Re:The difference between IT and other professions
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
Ditto the British Computer Society in the UK which issues professional qualifications backed by a code of ethics, code of conduct etc. The BCS and the IEEE are affiliated and there are various links to the ACM too.
The BCS operates under a royal charter which is how professional qualifications are managed in the UK. You also get a nice badge which allows you to order the burning of unethical persons unless they are 'fellows' of the aforementioned institutions in which case they may opt for beheading instead. Or a career in politics.
How can something that 'the locals' have a name for be 'discovered'. In what context is this discovery? Are the locals non-human in some way or has the 'discoverer' meerely dehumanised them in order to get his/her name into the species list.
Thing is, everyone talks about rights, but there are a lot of people not prepared to live up to their obligations. In this case the obligation to help ensure that your fellow travellers are safe. Rights bring obligations. When people talk up their rights and walk away from their obligations, that's decadence. I don't care how much money he gives to worthy causes, he's decadent. Sounds to me like they are mostly about 'hey don't stop me doing stuff.' ACLU for the dot com age? Bull. Dot commers are not made to ride in the back of the bus, not lynched or raped for being dot commers, not disenfranchised. I'm a liberal. I believe in rights and obligations but not this.
You could turn it into just such a machine by putting ipods on each truck and a wireless network to download data . . . oh no wait
Putting magnets on the trucks doesn't help. To work, the movement of the trains has to create the ISM. You could do it by shunting the cars into different sequences and having an infinite number of cars.
Wow. Maybe that's how DNA works?
Not correct.
My first point was to correct a missrepresentation of what the engineering team leader said.
My second point was that quality was lost by using the redundant data channel. Peices of the panoramic mosaic were lost in some sets of pictures because pictures from different cameras went onto different channels. It would seem sensible to group together each triplet of pictures on one channel. That way if you do loose one channel, you get a consistent set of pictures from each altitude.
Two channels were provided in case one failed but the imaging team decided to use the two channels to double the number of images that they could return. Southwood's point is that they imaging team used the redundant channel to increase volume. That was wrong. They didn't loose much but they did loose some of the peices of the panoramic picture. Science is about quality not quantity, so they were wrong to do that.
Second. Channel A - the one that was lost - was used to measure the windspeed around the lander by measuring the doppler effects. They couldn't repeat the experiment on channel B because it was less stable. In this case there was no option for redundancy unless they added a second channel A transmitter. Since the reciever was not switched on, that wouldn't have helped. However, the radio telescope network picked up the Channel A transmissions and will be able to recover the doppler information and rescue the wind speed experiment.
Don't be suprised if some boffin manages to extract the data stream too, at some point. That will be quite an achievement.
My first thought too . . .
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gs2.cgi?path=../multimedia/images/titan/images/pia-titan-1-2.jpg& type=image
. . . There is a regular ring on the 'land' side too, but my instinct tells me that these are camera or image processing artefacts. The interface between the light and dark, though, looks exactly like a coastline with islands and indentations formed by wave/tide action. It could be dark terrain overlaid with ice or clouds or both.
You have to be careful to understand what light and dark actually mean - I don't know what wavelengths these were taken at but if the camera is optimised to see through methane/hydrocarbon smog then that would appear darkest.
If the dark part is a liquid ocean then why does the top right show up as so hazy? I'm more interested in the rings. The obvious one is associated with an indentation in the coast to its 'north'. If you go left from there, there is another one much fainter but that is associated with a diffuse 'stain' or pan of material and also has a 'coastal' feature to its north.
Intriguing.
So, in 100 years they haven't managed to build an ignition system that can't be bypassed and they think this will work. Right. Someone has shares in the company, methinks.
And another thing. Every few minutes I have to blow into this tube while I'm driving, right. Hmm.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to build a system which measures the consistency of your driving, swerving and reaction speed and if you don't measure up, gradually cuts the speed of the car and sets all the lights flashing ?
How about an IQ interlock test. You have to keep proving that you are smart enough to drive half a tonne of metal around at high speed without killing anyone. That should empty the roads.
How about the same thing for politicians: excuse me Mr Bush, please hold your speech for a second while I measure your ego . . .
