We struggle trying to get someone new motivated to learn the technology.
I wonder how the banks end up getting people working in banking. After all, it's dull (yeah, the maths in the software is generally not that interesting), high stress and ultimately pointless. I guess they find *some* way of motivating those people.
Agreed. Adding my own anecdote.
(modesty filter off for a moment)
I'm a talented programmer. Yes, I'm in my 40's, but I'm also well-versed in tech both new and old. I keep up with the kiddies and their frameworks-of-the-month for web, mobile, and other development platforms. I grok my systems from the applications down to the network protocols on the wire and the byte arrangement on the disks. I can train, have written books, deal with management well, and mange people adequately. I can work where I want to, command good salaries, and have turned down good offers recently.
(modesty filter back on)
I'm currently working in the Payroll industry in the midwest. Not quite banking, but well, it's close. The core application here is from the 1980's. Legacy shit abounds in this place. Our vendors are using tech even older, judging by how file exchange and their API's look. Government and regulatory agencies are terrible partners. Progress is slow, cumbersome, and painful.
Why the hell would I work here? Employers take note:
* They pay me very well.
* I have a short commute. I don't waste a lot of time in my car or on a train.
* They don't work me very hard. Honestly I can come and go as I need. My time off is mine.
* Regulatory deadlines are distant, well-known, rock solid, and usually easily achieved. Congress notwithstanding.
* There's money here. If I need equipment, it shows up. If I need software, it gets bought.
* My software is quietly useful. Millions of people look at their paychecks (or bank statements) and most of the time it's just right.
* I am not technologically micromanaged. I can use the tools I want, the way I want.
* My employers are good at weeding out poisonous co-workers. I don't work with assholes, ever.
* The challenges are of my own devising. I have enough time to experiment, throw away, re-work, and try new things.
All of that is how dull industries like banking (and payroll) wind up with talented people.
It's not the boxes themselves that are the failures, it's the content that's all shit. Netflix has old shit, HBO doesn't play nicely with anyone, movie and cable distributors are still living in the 1970's, sports leagues are still living in the 1980's. Even when you manage to get two or more players together, the metadata blows chunks.
I've seen largemouth bass take dragonflies at full speed over the water, and those little things are fast. That a larger fish could take a bird in flight comes as no surprise.
For the fish a bird is a large, tasty, pretty much defenseless (once it hits the water) meal.
Nico Smit, director of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University in Potchefstroom, needs to get out more.
If you shot down a PETA drone on public land while, say, quail hunting the local sheriff or game officer who'd investigate wouldn't give you any trouble and would be quite sympathetic I'm sure. You're shooting flying things, something flew by, oh well. Many birding seasons overlap.
Deer hunting would be a tougher sell to the sheriff.
I don't hunt, but I do fish (for food, not sport). If I were harassed somehow by a PETA drone it would have to be awfully close by to really be bothersome; close enough that a heavy test line and a weight with large treble hooks attached could bring it down. Like anything caught accidentally out of season, I'd evaluate its condition and throw it back in the water immediately. Possibly with some assistance to help it swim.
It's easier to spook game for hunters than fishermen. You'd have to fly damned close to the water for noise, and drones don't fly like fish-eating birds do.
Over the summer I learned that the medical research division at ARPA has one bio-ethicist on staff. He's completely overwhelmed, walks around in a horrified daze, and rubber stamps everything that lands on his desk (when they bother). This is third-hand, of course. I can't believe that a Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer for the NSA would be any more useful than just a PR stunt.
And, sadly, once he saw it, and reasonably knew what the second one was likely to be used for.. he was screwed. Because either he said nothing and became complicit, or he turned in some shady people who might not be understanding of that.
A couple of months ago, Bruce Shneier linked to an interview with a professional safe cracker. Relevant piece:
Q: Do you ever look inside? A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.
When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
I think if Anaya was following the same rule, he'd be a free man today. Once the mechanisms failed to trip, he should have handed the gentlemen tools (drill, saws, etc..) told them where to drill and walked away.
Can anyone show me an alternative that isn't getting totally hammered right now? That kind of thing just doesn't inspire confidence...
