(a) the jurisdiction is Oregon not California, so Hurd may well be SOL
(b) even in CA, they haven't been "disallowed", they just have to adhere to rather widely accepted guidelines (e.g. the non-compete clause must place reasonable limitations on geographical and time extents)
But Google's search algorithm is published -- there's even a helpful book about it, Amy Langville's "PageRank and beyond" which demonstrates that it's no more complicated than the linear algebra you learned in your sophomore year of engineering school.
"'adhere to EEOC guidelines'" is not leadership because it's "memorizing a bunch of artificially imposed minutia that is not very interesting"?
Well, you're right. Leadership that promotes objectivity and fairness regardless of gender, race, childbearing status or age will simply not have to worry about adherence to EEOC guidelines--because the leader will have made it very clear how people are to be treated and evaluated by both their peers, their reports, and by management.
Instead of playing "divide and conquer" along race, religious, gender, and age lines in order to maintain his own petty authority by keeping his charges fighting with each other instead of *him* (and bad leaders like this are almost always insecure unqualified white males promoted beyond their actual abilities because of their lame white maleness), a *real* leader can motivate everyone to do their best work by making it clear that good work -- not good looks -- is what's noticed and rewarded.
Interestingly, because women, African-Americans, Latinos and particularly Latinas have to be grossly overqualified and between two and three times harder working than their white male counterparts, and since they are so used to never getting a fair shake -- simply BEING FAIR is a big surprise to us.
What isn't public is how the values of certain thresholds are determined to, for example, weed out link farms and add small statistical variations to the link adjacency matrix so that it can be more easily solved. These are determined heuristically -- trial and error, in essence.
The devil is in the details, but who cares -- search indexes are easy enough to build and even easier to filter and skew.
Google is just flattering itself by pretending there's something big and complicated beyond the linear algebra and statistics we all studied freshman or sophomore year in engineering school behind this.
Former Justice John Paul Stevens was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, for example. Oh, and he *started* his judicial career at 50, in the Nixon administration.
Few federal judges are appointed before their 40's. At Google, by contrast, anyone 40 or older is eligible for the "Greyglers" -- their lame and left handed attempt to make "old people" feel less isolated.
Hi there! I started programming professionally in 1978 on mainframes and micros, upgraded my skills to that then-new unix boxes (4.2, 4.3 BSD) throughout the 80's, stayed current as all those new Unix Workstations came out, and then to the Linux and web programming (server side of course) in the 90's. Picked up SQL and now noSQL database skills in the mean time.
It's all more relevant than ever, isn't it? After EDIFACT, XML was like a breath of fresh air, and after XML, JSON was like a breath of fresh *clean* air. Python is more fun than C++, C still makes cleaner system interfaces than C++. Ruby, Java and Scala are pretty much a POS, but the kiddies haven't quite figured that out yet. The kiddie managers keep going for silver bullets less and less likely to dig them out of a hole ("Java site failed? oh here's a bright young man who will reprogram the whole thing in Ruby! Ruby failed? Oh, here's another bright young man who will reprogram the whole thing in Scala!") Face. Palm.
When the whole enterprise turns to custard, it turns out to be some basic easy fix in the guts of the code they were afraid to touch -- you know, the C parts, with the system calls. Lol.
I'm well into my third decade of continuous employment as a programmer and still love it.
Every once in a while an employer will try to move me into management because "women are so good with people" and watch them try to credit my male co-workers with code *I* wrote -- when there's a perfectly good code repository that fails them when they try to back up their ill considered opinions with facts. It's hilarious.
...Actually Google tried that "company culture" line of crap out on Brian Reid, and it's actually digging them further into a hole -- because the "stray remarks" doctrine no longer applies in that case -- since "stray remarks" are indicative of "company culture."
It's funny how the things companies try to keep themselves off the hook tend to be the very things that hoist them in the high-profile cases.
This is a really balanced and thoughtful article, giltwist -- and agree with you that the benefits of solitary study, or in the virtual company of others, under virtual guidance has a lot to offer.
I would say, though, that a student's physical surroundings and level of comfort, and meatspace social environment -- including immediate and extended family -- have a huge influence on how persistent and motivated she or he is, especially in more challenging areas.
Think about it -- the first thing an online community tries to figure out when they really connect is...how to meet up! Isn't that funny?
