Page 1: Preamble Page 2: Several billion to blow shit up in middle east Page 3: Perks for politicians. Lots of air travel etc.
Oh yeah. I like a green budget. Just because you put it online and maybe avoid printing a few copies, doesn't make it a green budget. That's like saying loggers that use the right bin for their recycling are conservationalists. In a few generations these few generations will be known as the scum that caused half of the problems being faced while making ourselves feel good by using a different kind of light bulb and shopping bag and occassionally not bothering to print something.
Technically, everything is copyrighted. My website, your website, this website, all copyrighted
It's more basic than that. The Internet is all about the "transfer" of data. However when we talk about transfer of data we really mean copying the bits across the wire. Usually the data is not "transfered" because the original isn't removed or destroyed. The Web and the whole of the Internet work like this. It always amazes me that intelligent people don't seem to understand that the success of the web is all about copying. Trying to selectively control what's copied with asinine schemes like DRM and content filtering seem to me about as viable as trying to tag chemically and isotopically identical water molecules and select which ones pour through a hole in a glass of water. It's all very artificial.
I spent those 4 years programming and not in a university. I've worked alongside people who did spend those 4 years in a university, and some came out with hardly a drop of practical knowledge....and your point is? I know the type but I also know people who've been programmers doing practical work for years and are STILL useless.
University isn't a place where your hand is held or you magically learn things. You may wish to argue that they shouldn't have been able to earn a degree and still come out clueless, but it's amazing what people will do to pass a test without actually doing the learning. In other words in University, you can learn as much as you want or as little as is needed to pass a test.
The halting problem is a fun exercise in logic, but to say that one must have knowledge of it to realize that writing a compiler in 1 month is unrealistic is... unrealistic.
Well you're definitely right. You don't need to understand the halting problem to understand a good estimate for writing a compiler isn't 1 month. However someone who understands computability and who understands how compilers work is much less likely to make such rediculous demands.
Your dismissal of the halting problem as "a fun exercise in logic" shows that you don't understand its significance at all. There are entire classes of problems that you can run across and that aren't obviously impractical to implement in code. If you don't understand these things and you come across a slightly more complex problem than your typical business problem (fetch and edit data with some calculation) you can bring a whole project unstuck.
Considering the years and (tens of) thousands of dollars you've invested in formal education, I can see why you would want to justify that decision.
See, now that's both illogical and just plain nasty. You know nothing about me and why I may or may not want to "justify that decision". I could just as easily argue that since you've decided not to spend that time and money I can see how you'd want to justify working instead.
Personally, the years I spent earning money and gaining experience in the field lead me to believe that a degree would have been a less-than-optimal use of my time and money.
Well I'm 32 and I have about 10 years in the industry. If I hadn't done my degree I might have 13 or 14. Not a huge difference even this early in my working life. I've easily made back any money I've spent on my undergrad degree. My current job, and my previous one both required that I have a University degree and paid much better than my first programming job which did not (I would have done better working at MacDonalds than working at that first job.). I understand what I'm doing much better than I would have and at a deeper level than if I'd just coded....but go ahead, continue to display bad manners with childish personal attacks and keep telling yourself that a degree is a waste of your time next time you're turned down for a nice job that pays well (or are paid less than you're worth).
I think you're missing my point. If you want to learn theoretical computer science, where would *you* go to learn it?
I'd research my courses very carefully and go somewhere where theoretical subjects were taught. That may mean a masters or even a PhD.
When I did my B.Sc. in Computing Science, we had a mix of theoretical subjects (automata and discrete math were actually core, compilers was an elective I took, I took a couple of artificial intelligence subjects as well)
Because they don't teach it at universities in general (with some notable exceptions).
Ahhh so there are "some notable exceptions". Could it be that you should seek one of these out if that's what you want to do?
They churn out professional programmers, who would actually be *much* better off (in terms of being good programmers) to just spend those 4 years writing code.
Complete garbage. Programmers who don't understand how the machine works under the hood, don't understand that you can express problems that can't be solved, or can't be solved practically etc. are rubbish. They don't understand the very tools they use. I've worked with people who understand the classics like the travelling salesman problem, or the halting problem. I've also worked with people who don't. Let me tell you I'd much prefer to work with those that aren't going to propose something impossible and set a deadline for my team to meet in creating it. (I once had a manager propose we write a full blown compiler in a month, and it was clear she had zero understanding. My current boss on the other hand - and I work elsewhere thankfully - use to write software and she's brilliant). It doesn't matter if you never become a computer scientist proper. These things are VERY important.