If these services are totally hammered now when people are just browsing for an alternative, think of how piss-poor it will be when the service has actual users, and data and... .
*shudder*
Someone will eventually emerge with a usable, scalable service to take in the Reader Refugees. Until amateur hour is over, I'll just sit on the sidelines and wait for that service to emerge.
If this hacker group is "sophisticated" enough to DDOS banks... wouldn't they realize that "eliminating" ANYTHING from the Internet is impossible?
The stated goal is for shit. This has nothing to do with some video insulting the prophet Mohamed. That was simply the next excuse that came up when the Mohammedans shook the Magic 8-Ball of Islamic Gripes. The next will be Israel's existence, infidels in Afghanistan, pornographic magazines like "Time" and "National Geographic" with immodest women, or some other perceived insult that demands some kind of retribution.
Let's use your physical mail analogy, under your idea charitable organizations would not be allowed to mail people who have signed up as supporters unless they went through a commercial mass mailing company paying a huge fee per piece mailed. While that's kind of the status quo for poorly run charities with a high overhead cost none of the charities I choose to support are so stupid, why you would want to reduce the amount of money reaching deserving causes and feed the commercial mass mailers I have no clue.
Once the charities reach the size that the volume of mail they send raises the hackles of the post office, then they've already become part of the "conspiracy". The Iron Law is already in effect, regardless of their donation/overhead ratio. They just need to own up to it and formally join the cabal.
To the original article: a mailing list of 400,000 addresses isn't a community, it's a nation bigger than Iceland or Belize.
I was more addressing the fact that the liability issues of building and "selling" a thinking machine have been considered before.
However, an Asimov robot can be manipulated into violating the Laws. For example the First Law could be voilated if a robot was convinced that a human really wasn't human (this worked on Solaria in "Robots and Empire" [?]) or by performing a seemingly innocuous action that led to to a human's injury ("The Naked Sun"). Also, Asimov robots were built with altered Laws to allow humans to perform potentially hazardous work ("Lost Little Robot") and child care (drawing a blank here, so that children could actively play and risk minor injury).
To put it bluntly, raise your hand if YOU want to be the first car manufacturer to make a car for which you are potentially liable in *every single accident that car ever gets into*, from the day it's sold until the day it's scrapped. Any takers?
... no one. But you'll get plenty who charge mandatory tune-ups to ensure compliance. The question will be "which company DOESN'T charge a fee for a mandatory yearly check-up"?
Asimov's early robot stories dealt frequently with corporate liability and it was often the source of the plot conflicts. If a proofreading robot made a mistake causing a slander ("Galley Slave") or an industrial accident resulted in injury, US Robotics was put into the position of having to prove that it was not the fault of the robot (which it never was).
This is why Asimov's US Robotics didn't sell you a robot, they leased it to you. The lease was iron-clad, could be revoked by either party at any time, had liability clauses, and had mandatory maintenance and upgrades to be performed by US Robotics technicians. If you refused the maintenance US Robotics would repossess, sue and claim theft if you withheld ("Bicentennial Man", though unsuccessfully; "Satisfaction Guaranteed").
A properly functioning robot would not disobey the three laws, and an improperly functioning robot was repaired or destroyed immediately ("Lost Little Robot"). Conflicts between types of harm were resolved using probability based on the best information available at the moment ("Runaround"), and usually resulted in the collapse of the positronic brain when it was safe to do so ("Robots and Empire", etc.).
Like IE or hate it, it still has the best Javascript profiler available today -- and it's built in. It beats the ever loving crap out of Firebug's pathetic profiler, and presents timing data in a proper tree with better function name resolution than Chrome's.
It's other development tools are marginal though. Debug your app in Firebug, and fire up IE to check it for compatibility and find the slow bits.
Likely they were observers. My wife has worked the elections for the Clerk's office and as a poll observer (not at the same election). Really, there's not much they can do but sit and watch and stay out of the way.
Long, complicated ballot in Michigan this year with lots of asinine state constitutional amendments. This made for about a 45 minute wait in line to even get a ballot. I figured out my choices the weekend before and put the options on my phone to read in the booth; even then, filling the real ballot out correctly still took about 5 minutes.
