This would be a sensible match; probably because of the culture differences, but also the similarities.
The easy, "what's different?", part first. East vs West coast external cultural differences aside what is left is b2b and b2c (business, consumer) channel differences. The "standard" IBM business model for the PC helped to spawn an industry, Apple differentiated itself through the human element and ease of use aspects in order to survive in an extremely cut-throat industry.
Desktop publishing as such did not exist, except in that most arcane of markup languages, TeX. Then came a usable page descriptive language (PostScript), a nice user interface from the Xerox Palo Alto Research establishment and the ability of Apple to produce first the Lisa, and then the Mac.
DTP was the killer app for that platform, just as Visicalc was for the Apple II. (and indirectly, IBM and the PC)
This value-added benefit makes Apple a lively contender in introducing new technologies with sufficient margin to support a dealer channel to the consumer.
And the similarities?
Both IBM and Apple are known in their respective fields for dependable, "boring" products and services. Both have inculcated unique corporate cultural elements (belonging) in their employees. Both have memorable CEO's with some idea of where the better opportunities are liable to present themselves.
Whatever direction they take, both organizations can learn from each others best practices.
Whether they choose to do this, or not, depends on the ability to spin^h^h^h^h convince the Corporate Investors that this would be a Good Thing, and lead to more Return on Investment aka Profit.
This little tidbit is indicative, perhaps, of the clear moral rot directly attributable to past generations.
We Modern Thinkers Strongly Believe that Greed is Good. From the individualistic "grab the money and run" crowd, to the Corporatist Wannabe who lusts after the contents of your wallet, we are forming an invincible faction in this most debased of societies.
And what is the basis of this moral rot, this undeniable perversion of aravice? This creeping horror that threatens the very foundation of a society dedicated to rapine, immolation and pillage?
This proud society that has "might is right" political buttons, and sufficient numbers of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass distruction to make everyone agree with our point of view? And light automatic weapons to punctuate our arguments? What is that vile affectation that threatens us?
In that word of debased infamy
SHARING
Previous misguided generations actually thought that this sharing and fairness benefited society. They actually had entire religions teaching this indoctrination of so-called ethical values. With some efforts we have infiltrated those organizations and rendered them ineffective. When have you seen those precepts being applied lately?
We have had most success converting heirarchical organizations to our view - consider what we have successfully done to the Buddhist, or Christian organizations.
Why, one of our successes is requiring the needy to pay for their shelter in inclement weather! Next time you see a pan-handler ignore them ( you will anyway) with luck, they will freeze to death in the cold and no longer bother you. But it looks sooo good for the books on the Charitable Administrations. The appearence of being helpful is oh so more rewarding when you can commit the small indignities on the helpless. Be assured in our infiltrated "charitable" organizations, the milk of human kindness is a facial come shot. Really.
What is worse, our ancestors actually had the temerity to twist the mathematics to prove that a policy of co-operation has a greater systemic advantage then that of rugged individualism. Something called game theory.
A Pox on Both their Houses!
We will persevere, we have the firepower to do it. Lawyers are standing by - Disagree at your peril....
"I have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has looked into me.
Not a pretty heading, but the Internet, though the greatest index that I have used, does have drawbacks. They are: database rot; non-referred opinion masquarading as fact; outright flaunting of responsibility and a lack of respect of others.
Database rot - typically 2% of entries become incorrect per month. Interestingly, the cost of carrying physical inventory is deemed to be about 1-2% by the accounting profession. We won't get into what inventory turns means in databases...;^>
Non- referred information means that there is no scholarly agreement on the verifiable truth of facts presented. Opinions are fine, but contrast the popular Zen of anything with the scholarly work of D.T. Suzuki (who, by the way corresponded with Thomas Merton). Entire areas of knowledge require a discipline of practice and conversation just to begin to access their content.
To express an opinion, is wonderful, but to speak from experience, to the needs of the listener, in a mentoring manner, without knowing the person is a little dangerous. I personally have misspoken more then once, without realizing the harm that would come of it, in that circumstance.
Respect for other people can disappear in a mass of flameage. Hasty words often carry little wisdom. Who hasn't felt the seductive draw of flamebait?
On the other hand, as a quick overview the net can't be beaten - And I use it to cull the things I am researching. But you need a broad viewpoint, grounded in the physical reality to effectively use the internet in its' full potential.
