I've managed people in the past, and it struck me that Management should really be a support role. My most valuable contribution as a manager was making sure my people understood what was expected and getting them the information and resources they needed to do their best work. This involved a lot of spreadsheets and scheduling, which had nothing to do with the job I was promoted from (mechanic). The second most valuable contribution was protecting my people from the whimsy and downright predation of higher management, who felt that their purpose in life was to crack whips and make sure everyone below them knew they were being watched.
I once (many years ago) had a manager like that. He was able to find me an IBM System/360 model 40 with a paper tape punch in Detroit so we could recompile our application. Is your company hiring?
It's due to management believing that if you make X amount of
money, you are supposed to be in management.
Which tells you that the management is bad, and you should
not be working for the losers anyway.
This belief on the part of management is bad for the company. Digital Equipment Corporation had a solution they called dual-track. You could elect to work your way up the management ladder or up the technical ladder. At the highest level, the technical ladder would get your picture in the annual report, along with top management. Salaries were also similar, and you got a lot of respect throughout the company.
I do understand and advocate the need for excellence in coding practices. I even teach it. But as so, I am also the first to tell that we should NOT allow the need to have others understand what we want to sacrifice the absolute necessity of having the computer understanding just as much.
I think you are misconstruing the intent of Literate Programming. It isn't Programming if you aren't telling the computer what to do. Programming becomes Literate Programming when a person, reading your code, is also able to understand what you are telling the computer to do.
The first time I read a program, I ignore the code and look only at the comments. I hope to get a high-level understanding, so on the second read I can comprehend the details better. When I review my own code I do the same, and improve the comments if they don't convey an appropriate level of information.
I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.
I also recommend community theatre. As stated above, you can do something techy, such as lighting or sound; you don't have to be able to act, sing, dance, memorize lines, direct, or take direction. I have been doing sound effects and sound reinforcement for local community theatre groups since 1989, and I have met a lot of very interesting people.
If you can double as a rehearsal pianist you will be in considerable demand.
...I've been on the other side doing development and it's a similar problem there. It's very easy to make a simple typo or other mistake and never know the difference. No one in the call center ever tells you that the customer is having a problem, so you don't know that something needs to be fixed....
I ran into this problem when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, and came up with a solution. I was the one from our software development group who went to Colorado Springs to train the telephone support troops. I developed a rapport with them, and they allowed me read-only access to their call logs for the product. I would pass bug reports to the rest of the development group. In addition, I was able to provide feedback to the support people about incorrect or incomplete responses to customers.
Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?
I have a modest proposal. The RIAA should ask Congress to remove copyright protection for sound recordings. That will eliminate illegal file-sharing (by making sharing legal) and will rehabilitate the RIAA's reputation.
When I was installing an emergency generator for my home, I decided on a small commercial generator instead of a residential generator. I ended up with an 8 kva unit on a concrete slab in back of the house. It is connected through a transfer switch, and starts automatically 30 seconds after power is lost. The switch also shuts down the generator and switches the house back when power is restored.
The generator runs off the same propane tanks that supply fuel for home heating, hot water, the stove/oven, and a fake fireplace that can keep us from freezing if the heating system suffers a mechanical problem. I have two 400-gallon propane tanks, so I was able to ride out the 6-day power outage early in December.
Once a week the generator runs for a few minutes, just to prove it is still working. When it doesn't start we call the service guy, who tells us that our model is widely used by doctors and dentists, but generally not by private residences. Nevertheless, it is a good system if you want something that “just works”.
An advantage of a fully automatic system is if we are on vacation during the winter and power fails, the pipes won't burst.
It's a shame that most of these computers probably don't run any more - it's a bit like going to an aviation museum and seeing all these planes that will never fly again - it's a little bit sad. I'd love to see a museum with as much hardware *working* as possible - where you can see the blinkenlights, type something at the console, or whatever. Unfortunately, it's probably not very practical with many of these machines.
Maybe not, but there are people who are restoring the old machines.
Here is a video of a
restored IBM 1401 running.
Their web site is
here.
As gamers age, they begin to seek out copies of games they played as kids. I know I have and I promise I'm not alone.
Amen, brother! My first computer game was Spacewar, a video game for the DEC PDP-1. PDP-1s are hard to find today, so I taught myself Java, bought a couple of joysticks, and coded my own implementation.
It could be GPL. Is Diebold making the source to Ghostscript, as used in their product, available?
