Godwin's Law simply says that the longer an Internet discussion gets, the more likely a Nazi reference becomes
No, it says that one party will compare the other party to the NAZIs, and at that point a) the discussion is over and b) the person who made the comparison lost.
It's just so much better to invest in people, than to buy overprised pieces of outdated warfare machinery. Manhattan project also sounded pretty evil, but it turned out to be pretty good.
I don't really count several hundred thousand dead and the world held in a balance of terror for decades as "pretty good", although there's no certainty that or worse wouldn't have happened with Manhattan.
But the space program sounded good and did good. If we're going to throw money away on stuff why not exploration and discovery rather than destruction and killing?
Why this fascination with economically useless dead weight loss industries that are capable by design of doing nothing but destroying human lives and which are incapable economically of doing anything but funneling money into the pockets of job-destroyers? As any economist about the effects of the military on economic growth and you'll get the same answer: it is a diversion of valuable resources away from production and out of the economy entirely.
Suppose I were to propose that the US government invest tax-payers money in an industry that had no other purpose that to create goods that would either a) sit unused for decades while absorbing maintenance costs or b) blow themselves to bits while doing enormous damage to international trade. Only an idiot would say that is a good thing.
Republicans usually slant towards free markets, low deficits, small government etc.
As others here have pointed out, this is false. Completely, utterly and entirely false.
How in 2012 after decades of Republican deficits and Republican government growth can anyone believe this?
Republicans at all levels of government have actually managed to grow deficits and government programs faster than Democrats, and that takes some doing.
There is simply no possible way anyone who has been paying attention and has a shred of intellectual honesty can say Republicans are for any of the things you say they are for. The usual trick of the intellectually dishonest is to claim that 100% of the deficits are due to the other party being in control of some other part of the government, rather than observing that neither party has done much of anything to balance budgets except briefly under Bill Clinton's leadership (which I'm told was mostly an accounting fiddle, although Clinton did campaign as a budget-balancer in '92, specifically saying in the debate between GHW Bush and Ross Perot that he'd done something neither of the other two had: balanced a government budget.)
Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy.
Gingrich has at best a 4% chance of winning. 96% of the time the candidate with the most money wins the primary and the election.
As of September of 2011 Romney had raised $30 million and Gingrich $3 million. Assume Gingrich has doubled his take since then and Romney has gained nothing. Romney could match Gingrich dollar for dollar in Florida and in the worst case come out with $24 million in the bank while Gingrich ends up broke. I'm tilting the numbers way beyond reason in Gingrich's favour here and they still don't work for him.
Talking about "momentum" or other such nonsense is as silly as Gingrich promising a base on the Moon. Nothing will give you a deeper insight into the outcome or a higher probability of judging it correctly than a trivial comparison of the dollars each candidate has raised.
Conclusion: Romney will win the Republican nomination unless Gingrich finds a way to improve his fund raising by a factor of ten. That doesn't seem likely even assuming Rick Perry's backing comes with full financial support.
What else could be better done on the Moon's than in orbit?
Neutrino physics. Terrestrial neutrino detectors are plagued by muons which are created by cosmic-ray protons that create pions high in the atmosphere where the low-density means the pions retain most of their energy before decaying to muons, so cosmic rays at the Earth's surface are rich in very high energy muons and we have to go kilometers underground to get away from them.
On the Moon the lack of atmosphere means the protons impact on the surface and the pions are created in dense rock which slows them down before they have a chance to decay. This cuts the high energy muon spectrum by orders of magnitude. A neutrino detector would only have to be under a couple of meters of overburden on the Moon to have a much lower muon background than what is seen on Earth.
Take away their special property taxes, tax increment finances, lowering their local corporate rates, right of ways, government backed loans, government bonding, ability to eminent domain, and any other such government provided benefit that gives them a business advantage over the free market.
Why not take away their liability limitation and other special privileges granted to them under statute by the corporate form of organization and let them compete in a genuinely free market?
Corporations do not exist in free markets: they are a legislatively defined and created form of collective organization. When I formed my company I filed forms with the government that gave me a special legal status. Without such legislative intervention to subvert the free market I'd be just a guy selling services, or a group of people selling services.
Forming a company was an act of legal coercion against my fellow humans, which protects me and my employees from certain types of court action. It was only possible because of government intervention in the free market.