This is a business admission that the market share for winCE is, in fact, dropping like a stone. The embedded market uses Linux, which allows the tailoring of capabilities, a general understanding and lots of third party documentation ( like o'Rielly). And, the development platform is congruent to the target platform - increasing productivity. I would not use WinCE for a design, and I am a hardware engineer, with a real need to keep the costs way down. WinCE was 50 bucks, which is a lot of money in an embedded product.
And, dammit, even being fairly inarticulate in software, I have been able in the past to debug the hardware using linux - even if I had to learn the software tools to do it, on the run, as it were.
Others probably have similar experiences.
The mathematics that I believe should be taught as the very first thing would be linear algebra - in all its formal glory.
This may not go over particularly well, but a mathematician that I respect a great deal offered this comment:" Most of mathematics deals with linear things; since linear mathematics applies to a lot of mathematics itself, this should be the very first thing taught. The formal proofs and other mechanics of mathematics are included in the price of admission. And, it has immediate practical relevance. The concepts are simpler then real analysis." ( the basis of the calculus)
In my work, I found this to be the case. Electrical Engineering is now full of group theory ( abstract algebra of galois fields for error correction, coding, spread spectrum stuff, etc, and it all runs on micros - which is within CS)
At a guess, I would have to settle for what Knuth considers to be important, or courses which make the reading of the Art of Computer Progamming easier. Not because Knuth is Knuth, but he does have a very practical view of algorithms and their design.
Other posters have fairly extensive lists as to what they found useful - reading them ( and modding them up) would be a nice gesture!
First, it is a better absorber then what we have now, which, as someone pointed out, would make an incremental improvement for things such as solar collectors.
Second, it may find some powerful uses as a black body emitter, which would have some applications for cooling. Specifically, there is a window in the atmosphere where energy can leave the atmosphere ( around one of the IR ammonia lines, IIRC) this may alleviate the greenhouse effect... maybe...
As one of my Professors used to say "Progress is measured by progress in Materials Science". He might have been biased, however...
I would be very interested to find out the wavelengths where this is effective.
There are three types of reflectance that I am aware of: mirrors; diffuse reflectors (lambertian surfaces) and a special case of reflectance as found on a dusty surface, such as the moon( which is an aggragation of spherical lambertian surfaces, with special properties). Anyone else know of any others?
Interesting point about the communal kitchen - I found that usually there will be one or two real cooks. Others will clean for prepared food. People tend to organize themselves when they get a net gain. Unfortunately, Adam Smiths Invisible Hand is a poor dishwasher...so we took turns.
As to the apparent disrepair, this may have been true. However, in New Zealand, they deliberately overgraze in a paddock system. The high animal density is good for a short period. The manure gets stomped into the soil, and everything, including the weeds is eaten. Then the land is let to lie fallow. The productivity goes way up, and weed control is very easy.
It seems difficult to believe that people, whos' dependence on the land, and close ties to it, would not be aware of this intuitively. But then, that would be oral history, and history is written by the winners....
http://www.soilfoodweb.com has some interesting information on soil microbiology.
Unfortunately, they cannot identify the stuff in the back of the 'fridge in any known geekhouse...
Cheers!
Although RMS does arouse some passions within the slashdot community, in this, I believe, he is right.
There is, in English Common Law history, a subject area, called the Enclosures Acts, where vast quantities of land were removed from common use, and awarded to landowners in what was a thinly veiled land grab.
It had justification, of course. Private Ownership was deemed more efficient by those that grabbed the land. Far be it for the government to disagree. The whole idea of common weal ( as in commonwealth) was called The Tragedy of The Commons.
It would appear that history is attempting to repeat itself. If computing can be controlled by a trusted source - Who will that trusted source be?
This age old problem, can be solved in a number of ways - a dictatorship, or, a democracy, or...
Not quite trusting my fellow man, I think I would rather do my own choosing. But then, I use GPL'd software. A lot. And your choice will be?
The last mile has been a stumbling block for telcos for about two decades, now. Available silicon can easily handle fibre to the curb, but getting it in already existing buildings has been a problem.
The ISDN suffered from unknown physical plant characteristics - stubs, splitting pairs, and other analogue phone cruft seriously debilitated ISDN acceptance. ADSL leapfrogged the ISDN performance by learning from the mistakes in the ISDN development/deployment.
Hopefully, this repurposing of technology may be just the boost that an ailing telecommunucations industry needs. The hardware portion of the high-tech sector has suffered an abundance of losses after the dot-com meltdown.
The internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. It has redundancy, fault tolerance, and, with GNU ( and BSD and..) software, has an open access to most anyone that would wish to invest the time to master it.