If you say that someone who would volunteer is 'whacko' you are meerly forcing your own cowardice in others.
Count me in anytime, I'm quite serious too.
We seem to have lost our pioneering instincts. The sailors who first sailed around the world had a terrible death rate. Not all of them were forced, many signed on for money (suprise suprise), glory and the sense of adventure.
We are also ready to accept that soldiers will gladly sacrifice themselves for military objectives, but we can't accept that people would sacrifice themselves for any other greater good.
What about the guy who demonstrated the link between stomach ulcers and heart disease ? He was so convinced he was right, he experimented on himself and could have died.
There would be a long queue of high quality, sane, competent individuals volunteering for this.
I think this is the coolest article ever. Or do I ?
I used to troll - sorry - contribute to alt.postmodern under the name of Hipp. Stenoglepsis a long, long time ago, back when the internet was a baby and there were no pictures.
Some of those guys have a sense of humour but I kind of preferred the others.
In the US people are insulated from each other, driving everywhere, moving from air-conditioned box to air-conditioned box. In that environment people become polarized in their views and treat each other in the abstract. So you can easily have groups of people who see violence as intrinsically evil and a couple of psychos in the room next door polishing their guns. The only place people mix is on TV, which is controlled and compartmentalised too, or through ever more realistic computer games, violent movies that don't reflect objective reality or porn. Add boredom and blood sugar dips and its no wonder some people eventually train themselves that the Matrix is real and other people are just avatars.
Building a dam would be a better option, then put the train on top. The view would be better, the amount of hydroelectric and wind power generated would be awesome and the revenue obtained from charging ships to pass through via locks would make both countries financial superpowers. The only snag would be the occasional submarine stuck in the hydroelectric turbines. Underwater locks anyone ?
I live in Cambridge. I picked up a packet of razors. Now I have radiation burns and smallpox, a man follows me with a camera all day and people stop me in the street and their children say 'look mummy, there's that nasty Osama Bin Hussein.' My dog has died, my wife has left me and I have had to grow beard. Who do I sue ? WHO DO I SUE ??!
Most organisations have Just * Do It Person and Process Junky Person. As a software engineer you have to manage the balance.
If you live at the process junkie end of the spectrum, the software that you create is very expensive and may actually never get to the market.
If you live at the extreme end of JFDI space then the chances are your company will make money this year and then die the death of a million user group quality flames.
When I have to cope with JFDI this is what I do.
First, don't cut off future improvement. It should be obvious but there is a fundamental difference between putting out a bowl of spaghetti and putting out a minimal solution with extension points.
Don't panic. Design reduces coding time, always. I don't care if you are talking about ten person years coding or two hours at 3am. Designing the solution always reduces coding and testing time. It also improves quality and therefore reduces your rework when the bug reports come in. If you have to fix lots of production bugs, extending your solution to meet Process Junkies idea of minimum quality will never happen.
Defend yourself. JFDI can't tell you to go straight to the code. This is a big problem, but ultimately JFDI should be managing the crisis that has led to the urgent requirement, not hassling you for scribbling designs instead of cutting code. Also, find out what JFDI is going to do for you when you solve their problem before you solve it. It doesn't always work, but we have all worked all night for someone who doesn't say thank you, or criticises the solution. Personally, I look for a written/email request for me to pull out the stops, stating a business need. Bombarding JFDI and PJ with emails at hourly intervals around the clock also helps drive home the point. Remember, JFDI person has that role because they aint subtle.
Think like the CFO. These guys want revenue and increased earnings per share this quarter. Future quality issues are secondary and, in some cases, are seen as a source of future revenue. JFDI cuts cost and therefore increases earnings per share. Instilling future quality and maintainability is fundamentally something that you do to make your job more satisfying, easier and professional. Only you and Process Junkie Person care about that. JFDI doesn't because they get more crises to manage if quality falls. CFO/CEO don't. So, don't be naive about the management being on your side in this, you have to protect yourself.
So, fundamentally, until Software Engineering is a formal profession with audits and minimal standards, until customers can sue software companies for negligence in their engineering process, quality is down to you. If JFDI calls, you have to build in the quality, or at least the potential to reach the quality threshold yourself.
