I don't think that wedging everyone into a bell curve is necessarily the fairest way to go about ranking employees. As others have pointed out, it's entirely possible that (under that scheme) the lowest-ranking person actually outperforms the average person in other companies. The reverse is also true, if a supervisor has managed to collect a bunch of dumbasses into one group.
It's a little more fair for upper management to give the supervisor a budget to be allocated for pay raises and bonuses. The supervisor then winds up ranking the employees and giving the higher-performing ones a larger slice of the budget. This doesn't work if the supervisor is playing political games, or has it "in" for an employee, but then again the 1-5 ranking scheme won't work in that case, either.
The searches work, but you can't personalize them dynamically with a slider. Instead of the slider, which should be above the hit list, you see the error message.
I wonder if, in this case, Apple has purposely created only a minimal set of documentation in order to feed interest in GarageBand. For many people, finding undocumented features and easter eggs in software is fun. Couple that with GarageBand's "coolness factor" and you wind up with a group of very avid users. Granted, there would probably be fewer of them, but they would more than make up for that in loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
I admit to being a big fan of Gran Turismo, providing I'm using a force-feedback steering wheel ("driving" with a Playstation control is just wrong).
While I can't vouch for GT providing me with any real-life reflexes I can say that, after playing it for several days, I start watching road differently when I go for a (real) drive. Things like looking for max-acceleration tracks in curves and corners, finding aggressive passing vectors on the freeway, etc.. Of course, the people in my life think I drive like a bat out of hell anyway, so this is not necessary a Good Thing....
Anyway, my point is that concepts or ways of thinking seem to transfer relatively easily to the real world. But unless the simulator is really, really good and you have access to a simulated environment (eg, a plane's cockpit), you won't get the actual reflexes.
Here is an interview that Andy Oram did with Symbiot (collectively, apparently). It includes much more information regarding their product. Worth a read.
Well, this certainly flies in the face of at least one previous report, doesn't it? From that linked article:
Blake Stowell, SCO's director of communications, acknowledged that the leaked memo is real.
But, Stowell claimed, pundits had mischaracterized the memo's context. "We believe the e-mail was simply a misunderstanding of the facts by an outside consultant who was working on a specific unrelated project to the BayStar transaction and he was told at the time of his misunderstanding. Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."
Responding to the allegations, a Microsoft spokesman said: "The allegations in the posting are not accurate. Microsoft has purchased a license to SCO's intellectual property, to ensure interoperability and legal indemnification for our customers. The details of this agreement have been widely reported and this is the only financial relationship Microsoft has with SCO. In addition, Microsoft has no direct or indirect financial relationship with BayStar."
(Emphasis mine.)
Golly gee, I wonder what they're trying to hide? Anyone?
Better keep this guy away from the experiments, then. He's already very, very intelligent, as you can tell by reading his article. A bigger brain would result in even more/. submissions.
The first thing I thought of when I read the article was, "Great. Instead of Big Brother we now have to worry about his zillions of little siblings."
While I can see the interest in a gadget like SenseCam, how many of you believe that it will be turned into spyware by a large number of people almost immediately?
We've already seen some of the negative effects of putting cameras into cell phones: Guys snipping pictures up skirts in bars, etc.. You also hear about pictures being taken by witnesses of license plates on cars used in crimes, but not as often. These events don't occur very often because people still have to actually take the picture, and that takes time and coordination, and also because cell phone cameras suck so bad.
But let's give people a very, very easy way to take pictures of whatever is in front of them. What happens? People go looking for interesting things to stand in front of. Other people are interesting, especially when they're doing something out of the ordinary. Or something wrong.
Because the SenseCam people don't have a BatPhone, they don't know where the interesting people are minute-to-minute. They take their cameras and just start hanging around places. The cameras take lots of pictures. Later, the pictures get reviewed. Many get deleted, some are saved, some are posted to the Internet as some kind of video blog.
