Here's what I wonder, though: on who will it be used?
On enemy soldiers? If someone is dead set on ventilating your brain, what's to stop them from using some kind of shielding? If it's millimeter wave, it's still possible to block it, for example, with a fine enough metal mesh. You can see through it (poorly) to aim the gun. Plus, guiding a weapon via a periscope isn't exactly a new idea. Any tank or APC includes such devices.
Will it protect against a sniper in Iraq? Well, no, because if you knew where the sniper is, and had LOS for such a device, then you also have LOS to counter-snipe him. In practice they can still shoot once or twice with impunity, then be gone before you even figure out where he was.
So they're going to help, how? Preemptively microwave everything in sight, including kids, pets, retired seniors and everything, just so a possible sniper gets inconvenienced too? Not entirely practicable or sane.
It seems to me like this kind of thing is only useful for one thing: against demonstrators which weren't armed to start with. Yeah, giving a few of those burns will soo make it clear that the USA is there just to bring them democracy and freedom of speech.
whatever gets them to give us affordable service faster than about 5mb/s, i'm all for.
even if it's just as bad as that political campaign crap for once it's positive.
Still... I can't really stop being disgusted by such PR trolling and pseudo-science. They could have called it a "top 10 high-tech cities" or whatever, and I wouldn'd have minded it. After all, that's what they really measure there.
But handwaving a "you're stupid if you don't give us lots of money" prestidigitation is lame. Real lame. Preying on some mothers' fears to sell them snake oil ("auugh, my kid will grow up dumb if the community doesn't dump all its funds into upgrading broadband"), is lame. We're already out of the realm of normal marketting, and straight into the world of con men, snake oil peddlers, and generally low lives. I'd rather not encourage them any more, God knows they breed like rabbits already.
Plus, the quality of education and the culture's slide into "being dumb is good, being a nerd is unfashionable" is already an issue by its own, and schools are underfunded and badly staffed as it is. Highjacking it for some personal "see, you should give us more money instead of giving them to the schools, if you really want to be intelligent" agenda is... I don't know, I find it as abhorrent as it gets. It's one thing to rob from the rich, Robin Hood style, and it's another to try to steal from the poor and divert money from the schools. I mean, what next? Rob an orphanage? FFS...
Here's a novel idea: the same content, and sometimes even better is available at your local library. Yet I don't see the number and quality of libraries mentioned in their measure of intelligence. People have been using their brains before YouTube too, you know.
Language? I learned English from tapes and books, and then from a teacher. I got taught French by my grandma using Pif comics. You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it. Even if (for whatever psychiatric reason) you're absolutely _only_ able to do it over the Internet, you don't absolutely need broadband for that: to learn to read you only need a freakin' ASCII file, and to hear it you need an MP3. Trust me, you can squeeze those even through an analog modem if you really want to, especially since you don't need to stream them in real time: you can download them in advance just as well.
Learn to play an instrument? How about getting one of the about a million books on the topic? Again, chances are your local library carries several. I know a ton of people who've learned to play the guitar without broadband.
Etc.
Plus, as the unused libraries prove, there's a heck of a difference between something being available and people actually using it. Just because a community has broadband, it doesn't mean automatically everyone starts using it to learn stuff. Except if by "learn" you mean, "my word, I didn't know a double anal penetration was even possible.";) Lots of, ahem, "educational" videos on _that_ kinda topic.
Now I'm not against broadband or anything, but measuring a community's intelligence by the available megabits per second is at best PR trolling (seeing as the "independent think tank" is actually just a lobby group to push for more subsidized broadband), and at worst genuine techo-utopian stupidity.
Even if we're to spend tax money to improve intelligence (a good idea, by all means), I'm still waiting for any study to show that broadband is the best return on investment. How about investing half that amount in improving the schools, for example? A good teacher can help more than just upgrading someone's internet connection. How about, political correctness and feel-good education be damned, someone actually make a class out of the nerdiest kids who actually want to learn? And I mean really learn stuff, not get some watered-down bullshit and "brain gym" pseudo-education.
