Have the bean counters gotten in the way? Yes, but remember they're the ones who have to show management that you're tracking on schedule and delivering something that will work; keeping you employed.
At what point does it become excessive tracking and managing by the bean counters? I've watched over 15 years a shift from wild west to overly bureaucratic. What if all those bean counters cause quality to go down, not up? Yes we need to avoid the wild west development style to avoid those problems but we seem to be solving that by going in the absolute opposite direction. I've seen bug fixes for simple things take years to work their way through the process. I have witnesses simple side projects with budgets of $50K turn into millions of dollars annually due to process overkill. There has to be an in between where we have some process over site but allow some flexibility for developers to do their jobs. At what point do those bean counter be the reason the company goes under and every one is no longer employed?
I've been programming since the 80's and getting paid to do it since the mid 90's. It was the mid to late 90's when I got introduced to life cycle methodologies and at first I applauded them. I was even selected for a committee to help firm up our "best practices". I thought I would improving things by stopping bad practices by bad programmers. After a while it turned into a nightmare as those bad programmers started using the "best practice" rules as cover for the crap they produced. "But it passed unit testing and UAT, it must be awesome". Our project budgets went up and implementation time increased while our customers were visibly pissed at the final product.
The problem with SDLC process management has been sufficiently skewered by Joel Spolsky in a blog post several years ago. By putting a bureaucratic process in place you replace rock stars with compliance monkeys. Actually delivering a solid product is far less important than meeting checkpoints. And when your a programmer who's dedicated to a polished final product it's like murdering your soul to watch mid level managers (who know nothing of development) work hard at micro-managing you to ensure those check points are met on time. The actual outcome is irrelevant, the surgery was a success even though the patient died.
I have worked in both environments, the loosy goosy no rules and the highly rigid SDLC bureaucratic world. I understand the need for review and verification and the problems of wild west development. But development process methodologies are dangerous enablers of bad middle managers and "consultants" that sell you management processes that don't really help any body.
You sound either insane or too young to know what goes on in development. Development encompasses a lot of things and many projects don't even have a "designer" involved at all. Properly tackling how interfaces connect back to back end databases and other services takes smarts and passion. There is a whole host of things that go on behind that pretty screen that you "design". If you don't have smart people thinking creatively how to do that the project will be crushed by bugs and poor performance.
It's WPA2 of course, and I created a randomly generated 16 character password of upper and lower case letters, number, and special characters (! & etc).
Guests to my house that ask for access are mortified at entering the password on their smart phones.
"I don't know about you out there, but I'm a big fan of this whole "society" thing, and if random JoeBlow walks up to my house and asks for a drink of water"
And what happens when many neighbors keep coming up to your door for water? What if several pull up and ask you to fill up their barrel with water? What if the wants lots of your water to drown their wife for kids? Water their 40 acres of crops? Fill a swimming pool? What's your limit of giving?
It might be a tiny cost now, but with that big a drain on your water supply won't the water utility question this and charge you more? Metered water is a fact in most cities these days. Are you willing to pay way more for your benevolent community contribution? You are asking to be taken advantage of. It's the same thing with wi-fi signals, people will take advantage of you and then you will get your Internet usage bill. Once that occurs you will change your tune.
This is one of those articles where the writer does not fully understand what is really going in and is fascinated by jargon he or she misunderstands.
There is no way a trade on any financial system will occur in a piconet. If you have a super fast computer ever on the planet that was plugged directly into the exchange's server with a super high speed connection you could get your bid or ask lot on in a picosecond (as other posters have pointed out). But first you have to make the decision, and that takes some processing time even if you have your technical analysis rules well developed. Your decision making process has to scan the current bid's and ask's list and make a decision, something taking more than a picosecond even with the greatest computer ever. That bid and ask table can change in the middle of your calculation and then your back to square one. Once you have decided to put your bid or ask in it is then just posted, you haven't bought or sold anything until some one else takes up your offer.
There is a lot going on between the time you press the buy/sell button and an actual trade occurring on the market. The process takes much longer than a picosecond I can assure you. Milliseconds I can buy, but not picoseconds. No computer network or processor is that fast yet.
