Perhaps a more useful metrics are how many use cases a programmer has satisfied, or how many bugs were fixed. In other words, measure a programmer's productivity based on success in making customers/clients/users happy.
OJ was set free by the criminal courts, but was found guilty and had to pay a large fine in civil court.
At least in the U.S. system, it's much harder to get a judgement in a criminal case than a civil one (probably rightly so). So where M$ is not being significantly punished (arguably rewarded) in criminal court, it may very well receive judgements against it in civil court, where the appeals court upholding their monopoly status does much of a prosecutor's work for her.
Q:"And is it your understanding that Microsoft did that by engaging in certain practices that the courts have held to be unlawful?"
A: "Yes,"
So he admits that M$ DID engage in those practices that the court found to be unlawful! Not just that the court ruled such and such, but that M$ did what the court claims they did.
Ever see Pinocchio (Disney version) when the fox and the cat convince Pinocchio to ditch school to play games, drink beer, and smoke cigars all day? Turns out there was a catch.
If you go after M$ free stuff and propoganda, garunteed they'll find a way to make an ass of you and extract their price in the end.
As a result, he's prone to miscommunication. He appears confrontational because he frequently speaks his mind in a way that's going to get misinterpreted by everyone else. So is it our fault for not understanding his 'great mind'?
Not being able to understand what RMS is saying demonstrates a serious lack of verbal comprehension skills. I can't think of any frequent writer/speaker who states things more plainly than RMS.
RMS is disliked because he stands on principle and won't budge. He's misunderstood because we are living in probably the least principled time in recorded human history.
Lets not forget a dress code. Yeah, lets not enforce that, you don't need to look good to program, man. Until that one programmer wearing the 2 sizes too small phantom menace t-shirt with the body odor turns off a potential client. Is wearing a pair of dockers and a shirt that doesn't have a fucking wookie on it going to kill you?
Dress code is a corporate culture issue. I work at a company where the CEO wears a black turtle neck and shorts or jeans pretty much every day. So it makes sense that the employees aren't wearing a suit or even button down shirts every day.
Ooh, and lets pamper the programmers with soda and candy and teddy bears and futuristic chairs. Until the rest of the company, who work just as hard as the programmers, begin to get a little pissed off. Soda is 30 cents a can. Suck it up.
Well certainly any perks should be available to all employees, not just the programmers.
Yeah, its really hip to have that one guy come in at work at 2pm and work until 9 at night, because he's so damn elite, until you realize that he's unable to interact with all of the _adults_ who have children and real-life responsibilities. Its called a team. "Oh, I don't work well in the morning." Oh, i'm so sorry! Gee, because the rest of us automatically wake up at 6:30am chipper and ready to go!
It's not that programmer's problem that you may have more personal responsibilities right now than she does. And the flip side of the programmer who never goes to any meetings are the employees who are in meetings constantly but never actually do any work that produces or sells any of the company's goods or services. Programming is usually solitary work, and sitting around with a bunch of other people who scheduled a meeting so they can demonstrate that they're very busy and important doesn't get the code written any faster.
4) Recognize that some technical problems are not progressive and people cannot give a time estimate. "When will you find the bug?" often does not have a meaningful answer. There is no such thing as X percent done with this kind of task and the rate of progress cannot be measured. It's done when it's done.
I don't agree with this. It is the coder's responsibility to come up with the schedule. You may not know precisely how long it will take to find the bug, but saying the project will be done "whenever" is not acceptable. If the coders made the schedule but aren't sticking to it, they need to explain why it's taking longer than expected and give a new estimate of how long it will take.
Not that I'm the best scheduler myself, and something always does come up. But the alternative is to let the managers make the schedule, which we certainly don't want.
My answer to your question is this: I've always wanted a boss who understood what I was doing as well as I did, and probably better.
If your boss is better at your job than you, why isn't he coding and someone else managing?
Managing coders and coding are totally orthogonal skill sets. Managers need to let coders know what the needed features are, prioritize them, then let the coders come up with a schedule and hold them to it. Besides periodic updates, the manager should leave the coder alone and keep anyone who wants to add to the feature set or change the schedule away from the coders at all cost.
That's a good tech manager. Being able to code has nothing to do with it.
You honestly think that the Microsoft lobbiests will let the Feds choose something that's open-source over their proprietary formats?
