Though if you think that is possible, go an entire day without making one single mistake.
Oh for pity sake. I'm not suggesting we create infalible human beings or require human beings to be infallible. It is possible to ensure people do things much more accurately through a system of redundancy. More than one person checking off on a procedure (when time permits). More checks and balances. Automation of arithmetic for calculating dosages. Automation in diagnostics so that a doctor can check he hasn't missed a possible cause for a condition etc.
Also differentiate between petty stuff that will mean a patient is inconvenienced and stuff that will kill a patient.
More than 99% of plane landings go well. Your odds of surviving when you drive to work are better than 99%. It IS possible.
Imagine if the brakes on your car failed just 1% of the time. For every 100 times you brake 1 time you'd just keep going. How many times do you brake on an average 1 hour trip? Sometimes for mission critical systems even 99.999% isn't good enough. It's not just mission critical systems though. What about computers. If they made errors once in 10000, with several billion cycles per second, they'd be unusable.
Anyway if each patient requires 178 actions then 1% means every patient has between 1 and 2 mistakes made for them per day. I presume some of these actions are trivial otherwise I'd be amazed if anyone survived.
Never mind I just saw my error. He didn't trial this in one hospital - he did so in a whole state (presumably one that has more hospitals than average since you have more than 28 states).
Pronovost oversaw the introduction of checklists in the ICUs in hospitals across Michigan, and the result was a thousand lives saved in a year. That would translate to 28,000 per year if scaled nationwide
I know that the US medical system is in tatters but surely you have more than 28 large hospitals nationwide???
That's called a straw man. I didn't say that Python is COBOL or Python is FORTRAN. I said they had something in common, and that people who have experienced languages with that common feature have had bad experiences with it and are not just speculating on some aspect of coding they've never had any experience with. I'm saying they have very good reason to distrust the syntactic relevance of white space.
Trust me, I know the limitations of python and I could go on about where it is lacking or what is wrong with it--but the whitespace issue is not included. I simply refuse to believe that would be a deal killer for an intelligent person, but alas it is. Strange world.
So are you intentionally implying that if someone disagrees with you on this point they're not an intelligent person? You're not going to get anywhere having a genuine debate with someone if that's your attitude.
The questions you're asking are very broad and very basic. You're going to fall flat on your face and work long and hard for a net loss if you're not very very careful.
On the one hand you're asking for a good way of doing estimates, but on the other you're asking if you should provide fixed quotes. It should be clear that if you don't have much experience estimating, you shouldn't be shooting for fixed work. You need to get these skills up BEFORE taking on this kind of work (and certainly before you take it on a fixed price basis).
Your best bet at this stage is to apply for some short term contracts, paid by the hour while you develop your estimation skills. Go through an agency to begin with if you can. Do this and provide YOURSELF with a fixed estimate at the start of the job. Write down your assumptions (which should always be part of any fixed quote - unless you want to work for free when the scope creeps). Only when you're able to create accurate estimates should you take on fixed work (making sure anything you sign limits the scope of the estimate). Make sure you're permitted to see the details of all contracts regarding your employment, and keep a copy to refer to if you do decide to take anything on without an agency. (Fixed contracts will be different again to hourly, but you need to start getting an idea of what the language is like in your employment contract if you're going to handle all this yourself).
If you "fear" Java but not C, you don't know enough about the two languages.
Java has huge marketshare in business programming at the moment. Java is object orientated and the memory is managed. If you know C# you'll find Java similar in certain aspects. If you know.NET and Java you've got most of the business market covered.
C is the foundation of Linux/Unix and teaches you about memory management. C might not be going anywhere but businesses are steering clear of non managed environments. Not knowing how they work however is a mistake. If you work on embedded systems or games, you'll want to know C. If you do go down this path far enough you'll also want to learn C++ eventually but learn one step at a time.
Look, this is everyone's biggest beef with python if they are not yet proficient at it. Somehow, we have come to believe that whitespace is sacred and that a language shouldn't tell us how to use it. I'm not sure how to convince you otherwise except this: don't knock it until you have tried it. Once you really delve into the language, you will wonder why anyone ever would program in any other language for general purpose programming.