They would have to do that if it's GPL. This would not require them to release source to other software on the disk. There is a difference between aggregation and the creation of a derivative work. A program that just calls Ghostscript to run isn't a derivative work of Ghostscript.
There is a contrary point of view, which is that Diebold is releasing not an aggregation (like a book of short stories) but a complete product. That product is composed of many parts, none of which can be removed without making it incapable of performing its essential functions. The product is therefore "derived from" (in the sense of copyright law) all of its essential parts. If one of those parts is licensed to Diebold under the GPL, then they must license their product to others under the GPL.
That contrary view is not the view that most people take, but I believe it is a reasonable argument under the law.
When I tried elbot I was disappointed to find that it was not as persuasive as the original Eliza. I knew Kenneth Colby when he was developing the contemporary program PARRY. To get a flavor of these early attempts at AI, check out the conversation between Eliza and PARRY memorialized in RFC 439.
When you register a domain with Register.com, it comes with a free webmail account with two mailboxes. Their webmail interface is pretty primitive (last I looked anyway), but it allows you to configure email forwarding. So I forward to my Gmail account, and setup Gmail to use my personal domain on outgoing mails.
I also use register.com. I set up www.systemeyescomputerstore.com to point to my home PC running Apache, but I use their e-mail service. They offer a webmail interface, but I use it through IMAP.
It's not as simple as just gas mileage. The other major factor is resale value. The Prius is currently (and for several years) the leader in value-retention. I could sell my 8-month old Prius right now for sticker price. You simply cannot do that with a Chevy Malibu or a Ford Taurus.
So the calculus for the cost of owning the car depends entirely on what you plan to do with it afterwards. In my case, I'm financing my Prius and will sell it after 2-3 years and recover something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the sticker price. The total cost of ownership per month therefore ends up being lower than any other car of comparable quality/size/features.
If it was just about gas mileage, you'd be right. But it's more complicated than that. So you're wrong. Sorry!:P
As another example, I have a 2000 Honda Insight with over 100,000 miles on it that I bought in November of 2000. The last time I checked they were selling for $10,000, which is about 1/2 what I paid for it almost 8 years ago.
Over here (the netherlands) lots of people use direct debit....If you need to transfer some money to someone you usually transfer it directly from your account to theirs.
That wouldn't work in the United States, where recreational drugs and prostitution (in most places) is illegal, and therefore dependent on an underground economy, which requires an anonymous way of making payments.
In most companies where software is not the main focus, the deadlines are for the main product and the software had better be done by that deadline. The software guys have nothing to say about the schedule.
I saw this effect first-hand at Digital Equipment Corporation. Although we did a lot of software, the corporate culture focused on hardware, so the software had to be ready when the hardware shipped. Fortunately, the software guys were generally able to get a prototype far enough in advance of "first customer ship" that it was possible to get the drivers written. From a software point of view the hardware documentation was sometimes lacking: once I recruited the assistance of an in-house field service guy to help me read the engineering drawings so I could figure out how to program a new device.
Credit card numbers and other personal information is easily stolen, as this article makes clear. The credit card companies and others, like Best Western, who store their customer's personal data call this "identity theft" to make us consumers think that we are the victims, and must pay the price for the theft. A better name for what is happening is "information theft". Private information has been stolen from the company, and it is the company who should suffer the consequences.
I watch my credit card charges carefully. If I see something I don't recognize, I tell the credit card company to charge it back to the merchant. It was the merchant who was defrauded, and possibly someone else who leaked the personal information that enabled the fraud. I am not at fault and shouldn't have to pay.
If some inaccurate information should get into my credit report because of somebody pretending to be me, I would write a letter to the three credit reporting agencies explaining that their records are inaccurate: the person who took the reported action was not me. That should be all that is necessary to "clean up" my credit record.
I feel that keeping careful track of one's transactions is a necessity in today's world, and I have no problem doing it to protect myself.
I mean most people think, and correctly so in most cases, that if you pay for something, that means it is legal for you to use/have it.
...
So it is quite easy to see how someone might download music and perfectly well believe they were not breaking the law.
Even when you don't pay for something, there are many situations in our society where it is legal. I don't have to pay to watch the sun set from my porch, or to listen to a song on the radio. Maybe the defendant thought KaZaa was the Internet equivalent of radio.