When you actually look at why and how failing schools are failing, it is, in large part, economics and attention. The rich schools do well while the poor schools fail, not because the rich schools have more resources or better teachers or smarter students...but because the kids at poor schools come in tired, hungry, stressed and often abused.
Simply offering breakfast, lunch and wholesome supervised after-school activities (sports, mathletes, debate club, AV or just a quiet place to study) makes a bigger difference than all the computer labs and fancy landscaping and moderne architecture combined.
I was a poor kid in a rich district, so luckily I was surrounded by intellectually switched-on kids (thanks to tracking!) and, yes, got free lunch (and free run of the library) and learned that if I got up *real* early and made myself breakfast, I would have a couple hours of utterly silent time in the house to study and finish up my homework. Otherwise my studies (and my sustenance) had to compete with a house full of screaming kids and parents, blaring televisions and stereos and the constant demand to clean up after all of them, as the oldest daughter in a house where both parents worked. Yet I acquired some kind of "herd immunity" from the insanity of a large chaotic family by being surrounded by being surrounded by kids from a more secure background -- they went out for sports, so I went out for sports; when they were applying for top schools, I, having better AP scores than a lot of them, did too. And got into better schools than any of them. It was the interaction with teachers, coaches and my classmates that made this happen -- lucky to be in a good school district, and at least have a roof over my head and adequate nutrition, medical care and rest.
The vast majority of kids these days don't even have that these days. Look at the statistics on childhood poverty. Look how poorly single mothers, in particular, are treated in the workplace: no family medical or dental plan, not enough resources to put food on the table or maintain a stable address. And when the kids come in tired, hungry and mentally stressed, it's suddenly a "teacher quality issue" and "not enough computers" that's the problem -- as defined by the companies getting rich off of training more teachers to throw into the fray, developing more tests to cycle them through faster, and building impressive computer labs.
How is "AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so..." any different from bog standard hop count updates on existing routers, and routing on the basis of the shortest path?
I think the authors are playing semantic games here, not doing research.
Really the Google-Verizon statement in favor of net neutrality "in principle" (but clearly not in practice!) is right up there with "Ignorance is Strength."
It only takes ONE "contractor" like this in a company to totally discredit any other incoming women, no matter how many times over they can prove that their technical qualifications and achievements were earned fair and square. People won't even bother to find out. They'll just *assume* she got her grades, degrees, honors and awards on her back, got men to do her homework for her, "managed" to take credit for other peoples' work in all other previous work experience, and just happens to "know what the words mean." Except that the a-hole men on the project will simply not listen, assume she's "got it all wrong" and then have to find out the hard way what her point was -- when the little boys walk right into typical traps for young players that she'd warned them about.... having more experience.
"contractors" like this piss me off even more than ethically-impaired sociopaths like Hurd. And for a *prostitute* like that to scream "sexual harassment" when he gets tired of her just makes a mockery of *real* cases of sexual harassment, which sorry -- goes on ALL the time.
...and the students learn absolutely dreadful sentence construction besides!
Honestly, your point is very well taken, if I understand it correctly.
The certs you would have to go through to officially teach programming in the schools are so demeaning and outdated, that no programmer would do it -- and I've never met a teacher, even in the hard sciences or tech, who even knew what 'programming a computer' was: they were downright suspicious of the practice, because they couldn't distinguish it from 'hacking'.
They're certified to teach to the test, which means basic MS user skills, and maybe swapping boards in PCs and re-installing...you got it: windows.
Actually, if I were "Blonde [sic]" I'd prefer a brain scan than people just assuming I was stupid and making stupid career recommendations based on their stupid assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Something is lost and must be found!
St Anthony, patron saint of lost car keys and unmatched socks, is a favorite name for RC search engines.
Wait, that would make a good game!
Zynga's already playing it in real life.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181984/
Ever speculate that "Zynga" and "RICO" would make for some snappy headlines together...?
PLEASE don't try to convince us that you know anything at all when you don't even know the difference between a breach and breeches.
(a) the jurisdiction is Oregon not California, so Hurd may well be SOL
(b) even in CA, they haven't been "disallowed", they just have to adhere to rather widely accepted guidelines (e.g. the non-compete clause must place reasonable limitations on geographical and time extents)
OOOh, they have to parse html? Wow, that must be sooo hard....NOT!
And relevancy ranking has been beaten to death by the information retrieval people, for decades.
Try again, kimosabe.