I would like to volunteer my brother. He's incredibly useless but it would serve the human race if he were farther away from it. If there’s room for more I have more family members that could be volunteered.
I live with an iPhone user and many of her friends. It's obvious why one would make more developing on that platform, because Apple users are willing to fork over more money for the Apple logo as well as a "simpler" type of user that doesn't want to be confused. I've seen people pay five bucks for an app that to randomly pick and display one of a handfull fo sayings. Once one friend got it they all had to have it. What did that take, 5 minutes for some guy to program. Apple customers are willing to pay extra for a limited device if it doesn't cause problems. I am interested in an Android phone because I can work with it and build my own apps, no approval needed. I am also less willing to fork over dollars for apps.
So an app developer has a choice of platforms; a group that pays more money for less complicated apps, or a group that is less willing to pay and wants more complex and configurable apps. The iPhones cult status gives developers more reasons to program on that platform when profits are involved.
The comment about coop play vs. lone wolf is not a political or cultural thing, it's an evolution of technology. Having played games from the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 to today's systems I can see this. Back in them thar days, games could only be designed to be played as an individual. You would play the exact same enemies/monsters who came at you from the exact same location in the exact same pattern every time like clockwork.
Later with the network play Doom allowed it became more fun to frag your friends who could adjust and were far more unpredictable than the computer characters (except that one guy who was a bit of a dork, but I digress). This has its limitations when you put the game on the internet and allow a free for all of 64 or 128 players shooting at anything that moves. It obviously had to evolve to coop and team play.
There may be some sprinkling of ideology in the games, but they don't last long. It's about fun game play, not messages.
Now I'm no biologist. But from what I have been reading over the years on a tree's CO2 sucking ability is that this is only a positive when the tree is young. Older trees emit more CO2 than they take in. Even Wired brought that point up in one of its articles. These articles also pointed out that when a tree dies and falls to the ground (I hear the puns now) it emits a lot of CO2 while not taking any in. Forgive for being too lazy to google this stuff but I'm sure it's not that hard (biology geeks please speak up).
The other is what if this device sucks up more CO2 in the space it takes up compared to the equivalent amount of trees. In the end we want to take more carbon out of the air to get things back in balance, wouldn't these be a handy tool to do it? If it works more efficiently than a tree why not?
This is an excellent article to link on the subject and I am glad you did. There are smart reasons for providing a free product when it increases the value of another product. But there are also dumb reasons. You can't just provide free and thing money will magically appear. There has to be a complimentary product that brings in the revenue.
I spent much of my childhood as a "bad kid" in school. I hated going and the teachers hated me. I was not welcome by anyone in the class. I hated learning by the pace dictated by who ever designed the curriculum. But I loved learning and loved reading up on different subjects. I barely managed to get a high school diploma and get into community college where I just gave up and stopped going.
Years later I am one of the more handsomely paid programmer analysts in major corporations. I am well versed in political science, literature, economics, and of course technology. Even in a recession I don't have job security issues because I can deliver results for my employers.
I've always wanted to get a university degree just to prove those teachers who hated me they were wrong. I've ended up pursuing a degree at Athabasca and after two years I love it. There are no classes and it's all up to the student to get course work done on time and exams passed. It required strict discipline compared to traditional universities that clearly don't want anything to do with me. I find people who need "class time" lack the discipline to actually read a textbook and figure out things on their own.
To all those people who blather on about the importance for class time and teacher face time, please, shove it up your arrogant ass. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people are self-motivated and don't need hours of group discussions to figure out what the textbook has all ready clearly spelled out.
As we move further into the future, learning will be a life long process that does not stop with graduation. If you want to stay competitive in the work force you will constantly need to take courses. Online course work is perfect for disciplined working adults who can't stop for four years to have classroom "face time".
"There's absolutely nothing specific to developers here. You have the same kind of people in every other job."