...is that they only asked Fortune 1000 CIOs. Where do the majority of IT people work? I'll give you a hint: it ain't in F1000 organizations. I'm an independent contractor working in the small business sector. My clients have 50, maybe 100 total employees, $1-$10 million in revenue and no programmers on staff. Yet they need, or want, custom systems built. I have to turn away business and I see no end in sight.
How about sending some of that "turned away" business our way? When you have to turn down an opportunity, ask the employer to advertise the job on Dice, Monster or CraigsList so your Slashdot buddies can apply for it.
I believe the notion of shipping licenses in boxes started at Digital Equipment Corporation. The idea was that by shipping it in a box, it was less likely to be thrown away (as "worthless paperwork") before reaching the technical person who would understand its value. That idea seems to have survived two changes of corporate ownership, so maybe it's correct.
The major experiment uses a flawed definition of "decision". If I were the subject it might take me several seconds of unconscious cogitation to formulate a plan: when the next letter flashes I will press the left button, for example. The real decision is made below the level of consciousness, so the letter recorded is the one shown when the action is started, not the one shown when the decision-making process is started.
Hm, I'm having a bit of trouble making out what your argument is here...
The major experiment uses a flawed definition of "decision". If I were the subject it might take me several seconds of unconscious cogitation to formulate a plan: when the next letter flashes I will press the left button, for example. The real decision is made below the level of consciousness, so the letter recorded is the one shown when the action is started, not the one shown when the decision-making process is started.
This is similar to driving a car. When you are driving to a well-known destination, when do you "decide" to turn the steering wheel to enter the parking lot? At the conscious level you decide when you see the driveway, and that there is no traffic in your way. The real decision, however, is made as part of the plan to drive to your destination, which may have been decided minutes or hours earlier.
The experiment is really about the unconscious part of the decision-making process. That is interesting, but it has nothing to do with free will, since our unconscious is as much a part of us as our conscious.
Slashdot Mirror
I've managed people in the past, and it struck me that Management should really be a support role. My most valuable contribution as a manager was making sure my people understood what was expected and getting them the information and resources they needed to do their best work. This involved a lot of spreadsheets and scheduling, which had nothing to do with the job I was promoted from (mechanic). The second most valuable contribution was protecting my people from the whimsy and downright predation of higher management, who felt that their purpose in life was to crack whips and make sure everyone below them knew they were being watched.
I once (many years ago) had a manager like that. He was able to find me an IBM System/360 model 40 with a paper tape punch in Detroit so we could recompile our application. Is your company hiring?
It's due to management believing that if you make X amount of money, you are supposed to be in management.
Which tells you that the management is bad, and you should not be working for the losers anyway.
This belief on the part of management is bad for the company. Digital Equipment Corporation had a solution they called dual-track. You could elect to work your way up the management ladder or up the technical ladder. At the highest level, the technical ladder would get your picture in the annual report, along with top management. Salaries were also similar, and you got a lot of respect throughout the company.
I do understand and advocate the need for excellence in coding practices. I even teach it. But as so, I am also the first to tell that we should NOT allow the need to have others understand what we want to sacrifice the absolute necessity of having the computer understanding just as much.
I think you are misconstruing the intent of Literate Programming. It isn't Programming if you aren't telling the computer what to do. Programming becomes Literate Programming when a person, reading your code, is also able to understand what you are telling the computer to do.
The first time I read a program, I ignore the code and look only at the comments. I hope to get a high-level understanding, so on the second read I can comprehend the details better. When I review my own code I do the same, and improve the comments if they don't convey an appropriate level of information.
To my mind, the best coding standard is Don Knuth's Literate Programming: http://www.literateprogramming.com/. Quoting:
FMS, the Fortran Monitor System for the IBM 709, 7090 and 7094, is truly dead. It was replaced by IBSYS, which evolved into OS/360.
I also recommend community theatre. As stated above, you can do something techy, such as lighting or sound; you don't have to be able to act, sing, dance, memorize lines, direct, or take direction. I have been doing sound effects and sound reinforcement for local community theatre groups since 1989, and I have met a lot of very interesting people.
If you can double as a rehearsal pianist you will be in considerable demand.
...I've been on the other side doing development and it's a similar problem there. It's very easy to make a simple typo or other mistake and never know the difference. No one in the call center ever tells you that the customer is having a problem, so you don't know that something needs to be fixed....
