Hardware, maybe, for laptops... different people have different speed/battery life/size needs. Desktops, you reduce that list to speed (fancy graphics, or extreme storage only rarely pops up as a need), so I think you can just have a list of a couple standard models you update every few months.
Software? Configuration? Are you kidding me? 99% of users should have their boxes locked down tight.
Obviously, special allowances need to be made for programmers, testers, and the IT staff themselves, but even there, I wouldn't underestimate the benefits of standardization; I just think practically it's going to be more limited in scope, it has to be mostly self imposed or you'll have a revolt on your hands.
You're right that age and wisdom are only weakly correlated and your manager does sound like a dud. That said, wisdom is the product of intelligence, experience, and HUMILITY.
Take another look at yourself by the last criterion lest you become dogmatic and compound your foolishness (everyone has some even if they don't realize it yet) in the years to come.
I'm not trying to lecture you, but I've being canned for being arrogant and not listening to what I thought was bad management (it was bad management, mostly, but I addressed it the wrong way). I am hearing a slightly younger version of myself echoed in your remarks.
That, and of course lack of wisdom will hurt you even more if you don't
Offer more money, maybe significantly more. There are a lot of very capable people who are not on the market per se, but would move for the right opportunity. Make this the right opportunity.
You also need to make your interview process less painful. I always recommend technical screen first since it's more objective and if you start with automatic tests much less time consuming for your staff (online tests are ok, I like to bring people in and give a timed development task to an interface I can test automatically).
Another good screen is have the candidate submit a code sample. If the candidate doesn't have ANYTHING outside of work that they're willing to show, invite them to whip something simple up. If they come back with something, they merit at least some attention. If they don't submit a sample, usually they don't merit attention (but be willing to make an exception for a solid resume and EXCELLENT performance on the automatic tests).
After this, use whatever you like to pick who is right for you... you'll have a more manageable number of candidates and they'll all be pretty good as long as they don't have some sort of major personality issue.
These are all very, very valid points, but it's more or less impossible to come up with good estimates for any of the piece parts here, never mind the lot of them. Garbage in, garbage out. Not to say this is without value... it makes for a great presentation to management, but your instincts are usually a better guide than a spreadsheet filled with SWAG, especially since there's no S for a lot of these numbers until you gather data yourself.
What are your instincts telling you? Listen to them. Also listen to other people with experience with the new target language/framework and veterans who've been through rewrites. If you strongly feel that you should try the move the application to a new language/framework, explain this to management and together find small sized pieces of the system that you can rewrite independently in the target language/framework at times that don't hit the business too badly.
Expect it to be a rough at first, any time you're moving to new stuff there's a learning curve, but take a look at the final product... is it better? How much better? By what measures? As long as the experience wasn't an unmitigated disaster, try it once or twice more. Then you can fill your spreadsheet with a little more S now in your SWAG, but you'll probably know whether you're on the right course or not.
If you're not on the right course, for sure that's a painful realization, but by approaching the rewrite as an experiment rather than a personal crusade, you've insulated yourself and your company from an order of magnitude larger debacle. That maturity is generally appreciated.
If it does work, great... you've have not only a spreadsheet of SWAG, but actual precedent to make the case for the larger system rewrite. Again, coordination with management and business needs is key, but you'll generally get some good backing to actually do it by virtue of having approached this the right way and made your case.
If you don't have an app that isn't well factored enough to make this course practical, you should refactor it within the existing language/framework first... doing a top to bottom rewrite without any experimentation is a recipe for disaster. Also, refactoring within the same language/framework is a lot less risky, and often is a good 80/20 when the desire to do a rewrite hits.
And to rain on this parade some more, this one doesn't look like it's there yet, not even in the lab.
The original article doesn't give any specifics, but links to "some stunning developments this week at MIT".
Follow that link, and you get a little discussion of the process for making the nanotubes, how impressive the carbon nanotubes should be by the math, some digression about batteries vs. capacitors, and couple lines that completely take the wind out of the sails of anyone who's paying attention.
"The challenge has been in reaching the theoretical capacity that Schindall's team originally calculated. So far, the nanotubes can match the energy storage of standard ultracapacitors, but the goal remains to boost that capacity by a factor of five or even 10. "A couple of years ago, we thought we were six months to a year away. And that time has come and gone," he says. "
The article puts an optimistic spin, talking about them trying to release test cells within a year, or possibly a few months.
That's fine, I really do wish them well, but what do we really have here? Another idea with a lot of promise, but this time we don't even have a lab result here that's categorically better to stuff that's already out there!
The problem of our patent system is that those companies with deep enough pockets for a well staffed legal department can currently obtain patents almost without regard to prior art or their obviousness. Once they have a big and broad enough patent portfolio, they can use that stick effectively against competitors who don't have similarly deep pockets.