And the point of my rant remains. The purpose of the university is basic research.
The point of a university is higher learning. One avenue is basic research.
What we risk by not investing in basic research is a stagnation in computer theory. Marvin Minsky proved that perceptrons can't compute everything. Then in a off hand comment said that he didn't know if multi-level neural nets had the same problem. It took something like 10 years before anyone even checked.
If it were an easy problem Minksy would have set one of his grad students to work on it.
Look the rest of this refutation is pointless. If you want to move into a career of research now, you clearly have the intelligence and articulation required. Your education has put you in better stead than you give it credit for. What I don't know is whether you have the drive and circumstances to persue another degree or a change of career. If you want it desperately enough, you're willing to make the sacrifices and you're lucky enough to do it, I wish you the best of luck.
I'm not saying this flippantly either. I dropped out of a science degree because I found it didnt suit me. I worked then went back and didmy comp sci and found my career in IT. Science was a dream of mine right through highschool. When I found I couldn't persue it I didn't give up on it. I went and did a Masters of Astronomy part time and on the Internet. I certainly didn't have my hand held to learn what I did, and though I never intended it as a change of career (ie. I l did the degree "for fun") and though it cost me big time health wise and socially (not to mention financially) I don't regret doing it. It is part of who I am, and I loved the challenge and cherish the knowledge I gained. I finally know how we know what we know about the universe. I've computed the distances to stars and understood their life cycles. I understand what the universe looks like on the grand scale. In short I have a better understanding than the average person of the universe I live in. While I'd love to go and do research I know I won't sacrifice what I have to for that. It's still okay. My degrees have been anything but a waste of time.
Some fool will think this is trolling, but it's not.
You go right ahead and phone your university and ask for your tuition back. Clearly you learnt nothing about professional behaviour or life long learning.
You don't just stop learning at University. You'll never cover everything you want to know at University. It's a starting point. If you're really aching for that knowledge, yes you can learn it on your own, or yes you can do a higher degree BUT for fark sake research what's in it first!!! If you want to work on something mathematical, talk to the people doing it and ask for their advice on what to do.
It sounds to me like you wanted to do a pure research degree, took a comp sci course because the word science was tacked on the end, and are now feeling sorry you didn't do anything more advanced. What's worse you show a complete lack of regard for what you have learnt and I'll bet it's how you're making your living. You want to do higher learning? Well the first thing you should learn is that the onus is on YOU to find out what a course covers. Stop asking for your goddamn hand to be held. You can't have it both ways. Advanced means you do most of the learning yourself.
Outsourcing is basically a gamble on the truth of the following inequation
R + I > R + P + O + E
R = Required: Cost of work required to do the job in the best way with maximum efficiency
I = Internal: Extra cost due to effort required by Internal staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
P = Profit: External party's (outsourcee) required profit to do the work. ie. The contractor's cut.
O = Overhead: Extra management cost of outsourcing for both the outsourcer and the outsourcee.
E = External: Extra cost due to effort required by External (outsourced) staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
In other words you're gambling that the company you're outsourcing your work to is so much more competent than your own people that even after they've made a handsome profit and after you've paid the overhead to manage the relationship you'll still be ahead paying for the outsourcee's solution.
Now sometimes outsourcing is a good gamble. For example economies of scale in manufacturing mean you'd never ever want to produce 100 office staplers yourself. Forget for a second that your core business isn't making staplers, think of the cost of tooling when producing 100 vs 10 million. Similarly for software no company is going to write their own word processor when there are feature rich off the shelf packages out there.
However for most custom work where a business wants to and is large enough to do things their own way, even if it's not your core business, unless you're going to leverage external expertise (or a code base) that you don't have in house or won't need for long (and therefore can't afford to hire and manage) P + O + E will be much greater than I. Unless of course your in house staff is nonexistent or so brain dead it needs to be replaced.
I understand that I've oversimplified above, but what I don't understand is why people high up in the decision making structure in big business don't understand it even this well. It shouldn't require huge textbooks and research to understand this.
Why would they not admit that in a survey? Hell, why wouldn't they admit it to their girlfriends? It's a compliment: I only date beautiful women. I'm dating you. Ergo, you are a beautiful woman.
Because beauty fades and what "I only date beautiful women" means is "I'll dump your ass as soon as your bits start to sag".
A) Discuss the possiblity first (after living together for a about a year.
B) Go shopping together at the local markets for a $5 pretend ring for the occassion if and when it arises. The agreement I made is that if/when I ask we'll go shopping for a real ring right away, but take our time settling on one.