Are kids that much more likely to learn foreign languages well on the Internet than from a teacher, for example? Really? Because so far I've seen people even forgetting whatever proper English they knew after a couple of years on MMOs. The English I could learn on, say, City of Heroes, is of the caliber of, "soz m8, g2g, got skewl 2moz". (Translation for those who aren't fluent in l33t: "sorry mate, got to go, got school tomorrow." Yeah, I know, it made me go cross-eyed trying to decode it too.) Genuine quote off one of the UK servers. No kidding. I swear to God, someone actually typed that abhomination.
There's a whole generation by now who's learned to write badly not even in the name of typing speed, but out of some idiotic notion that writing "skewl" instead of "school" is somehow cool, hip, elite, or whatever. And it's contagious. People who _are_ capable of writing proper English and typing fast enough, end up getting that idea too. I was shocked to discover that a middle-aged mid-level manager I know had started to type like that on a MMO. That's broadband intelligence for you.
It still makes me wonder. Sun has been known to do crass benchmarketting before.
E.g., when Hotspot first came around, it claimed to accelerate some benchmarks thousands of times, which was already suspect. It turns out that in one popular benchmark at the time, it completely elliminated the loop. Which in and by itself would be a valid optimization, if it were on the general case. But it turned out that as little as changing an "if (A == B)" to "if (B == A)" was enough to disable that optimization. Sun's smart guys literally recognized and elliminated the _exact_ bytecode sequence of that particular benchmark. In actual programs the gains and ability to recognize dead code were _much_ lower.
Not to say IBM doesn't do the same thing, but I'd take such claims with a grain of salt. If on one particular benchmark Sun is doing twice as well, but not on the general case, well, you know what I'll suspect.
1. About "no brainers", lots of things looked like "no brainers" at various points, and turned up to be false. E.g., at some point it looked like a no brainer that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast. That's why we still do studies to try to prove or disprove it.
2. Teenagers and kids pick the bad habbits of their parents, and are fed by their fat parents, so it's not exactly that independent.
E.g., I can tell you that both me and my brother got to eat a lot of fat and sugar as kids, because that's what both our parents liked. And I mean pretty much literally everything made with very fat meat, fried in lots of fat, and pretty much everything doused in lots of fat as served. Then came mom's cakes which, delicious as they were, were an exercise in eating a lot of butter with a heck of a lot of sugar.
Mom turned from a slim girl into, well, something resembling the dwarf females in WoW even without living in the suburbs. She also destroyed her liver by now (though her taking generous doses antibiotics for anything and everything probably also helped.)
Guess what? So does everyone in the family, because we all were stuffed with the same things. Worse yet, taste is an educated thing, so my brother still swears by foods doused in generous amounts of fat. He got asked by his doctor around the age of 30 if he's an alcoholic, after seeing his liver numbers. The guy pretty much doesn't drink. He's also overweight.
I tried to resist, and in fact dinner time was pretty much the only conflict I had with my parents, but they weren't going to accept my being fussy at the dinner table. No, young man, you're gonna eat that big chunk of fat if you want any dessert. And you're going to finish everything on that heaped plate, at that. Figures. Other kids get told to eat their veggies.
Still, I had eventually at least managed to get them to heap my plate less. Most kids probably don't even put that kind of a resistance. My brother, for example, just gave up after a desperate last stand where he just stopped eating at all. And I'm not talking a rebellious teenager, but a primary school kid. You have to get one really desperate to do something like that. But after he got out of hospital, he just fell in line. Still, as I was saying, at least I had negotiated some half-way truce with my parents.
But then came a whole summer vacation at my grandma from dad's side, when I was about 10 years old. (Guess where dad had learned to like such foods?) She stuffed me into such a nice round shape, that you could swear I'm a South Park character. Literally. I ran around the garden and stuff all day long (not out of some clever plan to burn calories, but because that's what kids do), but the calories intake was just so hideously high, that nothing could get rid of them. The shock of seeing me literally beachball shaped was such that, well, let's just say my parents never left me in her care ever again.