Just how many jobs does Microsoft create in Trent Lott's Mississippi, for example? Just how beholden to Microsoft are politicians in CA with Silicon Valley, VA and NY with AOL/TW headquarters, NC where Redhat is headquartered, etc.?
Has it occurred to you that evolution is the result of objective study and experimentation?
Glory be, I has seen the light! It's all so clear to me now! Silly me, of course nothing is ever taught in a university that's not true! How could I have thought otherwise?
Thanks to the clarity, lucidity and irrefutability of your argument, the scales have fallen off of my eyes! I once was blind but now I see!
Why stop at banning people from universities based on their beliefs? Let's burn one of those "Darwin fish with legs" symbols on their lawns to make our point! Heck, let's round them all up and make a big bonfire out of them before they can infect anyone else!
I guess it's ok then to treat lucky lumps of carbon like yourself with no more dignity than other lumps of carbon like trees, bacteria, coal, diamonds, etc.? I guess Hitler isn't morally distinguishable from an antibiotic or a coal furnace?
Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits--in this case, the ability to withstand an antibiotic's attack on a microbe. When a person takes an antibiotic, the drug kills the defenseless bacteria, leaving behind--or "selecting," in biological terms--those that can resist it.
Notice that the resistant bacteria were already ther. The antibiotic only selected for them, it didn't evolve or create them.
Just because science has yet to establish how something evolved millions of years ago when it appears irreduceably complex today is not evidence for "intelligent design", much less any flavor of creationism.
Just because science might be able to prove that something evolved sometime in the future is not evidence that the thing evolved.
I'm annoyed by morons who make vapid arguments then accuse others of not thinking.
He's taking the stand that the debate is over, when in fact our knowledge of the subject isn't necessarily any less primitive than Darwin's knowledge of vision.
He does NOT take the stand that the debate is over. (Don't remember this link location but) He says plainly that his hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a series of mutations plausible under natural selection that can give rise to his "irreducibly complex" structures.
By the way, how does one investigate intelligent design theory? You thinking about something like in "Contact" (not biology, but same idea)?
Behe actually sites SETI as an example of trying to identify designed phenomena. It seems reasonable that we take some of the same principles to identify whether biological structures exhibit evidence of design.
So God made the jump to creating species, and Creationism has been in retreat ever since.
Until recently. Intelligent design is the counter attack.
And it has not been ineffective. Otherwise the scientists in the article at the source of this thread would not be so concerned about answering the objections put forth by "creationists".
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.
No one has done that. At best they say "we might be able to give you one sometime in the distant future". That's not very impressive "evidence".
That mousetrap *isn't* reliant on all the components. Someone could hold the hammer and spring back, wait for a mouse and then let go. Without the need for a holding bar or catch.
In that case, the "someone" is functioning as the holding bar and catch.
I think he's a little too eager to declare the issue resolved in favor of molecular design, though. I can't argue that evolution presents a well-formulated answer to these problems, but I don't see any reason why it can't or won't, eventually.
That's pretty much the science version of "the check's in the mail", isn't it?
Behe answers your point thusly:
"I agree with the commonsense point that no one can predict the future of science. I strongly disagree with the contention that, because we can?t guarantee the success of intelligent design theory, it can be dismissed, or should not be pursued. If science operated in such a manner, no theory would ever be investigated, because no theory is guaranteed success forever. Indeed, if one ignores a hypothesis because it may one day be demonstrated to be incorrect, then one paradoxically takes unfalsifiability to be a necessary trait of a scientific theory. Although philosophers of science have debated whether falsifiability is a requirement of a scientific theory, no one to my knowledge has argued that unfalsifiability is a necessary mark."
(http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalob je ctionsresponse.htm):
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a more useful metrics are how many use cases a programmer has satisfied, or how many bugs were fixed. In other words, measure a programmer's productivity based on success in making customers/clients/users happy.
Best,
-jimbo
OJ was set free by the criminal courts, but was found guilty and had to pay a large fine in civil court.
At least in the U.S. system, it's much harder to get a judgement in a criminal case than a civil one (probably rightly so). So where M$ is not being significantly punished (arguably rewarded) in criminal court, it may very well receive judgements against it in civil court, where the appeals court upholding their monopoly status does much of a prosecutor's work for her.