Occasionally, there's a minor scuffle among competitors at the same tier, but that's much more unusual, there's a lot in the way of informal truces out there, because an outright patent war between, say, IBM and Microsoft would last decades and cost each company very, very dearly.
Adding a property tax on intellectual property would pull some profits away from companies with such portfolios, but wouldn't change the fundamental problem that deep pockets and a big portfolio of broad patents = protection against competitors. The IP bidding war by itself, or as a means to determine the taxable amount is interesting but just compounds the basic problem by transfering to likely even deeper pockets. If the bid is to bring the patent into the open, those bids arehandicapped by the simple fact that monopolies are far more profitable... the only patent this brings into the open are ripped from the hands of those without deep pockets by those with deep pockets, so while it's nice to see things go into the open, it's hard to argue that creates a more competitive landscape overall.
The central problem of our patent system is not that the short term monopoly as compensation for having the idea is such a bad way to do things (you should compensate for the idea in a way that bears some relation to its worth), it's that bad patents are being granted in the first place. Once the bad patents are out there, whether the bidding war is legal staff or directly on the patent, and regardless of whether there's a tax on the idea or not, the system will always favor those will already deep pockets to the detriment of their competitors and society at large.
True, but keep in mind it's not just the hippie stuff thats just there to give people the sense that their doctor is doing something to help them.
There's a lot of "real" medicine, medications and even operations that don't show convincing benefits especially in the long term but have been marketed enough to become mainstream. A lot of the reason the hippie stuff got traction is BECAUSE the "real" medicines weren't really all that effective either, and at least hippie treatments promised freedom from side effects.
Of course, much, much better than either of these is to build up your body's ability to regenerate through diet and exercise. Take the real medicine, too (as long as the side effects aren't worse, and the second opinion agrees that the meds are necessary), but you'll do much more for your longevity and health in the gym than in the doctor's office. Self reliance is the hardest answer to hear, and consequently, the one that most needs to be heard.
So, after TWO YEARS, was this really all worth it, or did you just sort of get dragged through it once they launched the defamation lawsuit? I mean, how many hours did you spend, are you actually seeing any of that judgment money? What impact has this had on your life?
Everyone acting in their individual best interest leads to everyone driving their own cars and clogging the roadways. Let's take that horrible waste of life and see what we can do to cut it down to size.
Public transit is a common suggestion, and nice idea in principle, but it takes a certain level of density to make it work, and most American cities aren't dense enough because they grew to where the land was cheaper, on the assumption of ubiquitous car ownership. Maybe over the span of 75 years or so the outer suburbs and exurbs will wither, but the trillions invested more or less guarantee that it can't happen until the structures start wearing out.
That leaves a few options... commuting at different times, carpooling, slugging, and park and ride style public transit... the latter two depend on businesses to be located in dense clusters which is more often true than residences, but still shakey. Still, it's not a terrible assumption in cities where the traffic is currently worst, so we'll run with it.
Both variable road usage fees and carpool lanes encourage all of the above, but can't fix the problem because in order for the carpool lane to be attractive enough to encourage people to change their habits the surrounding traffic has be substantially slower. Carpool lanes during rush hours may reduce the misery slightly if their usage is in a narrow sweet spot where there are notably fewer vehicles, but actually more people traveling in that lane. That sweet spot can be wider if there are more buses in the carpool lane, but that puts a lower cap on highway driving speed than people are liable to like.
So basically, carpool lanes do help those that can carpool without much difficulty, but they doesn't always help and sometimes hurt other drivers, and when they do help other drivers, it's only so much. So, it's a mixed bag and hard to tune right because you can't set up fractions of a lane for carpool, it's all or nothing.
In contrast, variable rates give you all the flexibility in the world to try an manipulate rates to decrease average travel times to something acceptable. Of course, there's a legitimate question how elastic demand is during peak times, and if this isn't just another way for the government to pick your pocket.
Let's consider the revenue neutral position to try and look at this on its intrinsic merits. Say, that the money raised goes to to reducing gas taxes at the level of government that's paying for the road. Folks who always drive outside the rush pay much less. Folks who still drive during the rush pay much more. Given that road construction/widening is primarily necessary for those who do drive during the rush, and that more maintenance is necessary on these wider roads, that's quite a bit more fair.
Of course, as with anything that asks for people to make decisions out of their pocket, there's concern that it's not fair to the lower middle and lower classes. But as a practical matter, many of those who are poor travel primarily outside rush hours anyway doing shift or part time work. I'd wager this would hit them less hard on average than a gas tax already does. It would hit a lot of office workers (like me) harder, but these are precisely the groups who are generally most able to do their work from home, (I suppose) better equipped to handle the costs when they can't.