If they were successful in un-coupling themselves from any designation as a public entity, then claiming they and their equipment is purely private?
Corporations are public entities whose very existence is made possible by government interference with free markets in the form of various Companies Acts. So any such claim as the one you posit would be incoherent at best.
It's important that we keep PUBLIC money invested in our infrastructure, so that nobody can make the claim of "the corporations made this possible, therefore we should let them run roughshod over us"
But this argument concedes far, far too much truth to the side of corporate lies.
Corporations may make something possible, but corporations are made possible only by government interference with free markets. Corporations exist solely because of the Companies Acts of the 1800's and their modern descendents. They are a pure product of that State for the purposes of generating particular types of public benefit, and as such may be regulated in any way required to best realize the benefits for which they were created.
But anyone who pretends that any good done by corporations is not also a public good, and fully claimable as such, is (inadvertently or otherwise) drinking the corporate kool-aid.
I'm excited to be that much closer to Star Trek-type replicators,
How exactly is the ability to download a file bringing us any closer to Star Trek-type replicators?
We've been able to download files for decades.
I also don't get why anyone would describe downloading a file as "physical item downloads". How is a file a physical item? Or is this some sort of marketing for idiots to confuse idiots who are too idiotic to grasp that neither file downloading nor 3D printing are particularly new, nor is the combination thereof.
The only thing new here is that anyone is idiotic enough to describe downloading a file to drive a 3D printer as "physical item downloads". You'd pretty much have to be a/. editor to be that idiotic.
There's a reason for classifying technology, and it's not to hide super-secret features. It's to prevent the enemy from knowing what a piece of shit the technology is.
I thought the reason was to slow down the inevitable diffusion of new technology to your enemies in the hope that the idiots who developed the current stuff would be retired before it comes back to bite them.
After all, as soon as something exists, it becomes easier of others to make it. Even the lies people tell about the details can be informative. The US taught the Russians that a fission bomb was possible. They then taught the Russians that a fusion bomb was possible and the fallout from it provided quite a bit of detail on how to go about building one. Lithium and all that.
Every piece of tech the US creates produces a 100% certainty that people who hate the US will have substantially the same tech in a few years, which works wonderfully for people who hate the US, like arms manufacturers and military procurement people in all branches of government, but not so well for the first-line dupes who actually go out and get killed, or for the American people generally.
Anyone who claims it's possible to keep technology secret indefinitely is lying or deluded.
Fixed it for you. Clinton was out of the white house by the time this incident occurred.
Yeah, but Clinton was well-known to hate the military so much he kept them out of stupid wars (but I repeat myself) so it must have been him. Bush on the other hand was so pro-military that he got over 3000 soldiers killed in a successful invasion and failed occupation of a country that posed no threat to the US.
Even though everyone knows the facts, the impressions distort our thinking.
I have a hard time believing they would do this if your theory - simple jamming - were correct.
Debugging this kind of issue is hard enough when you have the hardware that failed in-hand. I'm betting the AF came up with a plausible and psychologically satisfying explanation and ran with it. That explanation may be true, but unless they have logging information that can show the loss was NOT caused by Iranian jamming it's very hard to raise its plausibility to anything like the level of "proof".
Our knowledge is never certain (certainty is faith, not knowledge) so it's quite possible the Iranians legitimately believe they downed the drone deliberately (Islamic nutjobs have egos too) while the AF legitimately believes it was a rare technical fault.
Funny! Like saying, "Cell phones use microwave radiation, so OMG I'm being cooked by my phone!" Sadly, there are idiots of the kind you're parodying who really don't understand anything about power levels and who really do give credence to such nonsensical thinking, which is something I call "argument from abstraction": "X is a member of abstract category C. Y is also a member of abstract category C. Y has effect E, therefore X has effect E." It's nothing but a special for of undistributed middle, but it's common enough to deserve its own name, I think.
"In the not so distant future, every household might have a Star Trek-like tricorder capable of giving you cancer or other diseases."
That's the misinformation the medical establishment would like promulgated, so thanks for getting a jump on it.
It's really important that technology like this be seen as "potentially dangerous" so it's use can be restricted to highly paid professionals whose business model requires such legal limitations "for your own safety."