But Google's search algorithm is published -- there's even a helpful book about it, Amy Langville's "PageRank and beyond" which demonstrates that it's no more complicated than the linear algebra you learned in your sophomore year of engineering school.
...strange death spiral indeed.
"'adhere to EEOC guidelines'" is not leadership because it's "memorizing a bunch of artificially imposed minutia that is not very interesting"?
Well, you're right. Leadership that promotes objectivity and fairness regardless of gender, race, childbearing status or age will simply not have to worry about adherence to EEOC guidelines--because the leader will have made it very clear how people are to be treated and evaluated by both their peers, their reports, and by management.
Instead of playing "divide and conquer" along race, religious, gender, and age lines in order to maintain his own petty authority by keeping his charges fighting with each other instead of *him* (and bad leaders like this are almost always insecure unqualified white males promoted beyond their actual abilities because of their lame white maleness), a *real* leader can motivate everyone to do their best work by making it clear that good work -- not good looks -- is what's noticed and rewarded.
Interestingly, because women, African-Americans, Latinos and particularly Latinas have to be grossly overqualified and between two and three times harder working than their white male counterparts, and since they are so used to never getting a fair shake -- simply BEING FAIR is a big surprise to us.
Google's ranking algorithm *is* public. Read Amy Langville's book, "Google's PageRank and Beyond."
What isn't public is how the values of certain thresholds are determined to, for example, weed out link farms and add small statistical variations to the link adjacency matrix so that it can be more easily solved. These are determined heuristically -- trial and error, in essence.
The devil is in the details, but who cares -- search indexes are easy enough to build and even easier to filter and skew.
Google is just flattering itself by pretending there's something big and complicated beyond the linear algebra and statistics we all studied freshman or sophomore year in engineering school behind this.
You'll have to hire a patent lawyer?
Because you can't figure out how to use the USPTO web site? Or you've never heard of such a thing as a patent agent?
You only need a lawyer to litigate, not to investigate.
...on the inside of the toilet bowl lid.
lol
It's all true.
Former Justice John Paul Stevens was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, for example. Oh, and he *started* his judicial career at 50, in the Nixon administration.
Few federal judges are appointed before their 40's. At Google, by contrast, anyone 40 or older is eligible for the "Greyglers" -- their lame and left handed attempt to make "old people" feel less isolated.
Don't get me started.
Hi there! I started programming professionally in 1978 on mainframes and micros, upgraded my skills to that then-new unix boxes (4.2, 4.3 BSD) throughout the 80's, stayed current as all those new Unix Workstations came out, and then to the Linux and web programming (server side of course) in the 90's. Picked up SQL and now noSQL database skills in the mean time.
It's all more relevant than ever, isn't it? After EDIFACT, XML was like a breath of fresh air, and after XML, JSON was like a breath of fresh *clean* air. Python is more fun than C++, C still makes cleaner system interfaces than C++. Ruby, Java and Scala are pretty much a POS, but the kiddies haven't quite figured that out yet. The kiddie managers keep going for silver bullets less and less likely to dig them out of a hole ("Java site failed? oh here's a bright young man who will reprogram the whole thing in Ruby! Ruby failed? Oh, here's another bright young man who will reprogram the whole thing in Scala!") Face. Palm.
When the whole enterprise turns to custard, it turns out to be some basic easy fix in the guts of the code they were afraid to touch -- you know, the C parts, with the system calls. Lol.
I'm well into my third decade of continuous employment as a programmer and still love it.
Every once in a while an employer will try to move me into management because "women are so good with people" and watch them try to credit my male co-workers with code *I* wrote -- when there's a perfectly good code repository that fails them when they try to back up their ill considered opinions with facts. It's hilarious.
...Actually Google tried that "company culture" line of crap out on Brian Reid, and it's actually digging them further into a hole -- because the "stray remarks" doctrine no longer applies in that case -- since "stray remarks" are indicative of "company culture."
It's funny how the things companies try to keep themselves off the hook tend to be the very things that hoist them in the high-profile cases.
Ah, the irony, sweet irony.
...and just as illegal as discrimination based on childbearing status and gender, I may add.
This is a really balanced and thoughtful article, giltwist -- and agree with you that the benefits of solitary study, or in the virtual company of others, under virtual guidance has a lot to offer.
I would say, though, that a student's physical surroundings and level of comfort, and meatspace social environment -- including immediate and extended family -- have a huge influence on how persistent and motivated she or he is, especially in more challenging areas.