Thank goodness, I did finally switch to eating half-way sane (well, I still like sugar) after moving away, so I'm the only one whose liver still sorta works. As I was mentioning, my brother didn't.
Anyway, sorry if this extreme example sounds like whining about my family, the point I'm trying to illustrate is actually: kids and teenagers don't have control over more things than where they live. It's not like those kids in the suburbs get otherwise free hand over what they eat. If their parents eat crap, the kids eat crap too, and learn to like eating crap. If their parents' idea of a family evening out is going to McDonald and eating a mayo-doused burger, the kids grow up with the idea that mayo is good food and that being taken to a junk food joint is good times, or even a sort of a reward. It gets associated, Pavlov-style, with doing something together with the parents and getting lots of dad's attention, which is good times for a kid. If the parents' idea of a family evening together is sitting together in front of the idiot box, the kids too get the idea that that's what you do in the evenings.
So, yes, the fatsoes who moved to the suburbs so don't even have to walk to the corner store, raise their kids to be fat too. How's that for a different causation?
I meant it's marketting/advertising/PR, by any other name. It's not that everyone uses _only_ those 8800 GTX benchmarks to choose a lower end card, it's that it's there to bombard you with "company X is better/cooler/higher-tech/whatever than company Y" until it hopefully starts to create a subconscious bias. It's not the only criterion, but for enough people it ends up being _a_ criterion whether they acknowledge it or not.
Sure, we all like to pretend that we're, like, all intelligent and stuff, and would never let advertising rule our lives. In practice, we already know that marketting works.
See for example Coca Cola's "New Coke" disaster for the prime example of how much of a bias marketting can produce. It surprised even Coca Cola.
You can read a more detailed account on Snopes, for example, but basically it goes like this: in double-blind taste tests, not knowing which is which, the vast majority of people preferred the New Coke taste. It would stand to reason, then, that they'd go buy the drink whose taste they prefer, right? Well, wrong, as Coca Cola discovered. When they _did_ know which is which, the majority demanded the old Coke back. A helluva lot decided that they hate the New Coke without even tasting it, just because it wasn't the product that ads had told them to prefer, year after year.
So, well, maybe you are one of the select few who genuinely aren't swayed by marketting. Kudos and more power to you, then. But in more average people marketting can and does create pretty strong biases.
And benchmarketting is just one way to fight that war for mindshare, really.
If you look at the vast majority of chips either ATI or nVidia sell, they're actually pretty efficient.
But they invariably _have_ to have some benchmark-breaking super-card to grab the headlines with. The way it works is that while only a minority of people will actually buy the top-end graphics card, there are millions of people who just need a reminder that "nVidia is fast" or "ATIs are fast". They'll go to some benchmark site to see some "nVidia's 8800 GTX is faster than ATI's X1900XTX!" article (not entirely unexpected, it's one generation ahead), end up with some vague "nVidia is faster than ATI" idea, then go buy a 5200. Which is the lowest end of two generations behind the ATI, or 3 behind that 8800 GTX.
Both ATI and nVidia even went through times of not even trying to produce or sell much of their headline-grabbing card. And at least ATI always introduces their latest technology in their mid-range cards first, and they tend to be reasonably energy efficient cards too. But it's like a chicken contest: the one who pulls out loses. The moment one of them gave up on having an ultra-high end card at all, the benchmark sites and willy-waver forums would proclaim "company X loses the high performance graphics battle!"
I don't think Intel will manage to restore sanity in that arena, sadly. Most likely Intel will end up playing the same game, with one overclocked noisy card to grab the headlines for their saner cards.
Offtopic, but from my experience, the worst PHBs I've met were former brilliant nerds, one was even a Ph.D., who got hit with the Peter's Principle stick. They got promoted (or promoted themselves by starting their own company) to a management position that they thoroughly didn't understand, didn't like, and didn't have the social skills for.