I ran into this problem when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, and came up with a solution. I was the one from our software development group who went to Colorado Springs to train the telephone support troops. I developed a rapport with them, and they allowed me read-only access to their call logs for the product. I would pass bug reports to the rest of the development group. In addition, I was able to provide feedback to the support people about incorrect or incomplete responses to customers.
I have a modest proposal. The RIAA should ask Congress to remove copyright protection for sound recordings. That will eliminate illegal file-sharing (by making sharing legal) and will rehabilitate the RIAA's reputation.
When I was installing an emergency generator for my home, I decided on a small commercial generator instead of a residential generator. I ended up with an 8 kva unit on a concrete slab in back of the house. It is connected through a transfer switch, and starts automatically 30 seconds after power is lost. The switch also shuts down the generator and switches the house back when power is restored.
The generator runs off the same propane tanks that supply fuel for home heating, hot water, the stove/oven, and a fake fireplace that can keep us from freezing if the heating system suffers a mechanical problem. I have two 400-gallon propane tanks, so I was able to ride out the 6-day power outage early in December.
Once a week the generator runs for a few minutes, just to prove it is still working. When it doesn't start we call the service guy, who tells us that our model is widely used by doctors and dentists, but generally not by private residences. Nevertheless, it is a good system if you want something that “just works”.
An advantage of a fully automatic system is if we are on vacation during the winter and power fails, the pipes won't burst.
It's a shame that most of these computers probably don't run any more - it's a bit like going to an aviation museum and seeing all these planes that will never fly again - it's a little bit sad. I'd love to see a museum with as much hardware *working* as possible - where you can see the blinkenlights, type something at the console, or whatever. Unfortunately, it's probably not very practical with many of these machines.
Maybe not, but there are people who are restoring the old machines. Here is a video of a restored IBM 1401 running. Their web site is here.
As gamers age, they begin to seek out copies of games they played as kids. I know I have and I promise I'm not alone.
Amen, brother! My first computer game was Spacewar, a video game for the DEC PDP-1. PDP-1s are hard to find today, so I taught myself Java, bought a couple of joysticks, and coded my own implementation.
It could be GPL. Is Diebold making the source to Ghostscript, as used in their product, available?
They would have to do that if it's GPL. This would not require them to release source to other software on the disk. There is a difference between aggregation and the creation of a derivative work. A program that just calls Ghostscript to run isn't a derivative work of Ghostscript.
There is a contrary point of view, which is that Diebold is releasing not an aggregation (like a book of short stories) but a complete product. That product is composed of many parts, none of which can be removed without making it incapable of performing its essential functions. The product is therefore "derived from" (in the sense of copyright law) all of its essential parts. If one of those parts is licensed to Diebold under the GPL, then they must license their product to others under the GPL.
That contrary view is not the view that most people take, but I believe it is a reasonable argument under the law.
When I tried elbot I was disappointed to find that it was not as persuasive as the original Eliza. I knew Kenneth Colby when he was developing the contemporary program PARRY. To get a flavor of these early attempts at AI, check out the conversation between Eliza and PARRY memorialized in RFC 439.
I've been a programmer for 45 years, so I am definitely a stupid old person now. Nevertheless, for what it's worth, I endorse the above advice.
When you register a domain with Register.com, it comes with a free webmail account with two mailboxes. Their webmail interface is pretty primitive (last I looked anyway), but it allows you to configure email forwarding. So I forward to my Gmail account, and setup Gmail to use my personal domain on outgoing mails.
I also use register.com. I set up www.systemeyescomputerstore.com to point to my home PC running Apache, but I use their e-mail service. They offer a webmail interface, but I use it through IMAP.
It's not as simple as just gas mileage. The other major factor is resale value. The Prius is currently (and for several years) the leader in value-retention. I could sell my 8-month old Prius right now for sticker price. You simply cannot do that with a Chevy Malibu or a Ford Taurus.
So the calculus for the cost of owning the car depends entirely on what you plan to do with it afterwards. In my case, I'm financing my Prius and will sell it after 2-3 years and recover something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the sticker price. The total cost of ownership per month therefore ends up being lower than any other car of comparable quality/size/features.
If it was just about gas mileage, you'd be right. But it's more complicated than that. So you're wrong. Sorry! :P
As another example, I have a 2000 Honda Insight with over 100,000 miles on it that I bought in November of 2000. The last time I checked they were selling for $10,000, which is about 1/2 what I paid for it almost 8 years ago.