Bring back LSD
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No not that LSD I mean good old pounds shillings and pence. There you have a system which evolved - it sounds to me - to do precisely this. Whats more, even uneducated victorian urchins understood what two guineas less half a crown tuppence ha'penny was and could offer you change in the form of shillings, florins, pennies, etc.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, British currency up to the 1970s was counted in pennies, shillings (12 pennies), twenty of those to a pound, with a guinea at 21 shillings (lend a pound, get a guinea back in a year, see, works for interest too).
I raise your elaborate hoax with the uber-conspiracy, that of the so called 'declaration of independence' from which time the USA has been ruled by a star chamber of seven civil servants from Bethnal Green (London (England)) chaired by a nine foot giant lizard. See quick before they close it
You guys are mostly cowboys, according to my simple survey of the responses here. Software Engineering will never be accepted as a professional discipline while this kind of debate leans towards 'yo, just take the money dude'. I note that some others have posted on the ethics issue.
The BCS, IEEE and ACM all have codes of ethics. The response to this situation is clearly laid out.
If you are asked to do something that is not correct or not in the customer's interest, inform the customer.
If they do nothing about it, inform them of your objection in writing quoting the appropriate code of conduct/ethics and asking for a written response.
If they still do nothing, you walk away. Yes really.
If they tell you in writing to do the thing that you have objected to you must consider the consequences of the action that they have asked you to take.
If it is illegal or violates other clearly laid out ethical constraints, you walk away (yes really) otherwise its your call.
Yes, I have done this at least three times. The first time, the customer backed off. The second time we got to the written response stage and the customer ultimately respected the professional approach. The third time, they wanted to break the law and I walked.
It is possible to have an ethical career. Read 'Ethical Ambition' by Derrick Bell.
We are having a rest after inventing democracy (o/s for civilisation), the English language (o/s for culture and arguably thinking), Football (conflict resolution and war emulation) and Cricket (cultural add-on for massively-scalar beer drinking in the park).
We had a prototype system which lasted 15 years, you know the type - which was backed up every lunchtime by an operator who was usually the least experienced person on the production line ~16 or 17 years old. Occasionally the restart would fail because it couldn't find a node on the network. Not a big deal, a retry usually did the trick, but the error message was 'CATASTROPHIC error: A CATASTROPHIC error has occured.'
The Burren is an extremely attractive place, especially when the sparse wild flowers come up in contrast to the rock. Lonely, windswept, romantic, all pervading sense of wilderness with the odd bearded hermit in the distance . . . hey we're back to Linux again.
The burren is barren, relatively speaking. The amount of biomass over limestone pavement (i.e. Linux) is much lower than the amount of biomass over areas where there is a reasonable depth of soil (i.e. Windows). Of course, most of that biomass is festering, decaying, useless bits of old effluent but that is another argument entirely. I could compare Windows to agricultural mega-farms which recieve an annual liberal covering of manure, but I won't...
How appropriate that this should be held in Doolin. Doolin sits below The Burren, a huge barren stretch of limestone pavement, the fossilised product of the toil of millions of tiny creatures which provide no basis or encouragement for anything to grow, leading to a picturesque yet barren landscape attracting many tourists and little real work.
A bit like Linux really, there are even large cracks to fall in between the solid bits.;]
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto the British Computer Society in the UK which issues professional qualifications backed by a code of ethics, code of conduct etc. The BCS and the IEEE are affiliated and there are various links to the ACM too. The BCS operates under a royal charter which is how professional qualifications are managed in the UK. You also get a nice badge which allows you to order the burning of unethical persons unless they are 'fellows' of the aforementioned institutions in which case they may opt for beheading instead. Or a career in politics.
So if you play too long, you find yourself somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system due to your diy ionic propulsion drive :)?!
How can something that 'the locals' have a name for be 'discovered'. In what context is this discovery? Are the locals non-human in some way or has the 'discoverer' meerely dehumanised them in order to get his/her name into the species list.
Thing is, everyone talks about rights, but there are a lot of people not prepared to live up to their obligations. In this case the obligation to help ensure that your fellow travellers are safe. Rights bring obligations. When people talk up their rights and walk away from their obligations, that's decadence. I don't care how much money he gives to worthy causes, he's decadent. Sounds to me like they are mostly about 'hey don't stop me doing stuff.' ACLU for the dot com age? Bull. Dot commers are not made to ride in the back of the bus, not lynched or raped for being dot commers, not disenfranchised. I'm a liberal. I believe in rights and obligations but not this.
