blue?" There is a reason it is blue, but it does not desire to be blue. The universe was created (or always existed) but it did not want to be created or did not feel like being created. The desire to give "meaning" to natural phenomena is basic anthropomorphism and should be easily discarded.
The article is just as bad or perhaps worse than the summary. Most of the summary is just taking snippets out of the article, and some of the more egregious ones that I bothered to check aren't taking anything out of context. And there is plenty of worse content that the summary has left out.
thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them
This particular line of reasoning is the first one I checked on hoping it was just embellishment by the submitter. But it was there. The article loses absolutely all credibility in this one sentence. Science is more than capable of contemplating the cause of anything. It may not be good at anthropomorphizing natural phenomena and giving it intent (like wondering why the universe was created), but that is simply because scientific reasoning easily dismisses such thought as not only irrelevant but ultimately incorrect.
First of all, on the "poor underpayed H1-B" myth. I live and work in Seattle metro area. My base pay is $150k, and then another $40k on top of that in bonuses.
First off, individual salaries of very highly skilled H-1B visa holders does nothing to undermine the "poor underpaid H-1B" myth. Does the fact there is a black president mean there is absolutely no discrimination left in the US?
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, H-1B Visa holders in the computer industry make on average $13k less per year than a citizen. In addition to that, 85% of H-1B workers work for less than the median wage for their occupation. Looks like you are not the norm.
Just because you are one of the few H-1B workers that almost all US citizens would agree we want to immigrate here does nothing to disprove the fact that H-1B workers depress wages by flooding the market with underpaid workers.
Every time I see these stories, I know what comments there will be, but I'm getting tired of all the whining and bullshit.
The sad thing is when anyone complains about H-1B workers they are almost immediately accused of xenophobia and/or labeled as whining. I hate our H-1B system, but only because of how unfairly it treats H-1B workers. I am a consultant and I work with many of these immigrants. I am appalled at how horrible the system is that they describe. If we had a properly functioning H-1B program, instead of the indentured servitude it usually consists of, I would bet that H-1B workers would make above median wages.
If they weren't just an exploited group (in the vast majority of cases), companies would only bring over the best and the brightest. And this would be wonderful.
I find it just as likely that these workers never had passion in the first place. They were knowlegeable of the current trends right out of college because they spent the last four years learning them. But as soon as they left college the learning stopped. It wasn't noticeable for the first 5-10 years, but as the industry shifts it starts to become more obvious.
Everyone I know who was passionate about this industry in college has stayed passonate today (almost 15 years later). Some have switched to the business side and have become passionate there instead, but that internal drive is still there.
Too bad the show doesn't portray any intelligent person as normal as those you receive "support" from.
In the scientific crowds I have been a part of, Leonard is on par with the more "normal" people I have known. He still has quite a few geeky quirks, but overall he can blend in as well as most geeky guys can. He has a hard time with some of Penny's brain dead friends, especially when watching sports, but overall he seems pretty normal to me.
Leonard has always struck me as that one normal guy which is quite common in many geeky cliches. They can't have too many of their characters be well balanced or else why would the show be fun to watch?
From another angle, take a look at Two and a Half Men. You have a womanizing morally bankrupt millionaire, an incompetent brother, and a brain dead son. If I were a millionaire playboy, divorced middle aged man with career problems, or a teenager who struggled in school, I wouldn't want any of those characters to represent me. While each of them may get laid more than the character on BBT, I wouldn't consider any of them to be "normal" either. Abnormal people simply make for great television.
After reading the article, the $10k difference they are using was between those who took the COBOL class and ALL Business Computer Information Systems students. That degree is more of an IT degree than a software development related degree (at this school). It is a very bad comparison.
I would be more interested in how those students who took COBOL compared to the university's Computer Science and Engineering students.
Anthropology and Sociology are not typically considered STEM but "social sciences."
Social Sciences are part of STEM, it even has the word Science in there to help clear any ambiguity.
