I'm curious, as an economist, about the magic formula that you're using that determines value absent from a market...
Ah wait. I've just figured it out; it's your personal utility function. Well, that's fine, but it only applies to you, you of course realize? And that the market value is the aggregation of everybody else's equally valid personal utility functions?
I looked at the XP stuff, semi-digested it and rejected it as marketing hype. But one portion of the process I've really embraced is the automated testing. Called Test-Driven Development, the idea is that rather than writing a test to test the code you've just written (like you have to do regardless) and then throwing it away, you keep it, and also place it in an organized framework where it can be run again and again.
The upshot of it is that you're much les vulnerable to regression, or more precisely, that you can more readily see the effects. TDD is actually much more complicated than I've outlined here, but just search on JUnit (for Java developers) or NUnit (for Microsoft developers). Most of the big leaps forward are just formalizations of things good programmers already do, and I think that this qualifies.
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires / Nuclear Winter thing was Carl Sagan. Pretty much the entire nuclear winter thing has been discredited as pop / junk science at this point.
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
The enlightened country is the one that realizes that maybe different people at different times in their lives have different priorities.
A couple of years back, when I was trying to switch from being a tech support monkey to being a programmer, I worked a LOT more than 50 hours a week. I was also going to school and was newly married. No way to live, right? That short-term sacrifice has allowed me to have a much more affluent and healthy lifestyle.
I suppose I'd still be working tech support in Germany because of their beneficence.
The analog representation may be superior even in terms of software interface. My company's application needs times selected. Currently we use a digital representation, i.e., 12:35. Obviously, to change the time, you'll need either +/- elements or, even worse, listboxes.
My thinking with watch hand is that you click once, hours, twice, minutes, done. You lose a little precision, you might get 12:34 rather than 12:35 unless you really pay attention, but that's probably not that important.
Thread is long dead, but interesting and insightful post.
Re:Manufacturers are doing what they're supposed t
on
KISS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I bought an HDTV-enabled TV (that is, one with a monitor capable of displaying HDTV resolution but without an HDTV receiver) a few months back. In looking around, I found it easy to determine whether the receiver was integrated or not just by looking at the feature card.
So you think that that's not enough? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't see any simpler way that the TV's could be advertised. Maybe you could draw a line in the sand between "HDTV Television Set" and "HDTV-ready Television Set", but you know what? At least among my A/V enthusiast buddies, an HDTV monitor (see above defintition) is an HDTV. If you couldn't be bothered to have a salesman explain it to you in 15 seconds at Best Buy, there you are.
BTW, I'm sure in a Communist society, the companies would be sure to fully inform the customer about HDT- oh, that's right; in a Communist society you wouldn't have HDTV. I forgot. Maybe you're ascribing the evils of humanity to capitalism.
I don't think it's so much a matter of "it's so hard" as it is that everything they've done so far is research, and now they have to shift gears to producing them economically. Every new piece of technology goes through that curve, you just don't usually hear about it (except on Slashdot).
You're right about the amortization of labor. They'll have to produce a lot more for it to be truly economical.
I sure wish I had a job where I could produce nothing for six years and still have a job. Can anyone here explain to me why a project manager who is so obviously grotesquely incompetent hasn't been fired?
Imagine you're an investor for 3DRealms. You're sitting the fricking Duke Nukem license as it slowly slips out of the collective gamer memory. Who are these people who are handing those jackasses their pink slips?
Speaking as a programmer who actually has to ship code (imagine!), I would have long ago sold the license to someone who knows how to run a team.
There may be some of that, I suppose, but speaking as someone who is strongly advocating a rewrite for a new version, it's also a matter of just seeing vastly better ways of doing things now that you've had the benefit of the experience of v1.0.
Furthermore, all of the features that creep into v1.1,.2,.3, etc. that were not envisioned at all in v1.0 become code barnacles, stuck on to the coherent codebase and clinging for dear life. Better to create a new codebase that incorporates them as part of it.
It's expensive for the rich, who's time value is higher (higher wage, natch). Thus, it's only affordable for those whose time value is low (low wages). Odd thing that.
You see, it's the law of political correctness: if the character is a man, make him a woman. If the character is a woman, make him a black man. If the character is a black man, make him Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hmm...lost the analogy there somewhere...actually, there is a Susan Calvin character in the movie, played by Bridget Moynihan of Sum of All Fears fame.