You could turn it into just such a machine by putting ipods on each truck and a wireless network to download data . . . oh no wait Putting magnets on the trucks doesn't help. To work, the movement of the trains has to create the ISM. You could do it by shunting the cars into different sequences and having an infinite number of cars. Wow. Maybe that's how DNA works?
Not correct. My first point was to correct a missrepresentation of what the engineering team leader said. My second point was that quality was lost by using the redundant data channel. Peices of the panoramic mosaic were lost in some sets of pictures because pictures from different cameras went onto different channels. It would seem sensible to group together each triplet of pictures on one channel. That way if you do loose one channel, you get a consistent set of pictures from each altitude.
I'll try and remember that. Try and remember that telling people to try and remember things is patronising.
You are all completely missing the point.
Two channels were provided in case one failed but the imaging team decided to use the two channels to double the number of images that they could return. Southwood's point is that they imaging team used the redundant channel to increase volume. That was wrong. They didn't loose much but they did loose some of the peices of the panoramic picture. Science is about quality not quantity, so they were wrong to do that.
Second. Channel A - the one that was lost - was used to measure the windspeed around the lander by measuring the doppler effects. They couldn't repeat the experiment on channel B because it was less stable. In this case there was no option for redundancy unless they added a second channel A transmitter. Since the reciever was not switched on, that wouldn't have helped. However, the radio telescope network picked up the Channel A transmissions and will be able to recover the doppler information and rescue the wind speed experiment.
Don't be suprised if some boffin manages to extract the data stream too, at some point. That will be quite an achievement.
My first thought too . . . http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gs2.cgi?path=.. /multimedia/images/titan/images/pia-titan-1-2.jpg& type=image
. . . There is a regular ring on the 'land' side too, but my instinct tells me that these are camera or image processing artefacts. The interface between the light and dark, though, looks exactly like a coastline with islands and indentations formed by wave/tide action. It could be dark terrain overlaid with ice or clouds or both.
You have to be careful to understand what light and dark actually mean - I don't know what wavelengths these were taken at but if the camera is optimised to see through methane/hydrocarbon smog then that would appear darkest.
If the dark part is a liquid ocean then why does the top right show up as so hazy? I'm more interested in the rings. The obvious one is associated with an indentation in the coast to its 'north'. If you go left from there, there is another one much fainter but that is associated with a diffuse 'stain' or pan of material and also has a 'coastal' feature to its north.
Intriguing.
So, in 100 years they haven't managed to build an ignition system that can't be bypassed and they think this will work. Right. Someone has shares in the company, methinks. And another thing. Every few minutes I have to blow into this tube while I'm driving, right. Hmm. Wouldn't it be a better idea to build a system which measures the consistency of your driving, swerving and reaction speed and if you don't measure up, gradually cuts the speed of the car and sets all the lights flashing ? How about an IQ interlock test. You have to keep proving that you are smart enough to drive half a tonne of metal around at high speed without killing anyone. That should empty the roads. How about the same thing for politicians: excuse me Mr Bush, please hold your speech for a second while I measure your ego . . .
If you say that someone who would volunteer is 'whacko' you are meerly forcing your own cowardice in others. Count me in anytime, I'm quite serious too. We seem to have lost our pioneering instincts. The sailors who first sailed around the world had a terrible death rate. Not all of them were forced, many signed on for money (suprise suprise), glory and the sense of adventure. We are also ready to accept that soldiers will gladly sacrifice themselves for military objectives, but we can't accept that people would sacrifice themselves for any other greater good. What about the guy who demonstrated the link between stomach ulcers and heart disease ? He was so convinced he was right, he experimented on himself and could have died. There would be a long queue of high quality, sane, competent individuals volunteering for this.
I think this is the coolest article ever. Or do I ? I used to troll - sorry - contribute to alt.postmodern under the name of Hipp. Stenoglepsis a long, long time ago, back when the internet was a baby and there were no pictures. Some of those guys have a sense of humour but I kind of preferred the others.