At least two (one I've actually worked for, one I've had to do business with and heard stories from one ex-employee) ended up the worst kind of control freaks, as a result of not being able to realistically plan, control or set their expectations, and unable to motivate anyone. So they backed out into the only way out they could see, personally annoying everyone to make them work to those unrealistic plans and expectations.
For example, we all can remember some unrealistic "bah, I can do that in a day" we've said, which in practice turned out to be a week. Sometimes it was a superficial underestimation of the specification, sometimes wrongly omitting the interruptions and time to debug, etc. It happens. And we're all very quick to find excuses for ourselves afterwards. Both these guys ended up taking such guesses and holding others responsible to always finish within those unrealistic schedules, and with unrealistic optimization expectations at that.
And, oh, when I've mentioned that someone once told me, "wth do you need free Sundays for? You'd sit in front of a computer anyway." It was one of these guys, not an MBA. Damn glad I don't work for him any more. The other was known to pull such faux pas as calling one Russian employee to his office to translate an email in Russian another employee had sent to his wife from work. It just said he's going to be late for dinner because he's got to finish something. Both employees quit after that incident.
A third ended up, well, basically doing his best not to manage. He was the perfect yesman in _both_ directions, and just avoided taking any decisions, or attracting any attention from either superiors or subordinates. It sounds like fun to work for him, but unmanaged chaos is hardly actually that much fun in practice. A dose of laissez faire is good, complete chaos isn't. We ended up pretty much electing a team member to coordinate the project inofficially instead.
Thing is, none of the three was happy either. They had moved from doing a nerd's work that they loved, to doing a manager's work that they didn't like and didn't have much achievements either.
So basically, well, while we all like to think that one guy who's been on the receiving end of it would surely know better than to repeat the same mistakes he's been a victim of, that's hardly guaranteed. I'm glad that it worked for you, but for other people it doesn't.
Just as a clarification, in addition to what was already said: the tragedy of the commons is _not_ a generic wildcard for any tragedy in any kind of communal resource.
The essay is on a very specific scenario: over-utilization of an unmanaged resource.
The original example was this: you have an unmanaged piece of grassland, where all the villagers can bring their cows to graze. For each of the individual farmers, adding one more cow means more profits. Unfortunately the same applies to everyone, so everyone will keep adding just one more cow until that pasture can't possibly support them all and is even over-grazed into uselessness. Essentially the incentive is there for a course of action which will be very detrimental in the long run, but in the short run the pressure is to stay the course and keep doing it.
Real tragedies of the commons do spring in all sorts of places, some even in the last places you'd expect to find them. But some tragedies are an entirely different scenario. Again, "tragedy of the commons" is _not_ a generic all-size-fits-all wildcard for any tragedy on any common resource. If a resource is managed to start with, it's pretty much by definition not a tragedy of the commons. If it's not possible to "overgraze"/saturate it, it's also not a tragedy of the commons.
That's not to say it can't be a tragedy anyway, but then it's another kind of tragedy altogether. Lumping everything together in the same "tragedy of the commons" pot, is about as useful as starting calling all car malfunctions a "transmission problem" or starting caling all diseases "flu".
passage through the stomach isn't much of a test. you wouldnt really expect most things to survive passage through, nor would you necessarily want to (who knows what a large amount of live culture in your colon would do?). the proper question is how long do they survive in the stomach before dying and what do they actually do there, not how many get pooped out alive.
Heh. Actually surviving through the stomach is the _whole_ idea, since these bacteria are supposed to help in your intestines, not in your stomach. Noone found a bacteria that's useful in the stomach yet, unless maybe if you're a cow.
The short answer there is that there is no universal short answer. It depends on the market.
For the graphics cards it certainly works that way. Those sexy ultra-fast 8800 GTXs and whatnot are used to grab the headlines, rather than as the cash cow. People see some benchmark saying something like "the nWidia 8800 GTX is twice as fast as ATI's X1900XTX!" (not that unexpected, since it's one generation ahead), a lot of them end up with "nVidia is faster than ATI" from there, and then they go and buy an old 5200. It's got to be fast, because it's nVidia, right? And the bulk of the market are the corporate computers anyway, where noone in their right mind buys top-end gaming rigs for their secretaries and admins and whatnot.