The second, following We, the Living. It will be followed by Stephen King's We, the Dead. Then the series continues with Jerry Garcia's unpublished autobiography, For Us, the Dead. Finally it will be concluded with a Michael Crichton book, We, the terminally ill, but feeling better today. Perhaps there's still hope for a transplant.
One of the movies that best illustrated this shift was Flight of the Phoenix. To summarize quickly, an plane crahses in the desert and a team of tough oil workers, military men and the flight crew chafe under the direction of a nerdy engineer who leads them to rebuild the plane to fly to safety.
One of my favorite movies, and it's being remade with hottie Mirando Otto. Did I just say hottie? Please shoot me.
I've seen a lot of what made DS9 the best Trek ever in Galactica: shades of grey. While Picard was lily-white, Sisko engaged in back-stabbing, brutality and (otherwise unknown in Star Trek) self-doubt. Anyhow, this argument has been well-hashed out here and elsewhere about Trek.
What puzzles me watching the new Galactica is how I ever accepted the delivery of the premise of the old series. I mean, the premise lays out 99.99% of the human race has just been brutally slaughtered, and things don't look good for the remaining.01%, and yet we're still treated to light-hearted B.S. with Boxey and that loveable rogue (ugh) Starbuck. The new Galactica shows people how they would really be: frightened, depressed, and desperate.
Furthermore, as much as I loved John Colicos, the new characterization of Baltar is far more complex. Baltar seems to be a right-bastard, but one who realizes that he is and wishes (vainly) that he was not. Resigned to his nature, he's looking to cut the best deal he can.
They'll undoubtedly lose Mary McDonald before the end of the mini. This show kicks the crap out of anything else sci-fi has; I dearly hope that they chill on the pointless sex scenes, relax on the zoom-focus fx shots, and make this a damn series.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious, as an economist, about the magic formula that you're using that determines value absent from a market...
Ah wait. I've just figured it out; it's your personal utility function. Well, that's fine, but it only applies to you, you of course realize? And that the market value is the aggregation of everybody else's equally valid personal utility functions?
What was your point again?
I looked at the XP stuff, semi-digested it and rejected it as marketing hype. But one portion of the process I've really embraced is the automated testing. Called Test-Driven Development, the idea is that rather than writing a test to test the code you've just written (like you have to do regardless) and then throwing it away, you keep it, and also place it in an organized framework where it can be run again and again.
The upshot of it is that you're much les vulnerable to regression, or more precisely, that you can more readily see the effects. TDD is actually much more complicated than I've outlined here, but just search on JUnit (for Java developers) or NUnit (for Microsoft developers). Most of the big leaps forward are just formalizations of things good programmers already do, and I think that this qualifies.
I must say...that ranks up there with the NY Times article about the Olympic timekeepers:
"These are the souls that time men's tries"
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires / Nuclear Winter thing was Carl Sagan. Pretty much the entire nuclear winter thing has been discredited as pop / junk science at this point.
Sagan was a MASTER science popularizer and spokesman, in the end, he wasn't a very good scientist.
So in Canada, the pentagon only has four sides? You guys always get screwed on the exchange rate.
God's response:
You think you could do better in seven days? Fast, good, cheap; pick two.
The enlightened country is the one that realizes that maybe different people at different times in their lives have different priorities.
A couple of years back, when I was trying to switch from being a tech support monkey to being a programmer, I worked a LOT more than 50 hours a week. I was also going to school and was newly married. No way to live, right? That short-term sacrifice has allowed me to have a much more affluent and healthy lifestyle.
I suppose I'd still be working tech support in Germany because of their beneficence.
The analog representation may be superior even in terms of software interface. My company's application needs times selected. Currently we use a digital representation, i.e., 12:35. Obviously, to change the time, you'll need either +/- elements or, even worse, listboxes.
My thinking with watch hand is that you click once, hours, twice, minutes, done. You lose a little precision, you might get 12:34 rather than 12:35 unless you really pay attention, but that's probably not that important.
Thread is long dead, but interesting and insightful post.
I bought an HDTV-enabled TV (that is, one with a monitor capable of displaying HDTV resolution but without an HDTV receiver) a few months back. In looking around, I found it easy to determine whether the receiver was integrated or not just by looking at the feature card.
So you think that that's not enough? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't see any simpler way that the TV's could be advertised. Maybe you could draw a line in the sand between "HDTV Television Set" and "HDTV-ready Television Set", but you know what? At least among my A/V enthusiast buddies, an HDTV monitor (see above defintition) is an HDTV. If you couldn't be bothered to have a salesman explain it to you in 15 seconds at Best Buy, there you are.