I think this snippet from Avi's posting highlights something fairly important:
In the beginning of the election, we printed a "zero tape" of each machine. I found this to be the kind of charade that a confidence man would play when performing some slight of hand. So, the machines printed each candidates name with a zero next to it. Somehow, that is supposed to mean that there are no votes counted on the machine? I don't know. I think I could write a five line computer program that would print the zero tally, and I don't see how that ties into the security of the election.
The average person out there uses computers. They don't necessarily understand them. People tend to trust a computer's output if it matches their expectations. The "zero tape" is a great example of that, and Avi's subsequent comment about it being "eye candy" is spot-on.
Unfortunately, it takes a technically-astute person to identify a potential security flaw like this. It also takes a technically-astute person to implement the flaw. To the average person, the whole situation seems alarmist. It's in the same category as astroids striking the earth: Sure, it could happen, but....
Only after a failure of the e-voting system, a failure that's obvious enough for the average person to understand, will the public demand either better controls or removal of the system.
American society seems to be on this trend toward sweeping laws, regulations and decisions that are targeted to only a few individuals but affect everyone. A mandatory ignition interlock is yet another example of this trend.
It seems to me that when a solution to a problem adversely affects more of the population than the problem itself, the solution is wrong. Is that too simple a concept to grasp?
A short press release that contains a bit more information about how this works can be found here, on the Institute of Physics web site.
One item of interest is that this new technique converts ethanol to hydrogen at a 60% efficiency rate, compared to the 20% efficiency rate with current technology.
You described the same process I went through when I decided to change those side mirrors. In my car, this totally eliminated the blind spot.
However, I don't think that simply adjusting our side mirrors or installing a warning signal light is going to lessen accidents that much. After all, the driver has to be paying attention to the mirror or light before it becomes effective. A brief study of today's drivers show that many of them pay almost no attention to their total driving environment. At best, they seem to simply stare out the windshield and ignore everything else (dashboard, mirrors, etc.).
There was a study not very long ago that tracked driver's eye movements -- what they looked at and when. They compared the movements of sober and drunk drivers and came to an interesting conclusion: Drunks stared at the road and never looked around. They couldn't afford to pay attention to their total driving environment due to their lack of focus. Bad sober drivers often suffer from the same mistake. And neither of those will particularly benefit from just One More Thing To Pay Attention To.
I drink six cups of coffee before before I'm finished watching the morning news. What I want to know is: Am I avoiding more problems than I'm creating by drinking six pots of coffee per day?
I've had the same Tumi for several years now and can certainly vouche for it's durability. While expensive, my case has lasted through several friends' purchases of cheaper laptop bags. I suspect that we're about even on the total amount spent.
Tumi sells a lot of different bags made with different material and with different features. Their "Fusion Z" material, which is what my case is made of, is simply amazing. It's extremely durable -- my bag doesn't even have a worn spot on it yet -- and it's self healing in the event of punctures.
More directed to the original post, the case also has a suspension system for the laptop. The computer sits in a sling, a few inches off the bottom of the case, and the sling is made out of stretchable material. So if you drop the whole bag, your computer never really even hits the ground. Very, very cool. I looked at Tumi's web site and I believe that this feature is called "SafeCase" but I'm not sure.
I was called within the last week by AT&T. They are my long distance carrier at home, and they were trying to acquire my local service as well.
I interrupted the sales rep two or three times, saying each time, "Please put me on your do not call list." Eventually, he stopped his canned presentation and started going through another script -- a rather long-winded speech telling me that it would take up to 30 days before I was removed from their call list.
My reply was, in essence, "It better not take 30 days. There is no provision for a delay on your part within the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Remove my name from the list immediately." The rep maintained that it could take 30 days.
What I wonder, though, is this: Can I really get onto them, via the FCC or whoever, if they call me back within the 30 day period? I honestly don't know if the TCPA gives a grace period or not. Plus, I'm curious if the 30 day period will play in AT&T's defense against the FCC's suit.
