The bottom line is that science is still getting the shaft and you're using this "lie" as an opportunity to say that's fine with you. What a short-sighted fool you are.
Similarly, you can hire all the PhDs you want, but if you can't produce products that are secure, stable, or even responsive, then it just doesn't matter.
Spoken like a true ignoramus.
Even though I'm not a Microsoft fan, even I can see the value in the fundamental research they're doing. Given that Apple Labs, HP Labs, DEC WRL, Xerox PARC, and Bell Labs have all gone tits up (or, at least, significantly downsized) in the last decade, MSR, TJ Watson (and maybe Almaden), and (perhaps) Google Labs are the only ones in this country doing basic CS research anymore. In case you haven't noticed, government funds in CS R&D are going bye-bye rapidly (with NSF funding for this area being cut almost in half since 2001) and any contribution for this discipline is welcome.
The Internet you're reading this over today was basic CS research 35 years ago (DARPA); the OS you use was basic research of the same era (Bell Labs); GUIs, Ethernet, and laser printers were basic research about 10 years later (DARPA and Xerox PARC). Databases? Basic research in the mid-seventies (TJ Watson and DARPA via UC Berkeley). RISC architectures (TJ Watson, DEC WRL, and DARPA via Berkeley and Stanford). Even the WWW was an accidental contribution from a basic research lab (CERN - in Switzerland, though).
In my opinion, you'd all better pray that the few research labs still in business come up with stuff to move us forward, because if they don't the next thirty years are going to be pretty rough in our industry because we've been eating our seed corn for the past twenty.
Families that have large amounts of cash (and that maintain or increase the bank accounts while still living extravagantly) are probably (not always, but probably) doing smart things with the money to stay in shape financially. You don't just spend tons of cash and expect to stay rich.
Give me a base of $250M in assets to start from and I'm pretty sure I could get a mean 4% (discounting inflation) return annually with less than a week's worth of "work" (mainly oversight) per year. That would be enough to make sure that myself and any of the heirs I would care about could live quite comfortably. This allows me to have two heirs and transmit the same level of wealth to them over a period of 40 or so years (assuming no taxation, reasonable expenditures, etc.). If you try to provide the same $250M to your heirs starting from a $1M base, you'll find you have to put in a lot more of your own individual effort to maintain and grow the wealth. Start at the $10K asset base, and you need add not only a great deal of your own effort, but fairly large amounts of luck.
The idea that wealthy families need to put in a disproportionate amount of labor to maintain their wealth is pretty inane - they pay people to do that for them and diversify to limit the risk in doing so. Today, the only drag on families with large amounts of wealth are inflation, taxes, overbreeding (and that not usually, unless you count the Walton hillbillies), and stupidity (usually due to losses when they actually try to run their own businesses).
If you shook your head cynically, you are right. In fact, folks were a bit horrified by my suggestion that employers have some influence in the curriculum.
Well, I don't think that that's the reason. The IEEE and ACM (and, I assume, other professional societies in other technical fields) have a great amount of influence on curriculum matters - and industry representation in those societies is not particularly thin. I think the main reason that they reacted this way is because they wanted a (semi-)inoffensive way to tell you that your idea was not well though out, stupid, or both.
Let's say your school did implement a final certification program. Here I am, a student, having paid you upwards of $25,000 (at least - that's pretty cheap these days) over the four years I attended classes at your university, getting A's all the way. You are going to deprive me of graduation because I may not be able to pass some aggregate test? What were the course grades all along supposed to be doing, if not testing my knowledge of particular subjects? If the real issue is grade inflation, fix that. If the issue is that the material being taught is inappropriate, fix that. Quite frankly, if your institution did this and I was a prospective student, I'd look at the risk-reward ratio and pick another school. And, as for your notion that I'd know exactly what I had to know when I came in, I already have that information - it's called a course catalog and most of them have graduation requirements listed prominently.