The internet, and free, untrammelled communication between real persons has as its' only threat unrestrained greed. Call it corporatism, or totalitarianism or any other type of --ism that you wish; there are a class of people that have nothing better to do then to manipulate their fellows.
It is a start, but I do believe that until the internet has cellular -style, personally owned co-operative network nodes in an RF web, the freedom we enjoy to-day could be extinguished by corporate/regulatory/governmental fiat.
I don't think such a world would be enjoyable to live in... but YMMV...
This is very heartening news, as usually the professors that make the course material do research on that subject. Usually the course note depth is directly proportional to the intellectual passion for the subject.
However....
There is a lot more involved in mastering technical material then straight memorization of endless facts. In order to organize the facts, a simple mnemonic (theory - ok, maybe not so simple..) is used as an index, or memory trigger to a body of knowledge. This uses the ability to chunk complex sets of information into an abstraction. Recalling the information is walking the (chunked) tree. (Although Ted Nelson's ZigZag
http://www.xanadu.com/zigzag/ might be a better representation). Making sure that those processes are firmly grasped by the wetware ( ie the brain) is the tough part.
Also, a series of tests, exercises, assignments, etc. are required to cement that knowledge into long term memory.
In addition, there is ( as a poster has pointed out) the important human element in learning. Camradarie is not only found in the Military, but even in Slashdot! Flames and trolls notwithstanding...
Universities, despite their flaws, are still where you would find the Hackish majority. I blame the libraries, personally. Industry is ok, but you don't get the really ugly ( read - fun) problems there.
But, if problem sets are also released, I for one will be dancing in the streets!
It is necessary to train the sales force as to what is actually achiveable - this can be difficult. You are helped greatly by the simple fact that if the product is not on time, or stable, the salesperson looks bad too.
The single hardest thing to do is to find out what the customer really *needs*. To define it correctly, both you and the salesperson have to meet with the customer. This can be a three step:
1) Decide with the sales person what is the information that is needed from the customer meeting. The customer will have a whole bunch of wants, but he will not articulate his needs at all well. You will have to coax it out of him. The summary of this premeeting will be a table - features -> benefits to the customer -> costs.
While you are with the salesperson, ask him what he feels will be the next step in increasing his business in the account. This is an unusual question from a techie, and should score you business points which you can negotiate with, later.
2)The customer meeting, itself. Have a presentation as to what areas are do-able, and a relative idea of the costs ( especially elapsed time). If possible, try to block the project up into smaller deliverables, so that there is continued involvement with the customer. At this point you are negotiating what gets built, when.
Add feedback loops and kill points so that the risky items are clearly marked out. Don't ever commit to calendar time at this point - the analysis is not done, yet. Formally, this is scoping the project, and is an important part of success in project management.
3) Post meeting: document early and often, and now let the salesperson earn his keep by keeping close to the customer. The salesperson is your interrupt mask - make sure that he is the point man for the effort. Appreciate him, preferably in front of his boss. Sales is a people job.
Most of the grief I have been witness to has been squarly the problem of poor project manangement, unstructured, unprepared meetings, and general cluelessness. You can mitigate cluelessness, and the other things are either under your control, or can be influenced by encouraging the right questions to be asked, or asking them yourself.
Hope this helps. It's my personal opinion that the developers should not live in a cave, but should rub elbows with the outside world, from time to time. Large organizations have special people to act as technical bridges, but in a small company, you get to do this yourself...I like small companies for that reason.
The terminal man, if memory serves, was about using electric shocks for (negative) neural feedback to control seizures.
Problem was, the neural pathway in the person so wired, included a strong masochistic pathway - so instead of a purely negative feedback, the behavior had a positive feedback overtone. The resultant behavior was not pretty, as I recall...
Now fiddling with the limbic system via wires has yet to be achieved as a regular diagnostic practice.
How is this potentially related to the Slashdot crowd?
There are the psychoactive prescription drugs, that seem to be increasingly popular, and are certainly profitable, with potentially similar effects on affects, as the recent article on the post-Columbine lawsuit is alleging.
It would be probably a good idea that a specialist in psychiatry do the monitoring/ prescription of these substances - most of which do not have the longer history of the illegal psychedelics and other mood altering drugs. The family physician may not realize the severity of some of the side effects.
Perhaps there is no quick fix for that class of problem. But YMMV...
Slashdot Mirror
This would be a sensible match; probably because of the culture differences, but also the similarities.