I disagree completely. There are certain skilled jobs that allow the skilled employee to hold others hostage. As a programmer myself I have seen this countless times in several companies. Employee X is the only one that knows some system that is mission critical. It's difficult, even for other system developers, to jump in and understand how something works to replace employee X. It could take 6 months to a year. This doesn't work with secretaries, salesmen, accountants, managers (who are completely expendable), and "business analysts".
Besides programmers, you can count mechanics, doctors, electricians, and network technicians as having a special hold over their clients when they gain intimate knowledge of their daily jobs. Because of this they have special bargaining power that the normal managers and administrative assistants don't have.
"There is one single trait that all successful business people share: they are able to be successful."
That's crap and I don't buy it. Luck and chance do play a part, the degree to which is entirely dependent on circumstances.
What if you walk into a 7/11 for a pop and unluckily for you the store is robed at gunpoint and your killed for the contents of your wallet. What if your an incredibly skilled businessmen who works in the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept 11. All of your business skill means nothing. Your successful because you haven't run into an unlucky situation yet. There are countless important moments in history that could have been vastly different if only for chance. Famous historic battles could have turned if the wind blowed in a different direction or the field wasn't so soggy. Chance plays a role in everything.
"And the kids with straight A's in grade school only rarely grow up to be intellectual leaders"
Just because you got straight A's doesn't mean you had to work for them. Much of Gladwell's work shows that effort, time, and experience trump natural talent, if it exists. Who works harder to get the grade they did, the grade A wiz kid that finishes home work in no time or the D student who spends hours and hours trying to understand something.
Not sure if it's true or a myth, but I heard Einstein failed high school a few times before hitting on that relativity thing. I have also known in my own life a couple of academic super stars with Phd's that became useless in the career world. Last I heard one of them took a job on the factory floor at John Deere.
Blink - go with your first feeling. There, that's the whole 100+ page book in a five word sentence.
Actually that's incorrect. The book says that intuition in experienced people works well. It's quite lousy in people without experience. Your brain is intuitively capable of processing lots of data and coming up with a correct action to a problem based on your past experience. It can do this way faster than it takes to consciously work it out. There are many many people who can't seem to grasp this concept.
This is probably too late to respond to the next day but I should try and respond.
What, in your opinion, would be the deviation in the results between these different formulas if during an ordinary
My current employer uses it's own client records going back several years to try and determine default probability in it's retail products. Each bank has a differnt type of customer population. One bank may cater to wealthy clients while another focuses on blue collar folks in manufacturing belts. Not all banks use the same types of data either. Do you only use the account specific data, or do you add in client characteristics like age, profession, and geographic location? These can drastically change model results between institutions.
Energy and futures traders are different in that they use market trade data going back several decades to find trends and probabilities of loss. I have seen some modellers at other banks work macroeconomic numbers into their risk model. Risk rates can be calculated higher if gdp goes down or unemployment goes up. Using external publicly available data sources would lead to more similar risk models. What would differentiate these models is scope. If you analyse technical buy/sell indicators on the stock market, do you only use SP 500 stocks? Stocks with market cap over 1 Billion? Stocks with a minimum volume of daily trades? These can drastically affect model results.
do they then "act as one" when faced with a particular significant event?
There is always that 1% chance of a systematic failure, which is what is occurring now. Those firms that intelligently hedged their risks with credit default swaps, where several parties share default risk, still got screwed. Swaps are suppose to help reduce everyone's risk but don't work when every participant has mass defaults on the books. Firms that had conservative risk models and hedged with swaps are now in trouble because of this. Not only did the risk model fail, but the hedge against failure failed as well. Once fear ran through the swap market and AIG was in trouble it poisoned every thing.
I should state one thing; I work in the Canadian banking system where the government has to approve of risk models for regulatory purposes. The banks here are more conservative and regulated. OSFI (the regulator) is quite anal retentive about testing and retesting models. We are even required to show how accurate historical models where over time to them. Perhaps that's why Canadian banks are still floating and sound.
It's clear U.S. banks were not regulated like Canadian banks, but I have a hard time believing their risk models were the very similar across the board. Risk models, paticularly non-regulatory ones, are considered heavily guarded secrets in financial institutions. Financial institutions spend many millions annually on developing risk models because they are so crucial to determining profit and loss.