Resumes tell you very little, talking sometimes tells a tale, but it's an inefficient way to start.
Best way to start is do a screen based off coding ability (have a set of tests ready against simple problems and ask them to conform their answer to an API). Advantage of this is that it's very objective, and takes little time from your team. Do a screen based off coding ability but with harder problems, too. In both cases, leave just a little ambiguity in the problems to see whether the candidate spots them and asks for clarification, freezes, goes ahead with their assumption without asking. If they're smart enough to ask for clarification, how clearly specifically do they ask?
This will easily filter 90%+.
Next, do a basic knowledge test (never hire a liar). Based on what they put in their resume, ask trivially easy, and maybe a couple medium level obscurity/difficulty questions. If they're dead or really scrambling, don't waste any more time on them. Obviously, the more the knowledge needed on the job meshes with their resume the more this can weigh in a candidates favor.
Finally, try and figure if it's a personality fit. The less scripted this is the better. At the end of as normal a conversation as you can muster (and try to be listening 90% of the time rather than talking), do you have a definite positive feeling that this person would be able to fit in well, fill the gaps you need filled and bring something extra? If no, gotta make that final cut here, too, even if that leaves nobody.
The main problem is that management will tell you this process too picky and making it too hard to find someone. Remind them, you need someone good, tell them that nothing about this process is actually hard, they just need to up the offered salary to attract the interest of good applicants and not waste your time.
Also, remind them how well you would be able to do on all this as a way of hinting you need a raise;-).
When it stops being what's next, and starts being the old format that titles are being dumped in en mass on the cheap.
I have a nice library of VHS tapes, mostly from the 80s and early 90s, and am accumulating DVDs at an increasingly rapid clip. I've spent, maybe 800$ total on easily 200-250 movies.
Coming from an Ada man: "From our experience and that of our customers, we can say that a real programmer writes Ada in any language. "
Um, no. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, different emphasis, and find best application in different domains. It's natural that differences in programming style fall out of that.
I'm a LISP man, so I initially bought into the idea he expresses (replace Ada with LISP), but a few years in the business world have been enough to change my mind. Formal analysis has potential, but is still more often an academic pursuit than an industrial one, so I suspect that insularity is clouding his judgment.
Because everyone feels at least some pressure around New Year's to make resolutions including the weak willed and cynical (95% of us), and because of the holiday season pig-out leaves us ashamed, too many of us fall for the bait... gym discounts generally offered this time of year.
They know there's basically zero chance you'll be showing up with any frequency past the first two months, they make money from your failure. Don't give the smug bastards your money!
In the US, the math is skewed by the income tax deduction for mortgage interest. Take that away, or make rent deductible in a similar manner and you'll see fewer people buying homes because the payback takes longer. (That, and the correction in property values from the change in tax policy would scare some people away)
Having more land in the US factors into the equation strongly as well... on the whole a standalone home is a less risky permanent purchase... you can never control who your neighbors are, but if you're not right on top of, or next to each other, that blunts the impact somewhat.
A point about ownership: People justify the deduction for mortgage interest because owners are more likely to be conscientious members of a community. Makes some sense, but there's a downside... if major employers aren't also owners, they will move freely based on conditions, but people will be stuck because they can't sell their house for anything decent, and you'll have slightly higher unemployment and somewhat higher underemployment than you would otherwise.
Let's look at that additional data a little closer. Some of it might be useful, but a lot of it seems like noise.
* What did the user look at? - Noise, looking is way too weak an endorsement, and if not queued, it's probably not an endorsement at all
* What did the user rent? - Slightly more useful, but because the user wasn't explicit about their feelings (and most users don't rate a lot of movies), it's hard to come up with a convincingly reasonable way to rate them by default.
* How did they order their queue? - Sorry, this is noise, unless you believe newer movies are inferior to older ones. Maybe, maybe if you track difference between availability date and queue date you have something but that breaks badly on the classics.
* How long did the user keep the film? - This is pure noise... depends on hours to burn watching movies more than anything else.
* When did the user add additional films that can be considered "related"? - Somewhat useful, but high degree of randomization around that because surfing habits depend on mood and time available to kill.
* What did the user mark "not interested" (not included in the data set, IIRC) - As before.
A lot of getting to an actual reasonable solution to a problem in a reasonable amount of time involves the willingness to throw away information so you can simplify your analysis. Not saying I'm ready to throw it all away right off the bat, but I'd throw away a lot of it, and more if it didn't look particularly predictive under initial analysis.
Let's say someone, we'll call him Fred, was born because of the inaccessibility of abortions. Shitty childhood? Certainly an higher probability. But would Fred really go around his whole life or any significant fraction of it so miserable that he wished he were never born? No, because if he were truly that miserable he would commit suicide.