The easy, "what's different?", part first.
East vs West coast external cultural differences aside what is left is b2b and b2c (business, consumer) channel differences. The "standard" IBM business model for the PC helped to spawn an industry, Apple differentiated itself through the human element and ease of use aspects in order to survive in an extremely cut-throat industry.
Desktop publishing as such did not exist, except in that most arcane of markup languages, TeX.
Then came a usable page descriptive language (PostScript), a nice user interface from the Xerox Palo Alto Research establishment and the ability of Apple to produce first the Lisa, and then the Mac.
DTP was the killer app for that platform, just as Visicalc was for the Apple II. (and indirectly, IBM and the PC)
This value-added benefit makes Apple a lively contender in introducing new technologies with sufficient margin to support a dealer channel to the consumer.
And the similarities?
Both IBM and Apple are known in their respective fields for dependable, "boring" products and services.
Both have inculcated unique corporate cultural elements (belonging) in their employees.
Both have memorable CEO's with some idea of where the better opportunities are liable to present themselves.
Whatever direction they take, both organizations can learn from each others best practices.
Whether they choose to do this, or not, depends on the ability to spin^h^h^h^h convince the Corporate Investors that this would be a Good Thing, and lead to more Return on Investment aka Profit.
Money will Boldly Go, where Egos Fear to Tread.
This little tidbit is indicative, perhaps, of the clear moral rot directly attributable to past generations.
We Modern Thinkers Strongly Believe that Greed is Good. From the individualistic "grab the money and run" crowd, to the Corporatist Wannabe who lusts after the contents of your wallet, we are forming an invincible faction in this most debased of societies.
And what is the basis of this moral rot, this undeniable perversion of aravice? This creeping horror that threatens the very foundation of a society dedicated to rapine, immolation and pillage?
This proud society that has "might is right" political buttons, and sufficient numbers of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass distruction to make everyone agree with our point of view? And light automatic weapons to punctuate our arguments? What is that vile affectation that threatens us?
In that word of debased infamy
SHARING
Previous misguided generations actually thought that this sharing and fairness benefited society. They actually had entire religions teaching this indoctrination of so-called ethical values. With some efforts we have infiltrated those organizations and rendered them ineffective. When have you seen those precepts being applied lately? We have had most success converting heirarchical organizations to our view - consider what we have successfully done to the Buddhist, or Christian organizations.
Why, one of our successes is requiring the needy to pay for their shelter in inclement weather! Next time you see a pan-handler ignore them ( you will anyway) with luck, they will freeze to death in the cold and no longer bother you. But it looks sooo good for the books on the Charitable Administrations. The appearence of being helpful is oh so more rewarding when you can commit the small indignities on the helpless. Be assured in our infiltrated "charitable" organizations, the milk of human kindness is a facial come shot. Really.
What is worse, our ancestors actually had the temerity to twist the mathematics to prove that a policy of co-operation has a greater systemic advantage then that of rugged individualism. Something called game theory.
A Pox on Both their Houses!
We will persevere, we have the firepower to do it. Lawyers are standing by - Disagree at your peril....
"I have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has looked into me.
Not a pretty heading, but the Internet, though the greatest index that I have used, does have drawbacks.
They are: database rot; non-referred opinion masquarading as fact; outright flaunting of responsibility and a lack of respect of others.
Database rot - typically 2% of entries become incorrect per month. Interestingly, the cost of carrying physical inventory is deemed to be about 1-2% by the accounting profession. We won't get into what inventory turns means in databases ... ;^>
Non- referred information means that there is no scholarly agreement on the verifiable truth of facts presented. Opinions are fine, but contrast the popular Zen of anything with the scholarly work of D.T. Suzuki (who, by the way corresponded with Thomas Merton). Entire areas of knowledge require a discipline of practice and conversation just to begin to access their content.
To express an opinion, is wonderful, but to speak from experience, to the needs of the listener, in a mentoring manner, without knowing the person is a little dangerous. I personally have misspoken more then once, without realizing the harm that would come of it, in that circumstance.
Respect for other people can disappear in a mass of flameage. Hasty words often carry little wisdom. Who hasn't felt the seductive draw of flamebait?
On the other hand, as a quick overview the net can't be beaten - And I use it to cull the things I am researching. But you need a broad viewpoint, grounded in the physical reality to effectively use the internet in its' full potential.