The people telling you they don't like formal rules about the use of whitespace in syntax usually have tried it. "Old timers" probably had a gut full of problems this introduced into COBOL or FORTRAN code. (Or MAKE files that differentiate bewteen space and tab, so that there is no difference between correct and incorrect code when printed on paper).
When designing a language if you really want to enforce a formal way of formatting your code, stop at producing warnings, and let them be switched off. Anything else is horrible.
Hey, you actually got a very nice reply from EA Thailand explaining you why they didn't provide the English locale there. Someone actually read your mail and manually typed a reply explaining the situation, and quite honest too. No auto-generated mail. This gets my respect.
Wait a second, being given the silent treatment doesn't get your respect, but being given the finger (ever so nicely and politely) explaining why your arse has been raped, that gets you respect????
So are you also okay with being robbed at gunpoint, so long as the criminal explains he's trying to feed his family and it's not to support a drug habbit???
No fucking wonder these assholes are getting away with passing laws that theoretically see you in jail for 5 years for backing up a game. They've managed to brainwash people into accepting this is how it should be!
I still get requests to open-source a package I wrote 18 years ago for an OS which hasn't existed for 10 years. I wrote the original version of the package while I was a fulltime college student, in the two months before finals. I certainly went on to put another 3 or 6 months of fulltime work (spread over years) into improving it, so there's certainly some value I put into it. I don't think requesters really understand me when I suggest that if they were REALLY capable of using my code as a starting point, they would easily be capable of simply starting from scratch. There's maybe 10% of the code which really has value, but anyone talented enough to be able to pick that 10% out and repurpose it would probably have no desire to do so. I know that if I were tasked with solving the same problem, I'd just start over.
What if your code does something that I don't know how to do and rather than simply re-use it I want to try to learn what you're doing?
Alternately what if your code does something I need to do and does it well, and I can treat your code as a black box without actually understanding it too well? Then I could focus on the rest of what I want to do and treat your code as a black box.
What if I have no intention of creating a viable product from your code and just want to tinker and fiddle?
From what you're saying you have no use for the code. What exactly do you lose open sourcing it? Why do you even care what people will do with it? If they hurt their interests trying to use it in a way it wasn't intended, that's their responsibility.
I listen to music all day long... and every single album is Creative Commons licensed, either from Jamendo (14,000 albums) or from Archive.org (300,000 recordings), so I will never exhaust those catalogues in my lifetime. What's more, the albums are vastly better and more diverse than the charts crap.
I think I've liked 2 creative commons songs that I've downloaded. The only one I remember by name is "I'm Your Moon" by Jonathan Coulton. I just visited archive.org and downloaded recent 5 links under music. One of them was Al Gore's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech! What the!?!? Seriously. The reason creative commons music doesn't take off is that it's mostly garbage band and self-obsessed uni wannbe crapola. You have to siphon shit through a straw to find anything of value. It proves that even though RIAA music is bad it is very very possible to produce worse garbage.
Sounds like my sex life: My anti-STD solution is great. It blocks 100% of all known and unknown STD's. Just don't ask what my human-to-human sexual encounter rate is...:(
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks Design Patterns are just double speak.
I sat down once and started creating simple example implementations of each pattern in Java. I got through 8 or 10 before losing interest. It did make me a little more familiar with the patterns, but what really irked me was that in some case the difference between two patterns was the "intent". That alone speaks of over-complication when you need multiple phrases to describe the same idea and some subtle and subjective intent is the only difference.
However what I find worst about patterns is that whether or not programmers understand them they try to employ them anyway and end up with a overly configurable overly complex mess that they don't understand with awful performance because they've tried to cram every damn pattern in the book into their code.
The crux of the problem is this: Design patterns outline a solution for a problem that may or may not be relevant to the system you're working on and because patterns are flavour de jour people cram them into their code without ever doing a proper analysis. Couple this with XML configuration for everything (whether it needs to be configurable or not, just in case!!!) and you've just described the J2EE world in 2008....but wait there's more - lets shoe horn new language constructs like annotations into the mix, because code you can't follow in a debugger (sorry correct term is is code that addresses "cross cutting concerns") is soooo much better.