The article seems an over simplification and missunderstanding of risk analysis. I've been working in banking as a programmer in banking for a few years now. More recently I've been programming the risk analysis systems they talk about in the article. I can tell you there is no one forumula used by everyone. the modelers I work with try endless combination after combination to figure out what the banks portfolio risk is. They then test and retest the formulas constantly with various statistical analysis tools.
Other companies, paticularly in the energy futures business, are constantly tweeking and searching for better forumlas. They spend millions a year on systems to calculate risk. To say there is one formula that everyone used flies in the face of any one in the risk analysis business.
Way back in grade school of the late seventies I remember a debate about letting students use calculators. It would destroy our math skills. We needed to memorize those times tables or we would be stunted in math subjects for life.
I was recently at a presentation about finance and the presenter, an accountant, made a joke about how experienced accounts can't add two numbers without a calculator in hand. However these accountants can balance trillions of dollars in transactions and determine the marginal profitibility on a per unit basis of just about anything to a surprisingly accurate degree. Could quantum physics researchers really do their job if they were forced to use an abacus?
Google is similar to a calculator. It speeds up the mundane in information gathering. This bunk about memorizing facts is less important than understanding how to react to facts. The fact of the matter is (no pun intended) that facts change quickly these days. Information is becoming more and more real time. The person that understands how to look up and react to information has a better chance of getting ahead than some one who memorizes stale facts.
This is funny as hell. The fact they pinned it on a printer is telling of the ineptitude of the copyright leaching industry. But I am not sure if the general public or our public representitives understand whats going on.
I am starting to think we should step back and let the MPAA and other legalized mafioso have thier way for a while. Let's have DVD's with 10 minutes of forces comericials. Let the MPAA and MPA sue your IP enabled toaster. Let's see as content gets so locked down people won't buy a movie, ring tone, or networked device out of fear and disgust as "content owners" sue anything that answers a ping request.
It will be painfull for a while but after a critical mass the public revolt will come with such a ferocity the execs at the MPA and MPAA will have to leave in getaway planes to far away lands never to return like exhiled dictators. Politicians everywhere will be demanding the heads of the very same people they currently take bribes from hoping we don't lynch them in the process. Share prices will plummet, theaters will be vacent, and share holders will want blood.
Once it's all done no one will ever want to have draconian copyright measures enshrined in law ever again.
"Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong."
Que that Mac fan zealotry
Let me kick your Mac ideology with a bit of reality. Mac computers work well for a certain segment of users. They are lousy for certain other segments that really need to get work done.
I have Mac friends and they are amazingly ignorant of all the various things people need computers to do. These friends are graphic artists and the Mac seems well suited for their needs, not mine. If you hate spreadsheets and don't like tweeking your hardware then chances increase that your a Mac fan.
I spent time evaluating how Mac's could work for me, since my artsy friends seem to love them so much. I have found them to be abysmal for data analysis work and back end programming. I deal a lot with spreadsheets, SQL, huge databases, and data analysis and reporting software like SAS and Cognos. For these things Mac's are miserable and inefficient at the task. Mac's are also horribly unfriendly to hardware upgrades. I can't tweak the system like I can a PC. It's a locked box that displays pretty pictures.
Which is why my favorite OS is Linux. I can mess with Linux and build a custom system that fit my needs, not what Steve Jobs thinks I need. The OS can also be tweaked for the efficiency of the work I am doing. My second favorite is XP. XP brought me back to the dark side for the last few years. In XP you can still tweak and add custom hardware while still getting mainstream support.
But back to the article, there is a reason there is a strong avoidance of Vista. Vista seems to be trying to emulate the Mac in some ways when the Windows customer base really doesn't want to work on Mac's. I can see why people would switch to a Linux pre loaded systems over taking Vista. Certainly in my line of work there is more compatibility in switching to a Linux system from Windows than to a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Have the bean counters gotten in the way? Yes, but remember they're the ones who have to show management that you're tracking on schedule and delivering something that will work; keeping you employed.