Think about it -- the first thing an online community tries to figure out when they really connect is...how to meet up! Isn't that funny?
When you actually look at why and how failing schools are failing, it is, in large part, economics and attention. The rich schools do well while the poor schools fail, not because the rich schools have more resources or better teachers or smarter students...but because the kids at poor schools come in tired, hungry, stressed and often abused.
Simply offering breakfast, lunch and wholesome supervised after-school activities (sports, mathletes, debate club, AV or just a quiet place to study) makes a bigger difference than all the computer labs and fancy landscaping and moderne architecture combined.
I was a poor kid in a rich district, so luckily I was surrounded by intellectually switched-on kids (thanks to tracking!) and, yes, got free lunch (and free run of the library) and learned that if I got up *real* early and made myself breakfast, I would have a couple hours of utterly silent time in the house to study and finish up my homework. Otherwise my studies (and my sustenance) had to compete with a house full of screaming kids and parents, blaring televisions and stereos and the constant demand to clean up after all of them, as the oldest daughter in a house where both parents worked. Yet I acquired some kind of "herd immunity" from the insanity of a large chaotic family by being surrounded by being surrounded by kids from a more secure background -- they went out for sports, so I went out for sports; when they were applying for top schools, I, having better AP scores than a lot of them, did too. And got into better schools than any of them. It was the interaction with teachers, coaches and my classmates that made this happen -- lucky to be in a good school district, and at least have a roof over my head and adequate nutrition, medical care and rest.
The vast majority of kids these days don't even have that these days. Look at the statistics on childhood poverty. Look how poorly single mothers, in particular, are treated in the workplace: no family medical or dental plan, not enough resources to put food on the table or maintain a stable address. And when the kids come in tired, hungry and mentally stressed, it's suddenly a "teacher quality issue" and "not enough computers" that's the problem -- as defined by the companies getting rich off of training more teachers to throw into the fray, developing more tests to cycle them through faster, and building impressive computer labs.
and, yet, they've gotten your attention sufficiently to get you to repeat their name! No such thing as bad publicity!
And...dare I say it to a chiark? You are like putty in their hands. ssh into their site next time. :)
How is "AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so..." any different from bog standard hop count updates on existing routers, and routing on the basis of the shortest path?
I think the authors are playing semantic games here, not doing research.
Really the Google-Verizon statement in favor of net neutrality "in principle" (but clearly not in practice!) is right up there with "Ignorance is Strength."
Utterly.
Hilarious.
It only takes ONE "contractor" like this in a company to totally discredit any other incoming women, no matter how many times over they can prove that their technical qualifications and achievements were earned fair and square. People won't even bother to find out. They'll just *assume* she got her grades, degrees, honors and awards on her back, got men to do her homework for her, "managed" to take credit for other peoples' work in all other previous work experience, and just happens to "know what the words mean." Except that the a-hole men on the project will simply not listen, assume she's "got it all wrong" and then have to find out the hard way what her point was -- when the little boys walk right into typical traps for young players that she'd warned them about .... having more experience.
"contractors" like this piss me off even more than ethically-impaired sociopaths like Hurd. And for a *prostitute* like that to scream "sexual harassment" when he gets tired of her just makes a mockery of *real* cases of sexual harassment, which sorry -- goes on ALL the time.
...and the students learn absolutely dreadful sentence construction besides!
Honestly, your point is very well taken, if I understand it correctly.
The certs you would have to go through to officially teach programming in the schools are so demeaning and outdated, that no programmer would do it -- and I've never met a teacher, even in the hard sciences or tech, who even knew what 'programming a computer' was: they were downright suspicious of the practice, because they couldn't distinguish it from 'hacking'.
They're certified to teach to the test, which means basic MS user skills, and maybe swapping boards in PCs and re-installing...you got it: windows.
Some Like It Hot. La Dolce Vida. To Kill a Mockingbird. Young Frankenstein. Sunset Boulevard. The Last Picture Show.
Do they really think having 3D CGI fairies fluttering around the screen would really make these movies better than they already are?
Who do they think they're kidding?
Actually, if I were "Blonde [sic]" I'd prefer a brain scan than people just assuming I was stupid and making stupid career recommendations based on their stupid assumptions.
Why is it that hacker Barbie saying "math class is tough" assumed to be copping out?
Try this one on:
"Math class is tough, BUT I'm TOUGHER! roar!"