C) When I did ask, I dug up information on the diamond trade, how to buy diamonds etc. We took a few weeks to buy the ring. I also asked for a long engagement because while I was confident the relationship would work I liked the idea of being engaged for a while and just taking time as a couple. (There was no pressure from family about when we'd have kids for instance)
She was happy and got exactly what she wanted. She knew how much the ring cost and didn't get something too far out of our price range nor did she try to go for the biggest ring compared to friends and family. We made every attempt to get our money's worth and to ensure we didn't buy blood diamonds (though I still find the assurances you get less than satisfactory, even with a certificate on the diamonds and/or the ring).
Would I have spent money on a ring or a wedding if it meant nothing to my wife? No. Would I deprive her of something that was important to her. No.
Well my wife hardly wears jewelry, but when I proposed (with a $5 ring) I asked what she wanted, and even asked her to read material about the diamond trade which I dug up, before we got our real ring. (There was no way in hell I was buying something expensive based on a guess at what she likes. At best we'd be tied in to 1 store, and at worst I'd be stuck with something she didn't like). One guess what she wanted. She did at least try to get the diamond sourced in Australia where there's no slave trade but we both knew we only had the jeweler's word (and the fact that we live in Australia) to assure us, so we don't know for sure it's not a blood diamond, we just know we did our best not to buy one.
Mind you if the diamond companies are trying to get me to waste my money by not asking and not doing research, well then they wasted their money doing the advertising. I'm not that brain-washable.
I don't know why people feel the need to mark my comment as a troll. It wasn't but so be it./. moderation has been broken for a long time.
What I've seen is software getting unusable. Bugs that are show stoppers. Not just for the first version either, but bugs that persist to the point that they get in the way of you doing useful things. Not in all software, just in a lot of it. For example the miriad of video editors that crash more often than they produce video. (I've even seen a piece of DVD software for which creating a menu left you with one where the buttons didn't work and therefore instead of a DVD you had a coaster).
Things will get worse before they get better for software. We're accepting buggier software than ever and paying more for it than ever. We're spending more time trying to get the hardware and software to behave itself (maintenance and troubleshooting, never mind the BS companies are putting in our ways with things like DRM going crazy these days) than we are actually accomplishing tasks. I naively thought things would get better but it's become clear to me that things are going to much much worse before they get better. Only when things get so bad they're unusable (and therefore unbuyable) are people going to pay attention.
Is it unreasonable then to hold as one of your uncompromising requirements, not only the ability to recognize such brainwashing attempts, but also a refusal to submit to them?
My dear AC I don't give a damn about traditions, and don't have any interest in jewelry. I was speaking of the general population. For example if you think most women will simply accept a rational argument and be put off diamonds for a wedding ring you've got a lot to learn.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems
Nice assumption you make about my age, given that email is decades old, and has been in wide use for about 15 years.
I've worked on documents that are internal or external. Rightly or wrongly internal documents do get scrutinized for style when compliance to standards is actually measured. I worked as a consultant for roughly 8 years so I got to see how different companies and consultancies work.
I've also done a Masters and if you wanted to submit anything academic to a journal you had to do it exactly in the format requested. (Of course these qualify as external documents).
Most of the time when rough documents are required it's been email or MS-Word that I've used and most of my issues centered around formatting, pagination and corruption when a document gets large. However whenever the document format hasn't mattered, Wordpad would be just about good enough (not sure if wordpad does tables). Not that I'd use Wordpad if I have MS-Word installed.
I'm guessing you have youth on your side. The set of people of say, 90 who use email is not as universal as you might like to think. I write to my great-uncle in residential care: he's 80-something, and reads large print with difficulty. Email: he's never heard of it, never mind used it. My parents, in their seventies, are heavy users of email: many of their contemporaries are not.
I don't know how many 80 and 90 year olds that haven't heard of email work at your company. Clearly this isn't what we were discussing so this point alone makes me think you're trolling. Seniors who can only read large print are not likely to be using Word off their own bat either. If they're using software it's something someone else has set up for them that takes their special needs into consideration.
That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems. Japanese internal documents in particular are just glyphs on a page. Documents that go to customers, perhaps. Which is about 1% of the documents produced.
It's lovely that you have experience with 1 company (probably in one department) and can extrapolate that to everywhere else. I've probably had experience at more companies than you, even if I haven't been working as long as you. I'm in my 30s by the way.