At what point does it become excessive tracking and managing by the bean counters? I've watched over 15 years a shift from wild west to overly bureaucratic. What if all those bean counters cause quality to go down, not up? Yes we need to avoid the wild west development style to avoid those problems but we seem to be solving that by going in the absolute opposite direction. I've seen bug fixes for simple things take years to work their way through the process. I have witnesses simple side projects with budgets of $50K turn into millions of dollars annually due to process overkill. There has to be an in between where we have some process over site but allow some flexibility for developers to do their jobs. At what point do those bean counter be the reason the company goes under and every one is no longer employed?
I've been programming since the 80's and getting paid to do it since the mid 90's. It was the mid to late 90's when I got introduced to life cycle methodologies and at first I applauded them. I was even selected for a committee to help firm up our "best practices". I thought I would improving things by stopping bad practices by bad programmers. After a while it turned into a nightmare as those bad programmers started using the "best practice" rules as cover for the crap they produced. "But it passed unit testing and UAT, it must be awesome". Our project budgets went up and implementation time increased while our customers were visibly pissed at the final product.
The problem with SDLC process management has been sufficiently skewered by Joel Spolsky in a blog post several years ago. By putting a bureaucratic process in place you replace rock stars with compliance monkeys. Actually delivering a solid product is far less important than meeting checkpoints. And when your a programmer who's dedicated to a polished final product it's like murdering your soul to watch mid level managers (who know nothing of development) work hard at micro-managing you to ensure those check points are met on time. The actual outcome is irrelevant, the surgery was a success even though the patient died.
I have worked in both environments, the loosy goosy no rules and the highly rigid SDLC bureaucratic world. I understand the need for review and verification and the problems of wild west development. But development process methodologies are dangerous enablers of bad middle managers and "consultants" that sell you management processes that don't really help any body.
Developers just implement the design
You sound either insane or too young to know what goes on in development. Development encompasses a lot of things and many projects don't even have a "designer" involved at all. Properly tackling how interfaces connect back to back end databases and other services takes smarts and passion. There is a whole host of things that go on behind that pretty screen that you "design". If you don't have smart people thinking creatively how to do that the project will be crushed by bugs and poor performance.
It's WPA2 of course, and I created a randomly generated 16 character password of upper and lower case letters, number, and special characters (! & etc).
Guests to my house that ask for access are mortified at entering the password on their smart phones.
"I don't know about you out there, but I'm a big fan of this whole "society" thing, and if random JoeBlow walks up to my house and asks for a drink of water"
And what happens when many neighbors keep coming up to your door for water? What if several pull up and ask you to fill up their barrel with water? What if the wants lots of your water to drown their wife for kids? Water their 40 acres of crops? Fill a swimming pool? What's your limit of giving?
It might be a tiny cost now, but with that big a drain on your water supply won't the water utility question this and charge you more? Metered water is a fact in most cities these days. Are you willing to pay way more for your benevolent community contribution? You are asking to be taken advantage of. It's the same thing with wi-fi signals, people will take advantage of you and then you will get your Internet usage bill. Once that occurs you will change your tune.
This is one of those articles where the writer does not fully understand what is really going in and is fascinated by jargon he or she misunderstands.
There is no way a trade on any financial system will occur in a piconet. If you have a super fast computer ever on the planet that was plugged directly into the exchange's server with a super high speed connection you could get your bid or ask lot on in a picosecond (as other posters have pointed out). But first you have to make the decision, and that takes some processing time even if you have your technical analysis rules well developed. Your decision making process has to scan the current bid's and ask's list and make a decision, something taking more than a picosecond even with the greatest computer ever. That bid and ask table can change in the middle of your calculation and then your back to square one. Once you have decided to put your bid or ask in it is then just posted, you haven't bought or sold anything until some one else takes up your offer.
There is a lot going on between the time you press the buy/sell button and an actual trade occurring on the market. The process takes much longer than a picosecond I can assure you. Milliseconds I can buy, but not picoseconds. No computer network or processor is that fast yet.
Mod this comment up please! Well said.