The temporary escapes from an unhappy reality that Fred is more likely to be drawn to: alcohol, drugs, criminal and destructive behaviors... they certainly frustrate us, and sometimes really scare us. In fact, society at large may easily be better off without Fred in it if he doesn't have the resolve not to fall into those easy traps. However, to say blithely that Fred himself is better off dead is a pathetic lie to try and cover the cruelty and cowardice of terminating human life.
Look, consider abortion what you will, but it's clearly done for the benefit of everyone but the fetus.
As for decreased population growth being good, for a nation that exports half its food crop and has flagging entitlement system starting to buckle under the strain of the largest generation of retirees in its history, let's just say I'm a skeptic.
This is also probably why there's such a degree of insistence that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.
It's pretty good in most ways, pretty bad in some others, but at the end of the day, we can crush anyone who disagrees too loudly (nation building is another matter, but lets just blame the victim and call it a day, right?)
As many people have alluded to already, it's an incredibly bad idea to make your application have an unnecessary dependency on an external service. Keep a local copy, just copy it down once and you're done, simple as can be.
But maybe there are urls out there pointing to "the latest and greatest" version, rather than a specific version, and you like the idea of using "the latest and greatest". So, think for a moment what happens when the DTD/schema changes. Is your app magically going to change how it deals with the xml at the same time? Of course not!
So, until you can get out a patch, you'd be refusing xml docs your code/xsl has been built to handle, and possibly letting in xml docs that your code/xsl has not been built to handle. Whereas, if you just kept a local DTD/schema, you would have no trouble keeping it, and the code/xsl behind in in sync.
This is a no brainer. The standard was going to be approved anyway.
The only thing voting against would do would be to confirm what we already know, and everyone else shoud... that ODF is a long term threat to the dominance of MS Office.
By voting for its acceptance, they're playing that it isn't a threat.
This also let's them play the partial support game ("broken" ODF documents that don't work in word) with supposed good intentions.
If ODF gets even more traction and they do have to support it credibly to avoid losing big bucks, the supposed good intentions give them opportunity to play the embrace extend extinguish game a little longer before it becomes obvious what they're doing (to those that haven't paid attention to Microsoft business practices before).
Businesses, especially big ones, do really stupid stuff all the time.
The thing that's remarkable here is that the stupid stuff doesn't just have a flawed line of reasoning behind it, it has NO reasoning behind it. I mean, anyone, give me any reason, any reason at all for this as opposed to chat and videoconferencing. Physical organization is lame compared to virtual. Why simulate physical organization in a virtual environment?
So, this will go nowhere, on a budget large by sane standards and tiny by big corporate standards, but will be put out there as "something we're working on" as a form of image advertising for stupid investors following "the next big thing".
We said when we released 1Q results we would be putting in place a series of actions to address cost issues in our U.S. strategic outsourcing business. We have undertaken efforts toward that, and recently implemented a focused resource reduction in the U.S. While any such reduction is difficult for those employees affected, these actions are well within the scope of our ongoing workforce rebalancing efforts.
-- snip --
Translation: ------------ Q1 sucked, so we'll sack undisclosed number of technical people in the worst managed division, to make likely failure of that division more or less assured, but less costly. Some folks will be hired in Bangalore, etc... so we can keep milking the contracts we managed to land for a while until our reputation as a vendor is truly in the toilet. But this is business as usual, so you shouldn't be worried.
I know next to nothing of the particulars of this topic technically, but at a high level it seems to me like we're having a debate between sometimes complex and annoying configuration to do what should be simple, and a monolithic approach that is easy, but does not fit all circumstances.
So, aren't there other high level options here? Either (simplest) use the monolithic tool when it does what you want, configure by and when it doesn't, or... find an existing open source tool, or write your own (script/gui tool, whatever you prefer) that follows a convention to save yourself the time when the convention does what you want, but allow access to the underlying configuration you need to tweak (exposes those options in the script/gui tool).
Someone tell me why these high level options aren't available, or I just plan on ignoring all arguments/complaints as being based on an either/or fallacy.
It's completely bogus to say straight As = good kid, though that's the reward system kids learn.
It's somewhat valid to correlate greater intelligence (which grades correlate with in spite of how weak high school curriculum is), with a greater internal resistance to doing things that are dangerous/violent.
That said, kids that are intelligent but obsessive in at least equal measure can overcome that internal resistance. When they do, they're more dangerous, not less.
So, relating to the gun question, I'd say that someone who isn't especially bright might bring a gun to school to feel tough, someone more intelligent is much less likely to bring a gun in, but more likely to use it if they do bring it in.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware, maybe, for laptops... different people have different speed/battery life/size needs. Desktops, you reduce that list to speed (fancy graphics, or extreme storage only rarely pops up as a need), so I think you can just have a list of a couple standard models you update every few months.