There is exactly zero evidence, for example, that diagnostic ultrasound carries any risks, but there are still limitations on its use (you can buy your own unit but can't use it on people unless you're a trained, insured, highly paid professional.)
The end result is, the code actually is self-documenting and needs no explanation...
...to the people who wrote it. To everyone else--the maintenance coders, the guys who work for the company that bought the company that bought the company that wrote it--the "self-documenting" code is written in a private language. It may be possible to figure out what it's doing, but not why. Since engineering choices are never simple either/or code is full of trade-offs and the reasoning behind those trade-offs needs to be documented to it can be taken into account by people down the line. Otherwise they will at best waste time reinventing the wheel and at worst make design decisions based on incorrect guesses about the original intent.
You might as well claim that an engine is "self-documenting" because it is obvious that you've used 1/4-inch NF machine screws to hold a part in place. What isn't obvious is why you have done so.
The number of patients per what? Floor? Hospital? Wing?
Neither version is well-documented, although the latter is better. All it needs is one line at the top saying, "Patients per based on average room occupancy rate" or something like that.
One of the things that good comments do is provide context, and people who claim code is "self documenting" are generally junior developers who have never experienced how ad hoc code reuse and requirements drift can silently violate contextual assumptions in a way that introduces subtle bugs that aren't found until they bite you. Putting the context in the docs makes it easier to repurpose code properly and safely.
I prefer the theory that well developed code is it's own documentation.
I prefer the theory that developers who prefer the theory that well developed code is its own documentation are lazy and/or incompetent, so I don't hire them.
Most of the time the problem doesn't lie with the developer. The developer who actively refuses to document is rare.
I've worked with developers who simply won't document their code. They understand the importance of it, but they aren't able to express their intent in a meaningful and useful way. I've seen them try and fail.
My solution was to separate the documentation function from the development function, and I'd argue this is worth considering as a development practice. It has several advantages: 1) people who like to document migrate to documentation tasks 2) documentation gets written 3) documenting someone else's code is a great way to understand it and 4) if code can't be documented by someone else it probably has other problems too.
The document writers need to have some interaction with the code writers, and everyone needs to be writing some code, so no one is 100% documentation. This is a software engineering task, not a technical writing task. The document writers tend to be more junior people, although I've done a fair bit of documentation myself and senior people were encouraged to document other people's code as a break from head-down development.
I've only experimented with this approach in one relatively small team, but it dealt with a major headache and I'd definitely consider doing it again if I were running a larger team with documentation issues (my current team, bless them, is more meticulous about documentation than I am.)
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible.
But good metrics are really hard to come by. For call centers "solving the caller's problem" is the only reasonable metric, but there's no way to measure it. The worst metric I've ever heard of was at a call center where people were penalized for letting calls go over 12 minutes. Predictably (but quite unexpectedly to the morons who imposed the metric) people would do ANYTHING in minute-eleven to get the caller off the line: lie to them, "accidentally" hang up on them, pretend to no longer be able to hear them ("Hello? Are you still there sir?")
Yes, let's. American executives are paid more than anyone else in the world because they are supposedly able to make a huge difference to the performance of their company.
If you're going to claim at the first sign of misbehaviour that the executives have no control at all over anything anyone at the company does you should be following it up with an immediate rant about how over-paid they are.
Otherwise you just look like a hypocritical shill for corporate America.
doing exactly the same things all kenyan and indian businesses do.
"All"? How do you know? And why don't you mention that all human organizations in all nations are apt to do the same kind of thing: humans lie, cheat and steal. All humans, regardless of race, religion, nationality or party, have equal propensity to do this. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't been paying attention. Good individuals are good because of their individual choices, not the classes you choose to use to categorize them.
are you saying that google has instituted a policy for scam-calling business owners to trick them into paying them to have a domain name and a website hosted on google's servers ?
He isn't "saying" that. It is, on the evidence what Google is doing. It is clearly corporate policy, not some rogue group within the company, given the scale and scope of the operation and the IP hits from Mountain View.
does google have a hosting business ?
Yes, they do. Did you not read the article?
So your outrage claims amount to: 1) racist-nationalist nonsense implying that an American company would not engage in such fraudulent behaviour, 2) a rhetorical question asking if Google is doing exactly what Google is doing and 3) a rhetorical question asking if Google is selling a product that Google does indeed sell.