Right. That damn Screen Actors Guild forcing the top stars to work for a pittance. That bloody NFL Players Union forcing teams to hire second-rate scrubs.
Your notion of how unions work is ignorant and malformed. There's a huge difference between unions for grunt labor and unions for skilled professionals.
I considered your argument for a moment, really, and then quickly dismissed it as you picked a poor example. These are skilled entertainers, and I think that muddies the waters completely. The highest paid NFL players make over $11M/year and the lowest paid are making under $.4M. That's a disparity of 27:1. (I daresay that the SAG ratios will be far, far worse.) But consider if the NFL didn't put names or numbers on the jersey's and player stats were virtually un-collectible by fans.
Would that 27:1 ratio still hold for long? Oh I doubt it. The owners certainly would have to play some players more than others, but since everyone is anonymous the threat to sign with another team is greatly diminished. Peyton Manning would have to stand in line at tryouts just like everyone else. The competition at the high end would die quickly. If your resume didn't say "Super Bowl Champ _(last year)_" you'd be worth jack squat.
Programmers work in the dark, mostly. We're on teams, sure, but rarely do our names and faces get put on the product. We're not marketable and hold no value to our employers in that way. Instead of SAG or NFLPA, we'd wind up more like the UAW or the Teamsters possibly with some merit on our pay scale but not much.
I've been in a theater that caught fire... We all got up calmly and walked outside.
[Sigh] It's a meme from the days when building regulations and safety procedures where less rigorous than today. Imagine an 18th century theatre; lots of wood and other flammable materials. Crammed full of people; the rich sitting in balconies. The poor standing, tightly packed, below the stage. No emergency exits. A fire could kill almost everyone in there. Raising a false alarm would be likely to cause a couple of tramplings at least.
...Or what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was more familiar with when he cited that meme:
The crowded 19th century theater where all of the above was true, plus the theater was lit with gas lamps, the stage with arc lights, people smoking in the seats -- open flame and combustion sources everywhere. The theaters were getting larger and larger because of better knowledge of acoustics allowed it.
Mod the parent up, this is the first non-techie analogy that makes sense to anyone with any accounting or business background.
The "ledger" idea is the elevator speech you can give to the pencil-pushers. It's one thing to know what the bottom line on a balance sheet is, it's another thing to know how the numbers got there. Multiple sources of changes (Payables, Receivables, Sales, Petty Cash, etc...), in multiple directions (debits/credits), in multiple categories (Assets, Liabilities, Equity) . You'd be foolish to run a business without a general ledger. Source control is the ledger for the software.
Raising that bar from "making an edit and citing a source" to "engaging in a long-running flamewar with bots, edit nazis, and people who have no life outside of wikipedia" just to add to an article is not a good thing.
That was a typo -- I meant "perhaps traditionally the "E"s were just absent from programming"
I thought that might have happened. Thanks for clearing it up.:)
I don't think anybody says introversion is a disease. Neither is being an extrovert. Myers-Briggs is all about recognising these tendencies (they are not absolutes) and using that knowledge to get the best out of people.
Not only do Es need to understand you -- you need to understand Es. It's a two way street. Give and take.
I think that a lot of people treat introversion as a disease. It hides under labels like "socialization disorder" or "social anxiety disorders". Consider that being a perfectly normal introvert will get you several points towards an autism diagnosis.
It's not quite a two way street. Extroverts have no problems standing up for themselves, declaring what they want, and explaining to management how the world should work: in an extroverted way, of course, with large meetings, pair programming, open cubicles, in-person code reviews, and traditional group training. Introverts will have to wait until after calming down after the meeting to consider the proposals, and write a considered memo stating that maybe these things really aren't for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
We struggle trying to get someone new motivated to learn the technology.
I wonder how the banks end up getting people working in banking. After all, it's dull (yeah, the maths in the software is generally not that interesting), high stress and ultimately pointless. I guess they find *some* way of motivating those people.
Agreed. Adding my own anecdote.