As a development manager, I'm not sure I'd give your certification program any particular positive consideration either, as I'm probably not familiar with it, I don't know how it changes year-to-year, it's not vetted by any independent professional society or similar certification body, and I sure as heck don't know why I should trust you to administer it accurately or well. Given that you're looking for some sort of deus ex machina solution for what appears to be fundamental flaws in your institution, I'd be very surprised if you could. Any test you would come up with, unless you want to make it something like a multi-section, multi-day PE exam, would either be too narrow or incomplete, anyhow. I just don't see any advantage of this over a new grad's transcript and a decent interview process.
All things considered as well, if your calling support, you are probably already frustrated enough, and now you can't understand what the other person is saying? I can see that being pretty aggravating. Worthy of hating an entire nation? Probably not.
I don't know, we have a pretty low bar for hating nations these days...
It has similarities to Common Lisp and Scheme, but it uses a traditional infix notation. Paradigm-wise, it starts out a lot like C + structs, and you can explore out from there.
Which means you learn nothing other than a new syntax to program your same old style in (i.e, nothing worthwhile). Not to mention that Dylan's macro system will leave you crying because computational macro systems in a syntax heavy environment just suck. If you're really short of time, you're better off using it to learn Erlang, Prolog, or Smalltalk. With the first two, you'll learn new ways to think about programming; with the second, you'll at least get better tools and have more fun. Either is more useful than Dylan.
In short, they were greedy and milked the "big bulky muscle SUV" style car too long. Now they have to redesign, retool, remarket, and win over their loyal customers with designs that are completely unlike what they had before.
And, you know, it's not like they couldn't foresee this. They hit the same wall during the first oil shock in the mid-seventies and the writing has been on the wall for at least the past five years. But, as usual here in the US, they looked at the profit margin on SUVs and other big iron, did no investment in their capacity for smaller vehicles and, in the pursuit of quarterly profit, have probably destroyed the US automobile industry once and for all. Look for GM and Ford to give up their US badges for foreign imprints, soon, just as Chrysler did in 1998 (Ford's been most of the way there since the early nineties, anyhow). The tinfoil hat part of me says it's all part of the conservative movement's plan to crush one of the last major unions in America, but I try never to attribute to malice that which can be so easily ascribed to stupidity.
... how the hell does Starr think he can attack this?
It has been said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I foresee an Attorney Generalship in Mr. Starr's future if he keeps this kind of thing up (and people are stupid enough to elect another Republican president)!
People have never been shy about creating mountains out of molehills and getting in front of the lynch mob to gain a bit of notoriety and political gain. One need look no further than Bill O'Reilly and Fox News' battles in the "War on Christmas" to see another fine example of this principle in action.
With luck, the school will provide a scholarship to fill the gap.
Ooooh! Now we're supposed to trust the education of disadvantaged children to luck! I thought that vouchers were supposed to be the panacea that upgraded the educational experience for all, but now the child has to be lucky, too. Well, little inner city kid, do you feel lucky? Well do you, punk?
SO you have to SHOW YOUR PAPERS just cause you want the stuff that will actually WORK!
Dude, you have it good. Here in Oregon, you can't get it without a prescription. Luckily, I still have some left over from the last time I had to fly with a cold... and there's always diphenhydramine for the evening.
When you consider the available alternatives, is their any room here for suggesting that in this ONE case, Microsoft did something right, when it comes to Exchange Server?
This statement shows that the person involved has never programmed against Exchange.
In everything from malformed SMTP interfaces to obtuse API's, this server made Lotus Domino look like a shining example of programming ease (and anyone who's programmed against Domino knows what a low bar that is). The administration might be OK (unless you were trying to cluster and auto-failover one of them), but from a programming point of view, Exchange sucks hard. Maybe things have changed in the past three years, but to me, using the phrase "did something right" and the word Exchange in the same sentence is oxymoronic to any programmer who has to interface to its APIs at a sufficiently low level.