You've declared your ignorance of American (and human) business practices, you've declared your ignorance of the actual evidence for Google's corporate policy on this behaviour, and you've declared your ignorance of Google's product offering in Kenya. On the basis of those declarations you have reached a conclusion, but I'm not sure what the conclusion is.
You want to help me, as a marketer? Make sure your website has detailed, meaningful specs easily accessible for every product you sell.
Including the price. Nothing puts me off a product more quickly than a website that has all the details except the most important one: how much the product will cost me. Want me to enter an e-mail address for a quote? Sorry, not gonna happen, so you've just lost a potential sale.
The best book I've read on sales is called "Getting Into Your Customer's Head", and describes a selling process that recognizes your prospect's needs and knowledge of their own industry/requirements. I highly recommend it. As a business-person I never sold anything I didn't believe would make my customer's lives better, and while I didn't make a gazzillion dollars I did perfectly well and never had much trouble sleeping at night.
I was unaware that the clock was used for anything other than how close we were to nuclear war.
I was unaware the clock was used for anything but political commentary by a bunch of gutless moderate lefties on the current state of US policy. I've got nothing against the left (if I were an American I'd be considered very far left, which makes me a moderate liberal democrat in the rest of the world) but I do have something against cowardice, and from their misleading and dishonest name to their distracting and irrelevant tactics the "Bulletin of the Chemists" deserves some kind of prize for cowardice in political discourse. They have a definite political agenda but they attempt to hide it behind a purportedly objective measure of risk of nuclear war, which is in fact nothing but their subjective response to current American policy and has no objective basis whatsoever.
Chemists, not nuclear scientists. I have no idea why anyone thinks "atomic scientists" have anything to do with nuclear physics, although it seems like the people behind this have successfully confused the general public for a long time.
Perhaps they chose a misleading and dishonest name because they are misleading and dishonest people.
Slashdot Mirror
Godwin's Law simply says that the longer an Internet discussion gets, the more likely a Nazi reference becomes
No, it says that one party will compare the other party to the NAZIs, and at that point a) the discussion is over and b) the person who made the comparison lost.
It's just so much better to invest in people, than to buy overprised pieces of outdated warfare machinery. Manhattan project also sounded pretty evil, but it turned out to be pretty good.
I don't really count several hundred thousand dead and the world held in a balance of terror for decades as "pretty good", although there's no certainty that or worse wouldn't have happened with Manhattan.
But the space program sounded good and did good. If we're going to throw money away on stuff why not exploration and discovery rather than destruction and killing?
Why this fascination with economically useless dead weight loss industries that are capable by design of doing nothing but destroying human lives and which are incapable economically of doing anything but funneling money into the pockets of job-destroyers? As any economist about the effects of the military on economic growth and you'll get the same answer: it is a diversion of valuable resources away from production and out of the economy entirely.
Suppose I were to propose that the US government invest tax-payers money in an industry that had no other purpose that to create goods that would either a) sit unused for decades while absorbing maintenance costs or b) blow themselves to bits while doing enormous damage to international trade. Only an idiot would say that is a good thing.
Republicans usually slant towards free markets, low deficits, small government etc.
As others here have pointed out, this is false. Completely, utterly and entirely false.
How in 2012 after decades of Republican deficits and Republican government growth can anyone believe this?
Republicans at all levels of government have actually managed to grow deficits and government programs faster than Democrats, and that takes some doing.
There is simply no possible way anyone who has been paying attention and has a shred of intellectual honesty can say Republicans are for any of the things you say they are for. The usual trick of the intellectually dishonest is to claim that 100% of the deficits are due to the other party being in control of some other part of the government, rather than observing that neither party has done much of anything to balance budgets except briefly under Bill Clinton's leadership (which I'm told was mostly an accounting fiddle, although Clinton did campaign as a budget-balancer in '92, specifically saying in the debate between GHW Bush and Ross Perot that he'd done something neither of the other two had: balanced a government budget.)
Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy.
Gingrich has at best a 4% chance of winning. 96% of the time the candidate with the most money wins the primary and the election.