(modesty filter off for a moment)
I'm a talented programmer. Yes, I'm in my 40's, but I'm also well-versed in tech both new and old. I keep up with the kiddies and their frameworks-of-the-month for web, mobile, and other development platforms. I grok my systems from the applications down to the network protocols on the wire and the byte arrangement on the disks. I can train, have written books, deal with management well, and mange people adequately. I can work where I want to, command good salaries, and have turned down good offers recently.
(modesty filter back on)
I'm currently working in the Payroll industry in the midwest. Not quite banking, but well, it's close. The core application here is from the 1980's. Legacy shit abounds in this place. Our vendors are using tech even older, judging by how file exchange and their API's look. Government and regulatory agencies are terrible partners. Progress is slow, cumbersome, and painful.
Why the hell would I work here? Employers take note:
* They pay me very well.
* I have a short commute. I don't waste a lot of time in my car or on a train.
* They don't work me very hard. Honestly I can come and go as I need. My time off is mine.
* Regulatory deadlines are distant, well-known, rock solid, and usually easily achieved. Congress notwithstanding.
* There's money here. If I need equipment, it shows up. If I need software, it gets bought.
* My software is quietly useful. Millions of people look at their paychecks (or bank statements) and most of the time it's just right.
* I am not technologically micromanaged. I can use the tools I want, the way I want.
* My employers are good at weeding out poisonous co-workers. I don't work with assholes, ever.
* The challenges are of my own devising. I have enough time to experiment, throw away, re-work, and try new things.
All of that is how dull industries like banking (and payroll) wind up with talented people.
It's not the boxes themselves that are the failures, it's the content that's all shit. Netflix has old shit, HBO doesn't play nicely with anyone, movie and cable distributors are still living in the 1970's, sports leagues are still living in the 1980's. Even when you manage to get two or more players together, the metadata blows chunks.
No thanks. I'll wait for the Pirate Bay STB.
I've seen largemouth bass take dragonflies at full speed over the water, and those little things are fast. That a larger fish could take a bird in flight comes as no surprise.
For the fish a bird is a large, tasty, pretty much defenseless (once it hits the water) meal.
Nico Smit, director of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University in Potchefstroom, needs to get out more.
If you shot down a PETA drone on public land while, say, quail hunting the local sheriff or game officer who'd investigate wouldn't give you any trouble and would be quite sympathetic I'm sure. You're shooting flying things, something flew by, oh well. Many birding seasons overlap.
Deer hunting would be a tougher sell to the sheriff.
I don't hunt, but I do fish (for food, not sport). If I were harassed somehow by a PETA drone it would have to be awfully close by to really be bothersome; close enough that a heavy test line and a weight with large treble hooks attached could bring it down. Like anything caught accidentally out of season, I'd evaluate its condition and throw it back in the water immediately. Possibly with some assistance to help it swim.
It's easier to spook game for hunters than fishermen. You'd have to fly damned close to the water for noise, and drones don't fly like fish-eating birds do.
Over the summer I learned that the medical research division at ARPA has one bio-ethicist on staff. He's completely overwhelmed, walks around in a horrified daze, and rubber stamps everything that lands on his desk (when they bother). This is third-hand, of course. I can't believe that a Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer for the NSA would be any more useful than just a PR stunt.
And, sadly, once he saw it, and reasonably knew what the second one was likely to be used for .. he was screwed. Because either he said nothing and became complicit, or he turned in some shady people who might not be understanding of that.
A couple of months ago, Bruce Shneier linked to an interview with a professional safe cracker. Relevant piece:
Q: Do you ever look inside?
A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.
When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
I think if Anaya was following the same rule, he'd be a free man today. Once the mechanisms failed to trip, he should have handed the gentlemen tools (drill, saws, etc..) told them where to drill and walked away.
Can anyone show me an alternative that isn't getting totally hammered right now? That kind of thing just doesn't inspire confidence...
If these services are totally hammered now when people are just browsing for an alternative, think of how piss-poor it will be when the service has actual users, and data and... .
*shudder*
Someone will eventually emerge with a usable, scalable service to take in the Reader Refugees. Until amateur hour is over, I'll just sit on the sidelines and wait for that service to emerge.
PS: Fuck you, Google.
Possibly as a segue into a history discussion?