Software? Configuration? Are you kidding me? 99% of users should have their boxes locked down tight.
Obviously, special allowances need to be made for programmers, testers, and the IT staff themselves, but even there, I wouldn't underestimate the benefits of standardization; I just think practically it's going to be more limited in scope, it has to be mostly self imposed or you'll have a revolt on your hands.
You're right that age and wisdom are only weakly correlated and your manager does sound like a dud.
That said, wisdom is the product of intelligence, experience, and HUMILITY.
Take another look at yourself by the last criterion lest you become dogmatic and compound your foolishness (everyone has some even if they don't realize it yet) in the years to come.
I'm not trying to lecture you, but I've being canned for being arrogant and not listening to what I thought was bad management (it was bad management, mostly, but I addressed it the wrong way). I am hearing a slightly younger version of myself echoed in your remarks.
That, and of course lack of wisdom will hurt you even more if you don't
Offer more money, maybe significantly more. There are a lot of very capable people who are not on the market per se, but would move for the right opportunity. Make this the right opportunity.
You also need to make your interview process less painful. I always recommend technical screen first since it's more objective and if you start with automatic tests much less time consuming for your staff (online tests are ok, I like to bring people in and give a timed development task to an interface I can test automatically).
Another good screen is have the candidate submit a code sample. If the candidate doesn't have ANYTHING outside of work that they're willing to show, invite them to whip something simple up. If they come back with something, they merit at least some attention. If they don't submit a sample, usually they don't merit attention (but be willing to make an exception for a solid resume and EXCELLENT performance on the automatic tests).
After this, use whatever you like to pick who is right for you... you'll have a more manageable number of candidates and they'll all be pretty good as long as they don't have some sort of major personality issue.
These are all very, very valid points, but it's more or less impossible to come up with good estimates for any of the piece parts here, never mind the lot of them. Garbage in, garbage out. Not to say this is without value... it makes for a great presentation to management, but your instincts are usually a better guide than a spreadsheet filled with SWAG, especially since there's no S for a lot of these numbers until you gather data yourself.
What are your instincts telling you? Listen to them. Also listen to other people with experience with the new target language/framework and veterans who've been through rewrites. If you strongly feel that you should try the move the application to a new language/framework, explain this to management and together find small sized pieces of the system that you can rewrite independently in the target language/framework at times that don't hit the business too badly.
Expect it to be a rough at first, any time you're moving to new stuff there's a learning curve, but take a look at the final product... is it better? How much better? By what measures? As long as the experience wasn't an unmitigated disaster, try it once or twice more. Then you can fill your spreadsheet with a little more S now in your SWAG, but you'll probably know whether you're on the right course or not.
If you're not on the right course, for sure that's a painful realization, but by approaching the rewrite as an experiment rather than a personal crusade, you've insulated yourself and your company from an order of magnitude larger debacle. That maturity is generally appreciated.
If it does work, great... you've have not only a spreadsheet of SWAG, but actual precedent to make the case for the larger system rewrite. Again, coordination with management and business needs is key, but you'll generally get some good backing to actually do it by virtue of having approached this the right way and made your case.
If you don't have an app that isn't well factored enough to make this course practical, you should refactor it within the existing language/framework first... doing a top to bottom rewrite without any experimentation is a recipe for disaster. Also, refactoring within the same language/framework is a lot less risky, and often is a good 80/20 when the desire to do a rewrite hits.
And to rain on this parade some more, this one doesn't look like it's there yet, not even in the lab.
The original article doesn't give any specifics, but links to "some stunning developments this week at MIT".
Follow that link, and you get a little discussion of the process for making the nanotubes, how impressive the carbon nanotubes should be by the math, some digression about batteries vs. capacitors, and couple lines that completely take the wind out of the sails of anyone who's paying attention.
"The challenge has been in reaching the theoretical capacity that Schindall's team originally calculated. So far, the nanotubes can match the energy storage of standard ultracapacitors, but the goal remains to boost that capacity by a factor of five or even 10. "A couple of years ago, we thought we were six months to a year away. And that time has come and gone," he says. "
The article puts an optimistic spin, talking about them trying to release test cells within a year, or possibly a few months.
That's fine, I really do wish them well, but what do we really have here? Another idea with a lot of promise, but this time we don't even have a lab result here that's categorically better to stuff that's already out there!
Sigh.
The problem of our patent system is that those companies with deep enough pockets for a well staffed legal department can currently obtain patents almost without regard to prior art or their obviousness. Once they have a big and broad enough patent portfolio, they can use that stick effectively against competitors who don't have similarly deep pockets.
Occasionally, there's a minor scuffle among competitors at the same tier, but that's much more unusual, there's a lot in the way of informal truces out there, because an outright patent war between, say, IBM and Microsoft would last decades and cost each company very, very dearly.