Of all the things that the ACLU stands for, this is one I have NEVER seen them stand for.
The ACLU makes it clear that there are other rights organizations narrowly focused on Amendment 2. As such, they have no particular reason to re-cover that particular base. Realistically, they started out as an Amendment 1 focused organization branched out to Amendments 14 and 15 (when it was fairly clear that, in certain areas of the country, Amendment 1 rights were being denied on the basis of race) and have branched out to other (mainly due process) amendments because most of the abuses WRT the other Amendments tend to have a chilling effect on the First. I don't think they've ever said they were there to cover the entire Bill of Rights. Criticizing them for not doing so is as silly as criticizing the NRA for not defending Amendment 3.
I'm curious to know how developers in the Slashdot community handle situations in which they are given a project that rubs against their moral borders.
Well, you can stop working for SuSE for starters...
Obviously far, far less than 90% of the world's goods are transported globally in the first place.
Yeah, but they're working on that, too...
Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek problem
on
Why Vista Took So Long
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Choices are good.
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. You do not need 255 different ways to tell a laptop to "close up for later use". A true geek would want to be questioned for each process about whether it needed to be persisted or killed. This is a problematic mindset.
Trial lawyers giving money to politician lawyers, who make laws so trial lawyers can argue cases against rival trial lawyers in front of judge lawyers. So, what's the common denominator and who benefits? Follow the money.
And your solution is?
The problem is that you can't find one without putting undue burden on people who legitimately have a case and who need to go up against big pockets to get redress. Of course, as one who probably sees no personal need to do so in the future (as is the case for most of us), you can always work to change the system to screw the few who need to do so in order to prevent the even fewer cases like this one from taking place. Just be careful about what you wish for, because once you remove the right of redress from some, you're quite a ways down the path to removing it for all.
i.e. Provide a system to encourage the 12x surgeons/other-staff to succeed.
The problem is that there is probably no way to encourage them to be 12x more effective. People have limitations in talent and skills which is usually expressed in a Gaussian distribution when these attributes are measured. More training and "encouragement" will probably not transform the vast majority who are competent and who fall within two sigmas of the mean into the six-sigma wunderkinds who inhabit the high end of the curve. This is also true of programming and other human endeavors.
Solutions? Figure out a way to determine those who will be at the tail of the distribution and encourage those to actually take up that work; find more efficient processes and better support for the work; try to speed up evolution by eugenics. That's about it (and note that if you take these ideas to their illogical limit, you will be impinging on individuals' freedoms to a fairly large extent).
My solution is to not really care that much about the whole thing. Man may be an economic animal (who should value increased productivity) but, if that's all he is, he has no real benefit over a machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! That's even more than it takes to travel in time!
Yeah, but that's only if you burn them...
Except it won't let you allocate any packets to P2P because only dirty, evil pirates use P2P.
The bottom line is that science is still getting the shaft and you're using this "lie" as an opportunity to say that's fine with you. What a short-sighted fool you are.
How is this different from any other non-standard analysis approach?
Spoken like a true ignoramus.
Even though I'm not a Microsoft fan, even I can see the value in the fundamental research they're doing. Given that Apple Labs, HP Labs, DEC WRL, Xerox PARC, and Bell Labs have all gone tits up (or, at least, significantly downsized) in the last decade, MSR, TJ Watson (and maybe Almaden), and (perhaps) Google Labs are the only ones in this country doing basic CS research anymore. In case you haven't noticed, government funds in CS R&D are going bye-bye rapidly (with NSF funding for this area being cut almost in half since 2001) and any contribution for this discipline is welcome.
The Internet you're reading this over today was basic CS research 35 years ago (DARPA); the OS you use was basic research of the same era (Bell Labs); GUIs, Ethernet, and laser printers were basic research about 10 years later (DARPA and Xerox PARC). Databases? Basic research in the mid-seventies (TJ Watson and DARPA via UC Berkeley). RISC architectures (TJ Watson, DEC WRL, and DARPA via Berkeley and Stanford). Even the WWW was an accidental contribution from a basic research lab (CERN - in Switzerland, though).