As of September of 2011 Romney had raised $30 million and Gingrich $3 million. Assume Gingrich has doubled his take since then and Romney has gained nothing. Romney could match Gingrich dollar for dollar in Florida and in the worst case come out with $24 million in the bank while Gingrich ends up broke. I'm tilting the numbers way beyond reason in Gingrich's favour here and they still don't work for him.
Talking about "momentum" or other such nonsense is as silly as Gingrich promising a base on the Moon. Nothing will give you a deeper insight into the outcome or a higher probability of judging it correctly than a trivial comparison of the dollars each candidate has raised.
Here are the numbers: http://www.fec.gov/disclosurep/pnational.do
Conclusion: Romney will win the Republican nomination unless Gingrich finds a way to improve his fund raising by a factor of ten. That doesn't seem likely even assuming Rick Perry's backing comes with full financial support.
What else could be better done on the Moon's than in orbit?
Neutrino physics. Terrestrial neutrino detectors are plagued by muons which are created by cosmic-ray protons that create pions high in the atmosphere where the low-density means the pions retain most of their energy before decaying to muons, so cosmic rays at the Earth's surface are rich in very high energy muons and we have to go kilometers underground to get away from them.
On the Moon the lack of atmosphere means the protons impact on the surface and the pions are created in dense rock which slows them down before they have a chance to decay. This cuts the high energy muon spectrum by orders of magnitude. A neutrino detector would only have to be under a couple of meters of overburden on the Moon to have a much lower muon background than what is seen on Earth.
Take away their special property taxes, tax increment finances, lowering their local corporate rates, right of ways, government backed loans, government bonding, ability to eminent domain, and any other such government provided benefit that gives them a business advantage over the free market.
Why not take away their liability limitation and other special privileges granted to them under statute by the corporate form of organization and let them compete in a genuinely free market?
Corporations do not exist in free markets: they are a legislatively defined and created form of collective organization. When I formed my company I filed forms with the government that gave me a special legal status. Without such legislative intervention to subvert the free market I'd be just a guy selling services, or a group of people selling services.
Forming a company was an act of legal coercion against my fellow humans, which protects me and my employees from certain types of court action. It was only possible because of government intervention in the free market.
If they were successful in un-coupling themselves from any designation as a public entity, then claiming they and their equipment is purely private?
Corporations are public entities whose very existence is made possible by government interference with free markets in the form of various Companies Acts. So any such claim as the one you posit would be incoherent at best.
It's important that we keep PUBLIC money invested in our infrastructure, so that nobody can make the claim of "the corporations made this possible, therefore we should let them run roughshod over us"
But this argument concedes far, far too much truth to the side of corporate lies.
Corporations may make something possible, but corporations are made possible only by government interference with free markets. Corporations exist solely because of the Companies Acts of the 1800's and their modern descendents. They are a pure product of that State for the purposes of generating particular types of public benefit, and as such may be regulated in any way required to best realize the benefits for which they were created.
But anyone who pretends that any good done by corporations is not also a public good, and fully claimable as such, is (inadvertently or otherwise) drinking the corporate kool-aid.
I'm excited to be that much closer to Star Trek-type replicators,
How exactly is the ability to download a file bringing us any closer to Star Trek-type replicators?
We've been able to download files for decades.
I also don't get why anyone would describe downloading a file as "physical item downloads". How is a file a physical item? Or is this some sort of marketing for idiots to confuse idiots who are too idiotic to grasp that neither file downloading nor 3D printing are particularly new, nor is the combination thereof.
The only thing new here is that anyone is idiotic enough to describe downloading a file to drive a 3D printer as "physical item downloads". You'd pretty much have to be a /. editor to be that idiotic.
There's a reason for classifying technology, and it's not to hide super-secret features. It's to prevent the enemy from knowing what a piece of shit the technology is.
I thought the reason was to slow down the inevitable diffusion of new technology to your enemies in the hope that the idiots who developed the current stuff would be retired before it comes back to bite them.
After all, as soon as something exists, it becomes easier of others to make it. Even the lies people tell about the details can be informative. The US taught the Russians that a fission bomb was possible. They then taught the Russians that a fusion bomb was possible and the fallout from it provided quite a bit of detail on how to go about building one. Lithium and all that.