This affects a large chunk of the planet's population and hasn't happened in 600 years.
This'll give the history nerds something to talk about. (There are other kinds of nerds than tech nerds.)
Agree about Cyanide & Happiness. Sick, perverted, and completely inappropriate. And always funny despite just being stick figures.
(The thinking man's version of xkcd.)
HALGHALGHLAGHLAGH
If this hacker group is "sophisticated" enough to DDOS banks... wouldn't they realize that "eliminating" ANYTHING from the Internet is impossible?
The stated goal is for shit. This has nothing to do with some video insulting the prophet Mohamed. That was simply the next excuse that came up when the Mohammedans shook the Magic 8-Ball of Islamic Gripes. The next will be Israel's existence, infidels in Afghanistan, pornographic magazines like "Time" and "National Geographic" with immodest women, or some other perceived insult that demands some kind of retribution.
Let's use your physical mail analogy, under your idea charitable organizations would not be allowed to mail people who have signed up as supporters unless they went through a commercial mass mailing company paying a huge fee per piece mailed. While that's kind of the status quo for poorly run charities with a high overhead cost none of the charities I choose to support are so stupid, why you would want to reduce the amount of money reaching deserving causes and feed the commercial mass mailers I have no clue.
Once the charities reach the size that the volume of mail they send raises the hackles of the post office, then they've already become part of the "conspiracy". The Iron Law is already in effect, regardless of their donation/overhead ratio. They just need to own up to it and formally join the cabal.
To the original article: a mailing list of 400,000 addresses isn't a community, it's a nation bigger than Iceland or Belize.
RMS would be the stuffy guy they'd hit with a cream pie in every episode.
I was more addressing the fact that the liability issues of building and "selling" a thinking machine have been considered before.
However, an Asimov robot can be manipulated into violating the Laws. For example the First Law could be voilated if a robot was convinced that a human really wasn't human (this worked on Solaria in "Robots and Empire" [?]) or by performing a seemingly innocuous action that led to to a human's injury ("The Naked Sun"). Also, Asimov robots were built with altered Laws to allow humans to perform potentially hazardous work ("Lost Little Robot") and child care (drawing a blank here, so that children could actively play and risk minor injury).
To put it bluntly, raise your hand if YOU want to be the first car manufacturer to make a car for which you are potentially liable in *every single accident that car ever gets into*, from the day it's sold until the day it's scrapped. Any takers?
... no one. But you'll get plenty who charge mandatory tune-ups to ensure compliance. The question will be "which company DOESN'T charge a fee for a mandatory yearly check-up"?
Asimov's early robot stories dealt frequently with corporate liability and it was often the source of the plot conflicts. If a proofreading robot made a mistake causing a slander ("Galley Slave") or an industrial accident resulted in injury, US Robotics was put into the position of having to prove that it was not the fault of the robot (which it never was).
This is why Asimov's US Robotics didn't sell you a robot, they leased it to you. The lease was iron-clad, could be revoked by either party at any time, had liability clauses, and had mandatory maintenance and upgrades to be performed by US Robotics technicians. If you refused the maintenance US Robotics would repossess, sue and claim theft if you withheld ("Bicentennial Man", though unsuccessfully; "Satisfaction Guaranteed").
A properly functioning robot would not disobey the three laws, and an improperly functioning robot was repaired or destroyed immediately ("Lost Little Robot"). Conflicts between types of harm were resolved using probability based on the best information available at the moment ("Runaround"), and usually resulted in the collapse of the positronic brain when it was safe to do so ("Robots and Empire", etc.).
Like IE or hate it, it still has the best Javascript profiler available today -- and it's built in. It beats the ever loving crap out of Firebug's pathetic profiler, and presents timing data in a proper tree with better function name resolution than Chrome's.
It's other development tools are marginal though. Debug your app in Firebug, and fire up IE to check it for compatibility and find the slow bits.
"Artificial Womb" sounds so awkward. How about axlotl tank?
Likely they were observers. My wife has worked the elections for the Clerk's office and as a poll observer (not at the same election). Really, there's not much they can do but sit and watch and stay out of the way.