So what they're saying is simplify and use heuristics? Hasn't this been done for years now. One some level every single game out there does it because you can't model the real world 100% and the state you're considering is therefore simplified. What they're saying is simplify further by considering a subset or creating a model of the model that makes up the full game.
In the case of simplifying further, isn't this exactly how a chess engine works?
In the case of making a simplified model, I'd be surprised if lots of simulators didn't already do this - the trouble with this approach is that your simplified model may not behave well (ie. as expected) under certain conditions and even corner cases can break the illusion pretty badly.
First, please turn down the anger, proof by shouting is not very effective.
I'm sorry. I get very frustrated because people talk about the failings of science when the failing is that the scientific method has not been applied.
They showed in a pretty solid experiment that two average persons degrade their driving skills as much by talking on the phone as by drinking alcohol.
A sample size of 2 guys from the Mythbusters team is NOT a solid experiment.
Your hypothesis that some people would not be as badly affected is interesting, although it lacks proof (science speak for: you better back this up with at least one or two cases).
NO NO NO NO NO!!!! I have a hypothesis. It's perfectly valid as a hypothesis without ANY proof. For it to progress beyond a hyptothesis would take MANY MANY cases, not one or two. It would also take repeatability - someone other than me setting up the same experiment based on my description. To really be accepted other different independent experiments to test the hypothesis.
What's more a single negative result will disprove the hypothesis (within the constraints of the experiment). For example if I got together a sample of a few dozen or few hundred pilots and they did significantly better, my result would only be valid for pilots in the chosen sample space.
At the moment my unfounded wild speculation and the Mythbuster's wild speculation (with only a sample size of 2 to support it) are not on equal footing (since there's is at least tested) but they're not that far apart.
The problem is that people learn a very simplified scientific method in highschool, take it no further. Learn nothing about statistics and provability and how much rigor is required, then use the term "proven" very losely, meaning that a single statistically insignificant experiment "proves" something. The irony is "busting a myth" - disproving something actually only does require one experiment but that is not what the Mythbusters do most of the time, despite the name of their show.
WTF who measures things like MP3 compression time when testing a filesystem?!?
Anyone interested in real world usage. Resource usage of the file system drivers while doing something processor intensive such as encoding is certainly of interest.
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
If your brain was REALLY good at making shortcuts, it'd skip all that and use the only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear";-)
Show me a study that radio use has a similar effect on safety as cell phone use and drunkenness, and I'll agree that perhaps it needs to go. However, I can't imagine that law ever being passed. (And anyway, my best guess is that radio use actually improves safety by helping prevent boredom and sleepiness.)
Radio may or may not be a distraction but I can guarantee you children in the back seat do.
One of the main uses of a car is to transport people including small children, so it wouldn't make any sense to outlaw that.
Why not? If you don't want people to risk your life listening to the radio, why should you be allowed to risk theirs by transporting your kids? Better yet why not find a way to separate the driver from the children?
I like the idea of training people to deal with distractions. Considering the people I know, however, I have my doubts it would be effective. Not everyone can be a pilot, but almost everyone drives.
That's mostly because we set the bar so low for driving. I think if you get them young and there's incentive to drive, they'll certainly learn to cope with distractions. In any case ANY training is better than the current training (which is none).
There are ways to enforce cell phone laws. Cops could have cell detectors just like radar detectors....and what's the ratio of police vehicles to general civilian vehicles on the road? Honestly our law enforcement can't cope with violent crime and we have them chasing cell phone users and "pirates". Gimme a break. If the police need to be there to enforce the laws you either have dangerous people on the road (in which case remove them) or the laws are ridiculous and have other purposes than saving lives (revenue)
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Though if you think that is possible, go an entire day without making one single mistake.
Oh for pity sake. I'm not suggesting we create infalible human beings or require human beings to be infallible. It is possible to ensure people do things much more accurately through a system of redundancy. More than one person checking off on a procedure (when time permits). More checks and balances. Automation of arithmetic for calculating dosages. Automation in diagnostics so that a doctor can check he hasn't missed a possible cause for a condition etc.
Also differentiate between petty stuff that will mean a patient is inconvenienced and stuff that will kill a patient.