Over here (the netherlands) lots of people use direct debit....If you need to transfer some money to someone you usually transfer it directly from your account to theirs.
That wouldn't work in the United States, where recreational drugs and prostitution (in most places) is illegal, and therefore dependent on an underground economy, which requires an anonymous way of making payments.
In most companies where software is not the main focus, the deadlines are for the main product and the software had better be done by that deadline. The software guys have nothing to say about the schedule.
I saw this effect first-hand at Digital Equipment Corporation. Although we did a lot of software, the corporate culture focused on hardware, so the software had to be ready when the hardware shipped. Fortunately, the software guys were generally able to get a prototype far enough in advance of "first customer ship" that it was possible to get the drivers written. From a software point of view the hardware documentation was sometimes lacking: once I recruited the assistance of an in-house field service guy to help me read the engineering drawings so I could figure out how to program a new device.
Credit card numbers and other personal information is easily stolen, as this article makes clear. The credit card companies and others, like Best Western, who store their customer's personal data call this "identity theft" to make us consumers think that we are the victims, and must pay the price for the theft. A better name for what is happening is "information theft". Private information has been stolen from the company, and it is the company who should suffer the consequences.
I watch my credit card charges carefully. If I see something I don't recognize, I tell the credit card company to charge it back to the merchant. It was the merchant who was defrauded, and possibly someone else who leaked the personal information that enabled the fraud. I am not at fault and shouldn't have to pay.
If some inaccurate information should get into my credit report because of somebody pretending to be me, I would write a letter to the three credit reporting agencies explaining that their records are inaccurate: the person who took the reported action was not me. That should be all that is necessary to "clean up" my credit record.
I feel that keeping careful track of one's transactions is a necessity in today's world, and I have no problem doing it to protect myself.
I mean most people think, and correctly so in most cases, that if you pay for something, that means it is legal for you to use/have it.
...
So it is quite easy to see how someone might download music and perfectly well believe they were not breaking the law.
Even when you don't pay for something, there are many situations in our society where it is legal. I don't have to pay to watch the sun set from my porch, or to listen to a song on the radio. Maybe the defendant thought KaZaa was the Internet equivalent of radio.
...is that they only asked Fortune 1000 CIOs. Where do the majority of IT people work? I'll give you a hint: it ain't in F1000 organizations. I'm an independent contractor working in the small business sector. My clients have 50, maybe 100 total employees, $1-$10 million in revenue and no programmers on staff. Yet they need, or want, custom systems built. I have to turn away business and I see no end in sight.
How about sending some of that "turned away" business our way? When you have to turn down an opportunity, ask the employer to advertise the job on Dice, Monster or CraigsList so your Slashdot buddies can apply for it.
I believe the notion of shipping licenses in boxes started at Digital Equipment Corporation. The idea was that by shipping it in a box, it was less likely to be thrown away (as "worthless paperwork") before reaching the technical person who would understand its value. That idea seems to have survived two changes of corporate ownership, so maybe it's correct.
If I'm not mistaken, what you've described is the Birthday Paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox/
You aren't mistaken, but the Wikipedia reference is actually Birthday problem.
The major experiment uses a flawed definition of "decision". If I were the subject it might take me several seconds of unconscious cogitation to formulate a plan: when the next letter flashes I will press the left button, for example. The real decision is made below the level of consciousness, so the letter recorded is the one shown when the action is started, not the one shown when the decision-making process is started.
Hm, I'm having a bit of trouble making out what your argument is here...
This is similar to driving a car. ...
Ah, okay, that's better!
A car analogy is always appropriate on Slashdot.
The major experiment uses a flawed definition of "decision". If I were the subject it might take me several seconds of unconscious cogitation to formulate a plan: when the next letter flashes I will press the left button, for example. The real decision is made below the level of consciousness, so the letter recorded is the one shown when the action is started, not the one shown when the decision-making process is started.
This is similar to driving a car. When you are driving to a well-known destination, when do you "decide" to turn the steering wheel to enter the parking lot? At the conscious level you decide when you see the driveway, and that there is no traffic in your way. The real decision, however, is made as part of the plan to drive to your destination, which may have been decided minutes or hours earlier.
The experiment is really about the unconscious part of the decision-making process. That is interesting, but it has nothing to do with free will, since our unconscious is as much a part of us as our conscious.