I would like to volunteer my brother. He's incredibly useless but it would serve the human race if he were farther away from it. If there’s room for more I have more family members that could be volunteered.
I live with an iPhone user and many of her friends. It's obvious why one would make more developing on that platform, because Apple users are willing to fork over more money for the Apple logo as well as a "simpler" type of user that doesn't want to be confused. I've seen people pay five bucks for an app that to randomly pick and display one of a handfull fo sayings. Once one friend got it they all had to have it. What did that take, 5 minutes for some guy to program. Apple customers are willing to pay extra for a limited device if it doesn't cause problems. I am interested in an Android phone because I can work with it and build my own apps, no approval needed. I am also less willing to fork over dollars for apps.
So an app developer has a choice of platforms; a group that pays more money for less complicated apps, or a group that is less willing to pay and wants more complex and configurable apps. The iPhones cult status gives developers more reasons to program on that platform when profits are involved.
The comment about coop play vs. lone wolf is not a political or cultural thing, it's an evolution of technology. Having played games from the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 to today's systems I can see this. Back in them thar days, games could only be designed to be played as an individual. You would play the exact same enemies/monsters who came at you from the exact same location in the exact same pattern every time like clockwork.
Later with the network play Doom allowed it became more fun to frag your friends who could adjust and were far more unpredictable than the computer characters (except that one guy who was a bit of a dork, but I digress). This has its limitations when you put the game on the internet and allow a free for all of 64 or 128 players shooting at anything that moves. It obviously had to evolve to coop and team play.
There may be some sprinkling of ideology in the games, but they don't last long. It's about fun game play, not messages.
Now I'm no biologist. But from what I have been reading over the years on a tree's CO2 sucking ability is that this is only a positive when the tree is young. Older trees emit more CO2 than they take in. Even Wired brought that point up in one of its articles. These articles also pointed out that when a tree dies and falls to the ground (I hear the puns now) it emits a lot of CO2 while not taking any in. Forgive for being too lazy to google this stuff but I'm sure it's not that hard (biology geeks please speak up).
The other is what if this device sucks up more CO2 in the space it takes up compared to the equivalent amount of trees. In the end we want to take more carbon out of the air to get things back in balance, wouldn't these be a handy tool to do it? If it works more efficiently than a tree why not?
This is an excellent article to link on the subject and I am glad you did. There are smart reasons for providing a free product when it increases the value of another product. But there are also dumb reasons. You can't just provide free and thing money will magically appear. There has to be a complimentary product that brings in the revenue.
Based on the rates IBM charges, these customers will need it. $8,K will get you a round of golf with one IBM consultant for the afternoon.
I spent much of my childhood as a "bad kid" in school. I hated going and the teachers hated me. I was not welcome by anyone in the class. I hated learning by the pace dictated by who ever designed the curriculum. But I loved learning and loved reading up on different subjects. I barely managed to get a high school diploma and get into community college where I just gave up and stopped going.
Years later I am one of the more handsomely paid programmer analysts in major corporations. I am well versed in political science, literature, economics, and of course technology. Even in a recession I don't have job security issues because I can deliver results for my employers.
I've always wanted to get a university degree just to prove those teachers who hated me they were wrong. I've ended up pursuing a degree at Athabasca and after two years I love it. There are no classes and it's all up to the student to get course work done on time and exams passed. It required strict discipline compared to traditional universities that clearly don't want anything to do with me. I find people who need "class time" lack the discipline to actually read a textbook and figure out things on their own.
To all those people who blather on about the importance for class time and teacher face time, please, shove it up your arrogant ass. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people are self-motivated and don't need hours of group discussions to figure out what the textbook has all ready clearly spelled out.
As we move further into the future, learning will be a life long process that does not stop with graduation. If you want to stay competitive in the work force you will constantly need to take courses. Online course work is perfect for disciplined working adults who can't stop for four years to have classroom "face time".
"There's absolutely nothing specific to developers here. You have the same kind of people in every other job."