... and only because it doesn't cost as much? I hope not, but I could imagine that. It makes me sick how brainwashed some people are in this regard
Companies have invested a large amount of time and money to do that brainwashing. So much so that it's become part of our culture (as in everyone knows a wedding ring is a diamond ring...even though in reality the "tradition" is quite new). What's worse is that it understanding these things doesn't change the traditions, and will still want the traditional item.
It does the same thing as word. It just does it very differently.
You can choose to see it that way, but then if you're of that mindset you can also argue that a sports car and a semi-trailer are the same thing, they just do it very differently. I'd beg to differ.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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Are you trolling, or was this an attempt at a serious comment?
The kinds of documents you're talking about - where formatting doesn't matter - memos and letters to mum - are called email. You may use rich text or HTML in your mail, but you wouldn't present one as a company report, design document, or any formal piece of business writing. Of course if you're not going to email it and if what you're describing is what you're using your word processor for, save yourself the cost of MS Word and the headache of Latex, and just use Wordpad. Heck notepad might be good enough for you.
Oh but come on the GP has a point, even if he was being flippant. You can't take a starving child and say "here's a laptop kid". It won't work. To give them an opportunity and break the cycle, at a minimum you have to provide basic food and sanitation as well as that laptop.
Rather complex set of side effects don't you think?
Kind of like writing a flight simulator and accidentally simulating a highway traffic control system as a side effect. It just doesn't mesh. We're too complex.
It's the "killer ap" that got me to convert to linux full time.
Lyx (and Latex) does something very different from Word. I've never understood why technically competent people cannot grasp why the differences in the way each operates does not make either one a good substitute for the other. Just like the recurring suggestion here that Linux is a suitable substitute for Windows. They may be of a similar nature but each desktop OS does things very differently to the other and each has limitations that the other one doesn't have. The basic failure to understand this may or may not be a basic social failure but it is a failure nontheless.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorry but in my view you're dead wrong. WYSIWYG done well is exactly what is needed. In the real world you'll get asked to make precise changes to the way your document looks, and document format is not just an afterthought or a separate step of the process. Having to make changes to a document seldom means making changes to one or the other. What's more changing/rearranging the content can have a major impact on the layout of your document, which needs to be dealt with. Being able to see those changes as you make them makes it easier to manage them than some obscure two-step process.
Unfortunately what we have as standard is MS-Word which is WYSIWYG done very wrong that looks "good enough" to most businesses.It doesn't lay things out reliably and its bugs and quirks get in the way. There is no more need for these quirks and bugs than there is for Windows Explorer to be unable to resume a file copy when there is an error mid way throught (or Mac to delete files that haven't successfully been moved). ie. it's just badly written software made with commercial interests in mind trumping quality considerations.
Nope you're on track. The reason for this is what's interesting: 1) Word of mouth tells or first experience them that calling for support is a waste of time and their problem won't be fixed 2) In the case of Microsoft (and many other companies) they'd have to be prepared to pay big bucks for the privellege of the call. They either don't have the money or have better things to spend it on. Combing with #1 and I'd say they're making the right decision.
Thanks for making me laugh out loud. You put that very well.
What bothers me is that people who come up with this crap don't seem to realize that if this reality were some kind of simulation, we'd likely continually be hitting the limits of the simulation. Usually when a simulation is created it's for a purpose. Any effort required beyond the purpose (limits of the simulation) are wasted. So why would you add a fossil record, and a huge expansive universe to the same simulation? What would the purpose be exactly? A very similar question to why a God would create a misleading fossil record if the universe were 6000 years old.
VR simluation my arse. People come up with these pre-conceived notions and will do anything to justify them.
GGP said Galileo was famous for saying the earth is round GP corrected Galileo was famous for saying the Earth went around the sun Actually Galileo was famous for many other things and while he did get into hot water for supporting Copernicus' sun centered Universe, he wasn't the originator of the idea.
Copernicus wasn't first either but he was the first to be scientific about it. (You really shouldn't forget Kepler in all this either - he's the one that saw that Elliptical orbits were required to satisfy the observation. Both Galileo and Copernicus insisted on circular orbits, which also don't work neatly mathematically and require voodoo maths to make them fit observation. Kepler used the decades of (by the standards of the day) accurate observations of Tycho Brahe (Kepler was his assistant early in Kepler's career)
Saying that Galileo was famous for saying the Earth went round the sun is technically correct but implying he was the first is ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll go something like...
Page 1: Preamble
Page 2: Several billion to blow shit up in middle east
Page 3: Perks for politicians. Lots of air travel etc.