More than 99% of plane landings go well. Your odds of surviving when you drive to work are better than 99%. It IS possible.
Imagine if the brakes on your car failed just 1% of the time. For every 100 times you brake 1 time you'd just keep going. How many times do you brake on an average 1 hour trip? Sometimes for mission critical systems even 99.999% isn't good enough. It's not just mission critical systems though. What about computers. If they made errors once in 10000, with several billion cycles per second, they'd be unusable.
Anyway if each patient requires 178 actions then 1% means every patient has between 1 and 2 mistakes made for them per day. I presume some of these actions are trivial otherwise I'd be amazed if anyone survived.
Never mind I just saw my error. He didn't trial this in one hospital - he did so in a whole state (presumably one that has more hospitals than average since you have more than 28 states).
Pronovost oversaw the introduction of checklists in the ICUs in hospitals across Michigan, and the result was a thousand lives saved in a year. That would translate to 28,000 per year if scaled nationwide
I know that the US medical system is in tatters but surely you have more than 28 large hospitals nationwide???
Yep and
having your left arm amputated != having your right arm amputated
Doesn't mean I'd like to experience either.
python != cobol
python != fortran
That's called a straw man. I didn't say that Python is COBOL or Python is FORTRAN. I said they had something in common, and that people who have experienced languages with that common feature have had bad experiences with it and are not just speculating on some aspect of coding they've never had any experience with. I'm saying they have very good reason to distrust the syntactic relevance of white space.
Trust me, I know the limitations of python and I could go on about where it is lacking or what is wrong with it--but the whitespace issue is not included. I simply refuse to believe that would be a deal killer for an intelligent person, but alas it is. Strange world.
So are you intentionally implying that if someone disagrees with you on this point they're not an intelligent person? You're not going to get anywhere having a genuine debate with someone if that's your attitude.
The questions you're asking are very broad and very basic. You're going to fall flat on your face and work long and hard for a net loss if you're not very very careful.
On the one hand you're asking for a good way of doing estimates, but on the other you're asking if you should provide fixed quotes. It should be clear that if you don't have much experience estimating, you shouldn't be shooting for fixed work. You need to get these skills up BEFORE taking on this kind of work (and certainly before you take it on a fixed price basis).
Your best bet at this stage is to apply for some short term contracts, paid by the hour while you develop your estimation skills. Go through an agency to begin with if you can. Do this and provide YOURSELF with a fixed estimate at the start of the job. Write down your assumptions (which should always be part of any fixed quote - unless you want to work for free when the scope creeps). Only when you're able to create accurate estimates should you take on fixed work (making sure anything you sign limits the scope of the estimate). Make sure you're permitted to see the details of all contracts regarding your employment, and keep a copy to refer to if you do decide to take anything on without an agency. (Fixed contracts will be different again to hourly, but you need to start getting an idea of what the language is like in your employment contract if you're going to handle all this yourself).
If you "fear" Java but not C, you don't know enough about the two languages.
Java has huge marketshare in business programming at the moment. Java is object orientated and the memory is managed. If you know C# you'll find Java similar in certain aspects. If you know .NET and Java you've got most of the business market covered.
C is the foundation of Linux/Unix and teaches you about memory management. C might not be going anywhere but businesses are steering clear of non managed environments. Not knowing how they work however is a mistake. If you work on embedded systems or games, you'll want to know C. If you do go down this path far enough you'll also want to learn C++ eventually but learn one step at a time.
Look, this is everyone's biggest beef with python if they are not yet proficient at it. Somehow, we have come to believe that whitespace is sacred and that a language shouldn't tell us how to use it. I'm not sure how to convince you otherwise except this: don't knock it until you have tried it. Once you really delve into the language, you will wonder why anyone ever would program in any other language for general purpose programming.
The people telling you they don't like formal rules about the use of whitespace in syntax usually have tried it. "Old timers" probably had a gut full of problems this introduced into COBOL or FORTRAN code. (Or MAKE files that differentiate bewteen space and tab, so that there is no difference between correct and incorrect code when printed on paper).
When designing a language if you really want to enforce a formal way of formatting your code, stop at producing warnings, and let them be switched off. Anything else is horrible.