I disagree completely. There are certain skilled jobs that allow the skilled employee to hold others hostage. As a programmer myself I have seen this countless times in several companies. Employee X is the only one that knows some system that is mission critical. It's difficult, even for other system developers, to jump in and understand how something works to replace employee X. It could take 6 months to a year. This doesn't work with secretaries, salesmen, accountants, managers (who are completely expendable), and "business analysts".
Besides programmers, you can count mechanics, doctors, electricians, and network technicians as having a special hold over their clients when they gain intimate knowledge of their daily jobs. Because of this they have special bargaining power that the normal managers and administrative assistants don't have.
Based on the most recent macroeconomic manufacturing output numbers, no.
"There is one single trait that all successful business people share: they are able to be successful."
That's crap and I don't buy it. Luck and chance do play a part, the degree to which is entirely dependent on circumstances.
What if you walk into a 7/11 for a pop and unluckily for you the store is robed at gunpoint and your killed for the contents of your wallet. What if your an incredibly skilled businessmen who works in the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept 11. All of your business skill means nothing. Your successful because you haven't run into an unlucky situation yet. There are countless important moments in history that could have been vastly different if only for chance. Famous historic battles could have turned if the wind blowed in a different direction or the field wasn't so soggy. Chance plays a role in everything.
"And the kids with straight A's in grade school only rarely grow up to be intellectual leaders"
Just because you got straight A's doesn't mean you had to work for them. Much of Gladwell's work shows that effort, time, and experience trump natural talent, if it exists. Who works harder to get the grade they did, the grade A wiz kid that finishes home work in no time or the D student who spends hours and hours trying to understand something.
Not sure if it's true or a myth, but I heard Einstein failed high school a few times before hitting on that relativity thing. I have also known in my own life a couple of academic super stars with Phd's that became useless in the career world. Last I heard one of them took a job on the factory floor at John Deere.
Blink - go with your first feeling. There, that's the whole 100+ page book in a five word sentence.
Actually that's incorrect. The book says that intuition in experienced people works well. It's quite lousy in people without experience. Your brain is intuitively capable of processing lots of data and coming up with a correct action to a problem based on your past experience. It can do this way faster than it takes to consciously work it out. There are many many people who can't seem to grasp this concept.
Perhaps you should give the book a second read.
This is probably too late to respond to the next day but I should try and respond.
What, in your opinion, would be the deviation in the results between these different formulas if during an ordinary
My current employer uses it's own client records going back several years to try and determine default probability in it's retail products. Each bank has a differnt type of customer population. One bank may cater to wealthy clients while another focuses on blue collar folks in manufacturing belts. Not all banks use the same types of data either. Do you only use the account specific data, or do you add in client characteristics like age, profession, and geographic location? These can drastically change model results between institutions.
Energy and futures traders are different in that they use market trade data going back several decades to find trends and probabilities of loss. I have seen some modellers at other banks work macroeconomic numbers into their risk model. Risk rates can be calculated higher if gdp goes down or unemployment goes up. Using external publicly available data sources would lead to more similar risk models. What would differentiate these models is scope. If you analyse technical buy/sell indicators on the stock market, do you only use SP 500 stocks? Stocks with market cap over 1 Billion? Stocks with a minimum volume of daily trades? These can drastically affect model results.
do they then "act as one" when faced with a particular significant event?
There is always that 1% chance of a systematic failure, which is what is occurring now. Those firms that intelligently hedged their risks with credit default swaps, where several parties share default risk, still got screwed. Swaps are suppose to help reduce everyone's risk but don't work when every participant has mass defaults on the books. Firms that had conservative risk models and hedged with swaps are now in trouble because of this. Not only did the risk model fail, but the hedge against failure failed as well. Once fear ran through the swap market and AIG was in trouble it poisoned every thing.
I should state one thing; I work in the Canadian banking system where the government has to approve of risk models for regulatory purposes. The banks here are more conservative and regulated. OSFI (the regulator) is quite anal retentive about testing and retesting models. We are even required to show how accurate historical models where over time to them. Perhaps that's why Canadian banks are still floating and sound.
It's clear U.S. banks were not regulated like Canadian banks, but I have a hard time believing their risk models were the very similar across the board. Risk models, paticularly non-regulatory ones, are considered heavily guarded secrets in financial institutions. Financial institutions spend many millions annually on developing risk models because they are so crucial to determining profit and loss.