Oh yeah. I like a green budget. Just because you put it online and maybe avoid printing a few copies, doesn't make it a green budget. That's like saying loggers that use the right bin for their recycling are conservationalists. In a few generations these few generations will be known as the scum that caused half of the problems being faced while making ourselves feel good by using a different kind of light bulb and shopping bag and occassionally not bothering to print something.
Technically, everything is copyrighted. My website, your website, this website, all copyrighted
It's more basic than that. The Internet is all about the "transfer" of data. However when we talk about transfer of data we really mean copying the bits across the wire. Usually the data is not "transfered" because the original isn't removed or destroyed. The Web and the whole of the Internet work like this. It always amazes me that intelligent people don't seem to understand that the success of the web is all about copying. Trying to selectively control what's copied with asinine schemes like DRM and content filtering seem to me about as viable as trying to tag chemically and isotopically identical water molecules and select which ones pour through a hole in a glass of water. It's all very artificial.
I spent those 4 years programming and not in a university. I've worked alongside people who did spend those 4 years in a university, and some came out with hardly a drop of practical knowledge. ...and your point is? I know the type but I also know people who've been programmers doing practical work for years and are STILL useless.
...but go ahead, continue to display bad manners with childish personal attacks and keep telling yourself that a degree is a waste of your time next time you're turned down for a nice job that pays well (or are paid less than you're worth).
University isn't a place where your hand is held or you magically learn things. You may wish to argue that they shouldn't have been able to earn a degree and still come out clueless, but it's amazing what people will do to pass a test without actually doing the learning. In other words in University, you can learn as much as you want or as little as is needed to pass a test.
The halting problem is a fun exercise in logic, but to say that one must have knowledge of it to realize that writing a compiler in 1 month is unrealistic is... unrealistic.
Well you're definitely right. You don't need to understand the halting problem to understand a good estimate for writing a compiler isn't 1 month. However someone who understands computability and who understands how compilers work is much less likely to make such rediculous demands.
Your dismissal of the halting problem as "a fun exercise in logic" shows that you don't understand its significance at all. There are entire classes of problems that you can run across and that aren't obviously impractical to implement in code. If you don't understand these things and you come across a slightly more complex problem than your typical business problem (fetch and edit data with some calculation) you can bring a whole project unstuck.
Considering the years and (tens of) thousands of dollars you've invested in formal education, I can see why you would want to justify that decision.
See, now that's both illogical and just plain nasty. You know nothing about me and why I may or may not want to "justify that decision". I could just as easily argue that since you've decided not to spend that time and money I can see how you'd want to justify working instead.
Personally, the years I spent earning money and gaining experience in the field lead me to believe that a degree would have been a less-than-optimal use of my time and money.
Well I'm 32 and I have about 10 years in the industry. If I hadn't done my degree I might have 13 or 14. Not a huge difference even this early in my working life. I've easily made back any money I've spent on my undergrad degree. My current job, and my previous one both required that I have a University degree and paid much better than my first programming job which did not (I would have done better working at MacDonalds than working at that first job.). I understand what I'm doing much better than I would have and at a deeper level than if I'd just coded.
I think you're missing my point. If you want to learn theoretical computer science, where would *you* go to learn it?
I'd research my courses very carefully and go somewhere where theoretical subjects were taught. That may mean a masters or even a PhD.
When I did my B.Sc. in Computing Science, we had a mix of theoretical subjects (automata and discrete math were actually core, compilers was an elective I took, I took a couple of artificial intelligence subjects as well)
Because they don't teach it at universities in general (with some notable exceptions).
Ahhh so there are "some notable exceptions". Could it be that you should seek one of these out if that's what you want to do?
They churn out professional programmers, who would actually be *much* better off (in terms of being good programmers) to just spend those 4 years writing code.
Complete garbage. Programmers who don't understand how the machine works under the hood, don't understand that you can express problems that can't be solved, or can't be solved practically etc. are rubbish. They don't understand the very tools they use. I've worked with people who understand the classics like the travelling salesman problem, or the halting problem. I've also worked with people who don't. Let me tell you I'd much prefer to work with those that aren't going to propose something impossible and set a deadline for my team to meet in creating it. (I once had a manager propose we write a full blown compiler in a month, and it was clear she had zero understanding. My current boss on the other hand - and I work elsewhere thankfully - use to write software and she's brilliant). It doesn't matter if you never become a computer scientist proper. These things are VERY important.
And the point of my rant remains. The purpose of the university is basic research.
The point of a university is higher learning. One avenue is basic research.