Adding a property tax on intellectual property would pull some profits away from companies with such portfolios, but wouldn't change the fundamental problem that deep pockets and a big portfolio of broad patents = protection against competitors. The IP bidding war by itself, or as a means to determine the taxable amount is interesting but just compounds the basic problem by transfering to likely even deeper pockets. If the bid is to bring the patent into the open, those bids arehandicapped by the simple fact that monopolies are far more profitable... the only patent this brings into the open are ripped from the hands of those without deep pockets by those with deep pockets, so while it's nice to see things go into the open, it's hard to argue that creates a more competitive landscape overall.
The central problem of our patent system is not that the short term monopoly as compensation for having the idea is such a bad way to do things (you should compensate for the idea in a way that bears some relation to its worth), it's that bad patents are being granted in the first place. Once the bad patents are out there, whether the bidding war is legal staff or directly on the patent, and regardless of whether there's a tax on the idea or not, the system will always favor those will already deep pockets to the detriment of their competitors and society at large.
True, but keep in mind it's not just the hippie stuff thats just there to give people the sense that their doctor is doing something to help them.
There's a lot of "real" medicine, medications and even operations that don't show convincing benefits especially in the long term but have been marketed enough to become mainstream. A lot of the reason the hippie stuff got traction is BECAUSE the "real" medicines weren't really all that effective either, and at least hippie treatments promised freedom from side effects.
Of course, much, much better than either of these is to build up your body's ability to regenerate through diet and exercise. Take the real medicine, too (as long as the side effects aren't worse, and the second opinion agrees that the meds are necessary), but you'll do much more for your longevity and health in the gym than in the doctor's office. Self reliance is the hardest answer to hear, and consequently, the one that most needs to be heard.
So, after TWO YEARS, was this really all worth it, or did you just sort of get dragged through it once they launched the defamation lawsuit? I mean, how many hours did you spend, are you actually seeing any of that judgment money? What impact has this had on your life?
Just want to know.
Thanks,
Ben
Everyone acting in their individual best interest leads to everyone driving their own cars and clogging the roadways. Let's take that horrible waste of life and see what we can do to cut it down to size.
Public transit is a common suggestion, and nice idea in principle, but it takes a certain level of density to make it work, and most American cities aren't dense enough because they grew to where the land was cheaper, on the assumption of ubiquitous car ownership. Maybe over the span of 75 years or so the outer suburbs and exurbs will wither, but the trillions invested more or less guarantee that it can't happen until the structures start wearing out.
That leaves a few options... commuting at different times, carpooling, slugging, and park and ride style public transit... the latter two depend on businesses to be located in dense clusters which is more often true than residences, but still shakey. Still, it's not a terrible assumption in cities where the traffic is currently worst, so we'll run with it.
Both variable road usage fees and carpool lanes encourage all of the above, but can't fix the problem because in order for the carpool lane to be attractive enough to encourage people to change their habits the surrounding traffic has be substantially slower. Carpool lanes during rush hours may reduce the misery slightly if their usage is in a narrow sweet spot where there are notably fewer vehicles, but actually more people traveling in that lane. That sweet spot can be wider if there are more buses in the carpool lane, but that puts a lower cap on highway driving speed than people are liable to like.
So basically, carpool lanes do help those that can carpool without much difficulty, but they doesn't always help and sometimes hurt other drivers, and when they do help other drivers, it's only so much. So, it's a mixed bag and hard to tune right because you can't set up fractions of a lane for carpool, it's all or nothing.
In contrast, variable rates give you all the flexibility in the world to try an manipulate rates to decrease average travel times to something acceptable. Of course, there's a legitimate question how elastic demand is during peak times, and if this isn't just another way for the government to pick your pocket.
Let's consider the revenue neutral position to try and look at this on its intrinsic merits. Say, that the money raised goes to to reducing gas taxes at the level of government that's paying for the road. Folks who always drive outside the rush pay much less. Folks who still drive during the rush pay much more. Given that road construction/widening is primarily necessary for those who do drive during the rush, and that more maintenance is necessary on these wider roads, that's quite a bit more fair.
Of course, as with anything that asks for people to make decisions out of their pocket, there's concern that it's not fair to the lower middle and lower classes. But as a practical matter, many of those who are poor travel primarily outside rush hours anyway doing shift or part time work. I'd wager this would hit them less hard on average than a gas tax already does. It would hit a lot of office workers (like me) harder, but these are precisely the groups who are generally most able to do their work from home, (I suppose) better equipped to handle the costs when they can't.
Resumes tell you very little, talking sometimes tells a tale, but it's an inefficient way to start.
;-).