Most organizations such as universities and scholorship programs use the National Science Foundation's (NSF) definition of STEM. This is apt considering the term originated from the director of the NSF. Here is a list of degrees that are considered STEM which was compiled by the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency, who revised its definition of STEM to more closely align with that of the NSF in 2012. It clearly shows many social sciences as being part of STEM.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement was that the Note 4 hasn't eclipsed the iPhone nor is it out selling it. That statement is true.
It isn't really fair to just compare the Note 4 to the iPhone, since one of the primary benefit Samsung has going for it is options (although Apple closed this gap with the 6 and 6 plus). You need to compare the iPhone to the Note 4 and Galaxy S5/6, where the gap in sales is not nearly as large. And that is almost the only thing Apple has going for it is its better marketing / sales. That clearly would make me want to own Apple stock instead of Samsung stock, but it doesn't have anything to do with which phone I would want to buy.
The details about the Note 4 don't mean shit when the implementation on a whole is crap. Samsung is going to have to get away from Android and the fact that everything about it screams poor experience because its purpose is to basically steal information about the user to serve the user ads.
Those are all very subjective comparisons. I have only owned Galaxy Sx phones, not a Note, but the user experience has been great. I only know one person who switched from Apple to Samsung, but he greatly preferred the Samsung phone. Both your and my experience is very anecdotal though, and mostly meaningless.
You're one of those guys that thinks raw specs are all that matters for comparisons ... which is why we all drive race cars to and from work and the store.
It has been about 2-3 years since most phone specs mattered (IMHO) for most phones. But there are significant spec advantages for the Note 4 compared to the iPhone 6 Plus. The screen is much better, 3x the RAM (usually not a deciding factor with high end phones, but seriously only 1 GB Apple?), much better back and front cameras, and expandable memory. It is striking that the iPhone 6 Plus is just so inferior to a product that was launching just a month later. But the biggest advantage the Note 4 has is its multitasking capabilities not its specs.
This only thing Apple has going for it is a larger user base, so apps such as Facetime can almost single-handedly keep customers staying with Apple.
How is a device that most people have never heard of "eclipsing" the iPhone. It's certainly not outselling it.
How do you figure that Samsung hasn't eclipsed the iPhone? They sell more phones each year by a wide margin (Samsung: 444 million vs Apple: 151 million in 2013), and are on par with Apple when you only count phones that are comparable with the iPhone (about a third of their sales).
When you look at the quality of the phone features, Samsung really has the iPhone beat. I was contemplating moving to the iPhone when they announced their larger models since I have an iPad and would like my phone and tablet to be within the same app ecosystem. But details about the Note 4 and rumors about the S6 make the iPhone look really bad.
Apple does have Samsung beat in marketing and brand awareness, which helps them have far more profit (for now). But with the inferior phones they have produced over the past couple years it is hard to see them continuing their dominance over the next decade. Their tablets are still the best though (IMHO).
Taxation is kind of hard to see for phone support, since it's a cost center, not a revenue center.
You just aren't being very creative. If you want a little bit of profit to be made overseas, create a subsidiary in India that charges your company for phone support. Make sure the price is high enough that your subsidiary is making a profit, and you have just shifted some profit overseas.
Shouldn't the diversity crusaders be making waves calling for more male enrollment in fashion?
No, because no one feels the lack of diversity in fashion affects the efficiency of our economy.
and short of forcing students into majors they don't like, you're never gonna get perfect diversity?
That may be your contention, but there is a great deal of disagreement around this. Many people believe that culture has a significant impact on the careers people pursue. Many people feel someone working as an engineer improves society more than someone working as a retail worker, and that it is worth the effort to help women meet their full potential. I will sure try to do this for my daughter.
The same could be said about pretty much everything. The things you like are incredibly boring and stupid to a lot of people.
Yes, but I'm sure that no one spends huge amounts of their tax dollars supporting his boring recreational activities...
National parks, PBS, National Endowment for the Arts, etc. There are plenty of was the government funds recreational activities.