Best,
-jimbo
Q:"And is it your understanding that Microsoft did that by engaging in certain practices that the courts have held to be unlawful?"
A: "Yes,"
So he admits that M$ DID engage in those practices that the court found to be unlawful! Not just that the court ruled such and such, but that M$ did what the court claims they did.
Best,
-jimbo
Your Penis is the first step in creating RAPISTS _AND_ PEDOPHILES!
Actually, I believe this is an official position of the National Organization for Women.
Best,
-jimbo
Ever see Pinocchio (Disney version) when the fox and the cat convince Pinocchio to ditch school to play games, drink beer, and smoke cigars all day? Turns out there was a catch.
If you go after M$ free stuff and propoganda, garunteed they'll find a way to make an ass of you and extract their price in the end.
-jimbo
I believe you've just been trolled.
Best,
-jimbo
As a result, he's prone to miscommunication. He appears confrontational because he frequently speaks his mind in a way that's going to get misinterpreted by everyone else. So is it our fault for not understanding his 'great mind'?
Not being able to understand what RMS is saying demonstrates a serious lack of verbal comprehension skills. I can't think of any frequent writer/speaker who states things more plainly than RMS.
RMS is disliked because he stands on principle and won't budge. He's misunderstood because we are living in probably the least principled time in recorded human history.
Best,
-jimbo
Lets not forget a dress code. Yeah, lets not enforce that, you don't need to look good to program, man. Until that one programmer wearing the 2 sizes too small phantom menace t-shirt with the body odor turns off a potential client. Is wearing a pair of dockers and a shirt that doesn't have a fucking wookie on it going to kill you?
Dress code is a corporate culture issue. I work at a company where the CEO wears a black turtle neck and shorts or jeans pretty much every day. So it makes sense that the employees aren't wearing a suit or even button down shirts every day.
Ooh, and lets pamper the programmers with soda and candy and teddy bears and futuristic chairs. Until the rest of the company, who work just as hard as the programmers, begin to get a little pissed off. Soda is 30 cents a can. Suck it up.
Well certainly any perks should be available to all employees, not just the programmers.
Yeah, its really hip to have that one guy come in at work at 2pm and work until 9 at night, because he's so damn elite, until you realize that he's unable to interact with all of the _adults_ who have children and real-life responsibilities. Its called a team. "Oh, I don't work well in the morning." Oh, i'm so sorry! Gee, because the rest of us automatically wake up at 6:30am chipper and ready to go!
It's not that programmer's problem that you may have more personal responsibilities right now than she does. And the flip side of the programmer who never goes to any meetings are the employees who are in meetings constantly but never actually do any work that produces or sells any of the company's goods or services. Programming is usually solitary work, and sitting around with a bunch of other people who scheduled a meeting so they can demonstrate that they're very busy and important doesn't get the code written any faster.
Best,
-jimbo
4) Recognize that some technical problems are not progressive and people cannot give a time estimate. "When will you find the bug?" often does not have a meaningful answer. There is no such thing as X percent done with this kind of task and the rate of progress cannot be measured. It's done when it's done.
I don't agree with this. It is the coder's responsibility to come up with the schedule. You may not know precisely how long it will take to find the bug, but saying the project will be done "whenever" is not acceptable. If the coders made the schedule but aren't sticking to it, they need to explain why it's taking longer than expected and give a new estimate of how long it will take.
Not that I'm the best scheduler myself, and something always does come up. But the alternative is to let the managers make the schedule, which we certainly don't want.
Best,
-jimbo
My answer to your question is this: I've always wanted a boss who understood what I was doing as well as I did, and probably better.
If your boss is better at your job than you, why isn't he coding and someone else managing?
Managing coders and coding are totally orthogonal skill sets. Managers need to let coders know what the needed features are, prioritize them, then let the coders come up with a schedule and hold them to it. Besides periodic updates, the manager should leave the coder alone and keep anyone who wants to add to the feature set or change the schedule away from the coders at all cost.
That's a good tech manager. Being able to code has nothing to do with it.
Best,
-jimbo
I think the original comment was better stated. Elegantly short and to the point.
Best,
-jimbo
You honestly think that the Microsoft lobbiests will let the Feds choose something that's open-source over their proprietary formats?