Hey, you actually got a very nice reply from EA Thailand explaining you why they didn't provide the English locale there. Someone actually read your mail and manually typed a reply explaining the situation, and quite honest too. No auto-generated mail. This gets my respect.
Wait a second, being given the silent treatment doesn't get your respect, but being given the finger (ever so nicely and politely) explaining why your arse has been raped, that gets you respect????
So are you also okay with being robbed at gunpoint, so long as the criminal explains he's trying to feed his family and it's not to support a drug habbit???
No fucking wonder these assholes are getting away with passing laws that theoretically see you in jail for 5 years for backing up a game. They've managed to brainwash people into accepting this is how it should be!
I still get requests to open-source a package I wrote 18 years ago for an OS which hasn't existed for 10 years. I wrote the original version of the package while I was a fulltime college student, in the two months before finals. I certainly went on to put another 3 or 6 months of fulltime work (spread over years) into improving it, so there's certainly some value I put into it. I don't think requesters really understand me when I suggest that if they were REALLY capable of using my code as a starting point, they would easily be capable of simply starting from scratch. There's maybe 10% of the code which really has value, but anyone talented enough to be able to pick that 10% out and repurpose it would probably have no desire to do so. I know that if I were tasked with solving the same problem, I'd just start over.
What if your code does something that I don't know how to do and rather than simply re-use it I want to try to learn what you're doing?
Alternately what if your code does something I need to do and does it well, and I can treat your code as a black box without actually understanding it too well? Then I could focus on the rest of what I want to do and treat your code as a black box.
What if I have no intention of creating a viable product from your code and just want to tinker and fiddle?
From what you're saying you have no use for the code. What exactly do you lose open sourcing it? Why do you even care what people will do with it? If they hurt their interests trying to use it in a way it wasn't intended, that's their responsibility.
...in 5 4 3 2 1.
Slashdotters won't know what to make of this. Do they focus on the geeky, or focus on the boobies?
I listen to music all day long ... and every single album is Creative Commons licensed, either from Jamendo (14,000 albums) or from Archive.org (300,000 recordings), so I will never exhaust those catalogues in my lifetime. What's more, the albums are vastly better and more diverse than the charts crap.
I think I've liked 2 creative commons songs that I've downloaded. The only one I remember by name is "I'm Your Moon" by Jonathan Coulton. I just visited archive.org and downloaded recent 5 links under music. One of them was Al Gore's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech! What the!?!? Seriously. The reason creative commons music doesn't take off is that it's mostly garbage band and self-obsessed uni wannbe crapola. You have to siphon shit through a straw to find anything of value. It proves that even though RIAA music is bad it is very very possible to produce worse garbage.
Not today, not tomorrow, but someday you can expect content regulation to take place.
Um, last I checked content was regulated. If you arrange to commit a crime via the internet, it's illegal.
What the fuck does "regulate the inernet" actually mean? It could mean anything!
It means: All your base (and pr0nz) are belong to us!
I always check my GIT repository into SVN for safe keeping ;-)
Sounds like my sex life: My anti-STD solution is great. It blocks 100% of all known and unknown STD's. Just don't ask what my human-to-human sexual encounter rate is... :(
I just hope you realize STDs can cross species.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks Design Patterns are just double speak.
I sat down once and started creating simple example implementations of each pattern in Java. I got through 8 or 10 before losing interest. It did make me a little more familiar with the patterns, but what really irked me was that in some case the difference between two patterns was the "intent". That alone speaks of over-complication when you need multiple phrases to describe the same idea and some subtle and subjective intent is the only difference.
However what I find worst about patterns is that whether or not programmers understand them they try to employ them anyway and end up with a overly configurable overly complex mess that they don't understand with awful performance because they've tried to cram every damn pattern in the book into their code.
The crux of the problem is this: Design patterns outline a solution for a problem that may or may not be relevant to the system you're working on and because patterns are flavour de jour people cram them into their code without ever doing a proper analysis. Couple this with XML configuration for everything (whether it needs to be configurable or not, just in case!!!) and you've just described the J2EE world in 2008....but wait there's more - lets shoe horn new language constructs like annotations into the mix, because code you can't follow in a debugger (sorry correct term is is code that addresses "cross cutting concerns") is soooo much better.