According to Grantmakers in the Arts, public funding in the arts comes to about $1.14 billion per year. With the NFL receiving $146 million per year, the NFL is still getting a sizeable amount of money in comparison. But with about 1 in 3 Americans watching at least some football each year, football probably entertains at least as many people as the entire NEA funding does, so perhaps it is money well spent.
Toyota is very open about their processes - they give guided tours of their plants to their competitors. And where did you think those "TPS" reports came from in "Office Space?" "Toyota Production System." They also share methodologies with everyone, including their competitors, but that didn't stop them from becoming the #1 car manufacturer in the world.
If Toyota didn't settle with the Department of Justice for $1.2 billion earlier this year because of deliberately concealing vehicle safety issues, your statements would hold more water. Companies are so interested in keeping their problems secret they are willing to hide them even when it is against the law. So when hiding something is not against the law, the decision of whether to keep it hidden is far easier to make.
Food is also regulated by the FDA. You can search the same FDA database for "food bugs." Has that harmed the food industry?
Has is harmed them compared to what? The non-FDA regulated food items? This has no relation to a company whose competitors are not being forced to open their data, like food companies are. The sales and marketing teams wouldn't be nearly as upset if their competitors were forced to open their bug databases as well (like is the case with the FDA).
And as someone who did research with a professor in requirements tracing for the FDA, I can tell you there is plenty that is kept secret in the food and medical industries even with FDA approval.
Whether an open bugs list helps this business is what this story is about - NOT "open source vs closed source".
You brought up the "open source vs closed source" debate by comparing this company who writes proprietary software with the behaviors of open source projects. My entire point was that you shouldn't be bringing up open source projects, so thank you for agreeing with me.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision.
First, if you bothered to read the summary, the decision has NOT been made. The bug tracker is still open to everyone.
It is impossible from the summary to know where the company currently stands on this. We only know what actions management has taken so far. Bureaucracy can move slow. He has already stopping actively publishing links to the Bugzilla database, and admits he believes the next step of closing open access to the database is coming soon. The sales/marketing team has made up their mind that the open database is bad, it's just that the higher ups haven't completely forced their hand yet.
Those are all open source projects
So what?
It is important because open source software lives with a different set of advantages / disadvantages as closed software. Open source benefits from having more people looking at / working on the code, but has the downside of making the code available to anyone. Close source benefits from being proprietary and being able to control how they appear to the public, but lose the extra manpower.
Let's take another real-world example - bugs in pharmaceuticals. The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System [fda.gov]. Anyone can post to it, ...
Once again, you are looking at something completely different. Pharmaceuticals are regulated by the FDA, as even you point out. Government have (correctly IMHO) determined that the possibly damaging nature of these disclosures to the company is outweighed by the public benefit of knowing this information. If a government agency forced all ERP systems to publicly disclose their bug databases, then you would have an apt analogy.
So until there's proof, there's no valid reason to change current practice.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision. This is what you pay them for, and their opinions carry FAR more weight in this matter than your developers. They probably did seek the opinions of the development staff, since the poster said compromises have been made, but ultimately it is not up to the IT staff. And with the weak arguments used in the post, I can easily see why the sales and marketing teams are continuing to push back.
That one took only seconds to debunk [google.com]. The number one smartphone software in the world in terms of sales has a public searchable bug list., including open bugs. FreeBSD, which is the base of OSX and which Apple contributes heavily to, lets anyone browse all bug reports or just open ones [freebsd.org].
Those are all open source projects, which obviously have all bugs and even all software made public. Those are horrible examples; it is almost as if you agree with me and are purposely throwing out easily shot down arguments to bolster my case.
Bullcrap. Ask marketing to provide proof (not anecdotes - real proof) on the number of people who have switched away from the product because of the bug reports.
If you are asking for "real proof", that goes both ways. I doubt the software development team has any scientific studies showing a public development bug database works better than listing bug fixes in release notes. So both sides are just using their personal experience and generally accepted knowledge.