I second that observation, wholeheartedly. It's incredibly refreshing to hear a vendor speak in plain, honest sentences when describing their work and/or their product. It's saying, in effect, "Look at our work and judge for yourself." No hand-waving, no market-speak, no smoke and mirrors.
Amazing.
I also like the idea of bringing these guys into the US market, ASAP. Let them compete with the likes of Diebold. If the majority of the people evaluating the voting systems are not in someone's pocket, then Software Improvements will acquire a big contract, indeed.
Reducing the article from 777 words to 9 has certainly freed up a lot of time. Now let's go find some more blazingly obvious observations and post them to Slashdot, too.
"Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people around the world would be higher-quality than from people who do it professionally?..."
Why, yes there is, Mr. Ballmer. Among other reasons, there's vastly more people looking at the code and none of them having marketing directors breathing down their necks. Many more reasons, stated by many different people, can be found via Google in five minutes.
"Why is its pedigree better than code done in a controlled fashion? I don't get that,' he said."
You've just stated something that everyone knew long ago.
"There is no road map for Linux, nobody who has his rear end on the line. We think it's an advantage a commercial company can bring--we provide a road map, indemnify customers. They know where to send e-mail. None of that is true in the other world. So far, I think our model works pretty well."
Roadmaps make good software? Email answered by overworked and underpaid contractors make good software? Indemnification makes a Microsoft OS-based computer more secure, perhaps?
How long will it take before the cell phone manufacturers start putting some decent anti-spam-like features into their phones? I, for one, would love to have blacklisting and whitelisting options for inbound calls and text messsages. A SpamCop-like consensus voting and temporary blacklisting would be cool, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little more fair for upper management to give the supervisor a budget to be allocated for pay raises and bonuses. The supervisor then winds up ranking the employees and giving the higher-performing ones a larger slice of the budget. This doesn't work if the supervisor is playing political games, or has it "in" for an employee, but then again the 1-5 ranking scheme won't work in that case, either.
The searches work, but you can't personalize them dynamically with a slider. Instead of the slider, which should be above the hit list, you see the error message.
I wonder if, in this case, Apple has purposely created only a minimal set of documentation in order to feed interest in GarageBand. For many people, finding undocumented features and easter eggs in software is fun. Couple that with GarageBand's "coolness factor" and you wind up with a group of very avid users. Granted, there would probably be fewer of them, but they would more than make up for that in loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
While I can't vouch for GT providing me with any real-life reflexes I can say that, after playing it for several days, I start watching road differently when I go for a (real) drive. Things like looking for max-acceleration tracks in curves and corners, finding aggressive passing vectors on the freeway, etc.. Of course, the people in my life think I drive like a bat out of hell anyway, so this is not necessary a Good Thing....
Anyway, my point is that concepts or ways of thinking seem to transfer relatively easily to the real world. But unless the simulator is really, really good and you have access to a simulated environment (eg, a plane's cockpit), you won't get the actual reflexes.
Here is an interview that Andy Oram did with Symbiot (collectively, apparently). It includes much more information regarding their product. Worth a read.
Golly gee, I wonder what they're trying to hide? Anyone?
And we can't have that, now can we?
Playstation Fights Falling Sales. Granted, it's from July 2003, but still....
PlayStation is dying! No, no, wait. PlayStation will dominate!
No, no, wait....
While I can see the interest in a gadget like SenseCam, how many of you believe that it will be turned into spyware by a large number of people almost immediately?
We've already seen some of the negative effects of putting cameras into cell phones: Guys snipping pictures up skirts in bars, etc.. You also hear about pictures being taken by witnesses of license plates on cars used in crimes, but not as often. These events don't occur very often because people still have to actually take the picture, and that takes time and coordination, and also because cell phone cameras suck so bad.
But let's give people a very, very easy way to take pictures of whatever is in front of them. What happens? People go looking for interesting things to stand in front of. Other people are interesting, especially when they're doing something out of the ordinary. Or something wrong.