Best way to start is do a screen based off coding ability (have a set of tests ready against simple problems and ask them to conform their answer to an API). Advantage of this is that it's very objective, and takes little time from your team. Do a screen based off coding ability but with harder problems, too. In both cases, leave just a little ambiguity in the problems to see whether the candidate spots them and asks for clarification, freezes, goes ahead with their assumption without asking. If they're smart enough to ask for clarification, how clearly specifically do they ask?
This will easily filter 90%+.
Next, do a basic knowledge test (never hire a liar). Based on what they put in their resume, ask trivially easy, and maybe a couple medium level obscurity/difficulty questions. If they're dead or really scrambling, don't waste any more time on them. Obviously, the more the knowledge needed on the job meshes with their resume the more this can weigh in a candidates favor.
Finally, try and figure if it's a personality fit. The less scripted this is the better. At the end of as normal a conversation as you can muster (and try to be listening 90% of the time rather than talking), do you have a definite positive feeling that this person would be able to fit in well, fill the gaps you need filled and bring something extra? If no, gotta make that final cut here, too, even if that leaves nobody.
The main problem is that management will tell you this process too picky and making it too hard to find someone.
Remind them, you need someone good, tell them that nothing about this process is actually hard, they just need to up the offered salary to attract the interest of good applicants and not waste your time.
Also, remind them how well you would be able to do on all this as a way of hinting you need a raise
When it stops being what's next, and starts being the old format that titles are being dumped in en mass on the cheap.
I have a nice library of VHS tapes, mostly from the 80s and early 90s, and am accumulating DVDs at an increasingly rapid clip.
I've spent, maybe 800$ total on easily 200-250 movies.
Reasonable moral, but is it really better to believe bloggers?
Coming from an Ada man:
"From our experience and that of our customers, we can say that a real programmer writes Ada in any language. "
Um, no. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, different emphasis, and find best application in different domains. It's natural that differences in programming style fall out of that.
I'm a LISP man, so I initially bought into the idea he expresses (replace Ada with LISP), but a few years in the business world have been enough to change my mind. Formal analysis has potential, but is still more often an academic pursuit than an industrial one, so I suspect that insularity is clouding his judgment.
Because everyone feels at least some pressure around New Year's to make resolutions including the weak willed and cynical (95% of us), and because of the holiday season pig-out leaves us ashamed, too many of us fall for the bait... gym discounts generally offered this time of year.
They know there's basically zero chance you'll be showing up with any frequency past the first two months, they make money from your failure. Don't give the smug bastards your money!
Germans are better at math: http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/scores.html, but the Fins and South Koreans have us all beaten.
In the US, the math is skewed by the income tax deduction for mortgage interest.
Take that away, or make rent deductible in a similar manner and you'll see fewer people buying homes because the payback takes longer. (That, and the correction in property values from the change in tax policy would scare some people away)
Having more land in the US factors into the equation strongly as well... on the whole a standalone home is a less risky permanent purchase... you can never control who your neighbors are, but if you're not right on top of, or next to each other, that blunts the impact somewhat.
A point about ownership:
People justify the deduction for mortgage interest because owners are more likely to be conscientious members of a community. Makes some sense, but there's a downside... if major employers aren't also owners, they will move freely based on conditions, but people will be stuck because they can't sell their house for anything decent, and you'll have slightly higher unemployment and somewhat higher underemployment than you would otherwise.
Let's look at that additional data a little closer.
Some of it might be useful, but a lot of it seems like noise.
* What did the user look at? - Noise, looking is way too weak an endorsement, and if not queued, it's probably not an endorsement at all
* What did the user rent? - Slightly more useful, but because the user wasn't explicit about their feelings (and most users don't rate a lot of movies), it's hard to come up with a convincingly reasonable way to rate them by default.
* How did they order their queue? - Sorry, this is noise, unless you believe newer movies are inferior to older ones. Maybe, maybe if you track difference between availability date and queue date you have something but that breaks badly on the classics.
* How long did the user keep the film? - This is pure noise... depends on hours to burn watching movies more than anything else.
* When did the user add additional films that can be considered "related"? - Somewhat useful, but high degree of randomization around that because surfing habits depend on mood and time available to kill.
* What did the user mark "not interested" (not included in the data set, IIRC) - As before.
A lot of getting to an actual reasonable solution to a problem in a reasonable amount of time involves the willingness to throw away information so you can simplify your analysis. Not saying I'm ready to throw it all away right off the bat, but I'd throw away a lot of it, and more if it didn't look particularly predictive under initial analysis.
Let's say someone, we'll call him Fred, was born because of the inaccessibility of abortions. Shitty childhood? Certainly an higher probability. But would Fred really go around his whole life or any significant fraction of it so miserable that he wished he were never born? No, because if he were truly that miserable he would commit suicide.