This is a business admission that the market share for winCE is, in fact, dropping like a stone. The embedded market uses Linux, which allows the tailoring of capabilities, a general understanding and lots of third party documentation ( like o'Rielly). And, the development platform is congruent to the target platform - increasing productivity.
I would not use WinCE for a design, and I am a hardware engineer, with a real need to keep the costs way down. WinCE was 50 bucks, which is a lot of money in an embedded product.
And, dammit, even being fairly inarticulate in software, I have been able in the past to debug the hardware using linux - even if I had to learn the software tools to do it, on the run, as it were.
Others probably have similar experiences.
The mathematics that I believe should be taught as the very first thing would be linear algebra - in all its formal glory.
This may not go over particularly well, but a mathematician that I respect a great deal offered this comment:" Most of mathematics deals with linear things; since linear mathematics applies to a lot of mathematics itself, this should be the very first thing taught. The formal proofs and other mechanics of mathematics are included in the price of admission. And, it has immediate practical relevance. The concepts are simpler then real analysis." ( the basis of the calculus)
In my work, I found this to be the case. Electrical Engineering is now full of group theory ( abstract algebra of galois fields for error correction, coding, spread spectrum stuff, etc, and it all runs on micros - which is within CS)
At a guess, I would have to settle for what Knuth considers to be important, or courses which make the reading of the Art of Computer Progamming easier. Not because Knuth is Knuth, but he does have a very practical view of algorithms and their design.
Other posters have fairly extensive lists as to what they found useful - reading them ( and modding them up) would be a nice gesture!
This will prove to be useful, for two reasons:
First, it is a better absorber then what we have now, which, as someone pointed out, would make an incremental improvement for things such as solar collectors.
Second, it may find some powerful uses as a black body emitter, which would have some applications for cooling. Specifically, there is a window in the atmosphere where energy can leave the atmosphere ( around one of the IR ammonia lines, IIRC) this may alleviate the greenhouse effect ... maybe ...
As one of my Professors used to say "Progress is measured by progress in Materials Science". He might have been biased, however...
I would be very interested to find out the wavelengths where this is effective.
There are three types of reflectance that I am aware of: mirrors; diffuse reflectors (lambertian surfaces) and a special case of reflectance as found on a dusty surface, such as the moon( which is an aggragation of spherical lambertian surfaces, with special properties). Anyone else know of any others?
Interesting point about the communal kitchen - I found that usually there will be one or two real cooks. Others will clean for prepared food. People tend to organize themselves when they get a net gain. Unfortunately, Adam Smiths Invisible Hand is a poor dishwasher...so we took turns.
As to the apparent disrepair, this may have been true. However, in New Zealand, they deliberately overgraze in a paddock system. The high animal density is good for a short period. The manure gets stomped into the soil, and everything, including the weeds is eaten. Then the land is let to lie fallow. The productivity goes way up, and weed control is very easy.
It seems difficult to believe that people, whos' dependence on the land, and close ties to it, would not be aware of this intuitively. But then, that would be oral history, and history is written by the winners....
http://www.soilfoodweb.com has some interesting information on soil microbiology. Unfortunately, they cannot identify the stuff in the back of the 'fridge in any known geekhouse... Cheers!
Although RMS does arouse some passions within the slashdot community, in this, I believe, he is right.
There is, in English Common Law history, a subject area, called the Enclosures Acts, where vast quantities of land were removed from common use, and awarded to landowners in what was a thinly veiled land grab.
It had justification, of course. Private Ownership was deemed more efficient by those that grabbed the land. Far be it for the government to disagree. The whole idea of common weal ( as in commonwealth) was called The Tragedy of The Commons.It would appear that history is attempting to repeat itself. If computing can be controlled by a trusted source - Who will that trusted source be?
This age old problem, can be solved in a number of ways - a dictatorship, or, a democracy, or...
Not quite trusting my fellow man, I think I would rather do my own choosing. But then, I use GPL'd software. A lot. And your choice will be?
The last mile has been a stumbling block for telcos for about two decades, now. Available silicon can easily handle fibre to the curb, but getting it in already existing buildings has been a problem.
The ISDN suffered from unknown physical plant characteristics - stubs, splitting pairs, and other analogue phone cruft seriously debilitated ISDN acceptance. ADSL leapfrogged the ISDN performance by learning from the mistakes in the ISDN development/deployment.
Hopefully, this repurposing of technology may be just the boost that an ailing telecommunucations industry needs. The hardware portion of the high-tech sector has suffered an abundance of losses after the dot-com meltdown.
The internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. It has redundancy, fault tolerance, and, with GNU ( and BSD and..) software, has an open access to most anyone that would wish to invest the time to master it.
The internet, and free, untrammelled communication between real persons has as its' only threat unrestrained greed. Call it corporatism, or totalitarianism or any other type of --ism that you wish; there are a class of people that have nothing better to do then to manipulate their fellows.
It is a start, but I do believe that until the internet has cellular -style, personally owned co-operative network nodes in an RF web, the freedom we enjoy to-day could be extinguished by corporate/regulatory/governmental fiat.
I don't think such a world would be enjoyable to live in... but YMMV...
This is very heartening news, as usually the professors that make the course material do research on that subject. Usually the course note depth is directly proportional to the intellectual passion for the subject.
However....
There is a lot more involved in mastering technical material then straight memorization of endless facts. In order to organize the facts, a simple mnemonic (theory - ok, maybe not so simple..) is used as an index, or memory trigger to a body of knowledge. This uses the ability to chunk complex sets of information into an abstraction. Recalling the information is walking the (chunked) tree. (Although Ted Nelson's ZigZag http://www.xanadu.com/zigzag/ might be a better representation). Making sure that those processes are firmly grasped by the wetware ( ie the brain) is the tough part. Also, a series of tests, exercises, assignments, etc. are required to cement that knowledge into long term memory.
In addition, there is ( as a poster has pointed out) the important human element in learning. Camradarie is not only found in the Military, but even in Slashdot! Flames and trolls notwithstanding...
Universities, despite their flaws, are still where you would find the Hackish majority. I blame the libraries, personally. Industry is ok, but you don't get the really ugly ( read - fun) problems there.
But, if problem sets are also released, I for one will be dancing in the streets!
It is necessary to train the sales force as to what is actually achiveable - this can be difficult. You are helped greatly by the simple fact that if the product is not on time, or stable, the salesperson looks bad too.
The single hardest thing to do is to find out what the customer really *needs*. To define it correctly, both you and the salesperson have to meet with the customer. This can be a three step:
1) Decide with the sales person what is the information that is needed from the customer meeting. The customer will have a whole bunch of wants, but he will not articulate his needs at all well. You will have to coax it out of him. The summary of this premeeting will be a table - features -> benefits to the customer -> costs. While you are with the salesperson, ask him what he feels will be the next step in increasing his business in the account. This is an unusual question from a techie, and should score you business points which you can negotiate with, later.
2)The customer meeting, itself. Have a presentation as to what areas are do-able, and a relative idea of the costs ( especially elapsed time). If possible, try to block the project up into smaller deliverables, so that there is continued involvement with the customer. At this point you are negotiating what gets built, when. Add feedback loops and kill points so that the risky items are clearly marked out. Don't ever commit to calendar time at this point - the analysis is not done, yet. Formally, this is scoping the project, and is an important part of success in project management.
3) Post meeting: document early and often, and now let the salesperson earn his keep by keeping close to the customer. The salesperson is your interrupt mask - make sure that he is the point man for the effort. Appreciate him, preferably in front of his boss. Sales is a people job.
Most of the grief I have been witness to has been squarly the problem of poor project manangement, unstructured, unprepared meetings, and general cluelessness. You can mitigate cluelessness, and the other things are either under your control, or can be influenced by encouraging the right questions to be asked, or asking them yourself.Hope this helps. It's my personal opinion that the developers should not live in a cave, but should rub elbows with the outside world, from time to time. Large organizations have special people to act as technical bridges, but in a small company, you get to do this yourself...I like small companies for that reason.
The terminal man, if memory serves, was about using electric shocks for (negative) neural feedback to control seizures.
Problem was, the neural pathway in the person so wired, included a strong masochistic pathway - so instead of a purely negative feedback, the behavior had a positive feedback overtone. The resultant behavior was not pretty, as I recall...
Now fiddling with the limbic system via wires has yet to be achieved as a regular diagnostic practice.
How is this potentially related to the Slashdot crowd?
There are the psychoactive prescription drugs, that seem to be increasingly popular, and are certainly profitable, with potentially similar effects on affects, as the recent article on the post-Columbine lawsuit is alleging.
It would be probably a good idea that a specialist in psychiatry do the monitoring/ prescription of these substances - most of which do not have the longer history of the illegal psychedelics and other mood altering drugs. The family physician may not realize the severity of some of the side effects.
Perhaps there is no quick fix for that class of problem. But YMMV...