Every piece of tech the US creates produces a 100% certainty that people who hate the US will have substantially the same tech in a few years, which works wonderfully for people who hate the US, like arms manufacturers and military procurement people in all branches of government, but not so well for the first-line dupes who actually go out and get killed, or for the American people generally.
Anyone who claims it's possible to keep technology secret indefinitely is lying or deluded.
Fixed it for you. Clinton was out of the white house by the time this incident occurred.
Yeah, but Clinton was well-known to hate the military so much he kept them out of stupid wars (but I repeat myself) so it must have been him. Bush on the other hand was so pro-military that he got over 3000 soldiers killed in a successful invasion and failed occupation of a country that posed no threat to the US.
Even though everyone knows the facts, the impressions distort our thinking.
I have a hard time believing they would do this if your theory - simple jamming - were correct.
Debugging this kind of issue is hard enough when you have the hardware that failed in-hand. I'm betting the AF came up with a plausible and psychologically satisfying explanation and ran with it. That explanation may be true, but unless they have logging information that can show the loss was NOT caused by Iranian jamming it's very hard to raise its plausibility to anything like the level of "proof".
Our knowledge is never certain (certainty is faith, not knowledge) so it's quite possible the Iranians legitimately believe they downed the drone deliberately (Islamic nutjobs have egos too) while the AF legitimately believes it was a rare technical fault.
So "T-rays" would tends to cook you.
Funny! Like saying, "Cell phones use microwave radiation, so OMG I'm being cooked by my phone!" Sadly, there are idiots of the kind you're parodying who really don't understand anything about power levels and who really do give credence to such nonsensical thinking, which is something I call "argument from abstraction": "X is a member of abstract category C. Y is also a member of abstract category C. Y has effect E, therefore X has effect E." It's nothing but a special for of undistributed middle, but it's common enough to deserve its own name, I think.
"In the not so distant future, every household might have a Star Trek-like tricorder capable of giving you cancer or other diseases."
That's the misinformation the medical establishment would like promulgated, so thanks for getting a jump on it.
It's really important that technology like this be seen as "potentially dangerous" so it's use can be restricted to highly paid professionals whose business model requires such legal limitations "for your own safety."
There is exactly zero evidence, for example, that diagnostic ultrasound carries any risks, but there are still limitations on its use (you can buy your own unit but can't use it on people unless you're a trained, insured, highly paid professional.)
The end result is, the code actually is self-documenting and needs no explanation...
...to the people who wrote it. To everyone else--the maintenance coders, the guys who work for the company that bought the company that bought the company that wrote it--the "self-documenting" code is written in a private language. It may be possible to figure out what it's doing, but not why. Since engineering choices are never simple either/or code is full of trade-offs and the reasoning behind those trade-offs needs to be documented to it can be taken into account by people down the line. Otherwise they will at best waste time reinventing the wheel and at worst make design decisions based on incorrect guesses about the original intent.
You might as well claim that an engine is "self-documenting" because it is obvious that you've used 1/4-inch NF machine screws to hold a part in place. What isn't obvious is why you have done so.
The latter is the self-documenting version.
The number of patients per what? Floor? Hospital? Wing?
Neither version is well-documented, although the latter is better. All it needs is one line at the top saying, "Patients per based on average room occupancy rate" or something like that.
One of the things that good comments do is provide context, and people who claim code is "self documenting" are generally junior developers who have never experienced how ad hoc code reuse and requirements drift can silently violate contextual assumptions in a way that introduces subtle bugs that aren't found until they bite you. Putting the context in the docs makes it easier to repurpose code properly and safely.
I prefer the theory that well developed code is it's own documentation.
I prefer the theory that developers who prefer the theory that well developed code is its own documentation are lazy and/or incompetent, so I don't hire them.
Most of the time the problem doesn't lie with the developer. The developer who actively refuses to document is rare.
I've worked with developers who simply won't document their code. They understand the importance of it, but they aren't able to express their intent in a meaningful and useful way. I've seen them try and fail.
My solution was to separate the documentation function from the development function, and I'd argue this is worth considering as a development practice. It has several advantages: 1) people who like to document migrate to documentation tasks 2) documentation gets written 3) documenting someone else's code is a great way to understand it and 4) if code can't be documented by someone else it probably has other problems too.