Because the SenseCam people don't have a BatPhone, they don't know where the interesting people are minute-to-minute. They take their cameras and just start hanging around places. The cameras take lots of pictures. Later, the pictures get reviewed. Many get deleted, some are saved, some are posted to the Internet as some kind of video blog.
Slashdot readers can take it from there.
Unfortunately, it takes a technically-astute person to identify a potential security flaw like this. It also takes a technically-astute person to implement the flaw. To the average person, the whole situation seems alarmist. It's in the same category as astroids striking the earth: Sure, it could happen, but....
Only after a failure of the e-voting system, a failure that's obvious enough for the average person to understand, will the public demand either better controls or removal of the system.
"I see a device.... I can talk to it! Let's start out by identifying myself:"
COLOSSUS COLOSSUS COLOSSUS COLOSSUS COLOSSUS
(apologies to D.F. Jones)
I bet the anti-virus software companies are really going to like this one.
American society seems to be on this trend toward sweeping laws, regulations and decisions that are targeted to only a few individuals but affect everyone. A mandatory ignition interlock is yet another example of this trend.
It seems to me that when a solution to a problem adversely affects more of the population than the problem itself, the solution is wrong. Is that too simple a concept to grasp?
One item of interest is that this new technique converts ethanol to hydrogen at a 60% efficiency rate, compared to the 20% efficiency rate with current technology.
However, I don't think that simply adjusting our side mirrors or installing a warning signal light is going to lessen accidents that much. After all, the driver has to be paying attention to the mirror or light before it becomes effective. A brief study of today's drivers show that many of them pay almost no attention to their total driving environment. At best, they seem to simply stare out the windshield and ignore everything else (dashboard, mirrors, etc.).
There was a study not very long ago that tracked driver's eye movements -- what they looked at and when. They compared the movements of sober and drunk drivers and came to an interesting conclusion: Drunks stared at the road and never looked around. They couldn't afford to pay attention to their total driving environment due to their lack of focus. Bad sober drivers often suffer from the same mistake. And neither of those will particularly benefit from just One More Thing To Pay Attention To.
Who in this crowd is normally found out in the sun?
... running a DOS program under Linux is like tying bricks to a dog's head.
I drink six cups of coffee before before I'm finished watching the morning news. What I want to know is: Am I avoiding more problems than I'm creating by drinking six pots of coffee per day?
Tumi sells a lot of different bags made with different material and with different features. Their "Fusion Z" material, which is what my case is made of, is simply amazing. It's extremely durable -- my bag doesn't even have a worn spot on it yet -- and it's self healing in the event of punctures.
More directed to the original post, the case also has a suspension system for the laptop. The computer sits in a sling, a few inches off the bottom of the case, and the sling is made out of stretchable material. So if you drop the whole bag, your computer never really even hits the ground. Very, very cool. I looked at Tumi's web site and I believe that this feature is called "SafeCase" but I'm not sure.
I interrupted the sales rep two or three times, saying each time, "Please put me on your do not call list." Eventually, he stopped his canned presentation and started going through another script -- a rather long-winded speech telling me that it would take up to 30 days before I was removed from their call list.
My reply was, in essence, "It better not take 30 days. There is no provision for a delay on your part within the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Remove my name from the list immediately." The rep maintained that it could take 30 days.
What I wonder, though, is this: Can I really get onto them, via the FCC or whoever, if they call me back within the 30 day period? I honestly don't know if the TCPA gives a grace period or not. Plus, I'm curious if the 30 day period will play in AT&T's defense against the FCC's suit.
Amazing.
I also like the idea of bringing these guys into the US market, ASAP. Let them compete with the likes of Diebold. If the majority of the people evaluating the voting systems are not in someone's pocket, then Software Improvements will acquire a big contract, indeed.
Reducing the article from 777 words to 9 has certainly freed up a lot of time. Now let's go find some more blazingly obvious observations and post them to Slashdot, too.
No, no and no.
Nokia? Motorola? Anyone listening?