So what they're saying is simplify and use heuristics? Hasn't this been done for years now. One some level every single game out there does it because you can't model the real world 100% and the state you're considering is therefore simplified. What they're saying is simplify further by considering a subset or creating a model of the model that makes up the full game.
In the case of simplifying further, isn't this exactly how a chess engine works?
In the case of making a simplified model, I'd be surprised if lots of simulators didn't already do this - the trouble with this approach is that your simplified model may not behave well (ie. as expected) under certain conditions and even corner cases can break the illusion pretty badly.
First, please turn down the anger, proof by shouting is not very effective.
I'm sorry. I get very frustrated because people talk about the failings of science when the failing is that the scientific method has not been applied.
They showed in a pretty solid experiment that two average persons degrade their driving skills as much by talking on the phone as by drinking alcohol.
A sample size of 2 guys from the Mythbusters team is NOT a solid experiment.
Your hypothesis that some people would not be as badly affected is interesting, although it lacks proof (science speak for: you better back this up with at least one or two cases).
NO NO NO NO NO!!!! I have a hypothesis. It's perfectly valid as a hypothesis without ANY proof. For it to progress beyond a hyptothesis would take MANY MANY cases, not one or two. It would also take repeatability - someone other than me setting up the same experiment based on my description. To really be accepted other different independent experiments to test the hypothesis.
What's more a single negative result will disprove the hypothesis (within the constraints of the experiment). For example if I got together a sample of a few dozen or few hundred pilots and they did significantly better, my result would only be valid for pilots in the chosen sample space.
At the moment my unfounded wild speculation and the Mythbuster's wild speculation (with only a sample size of 2 to support it) are not on equal footing (since there's is at least tested) but they're not that far apart.
The problem is that people learn a very simplified scientific method in highschool, take it no further. Learn nothing about statistics and provability and how much rigor is required, then use the term "proven" very losely, meaning that a single statistically insignificant experiment "proves" something. The irony is "busting a myth" - disproving something actually only does require one experiment but that is not what the Mythbusters do most of the time, despite the name of their show.
If you don't think Red Flag is meant to be a Windows replacement, take a look at Wikipedia's screen shot of Version 6 (presumably out of the box).
What I found most interesting was that it looks like XP and not Vista.
local governments don't pay a shit
I'm unsurprised the Chinese government doesn't pay or accept such unofficial currency.
any people actually pay a shit to this
I'm unsurprised people aren't willing to offer such payment to the government (or it's rules).
WTF who measures things like MP3 compression time when testing a filesystem?!?
Anyone interested in real world usage. Resource usage of the file system drivers while doing something processor intensive such as encoding is certainly of interest.
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
If your brain was REALLY good at making shortcuts, it'd skip all that and use the only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear" ;-)
Show me a study that radio use has a similar effect on safety as cell phone use and drunkenness, and I'll agree that perhaps it needs to go. However, I can't imagine that law ever being passed. (And anyway, my best guess is that radio use actually improves safety by helping prevent boredom and sleepiness.)
Radio may or may not be a distraction but I can guarantee you children in the back seat do.
One of the main uses of a car is to transport people including small children, so it wouldn't make any sense to outlaw that.
Why not? If you don't want people to risk your life listening to the radio, why should you be allowed to risk theirs by transporting your kids? Better yet why not find a way to separate the driver from the children?
I like the idea of training people to deal with distractions. Considering the people I know, however, I have my doubts it would be effective. Not everyone can be a pilot, but almost everyone drives.
That's mostly because we set the bar so low for driving. I think if you get them young and there's incentive to drive, they'll certainly learn to cope with distractions. In any case ANY training is better than the current training (which is none).
There are ways to enforce cell phone laws. Cops could have cell detectors just like radar detectors. ...and what's the ratio of police vehicles to general civilian vehicles on the road? Honestly our law enforcement can't cope with violent crime and we have them chasing cell phone users and "pirates". Gimme a break. If the police need to be there to enforce the laws you either have dangerous people on the road (in which case remove them) or the laws are ridiculous and have other purposes than saving lives (revenue)