Just how many jobs does Microsoft create in Trent Lott's Mississippi, for example? Just how beholden to Microsoft are politicians in CA with Silicon Valley, VA and NY with AOL/TW headquarters, NC where Redhat is headquartered, etc.?
Best,
-jimbo
Has it occurred to you that evolution is the result of objective study and experimentation?
Glory be, I has seen the light! It's all so clear to me now! Silly me, of course nothing is ever taught in a university that's not true! How could I have thought otherwise?
Thanks to the clarity, lucidity and irrefutability of your argument, the scales have fallen off of my eyes! I once was blind but now I see!
Best,
-jimbo
Why stop at banning people from universities based on their beliefs? Let's burn one of those "Darwin fish with legs" symbols on their lawns to make our point! Heck, let's round them all up and make a big bonfire out of them before they can infect anyone else!
Woohoo! Discrimination rocks!
Best,
-jimbo
I guess it's ok then to treat lucky lumps of carbon like yourself with no more dignity than other lumps of carbon like trees, bacteria, coal, diamonds, etc.? I guess Hitler isn't morally distinguishable from an antibiotic or a coal furnace?
Or am I missing your point?
Best,
-jimbo
Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits--in this case, the ability to withstand an antibiotic's attack on a microbe. When a person takes an antibiotic, the drug kills the defenseless bacteria, leaving behind--or "selecting," in biological terms--those that can resist it.
Notice that the resistant bacteria were already ther. The antibiotic only selected for them, it didn't evolve or create them.
Best,
-jimbo
Just because science has yet to establish how something evolved millions of years ago when it appears irreduceably complex today is not evidence for "intelligent design", much less any flavor of creationism.
Just because science might be able to prove that something evolved sometime in the future is not evidence that the thing evolved.
I'm annoyed by morons who make vapid arguments then accuse others of not thinking.
Best,
-jimbo
He's taking the stand that the debate is over, when in fact our knowledge of the subject isn't necessarily any less primitive than Darwin's knowledge of vision.
He does NOT take the stand that the debate is over. (Don't remember this link location but) He says plainly that his hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a series of mutations plausible under natural selection that can give rise to his "irreducibly complex" structures.
By the way, how does one investigate intelligent design theory? You thinking about something like in "Contact" (not biology, but same idea)?
Behe actually sites SETI as an example of trying to identify designed phenomena. It seems reasonable that we take some of the same principles to identify whether biological structures exhibit evidence of design.
Best,
-jimbo
So God made the jump to creating species, and Creationism has been in retreat ever since.
Until recently. Intelligent design is the counter attack.
And it has not been ineffective. Otherwise the scientists in the article at the source of this thread would not be so concerned about answering the objections put forth by "creationists".
Best,
-jimbo
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.
No one has done that. At best they say "we might be able to give you one sometime in the distant future". That's not very impressive "evidence".
Best,
-jimbo
Keep your hands off OUR God.
Can't we share? :)
Best,
-jimbo
That mousetrap *isn't* reliant on all the components. Someone could hold the hammer and spring back, wait for a mouse and then let go. Without the need for a holding bar or catch.
In that case, the "someone" is functioning as the holding bar and catch.
Best,
-jimbo
Well, there's far too much here to reply to point by point, so I'll just point to this whole page of Behe addressing his critics criticisms.
Best,
-jimbo
I think he's a little too eager to declare the issue resolved in favor of molecular design, though. I can't argue that evolution presents a well-formulated answer to these problems, but I don't see any reason why it can't or won't, eventually.
That's pretty much the science version of "the check's in the mail", isn't it?
Behe answers your point thusly:
"I agree with the commonsense point that no one can predict the future of science. I strongly disagree with the contention that, because we can?t guarantee the success of intelligent design theory, it can be dismissed, or should not be pursued. If science operated in such a manner, no theory would ever be investigated, because no theory is guaranteed success forever. Indeed, if one ignores a hypothesis because it may one day be demonstrated to be incorrect, then one paradoxically takes unfalsifiability to be a necessary trait of a scientific theory. Although philosophers of science have debated whether falsifiability is a requirement of a scientific theory, no one to my knowledge has argued that unfalsifiability is a necessary mark."
(http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalob je ctionsresponse.htm):
Best,
-jimbo
Behe's response to talk.origins is here.
Best,
-jimbo