And truthfully, this is ONLY a marketing / sales issue. They are responsible for how the company communicates with its customers, not the developers. Either change their minds, convince the bosses to hire different people, or do what they say in this matter.
On top of this, I don't think the poster has a very good argument. Just look at this statement:
This had been appreciated by our support and developer community, as they can readily see what issues are addressed and what new features have been introduced.
You don't need to make your internal bug tracking software public to do this. You only have to provide release notes. You can go one step further and publish a roadmap if you feel that is helpful. But none of this requires you to "air your dirty laundry". The fact he tries validate his decision with facts that don't actually back him up just shows me he doesn't have a very good argument.
People know all software has bugs. Hasn't stopped Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Amazon, from doing business. If marketing doesn't know how to "feature" this openness - by emphasizing the responsiveness to users (not that it's open per se), then they're idiots.
If people are so knowledgeable about the fact all software has bugs, why do none of the huge companies you mention openly list their internal bug tracking data? They all have huge and experiences sales and marketing departments, and all of them feel it is not a good idea. Some cloud companies do publish very detailed uptime and maintenance reports, but that is because of how wary companies still are about trusting another company's uptime statistics. They still don't openly publish unfixed bugs; you need to go to someplace like StackExchange and blogs to find those.
I am confused. If they are testing the performance of ACID and BASE database systems, why did they use a data load that can easily fit on a single computer? The data size for both databases was under 150 GB which can easily sit on a single hard drive let alone a single server. Why would a BASE database have any edge over an ACID one for a data set that does not require distribution between multiple servers?
It is still important to see how much faster a more established DBMS is than a relative newcomer for smaller loads, but I still feel this comparison is a bit lacking.
The latest recession was never called the mancession.
How is this rated informative? It is plain wrong.
You could find the same few examples (among many others) with a simple Google search, but since that is obviously too much work ...
Mancession Definition
The Mancession
Thanks to the “mancession,” metrosexuals have become “manfluencers”
One Mancession Later, Are Women Really Victors in the New Economy?
Economy: The Man-cession and the He-covery
It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession!
My point is that studies have allowed for this pressure, and have been conducted only amongst women who have not disqualified themselves. If you compare only women without children to men, men still get paid more for the same jobs.
He wasn't just talking about childless women. If women without children choose lower paid professions, and put higher emphasis on things like work-life balance than men do. They also don't negotiate for salary as hard.
This has been allowed for in the various studies of the subject. Even among childless women there is a significant discrepancy in salaries for similar jobs. Though, from one article in the Economist, the discrepancy almost disappears for childless women not in any relationship.
Looking at only childless women is clearly not enough to remove all non-discriminatory factors that create the mythical gender pay gap. An American Association of University Women study and US Department of Labor research put the pay gap at 6.6% and 5.9% respectively. And they admit they could not adjust for some of the biggest elephants in the room, such as the lack of salary negotiation among women or women giving higher priority to their family than their career (they only adjusted for industry and education, not job position).
My wife is a good example of both phenomena. When she was offered her previous job the salary was about $58k. With negotiation she raised that to $69k. Studies show that women don't negotiate for salary as much as men, and if my wife was like the over 4 in 5 women who don't negotate salary her pay would have been 16% less.
On the other hand, I went back to school to improve my career while she held off on her MBA to have our children. It was a decision she made because she wanted to, but it will likely cost her tens of thousands if not possibly hundreds of thousands in lost wages. On top of the lack of an MBA (which honestly may not cost her any wages), she spends more time raising kids than I do because we both know my career is now the breadwinning one. I now make 70% more than I did 5 years ago while she makes about 25% more. And I am not objectively smarter or more determined than my wife, we just went down different paths.
On top of this, she even fits another gender stereotype by cleaning more than I do. I do far more cleaning than I did as a bachelor, but she needs to have an immaculate house. While I am reading journals, writing side projects, or just learning a new technology, she is tidying up the house. If she was willing to live in a house that didn't always look like it was being staged to sell, like I am, she would be able to spend more time on her career.