What we risk by not investing in basic research is a stagnation in computer theory. Marvin Minsky proved that perceptrons can't compute everything. Then in a off hand comment said that he didn't know if multi-level neural nets had the same problem. It took something like 10 years before anyone even checked.
If it were an easy problem Minksy would have set one of his grad students to work on it.
Look the rest of this refutation is pointless. If you want to move into a career of research now, you clearly have the intelligence and articulation required. Your education has put you in better stead than you give it credit for. What I don't know is whether you have the drive and circumstances to persue another degree or a change of career. If you want it desperately enough, you're willing to make the sacrifices and you're lucky enough to do it, I wish you the best of luck.
I'm not saying this flippantly either. I dropped out of a science degree because I found it didnt suit me. I worked then went back and didmy comp sci and found my career in IT. Science was a dream of mine right through highschool. When I found I couldn't persue it I didn't give up on it. I went and did a Masters of Astronomy part time and on the Internet. I certainly didn't have my hand held to learn what I did, and though I never intended it as a change of career (ie. I l did the degree "for fun") and though it cost me big time health wise and socially (not to mention financially) I don't regret doing it. It is part of who I am, and I loved the challenge and cherish the knowledge I gained. I finally know how we know what we know about the universe. I've computed the distances to stars and understood their life cycles. I understand what the universe looks like on the grand scale. In short I have a better understanding than the average person of the universe I live in. While I'd love to go and do research I know I won't sacrifice what I have to for that. It's still okay. My degrees have been anything but a waste of time.
Some fool will think this is trolling, but it's not.
You go right ahead and phone your university and ask for your tuition back. Clearly you learnt nothing about professional behaviour or life long learning.
You don't just stop learning at University. You'll never cover everything you want to know at University. It's a starting point. If you're really aching for that knowledge, yes you can learn it on your own, or yes you can do a higher degree BUT for fark sake research what's in it first!!! If you want to work on something mathematical, talk to the people doing it and ask for their advice on what to do.
It sounds to me like you wanted to do a pure research degree, took a comp sci course because the word science was tacked on the end, and are now feeling sorry you didn't do anything more advanced. What's worse you show a complete lack of regard for what you have learnt and I'll bet it's how you're making your living. You want to do higher learning? Well the first thing you should learn is that the onus is on YOU to find out what a course covers. Stop asking for your goddamn hand to be held. You can't have it both ways. Advanced means you do most of the learning yourself.
Outsourcing is basically a gamble on the truth of the following inequation
R + I > R + P + O + E
R = Required: Cost of work required to do the job in the best way with maximum efficiency
I = Internal: Extra cost due to effort required by Internal staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
P = Profit: External party's (outsourcee) required profit to do the work. ie. The contractor's cut.
O = Overhead: Extra management cost of outsourcing for both the outsourcer and the outsourcee.
E = External: Extra cost due to effort required by External (outsourced) staff to accomplish task due to incompetence or inexpertise
In other words you're gambling that the company you're outsourcing your work to is so much more competent than your own people that even after they've made a handsome profit and after you've paid the overhead to manage the relationship you'll still be ahead paying for the outsourcee's solution.
Now sometimes outsourcing is a good gamble. For example economies of scale in manufacturing mean you'd never ever want to produce 100 office staplers yourself. Forget for a second that your core business isn't making staplers, think of the cost of tooling when producing 100 vs 10 million. Similarly for software no company is going to write their own word processor when there are feature rich off the shelf packages out there.
However for most custom work where a business wants to and is large enough to do things their own way, even if it's not your core business, unless you're going to leverage external expertise (or a code base) that you don't have in house or won't need for long (and therefore can't afford to hire and manage) P + O + E will be much greater than I. Unless of course your in house staff is nonexistent or so brain dead it needs to be replaced.
I understand that I've oversimplified above, but what I don't understand is why people high up in the decision making structure in big business don't understand it even this well. It shouldn't require huge textbooks and research to understand this.
Why would they not admit that in a survey? Hell, why wouldn't they admit it to their girlfriends? It's a compliment: I only date beautiful women. I'm dating you. Ergo, you are a beautiful woman.
Because beauty fades and what "I only date beautiful women" means is "I'll dump your ass as soon as your bits start to sag".
What I did that worked well was:
A) Discuss the possiblity first (after living together for a about a year.
B) Go shopping together at the local markets for a $5 pretend ring for the occassion if and when it arises. The agreement I made is that if/when I ask we'll go shopping for a real ring right away, but take our time settling on one.