In my opinion, you'd all better pray that the few research labs still in business come up with stuff to move us forward, because if they don't the next thirty years are going to be pretty rough in our industry because we've been eating our seed corn for the past twenty.
Give me a base of $250M in assets to start from and I'm pretty sure I could get a mean 4% (discounting inflation) return annually with less than a week's worth of "work" (mainly oversight) per year. That would be enough to make sure that myself and any of the heirs I would care about could live quite comfortably. This allows me to have two heirs and transmit the same level of wealth to them over a period of 40 or so years (assuming no taxation, reasonable expenditures, etc.). If you try to provide the same $250M to your heirs starting from a $1M base, you'll find you have to put in a lot more of your own individual effort to maintain and grow the wealth. Start at the $10K asset base, and you need add not only a great deal of your own effort, but fairly large amounts of luck.
The idea that wealthy families need to put in a disproportionate amount of labor to maintain their wealth is pretty inane - they pay people to do that for them and diversify to limit the risk in doing so. Today, the only drag on families with large amounts of wealth are inflation, taxes, overbreeding (and that not usually, unless you count the Walton hillbillies), and stupidity (usually due to losses when they actually try to run their own businesses).
Well, I don't think that that's the reason. The IEEE and ACM (and, I assume, other professional societies in other technical fields) have a great amount of influence on curriculum matters - and industry representation in those societies is not particularly thin. I think the main reason that they reacted this way is because they wanted a (semi-)inoffensive way to tell you that your idea was not well though out, stupid, or both.
Let's say your school did implement a final certification program. Here I am, a student, having paid you upwards of $25,000 (at least - that's pretty cheap these days) over the four years I attended classes at your university, getting A's all the way. You are going to deprive me of graduation because I may not be able to pass some aggregate test? What were the course grades all along supposed to be doing, if not testing my knowledge of particular subjects? If the real issue is grade inflation, fix that. If the issue is that the material being taught is inappropriate, fix that. Quite frankly, if your institution did this and I was a prospective student, I'd look at the risk-reward ratio and pick another school. And, as for your notion that I'd know exactly what I had to know when I came in, I already have that information - it's called a course catalog and most of them have graduation requirements listed prominently.
As a development manager, I'm not sure I'd give your certification program any particular positive consideration either, as I'm probably not familiar with it, I don't know how it changes year-to-year, it's not vetted by any independent professional society or similar certification body, and I sure as heck don't know why I should trust you to administer it accurately or well. Given that you're looking for some sort of deus ex machina solution for what appears to be fundamental flaws in your institution, I'd be very surprised if you could. Any test you would come up with, unless you want to make it something like a multi-section, multi-day PE exam, would either be too narrow or incomplete, anyhow. I just don't see any advantage of this over a new grad's transcript and a decent interview process.
I don't know, we have a pretty low bar for hating nations these days...
Which means you learn nothing other than a new syntax to program your same old style in (i.e, nothing worthwhile). Not to mention that Dylan's macro system will leave you crying because computational macro systems in a syntax heavy environment just suck. If you're really short of time, you're better off using it to learn Erlang, Prolog, or Smalltalk. With the first two, you'll learn new ways to think about programming; with the second, you'll at least get better tools and have more fun. Either is more useful than Dylan.
Because "Worse is Better".
And, you know, it's not like they couldn't foresee this. They hit the same wall during the first oil shock in the mid-seventies and the writing has been on the wall for at least the past five years. But, as usual here in the US, they looked at the profit margin on SUVs and other big iron, did no investment in their capacity for smaller vehicles and, in the pursuit of quarterly profit, have probably destroyed the US automobile industry once and for all. Look for GM and Ford to give up their US badges for foreign imprints, soon, just as Chrysler did in 1998 (Ford's been most of the way there since the early nineties, anyhow). The tinfoil hat part of me says it's all part of the conservative movement's plan to crush one of the last major unions in America, but I try never to attribute to malice that which can be so easily ascribed to stupidity.