Nonsense. People understood the world before long science was invented, and very little of our useful understanding of the world comes from science. Most of it comes from direct experience or the experience passed on to us by others.
Nonsense. People may not always use science deliberately, but using direct experience along with inductive and deductive reasoning is the bedrock of scientific discovery. The scientific method is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is also not the only method in which people perform scientific studies.
Science exists because people invented it.
Correction: people discovered science. Inventing things is engineering; learning the concepts and natural laws that allow us to invent things is science.
[Science] does not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the sole mechanism for understanding the world.
Yes it does. Without logical arguments there is no verifiable way to ensure you know anything. Under circumstances where too much is unknown you can use very weak arguments, but they must still be backed up by some form of logical reasoning.
Even belief in God uses deductive and inductive reasoning. It is just very flaky reasoning that allows the believer to make no meaningful predictions.
Well, "God" or "Gods" being, by definition, supernatural entities (emphasis on the super in that term) are beyond the purview of science.
You can't just define something as being beyond the purview of science, and then argue that is why it is outside the purview of science.
Supernatural is not a useful term in this argument. Its definition is simply anything that is considered outside the laws of nature. It doesn't mean it is outside the laws of the natural world, because in reality nothing can be. We find things that are outside our current understanding of the "natural world" quite often, and then they become part of the natural world. Electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics all come to mind.
If we found evidence that some entity could break the laws of thermodynamics, it would not be supernatural. We would simply change the laws of thermodynamics to adjust for this new information.
Why are you right, and he wrong? Why are you right and the many sciences that believe in God are wrong about that?
How is what Feynman said and what I said at odds?
He says science cannot disprove the existence of God. Almost every atheist would agree with that. No one can disprove any claim which does not make falsifiable statements, and scientists are no different.
He also says someone can be a scientist and religious at the same time. That is obviously true because more than 0% of scientists are religious.
My contention is only that there are no questions that religion can answer that science cannot answer. The only time science and religion are truly at odds is when religion makes a claim that science already has a much more reasonable answer for. One example is contemplating the meaning of the universe.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
I personally see no problem with this statement. I would only disagree if Hamlet had said "Than can be dreamt of in your philosophy."
But personally I'd prefer a higher wage and leave out the modern over-hyped version of a flee-market we now call a "conference" It's a waste of my time and often costs 10% of my sallary for me to attend. Wouldn't you prefer a 10% raise? ...and I literally tell my management that. I wont waist your money, so don't waste my time. Pay me more and I wont leave.
The main reason why it makes more sense for your employer to pay for a conference instead of giving a raise is that the trip is tax deductible and you do not have to pay taxes on it either. The average real corporate tax rate is 12.1%, so that $10k conference only costs a profitable company about $8800. If they gave you the $8800 directly, after state, federal, FICA, and employment taxes that probably comes down to just under $5k.
So if you were to pay for the conference yourself, it would literally cost twice as much as if your company pays for it directly. And if you would rather have $5k than attend a $10k conference then the conference is clearly not worth it (either because the conference is worthless or you aren't ambitiousness enough to get much from it).
Please explain how science can explain its own existence,
Science can easily explain its own existence. Science exists because it is the only process of understanding the world in a way that can provide useful results. Or at least the only way we have found so far.
or why any given set of scientific axioms exist in the specific manner that they do?
They exist in the way that they do because that is where the evidence leads us. And basic human psychology shows any attempt to place desire or intent onto a scientific axiom is just anthropomorphism.
"Why?" is still a valid question; and science says we lack the tools to gather evidence of "why?".
"Why" is not always a valid question. When you ask "why is the universe here" the first thing to notice is you are giving human intent to something that has no intent. It is like asking "why does my shirt want to be blue?" There is a reason it is blue, but it does not desire to be blue. The universe was created (or always existed) but it did not want to be created or did not feel like being created. The desire to give "meaning" to natural phenomena is basic anthropomorphism and should be easily discarded.