C) When I did ask, I dug up information on the diamond trade, how to buy diamonds etc. We took a few weeks to buy the ring. I also asked for a long engagement because while I was confident the relationship would work I liked the idea of being engaged for a while and just taking time as a couple. (There was no pressure from family about when we'd have kids for instance)
She was happy and got exactly what she wanted. She knew how much the ring cost and didn't get something too far out of our price range nor did she try to go for the biggest ring compared to friends and family. We made every attempt to get our money's worth and to ensure we didn't buy blood diamonds (though I still find the assurances you get less than satisfactory, even with a certificate on the diamonds and/or the ring).
Would I have spent money on a ring or a wedding if it meant nothing to my wife? No. Would I deprive her of something that was important to her. No.
Well my wife hardly wears jewelry, but when I proposed (with a $5 ring) I asked what she wanted, and even asked her to read material about the diamond trade which I dug up, before we got our real ring. (There was no way in hell I was buying something expensive based on a guess at what she likes. At best we'd be tied in to 1 store, and at worst I'd be stuck with something she didn't like). One guess what she wanted. She did at least try to get the diamond sourced in Australia where there's no slave trade but we both knew we only had the jeweler's word (and the fact that we live in Australia) to assure us, so we don't know for sure it's not a blood diamond, we just know we did our best not to buy one.
/. moderation has been broken for a long time.
Mind you if the diamond companies are trying to get me to waste my money by not asking and not doing research, well then they wasted their money doing the advertising. I'm not that brain-washable.
I don't know why people feel the need to mark my comment as a troll. It wasn't but so be it.
What I've seen is software getting unusable. Bugs that are show stoppers. Not just for the first version either, but bugs that persist to the point that they get in the way of you doing useful things. Not in all software, just in a lot of it. For example the miriad of video editors that crash more often than they produce video. (I've even seen a piece of DVD software for which creating a menu left you with one where the buttons didn't work and therefore instead of a DVD you had a coaster).
Things will get worse before they get better for software. We're accepting buggier software than ever and paying more for it than ever. We're spending more time trying to get the hardware and software to behave itself (maintenance and troubleshooting, never mind the BS companies are putting in our ways with things like DRM going crazy these days) than we are actually accomplishing tasks. I naively thought things would get better but it's become clear to me that things are going to much much worse before they get better. Only when things get so bad they're unusable (and therefore unbuyable) are people going to pay attention.
Is it unreasonable then to hold as one of your uncompromising requirements, not only the ability to recognize such brainwashing attempts, but also a refusal to submit to them?
My dear AC I don't give a damn about traditions, and don't have any interest in jewelry. I was speaking of the general population. For example if you think most women will simply accept a rational argument and be put off diamonds for a wedding ring you've got a lot to learn.
That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems
Nice assumption you make about my age, given that email is decades old, and has been in wide use for about 15 years.
I've worked on documents that are internal or external. Rightly or wrongly internal documents do get scrutinized for style when compliance to standards is actually measured. I worked as a consultant for roughly 8 years so I got to see how different companies and consultancies work.
I've also done a Masters and if you wanted to submit anything academic to a journal you had to do it exactly in the format requested. (Of course these qualify as external documents).
Most of the time when rough documents are required it's been email or MS-Word that I've used and most of my issues centered around formatting, pagination and corruption when a document gets large. However whenever the document format hasn't mattered, Wordpad would be just about good enough (not sure if wordpad does tables). Not that I'd use Wordpad if I have MS-Word installed.
I'm guessing you have youth on your side. The set of people of say, 90 who use email is not as universal as you might like to think. I write to my great-uncle in residential care: he's 80-something, and reads large print with difficulty. Email: he's never heard of it, never mind used it. My parents, in their seventies, are heavy users of email: many of their contemporaries are not.
I don't know how many 80 and 90 year olds that haven't heard of email work at your company. Clearly this isn't what we were discussing so this point alone makes me think you're trolling. Seniors who can only read large print are not likely to be using Word off their own bat either. If they're using software it's something someone else has set up for them that takes their special needs into consideration.
That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems. Japanese internal documents in particular are just glyphs on a page. Documents that go to customers, perhaps. Which is about 1% of the documents produced.
It's lovely that you have experience with 1 company (probably in one department) and can extrapolate that to everywhere else. I've probably had experience at more companies than you, even if I haven't been working as long as you. I'm in my 30s by the way.