If you stick your head out of the window and it's hit by a flying chair, it's Microsofting out...
It has been said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I foresee an Attorney Generalship in Mr. Starr's future if he keeps this kind of thing up (and people are stupid enough to elect another Republican president)!
People have never been shy about creating mountains out of molehills and getting in front of the lynch mob to gain a bit of notoriety and political gain. One need look no further than Bill O'Reilly and Fox News' battles in the "War on Christmas" to see another fine example of this principle in action.
Ooooh! Now we're supposed to trust the education of disadvantaged children to luck! I thought that vouchers were supposed to be the panacea that upgraded the educational experience for all, but now the child has to be lucky, too. Well, little inner city kid, do you feel lucky? Well do you, punk?
It's what my daughter used to call an animal when she was three.
Or how you pronounce it if you want to make yourself sound special...
Dude, you have it good. Here in Oregon, you can't get it without a prescription. Luckily, I still have some left over from the last time I had to fly with a cold... and there's always diphenhydramine for the evening.
This statement shows that the person involved has never programmed against Exchange.
In everything from malformed SMTP interfaces to obtuse API's, this server made Lotus Domino look like a shining example of programming ease (and anyone who's programmed against Domino knows what a low bar that is). The administration might be OK (unless you were trying to cluster and auto-failover one of them), but from a programming point of view, Exchange sucks hard. Maybe things have changed in the past three years, but to me, using the phrase "did something right" and the word Exchange in the same sentence is oxymoronic to any programmer who has to interface to its APIs at a sufficiently low level.
The ACLU makes it clear that there are other rights organizations narrowly focused on Amendment 2. As such, they have no particular reason to re-cover that particular base. Realistically, they started out as an Amendment 1 focused organization branched out to Amendments 14 and 15 (when it was fairly clear that, in certain areas of the country, Amendment 1 rights were being denied on the basis of race) and have branched out to other (mainly due process) amendments because most of the abuses WRT the other Amendments tend to have a chilling effect on the First. I don't think they've ever said they were there to cover the entire Bill of Rights. Criticizing them for not doing so is as silly as criticizing the NRA for not defending Amendment 3.
Well, you can stop working for SuSE for starters...
And people like me who have SD TV's avoid watching them because of the poor programming quality. Tell me again why I need HD?
Yeah, but they're working on that, too...
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. You do not need 255 different ways to tell a laptop to "close up for later use". A true geek would want to be questioned for each process about whether it needed to be persisted or killed. This is a problematic mindset.
And your solution is?
The problem is that you can't find one without putting undue burden on people who legitimately have a case and who need to go up against big pockets to get redress. Of course, as one who probably sees no personal need to do so in the future (as is the case for most of us), you can always work to change the system to screw the few who need to do so in order to prevent the even fewer cases like this one from taking place. Just be careful about what you wish for, because once you remove the right of redress from some, you're quite a ways down the path to removing it for all.
The problem is that there is probably no way to encourage them to be 12x more effective. People have limitations in talent and skills which is usually expressed in a Gaussian distribution when these attributes are measured. More training and "encouragement" will probably not transform the vast majority who are competent and who fall within two sigmas of the mean into the six-sigma wunderkinds who inhabit the high end of the curve. This is also true of programming and other human endeavors.
Solutions? Figure out a way to determine those who will be at the tail of the distribution and encourage those to actually take up that work; find more efficient processes and better support for the work; try to speed up evolution by eugenics. That's about it (and note that if you take these ideas to their illogical limit, you will be impinging on individuals' freedoms to a fairly large extent).
My solution is to not really care that much about the whole thing. Man may be an economic animal (who should value increased productivity) but, if that's all he is, he has no real benefit over a machine.