The article seems an over simplification and missunderstanding of risk analysis. I've been working in banking as a programmer in banking for a few years now. More recently I've been programming the risk analysis systems they talk about in the article. I can tell you there is no one forumula used by everyone. the modelers I work with try endless combination after combination to figure out what the banks portfolio risk is. They then test and retest the formulas constantly with various statistical analysis tools.
Other companies, paticularly in the energy futures business, are constantly tweeking and searching for better forumlas. They spend millions a year on systems to calculate risk. To say there is one formula that everyone used flies in the face of any one in the risk analysis business.
Way back in grade school of the late seventies I remember a debate about letting students use calculators. It would destroy our math skills. We needed to memorize those times tables or we would be stunted in math subjects for life.
I was recently at a presentation about finance and the presenter, an accountant, made a joke about how experienced accounts can't add two numbers without a calculator in hand. However these accountants can balance trillions of dollars in transactions and determine the marginal profitibility on a per unit basis of just about anything to a surprisingly accurate degree. Could quantum physics researchers really do their job if they were forced to use an abacus?
Google is similar to a calculator. It speeds up the mundane in information gathering. This bunk about memorizing facts is less important than understanding how to react to facts. The fact of the matter is (no pun intended) that facts change quickly these days. Information is becoming more and more real time. The person that understands how to look up and react to information has a better chance of getting ahead than some one who memorizes stale facts.
I kept using MPAA when I should have been using RIAA. Forgive my moment of dyslexia.
This is funny as hell. The fact they pinned it on a printer is telling of the ineptitude of the copyright leaching industry. But I am not sure if the general public or our public representitives understand whats going on.
I am starting to think we should step back and let the MPAA and other legalized mafioso have thier way for a while. Let's have DVD's with 10 minutes of forces comericials. Let the MPAA and MPA sue your IP enabled toaster. Let's see as content gets so locked down people won't buy a movie, ring tone, or networked device out of fear and disgust as "content owners" sue anything that answers a ping request.
It will be painfull for a while but after a critical mass the public revolt will come with such a ferocity the execs at the MPA and MPAA will have to leave in getaway planes to far away lands never to return like exhiled dictators. Politicians everywhere will be demanding the heads of the very same people they currently take bribes from hoping we don't lynch them in the process. Share prices will plummet, theaters will be vacent, and share holders will want blood.
Once it's all done no one will ever want to have draconian copyright measures enshrined in law ever again.
"Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong."
Que that Mac fan zealotry
Let me kick your Mac ideology with a bit of reality. Mac computers work well for a certain segment of users. They are lousy for certain other segments that really need to get work done.
I have Mac friends and they are amazingly ignorant of all the various things people need computers to do. These friends are graphic artists and the Mac seems well suited for their needs, not mine. If you hate spreadsheets and don't like tweeking your hardware then chances increase that your a Mac fan.
I spent time evaluating how Mac's could work for me, since my artsy friends seem to love them so much. I have found them to be abysmal for data analysis work and back end programming. I deal a lot with spreadsheets, SQL, huge databases, and data analysis and reporting software like SAS and Cognos. For these things Mac's are miserable and inefficient at the task. Mac's are also horribly unfriendly to hardware upgrades. I can't tweak the system like I can a PC. It's a locked box that displays pretty pictures.
Which is why my favorite OS is Linux. I can mess with Linux and build a custom system that fit my needs, not what Steve Jobs thinks I need. The OS can also be tweaked for the efficiency of the work I am doing. My second favorite is XP. XP brought me back to the dark side for the last few years. In XP you can still tweak and add custom hardware while still getting mainstream support.
But back to the article, there is a reason there is a strong avoidance of Vista. Vista seems to be trying to emulate the Mac in some ways when the Windows customer base really doesn't want to work on Mac's. I can see why people would switch to a Linux pre loaded systems over taking Vista. Certainly in my line of work there is more compatibility in switching to a Linux system from Windows than to a Mac.