The document writers need to have some interaction with the code writers, and everyone needs to be writing some code, so no one is 100% documentation. This is a software engineering task, not a technical writing task. The document writers tend to be more junior people, although I've done a fair bit of documentation myself and senior people were encouraged to document other people's code as a break from head-down development.
I've only experimented with this approach in one relatively small team, but it dealt with a major headache and I'd definitely consider doing it again if I were running a larger team with documentation issues (my current team, bless them, is more meticulous about documentation than I am.)
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible.
But good metrics are really hard to come by. For call centers "solving the caller's problem" is the only reasonable metric, but there's no way to measure it. The worst metric I've ever heard of was at a call center where people were penalized for letting calls go over 12 minutes. Predictably (but quite unexpectedly to the morons who imposed the metric) people would do ANYTHING in minute-eleven to get the caller off the line: lie to them, "accidentally" hang up on them, pretend to no longer be able to hear them ("Hello? Are you still there sir?")
It's important to remember something here.
Yes, let's. American executives are paid more than anyone else in the world because they are supposedly able to make a huge difference to the performance of their company.
If you're going to claim at the first sign of misbehaviour that the executives have no control at all over anything anyone at the company does you should be following it up with an immediate rant about how over-paid they are.
Otherwise you just look like a hypocritical shill for corporate America.
doing exactly the same things all kenyan and indian businesses do.
"All"? How do you know? And why don't you mention that all human organizations in all nations are apt to do the same kind of thing: humans lie, cheat and steal. All humans, regardless of race, religion, nationality or party, have equal propensity to do this. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't been paying attention. Good individuals are good because of their individual choices, not the classes you choose to use to categorize them.
are you saying that google has instituted a policy for scam-calling business owners to trick them into paying them to have a domain name and a website hosted on google's servers ?
He isn't "saying" that. It is, on the evidence what Google is doing. It is clearly corporate policy, not some rogue group within the company, given the scale and scope of the operation and the IP hits from Mountain View.
does google have a hosting business ?
Yes, they do. Did you not read the article?
So your outrage claims amount to: 1) racist-nationalist nonsense implying that an American company would not engage in such fraudulent behaviour, 2) a rhetorical question asking if Google is doing exactly what Google is doing and 3) a rhetorical question asking if Google is selling a product that Google does indeed sell.
You've declared your ignorance of American (and human) business practices, you've declared your ignorance of the actual evidence for Google's corporate policy on this behaviour, and you've declared your ignorance of Google's product offering in Kenya. On the basis of those declarations you have reached a conclusion, but I'm not sure what the conclusion is.
You want to help me, as a marketer? Make sure your website has detailed, meaningful specs easily accessible for every product you sell.
Including the price. Nothing puts me off a product more quickly than a website that has all the details except the most important one: how much the product will cost me. Want me to enter an e-mail address for a quote? Sorry, not gonna happen, so you've just lost a potential sale.
The best book I've read on sales is called "Getting Into Your Customer's Head", and describes a selling process that recognizes your prospect's needs and knowledge of their own industry/requirements. I highly recommend it. As a business-person I never sold anything I didn't believe would make my customer's lives better, and while I didn't make a gazzillion dollars I did perfectly well and never had much trouble sleeping at night.
I was unaware that the clock was used for anything other than how close we were to nuclear war.
I was unaware the clock was used for anything but political commentary by a bunch of gutless moderate lefties on the current state of US policy. I've got nothing against the left (if I were an American I'd be considered very far left, which makes me a moderate liberal democrat in the rest of the world) but I do have something against cowardice, and from their misleading and dishonest name to their distracting and irrelevant tactics the "Bulletin of the Chemists" deserves some kind of prize for cowardice in political discourse. They have a definite political agenda but they attempt to hide it behind a purportedly objective measure of risk of nuclear war, which is in fact nothing but their subjective response to current American policy and has no objective basis whatsoever.
Personally I find it very alarming that a group of nuclear scientists can't even make a clock that doesn't work at a consistent rate.
I find it very alarming that anyone thinks nuclear scientists are in any way involved in this group.
So the group of nuclear scientists...
Chemists, not nuclear scientists. I have no idea why anyone thinks "atomic scientists" have anything to do with nuclear physics, although it seems like the people behind this have successfully confused the general public for a long time.
Perhaps they chose a misleading and dishonest name because they are misleading and dishonest people.