The temporary escapes from an unhappy reality that Fred is more likely to be drawn to: alcohol, drugs, criminal and destructive behaviors... they certainly frustrate us, and sometimes really scare us. In fact, society at large may easily be better off without Fred in it if he doesn't have the resolve not to fall into those easy traps. However, to say blithely that Fred himself is better off dead is a pathetic lie to try and cover the cruelty and cowardice of terminating human life.
Look, consider abortion what you will, but it's clearly done for the benefit of everyone but the fetus.
As for decreased population growth being good, for a nation that exports half its food crop and has flagging entitlement system starting to buckle under the strain of the largest generation of retirees in its history, let's just say I'm a skeptic.
This is also probably why there's such a degree of insistence that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.
It's pretty good in most ways, pretty bad in some others, but at the end of the day, we can crush anyone who disagrees too loudly (nation building is another matter, but lets just blame the victim and call it a day, right?)
As many people have alluded to already, it's an incredibly bad idea to make your application have an unnecessary dependency on an external service. Keep a local copy, just copy it down once and you're done, simple as can be.
But maybe there are urls out there pointing to "the latest and greatest" version, rather than a specific version, and you like the idea of using "the latest and greatest". So, think for a moment what happens when the DTD/schema changes. Is your app magically going to change how it deals with the xml at the same time? Of course not!
So, until you can get out a patch, you'd be refusing xml docs your code/xsl has been built to handle, and possibly letting in xml docs that your code/xsl has not been built to handle. Whereas, if you just kept a local DTD/schema, you would have no trouble keeping it, and the code/xsl behind in in sync.
This is a no brainer. The standard was going to be approved anyway.
The only thing voting against would do would be to confirm what we already know, and everyone else shoud... that ODF is a long term threat to the dominance of MS Office.
By voting for its acceptance, they're playing that it isn't a threat.
This also let's them play the partial support game ("broken" ODF documents that don't work in word) with supposed good intentions.
If ODF gets even more traction and they do have to support it credibly to avoid losing big bucks, the supposed good intentions give them opportunity to play the embrace extend extinguish game a little longer before it becomes obvious what they're doing (to those that haven't paid attention to Microsoft business practices before).
Businesses, especially big ones, do really stupid stuff all the time.
The thing that's remarkable here is that the stupid stuff doesn't just have a flawed line of reasoning behind it, it has NO reasoning behind it. I mean, anyone, give me any reason, any reason at all for this as opposed to chat and videoconferencing. Physical organization is lame compared to virtual. Why simulate physical organization in a virtual environment?
So, this will go nowhere, on a budget large by sane standards and tiny by big corporate standards, but will be put out there as "something we're working on" as a form of image advertising for stupid investors following "the next big thing".
-- snip --
We said when we released 1Q results we would be putting in place a series of actions to address cost issues in our U.S. strategic outsourcing business. We have undertaken efforts toward that, and recently implemented a focused resource reduction in the U.S. While any such reduction is difficult for those employees affected, these actions are well within the scope of our ongoing workforce rebalancing efforts.
-- snip --
Translation:
------------
Q1 sucked, so we'll sack undisclosed number of technical people in the worst managed division, to make likely failure of that division more or less assured, but less costly. Some folks will be hired in Bangalore, etc... so we can keep milking the contracts we managed to land for a while until our reputation as a vendor is truly in the toilet. But this is business as usual, so you shouldn't be worried.
I know next to nothing of the particulars of this topic technically, but at a high level it seems to me like we're having a debate between sometimes complex and annoying configuration to do what should be simple, and a monolithic approach that is easy, but does not fit all circumstances.
So, aren't there other high level options here? Either (simplest) use the monolithic tool when it does what you want, configure by and when it doesn't, or... find an existing open source tool, or write your own (script/gui tool, whatever you prefer) that follows a convention to save yourself the time when the convention does what you want, but allow access to the underlying configuration you need to tweak (exposes those options in the script/gui tool).
Someone tell me why these high level options aren't available, or I just plan on ignoring all arguments/complaints as being based on an either/or fallacy.
It's completely bogus to say straight As = good kid, though that's the reward system kids learn.
It's somewhat valid to correlate greater intelligence (which grades correlate with in spite of how weak high school curriculum is), with a greater internal resistance to doing things that are dangerous/violent.
That said, kids that are intelligent but obsessive in at least equal measure can overcome that internal resistance. When they do, they're more dangerous, not less.
So, relating to the gun question, I'd say that someone who isn't especially bright might bring a gun to school to feel tough, someone more intelligent is much less likely to bring a gun in, but more likely to use it if they do bring it in.
To all the ACs.
Homophone based mis-spellings are common.
This one's pretty funny, but I'm not an idiot, just sloppy.
You sound like you're about to have a fit over it.
Now you tell me THAT is not pathetic.