BTW, I'm sure in a Communist society, the companies would be sure to fully inform the customer about HDT- oh, that's right; in a Communist society you wouldn't have HDTV. I forgot. Maybe you're ascribing the evils of humanity to capitalism.
Also found: the brave Frenchman, the Irish master chef, the lazy Japanese man, the Slashdotting mack daddy...
Comedy gold.
I don't think it's so much a matter of "it's so hard" as it is that everything they've done so far is research, and now they have to shift gears to producing them economically. Every new piece of technology goes through that curve, you just don't usually hear about it (except on Slashdot).
You're right about the amortization of labor. They'll have to produce a lot more for it to be truly economical.
That's a technical problem that can be solved, though. Something to think about.
Their stock price doesn't support a 1000-1 markup. Maybe there are some cost components you're overlooking?
Wow. Here's a space.com article from three and a half years ago on the same subject.
I sure wish I had a job where I could produce nothing for six years and still have a job. Can anyone here explain to me why a project manager who is so obviously grotesquely incompetent hasn't been fired?
Imagine you're an investor for 3DRealms. You're sitting the fricking Duke Nukem license as it slowly slips out of the collective gamer memory. Who are these people who are handing those jackasses their pink slips?
Speaking as a programmer who actually has to ship code (imagine!), I would have long ago sold the license to someone who knows how to run a team.
There may be some of that, I suppose, but speaking as someone who is strongly advocating a rewrite for a new version, it's also a matter of just seeing vastly better ways of doing things now that you've had the benefit of the experience of v1.0.
.2, .3, etc. that were not envisioned at all in v1.0 become code barnacles, stuck on to the coherent codebase and clinging for dear life. Better to create a new codebase that incorporates them as part of it.
Furthermore, all of the features that creep into v1.1,
You mean the fellow who turned down person the year from Time so that it could go to the "American Soldier"?
Looks to me like you're not fit to carry his jockstrap, boyo.
It's expensive for the rich, who's time value is higher (higher wage, natch). Thus, it's only affordable for those whose time value is low (low wages). Odd thing that.
You see, it's the law of political correctness: if the character is a man, make him a woman. If the character is a woman, make him a black man. If the character is a black man, make him Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hmm...lost the analogy there somewhere...actually, there is a Susan Calvin character in the movie, played by Bridget Moynihan of Sum of All Fears fame.
The second, following We, the Living. It will be followed by Stephen King's We, the Dead. Then the series continues with Jerry Garcia's unpublished autobiography, For Us, the Dead. Finally it will be concluded with a Michael Crichton book, We, the terminally ill, but feeling better today. Perhaps there's still hope for a transplant.
One of the movies that best illustrated this shift was Flight of the Phoenix. To summarize quickly, an plane crahses in the desert and a team of tough oil workers, military men and the flight crew chafe under the direction of a nerdy engineer who leads them to rebuild the plane to fly to safety.
One of my favorite movies, and it's being remade with hottie Mirando Otto. Did I just say hottie? Please shoot me.
his most evil act, of turning the PR guy into a scapegoat
Unless you think that all of the technobabble he was spouting to the Colonel was actually true. Keeps you guessing.
No, that's the whole point. He knew that the meteorite was too far away to have heard the sound at the same time (speed of sound and all).
I've seen a lot of what made DS9 the best Trek ever in Galactica: shades of grey. While Picard was lily-white, Sisko engaged in back-stabbing, brutality and (otherwise unknown in Star Trek) self-doubt. Anyhow, this argument has been well-hashed out here and elsewhere about Trek.
.01%, and yet we're still treated to light-hearted B.S. with Boxey and that loveable rogue (ugh) Starbuck. The new Galactica shows people how they would really be: frightened, depressed, and desperate.
What puzzles me watching the new Galactica is how I ever accepted the delivery of the premise of the old series. I mean, the premise lays out 99.99% of the human race has just been brutally slaughtered, and things don't look good for the remaining
Furthermore, as much as I loved John Colicos, the new characterization of Baltar is far more complex. Baltar seems to be a right-bastard, but one who realizes that he is and wishes (vainly) that he was not. Resigned to his nature, he's looking to cut the best deal he can.
They'll undoubtedly lose Mary McDonald before the end of the mini. This show kicks the crap out of anything else sci-fi has; I dearly hope that they chill on the pointless sex scenes, relax on the zoom-focus fx shots, and make this a damn series.