Long, complicated ballot in Michigan this year with lots of asinine state constitutional amendments. This made for about a 45 minute wait in line to even get a ballot. I figured out my choices the weekend before and put the options on my phone to read in the booth; even then, filling the real ballot out correctly still took about 5 minutes.
Right. That damn Screen Actors Guild forcing the top stars to work for a pittance. That bloody NFL Players Union forcing teams to hire second-rate scrubs.
Your notion of how unions work is ignorant and malformed. There's a huge difference between unions for grunt labor and unions for skilled professionals.
I considered your argument for a moment, really, and then quickly dismissed it as you picked a poor example. These are skilled entertainers, and I think that muddies the waters completely. The highest paid NFL players make over $11M/year and the lowest paid are making under $.4M. That's a disparity of 27:1. (I daresay that the SAG ratios will be far, far worse.) But consider if the NFL didn't put names or numbers on the jersey's and player stats were virtually un-collectible by fans.
Would that 27:1 ratio still hold for long? Oh I doubt it. The owners certainly would have to play some players more than others, but since everyone is anonymous the threat to sign with another team is greatly diminished. Peyton Manning would have to stand in line at tryouts just like everyone else. The competition at the high end would die quickly. If your resume didn't say "Super Bowl Champ _(last year)_" you'd be worth jack squat.
Programmers work in the dark, mostly. We're on teams, sure, but rarely do our names and faces get put on the product. We're not marketable and hold no value to our employers in that way. Instead of SAG or NFLPA, we'd wind up more like the UAW or the Teamsters possibly with some merit on our pay scale but not much.
If he had written it in middle school, it would have ended:
Want to find out if the cryptanalysts ever broke Vigenère's cipher? Then read the book!
"Cryptography is a land of contrasts."
I've been in a theater that caught fire ... We all got up calmly and walked outside.
[Sigh] It's a meme from the days when building regulations and safety procedures where less rigorous than today. Imagine an 18th century theatre; lots of wood and other flammable materials. Crammed full of people; the rich sitting in balconies. The poor standing, tightly packed, below the stage. No emergency exits. A fire could kill almost everyone in there. Raising a false alarm would be likely to cause a couple of tramplings at least.
...Or what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was more familiar with when he cited that meme:
The crowded 19th century theater where all of the above was true, plus the theater was lit with gas lamps, the stage with arc lights, people smoking in the seats -- open flame and combustion sources everywhere. The theaters were getting larger and larger because of better knowledge of acoustics allowed it.
Mod the parent up, this is the first non-techie analogy that makes sense to anyone with any accounting or business background.
The "ledger" idea is the elevator speech you can give to the pencil-pushers. It's one thing to know what the bottom line on a balance sheet is, it's another thing to know how the numbers got there. Multiple sources of changes (Payables, Receivables, Sales, Petty Cash, etc...), in multiple directions (debits/credits), in multiple categories (Assets, Liabilities, Equity) . You'd be foolish to run a business without a general ledger. Source control is the ledger for the software.
Please mod the parent up.
Raising that bar from "making an edit and citing a source" to "engaging in a long-running flamewar with bots, edit nazis, and people who have no life outside of wikipedia" just to add to an article is not a good thing.
That was a typo -- I meant "perhaps traditionally the "E"s were just absent from programming"
I thought that might have happened. Thanks for clearing it up. :)
I don't think anybody says introversion is a disease. Neither is being an extrovert. Myers-Briggs is all about recognising these tendencies (they are not absolutes) and using that knowledge to get the best out of people.
Not only do Es need to understand you -- you need to understand Es. It's a two way street. Give and take.
I think that a lot of people treat introversion as a disease. It hides under labels like "socialization disorder" or "social anxiety disorders". Consider that being a perfectly normal introvert will get you several points towards an autism diagnosis.
It's not quite a two way street. Extroverts have no problems standing up for themselves, declaring what they want, and explaining to management how the world should work: in an extroverted way, of course, with large meetings, pair programming, open cubicles, in-person code reviews, and traditional group training. Introverts will have to wait until after calming down after the meeting to consider the proposals, and write a considered memo stating that maybe these things really aren't for everyone.