In the US people are insulated from each other, driving everywhere, moving from air-conditioned box to air-conditioned box. In that environment people become polarized in their views and treat each other in the abstract. So you can easily have groups of people who see violence as intrinsically evil and a couple of psychos in the room next door polishing their guns. The only place people mix is on TV, which is controlled and compartmentalised too, or through ever more realistic computer games, violent movies that don't reflect objective reality or porn. Add boredom and blood sugar dips and its no wonder some people eventually train themselves that the Matrix is real and other people are just avatars.
Building a dam would be a better option, then put the train on top. The view would be better, the amount of hydroelectric and wind power generated would be awesome and the revenue obtained from charging ships to pass through via locks would make both countries financial superpowers. The only snag would be the occasional submarine stuck in the hydroelectric turbines. Underwater locks anyone ?
I live in Cambridge. I picked up a packet of razors. Now I have radiation burns and smallpox, a man follows me with a camera all day and people stop me in the street and their children say 'look mummy, there's that nasty Osama Bin Hussein.' My dog has died, my wife has left me and I have had to grow beard. Who do I sue ? WHO DO I SUE ??!
200 people is still small enough to retain creativity. Everyone will know everyone and the big-company problems won't have set in.
When I have to cope with JFDI this is what I do.
So, fundamentally, until Software Engineering is a formal profession with audits and minimal standards, until customers can sue software companies for negligence in their engineering process, quality is down to you. If JFDI calls, you have to build in the quality, or at least the potential to reach the quality threshold yourself.
No not that LSD I mean good old pounds shillings and pence. There you have a system which evolved - it sounds to me - to do precisely this. Whats more, even uneducated victorian urchins understood what two guineas less half a crown tuppence ha'penny was and could offer you change in the form of shillings, florins, pennies, etc.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, British currency up to the 1970s was counted in pennies, shillings (12 pennies), twenty of those to a pound, with a guinea at 21 shillings (lend a pound, get a guinea back in a year, see, works for interest too).
This is true, go here
I raise your elaborate hoax with the uber-conspiracy, that of the so called 'declaration of independence' from which time the USA has been ruled by a star chamber of seven civil servants from Bethnal Green (London (England)) chaired by a nine foot giant lizard. See quick before they close it
Youz guyz aint even notice yet. Sheesh.
The BCS, IEEE and ACM all have codes of ethics. The response to this situation is clearly laid out.
Yes, I have done this at least three times. The first time, the customer backed off. The second time we got to the written response stage and the customer ultimately respected the professional approach. The third time, they wanted to break the law and I walked.
It is possible to have an ethical career. Read 'Ethical Ambition' by Derrick Bell.
We are having a rest after inventing democracy (o/s for civilisation), the English language (o/s for culture and arguably thinking), Football (conflict resolution and war emulation) and Cricket (cultural add-on for massively-scalar beer drinking in the park).
We had a prototype system which lasted 15 years, you know the type - which was backed up every lunchtime by an operator who was usually the least experienced person on the production line ~16 or 17 years old. Occasionally the restart would fail because it couldn't find a node on the network. Not a big deal, a retry usually did the trick, but the error message was 'CATASTROPHIC error: A CATASTROPHIC error has occured.'
The Burren is an extremely attractive place, especially when the sparse wild flowers come up in contrast to the rock. Lonely, windswept, romantic, all pervading sense of wilderness with the odd bearded hermit in the distance . . . hey we're back to Linux again.
The burren is barren, relatively speaking. The amount of biomass over limestone pavement (i.e. Linux) is much lower than the amount of biomass over areas where there is a reasonable depth of soil (i.e. Windows). Of course, most of that biomass is festering, decaying, useless bits of old effluent but that is another argument entirely. I could compare Windows to agricultural mega-farms which recieve an annual liberal covering of manure, but I won't...
How appropriate that this should be held in Doolin. Doolin sits below The Burren, a huge barren stretch of limestone pavement, the fossilised product of the toil of millions of tiny creatures which provide no basis or encouragement for anything to grow, leading to a picturesque yet barren landscape attracting many tourists and little real work. A bit like Linux really, there are even large cracks to fall in between the solid bits. ;]