... and only because it doesn't cost as much? I hope not, but I could imagine that. It makes me sick how brainwashed some people are in this regard
Companies have invested a large amount of time and money to do that brainwashing. So much so that it's become part of our culture (as in everyone knows a wedding ring is a diamond ring...even though in reality the "tradition" is quite new). What's worse is that it understanding these things doesn't change the traditions, and will still want the traditional item.
It does the same thing as word. It just does it very differently.
You can choose to see it that way, but then if you're of that mindset you can also argue that a sports car and a semi-trailer are the same thing, they just do it very differently. I'd beg to differ.
Are you trolling, or was this an attempt at a serious comment?
The kinds of documents you're talking about - where formatting doesn't matter - memos and letters to mum - are called email. You may use rich text or HTML in your mail, but you wouldn't present one as a company report, design document, or any formal piece of business writing. Of course if you're not going to email it and if what you're describing is what you're using your word processor for, save yourself the cost of MS Word and the headache of Latex, and just use Wordpad. Heck notepad might be good enough for you.
Oh but come on the GP has a point, even if he was being flippant. You can't take a starving child and say "here's a laptop kid". It won't work. To give them an opportunity and break the cycle, at a minimum you have to provide basic food and sanitation as well as that laptop.
Rather complex set of side effects don't you think?
Kind of like writing a flight simulator and accidentally simulating a highway traffic control system as a side effect. It just doesn't mesh. We're too complex.
It's the "killer ap" that got me to convert to linux full time.
Lyx (and Latex) does something very different from Word. I've never understood why technically competent people cannot grasp why the differences in the way each operates does not make either one a good substitute for the other. Just like the recurring suggestion here that Linux is a suitable substitute for Windows. They may be of a similar nature but each desktop OS does things very differently to the other and each has limitations that the other one doesn't have. The basic failure to understand this may or may not be a basic social failure but it is a failure nontheless.
Sorry but in my view you're dead wrong. WYSIWYG done well is exactly what is needed. In the real world you'll get asked to make precise changes to the way your document looks, and document format is not just an afterthought or a separate step of the process. Having to make changes to a document seldom means making changes to one or the other. What's more changing/rearranging the content can have a major impact on the layout of your document, which needs to be dealt with. Being able to see those changes as you make them makes it easier to manage them than some obscure two-step process.
Unfortunately what we have as standard is MS-Word which is WYSIWYG done very wrong that looks "good enough" to most businesses.It doesn't lay things out reliably and its bugs and quirks get in the way. There is no more need for these quirks and bugs than there is for Windows Explorer to be unable to resume a file copy when there is an error mid way throught (or Mac to delete files that haven't successfully been moved). ie. it's just badly written software made with commercial interests in mind trumping quality considerations.
Dude you're going to get a takedown notice from the copyright holders of John Lennon's Imagine :-)
Then again, I could be completely off base.
Nope you're on track. The reason for this is what's interesting:
1) Word of mouth tells or first experience them that calling for support is a waste of time and their problem won't be fixed
2) In the case of Microsoft (and many other companies) they'd have to be prepared to pay big bucks for the privellege of the call. They either don't have the money or have better things to spend it on. Combing with #1 and I'd say they're making the right decision.
Thanks for making me laugh out loud. You put that very well.
What bothers me is that people who come up with this crap don't seem to realize that if this reality were some kind of simulation, we'd likely continually be hitting the limits of the simulation. Usually when a simulation is created it's for a purpose. Any effort required beyond the purpose (limits of the simulation) are wasted. So why would you add a fossil record, and a huge expansive universe to the same simulation? What would the purpose be exactly? A very similar question to why a God would create a misleading fossil record if the universe were 6000 years old.
VR simluation my arse. People come up with these pre-conceived notions and will do anything to justify them.
GGP said Galileo was famous for saying the earth is round
GP corrected Galileo was famous for saying the Earth went around the sun
Actually Galileo was famous for many other things and while he did get into hot water for supporting Copernicus' sun centered Universe, he wasn't the originator of the idea.
Copernicus wasn't first either but he was the first to be scientific about it. (You really shouldn't forget Kepler in all this either - he's the one that saw that Elliptical orbits were required to satisfy the observation. Both Galileo and Copernicus insisted on circular orbits, which also don't work neatly mathematically and require voodoo maths to make them fit observation. Kepler used the decades of (by the standards of the day) accurate observations of Tycho Brahe (Kepler was his assistant early in Kepler's career)
Saying that Galileo was famous for saying the Earth went round the sun is technically correct but implying he was the first is ignorant.
He's scum and all but by making this person a former employee he actually did you a favour.