The article is just as bad or perhaps worse than the summary. Most of the summary is just taking snippets out of the article, and some of the more egregious ones that I bothered to check aren't taking anything out of context. And there is plenty of worse content that the summary has left out.
thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them
This particular line of reasoning is the first one I checked on hoping it was just embellishment by the submitter. But it was there. The article loses absolutely all credibility in this one sentence. Science is more than capable of contemplating the cause of anything. It may not be good at anthropomorphizing natural phenomena and giving it intent (like wondering why the universe was created), but that is simply because scientific reasoning easily dismisses such thought as not only irrelevant but ultimately incorrect.
First of all, on the "poor underpayed H1-B" myth. I live and work in Seattle metro area. My base pay is $150k, and then another $40k on top of that in bonuses.
First off, individual salaries of very highly skilled H-1B visa holders does nothing to undermine the "poor underpaid H-1B" myth. Does the fact there is a black president mean there is absolutely no discrimination left in the US?
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, H-1B Visa holders in the computer industry make on average $13k less per year than a citizen. In addition to that, 85% of H-1B workers work for less than the median wage for their occupation. Looks like you are not the norm.
Just because you are one of the few H-1B workers that almost all US citizens would agree we want to immigrate here does nothing to disprove the fact that H-1B workers depress wages by flooding the market with underpaid workers.
Every time I see these stories, I know what comments there will be, but I'm getting tired of all the whining and bullshit.
The sad thing is when anyone complains about H-1B workers they are almost immediately accused of xenophobia and/or labeled as whining. I hate our H-1B system, but only because of how unfairly it treats H-1B workers. I am a consultant and I work with many of these immigrants. I am appalled at how horrible the system is that they describe. If we had a properly functioning H-1B program, instead of the indentured servitude it usually consists of, I would bet that H-1B workers would make above median wages.
If they weren't just an exploited group (in the vast majority of cases), companies would only bring over the best and the brightest. And this would be wonderful.
I find it just as likely that these workers never had passion in the first place. They were knowlegeable of the current trends right out of college because they spent the last four years learning them. But as soon as they left college the learning stopped. It wasn't noticeable for the first 5-10 years, but as the industry shifts it starts to become more obvious.
Everyone I know who was passionate about this industry in college has stayed passonate today (almost 15 years later). Some have switched to the business side and have become passionate there instead, but that internal drive is still there.
Too bad the show doesn't portray any intelligent person as normal as those you receive "support" from.
In the scientific crowds I have been a part of, Leonard is on par with the more "normal" people I have known. He still has quite a few geeky quirks, but overall he can blend in as well as most geeky guys can. He has a hard time with some of Penny's brain dead friends, especially when watching sports, but overall he seems pretty normal to me.
Leonard has always struck me as that one normal guy which is quite common in many geeky cliches. They can't have too many of their characters be well balanced or else why would the show be fun to watch?
From another angle, take a look at Two and a Half Men. You have a womanizing morally bankrupt millionaire, an incompetent brother, and a brain dead son. If I were a millionaire playboy, divorced middle aged man with career problems, or a teenager who struggled in school, I wouldn't want any of those characters to represent me. While each of them may get laid more than the character on BBT, I wouldn't consider any of them to be "normal" either. Abnormal people simply make for great television.
After reading the article, the $10k difference they are using was between those who took the COBOL class and ALL Business Computer Information Systems students. That degree is more of an IT degree than a software development related degree (at this school). It is a very bad comparison.
I would be more interested in how those students who took COBOL compared to the university's Computer Science and Engineering students.
Anthropology and Sociology are not typically considered STEM but "social sciences."
Social Sciences are part of STEM, it even has the word Science in there to help clear any ambiguity.
Most organizations such as universities and scholorship programs use the National Science Foundation's (NSF) definition of STEM. This is apt considering the term originated from the director of the NSF. Here is a list of degrees that are considered STEM which was compiled by the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency, who revised its definition of STEM to more closely align with that of the NSF in 2012. It clearly shows many social sciences as being part of STEM.