For other things, like whole computers, it may or may not work like that. Apple certainly makes a tidy profit recently, but others haven't been so lucky. Just having a high priced product doesn't automatically put one in a position to also enjoy high margins.
E.g., Sun Microsystem and their even more expensive computers makes mostly losses for the last few years. Even when it announced a profit briefly in one 2005 quarter, it was almost 30 time less than either Dell or Apple, and followed by another loss in the next quarter. And a quick look on their site, well, let's just say their good news for the first 2007 fiscal quarter (which actually ended on October 1, 2006) is that they only lost 56 millions, as opposed to 123 millions a year before. So much for high prices meaning high profit, eh?:P
E.g., Digital. Not many people even remember the guys who were once the number one in the minicomputer arena. If anyone who's not at least in the 40's even remembers them at all, it will be more likely because of the Alpha microprocessor, not because of their once profitable minis. Sticking to their big, expensive, high margin boxes for too long was actually the beginning of the end for Digital, as cheap PCs ate right into that market fast.
At any rate, I'll grant you that: the commodity PC market is a _weird_ place to be in at the moment, and not a comfortable one either. I'm not surprised that Dell is starting to see somewhat of a soft cap on their profits. But then again, at half a billion dollars profit per quarter, they're not exactly in a bad position either. There are people and companies doing worse than that, you know what I mean?;)
Very true, and no arguments against that. I was just pointing out that the whole going down to a "yeah, but they're unique when you consider the spin of the electrons" level was not what was meant by that metaphor.
If the only thing that makes two things different is that one contains an extra H2O2 molecule instead of a H2O, then that's already breaking even the original metaphor. You can find bigger differences than that in machine-stamped assembly-line-produced pieces, hence the concept of "tolerance" or the six sigma hype. Yet noone would consider them unique. I've yet to hear anyone say "I'm unique like a standardized run-of-the-mill 5mm radius, 31 teeth, brass cog." And if you heard someone saying that, you'd think of it as sarcasm at best.
You don't understand the media "pundits", grasshopper. Their job is solely to sound all smart and knowledgeable, make all sorts of comments on a know-it-all tone, make some wild predictions and take credit only for the ones that come true.
E.g., if you predicted that Apple will make a PDA... some 5 years ago, do take the iPhone as confirmation that you're smart and predict stuff like the Oracle of Delphi. If you predicted that Intel will buy Apple (don't laugh, one idiot predicted just that), well, carry on as if that never happened.
And most of all, never forget the first rule for prophecies: give them an event _or_ give them a date, but never both.
E.g., if you predicted that someone will die of a heart attack (the event), don't tell them when, so you can still take credit for it 50 years later... when they're run over by a truck. Ok, tech ragazines and pundits predict about technology, not people, but the same metaphor applies verbatim. If you predicted in the 80's that the Mac will die because noone wants a graphics interface, feel free to act as if you were right all along when the slump happened at the end of the 90's, for completely different reasons. If you predicted that nVidia would buy ATI, feel free to act like you told everyone so when they get bought by AMD half a decade later.
E.g., conversely if you predicted that something will happen in 6 months, don't tell them exactly what. As a practical example: in this case we know when the iPhone will actually hit the shelves, so this guy has the date set for him. So all that's left is to make some vague comments and avoid anything quantifiable or falsifiable. No matter how many iPhones will actually sell, he can still pretend that his prophecy was right and Apple would have sold more without a pre-announce.
And again, be sure to sound like you're smart, knowledgeable, and can play Sherlock Holmes and pick the hints that everyone else missed. That's the stuff that sells ragazines. The more cryptic, far-fetched and conspiracy-theory-like it sounds, the more Joe Sixpack loves it. It makes him feel like he's learned some fantastic thing about technology and the technology companies. He suddenly feels like he's in the loop. He's suddenly no longer some frustrated guy sitting on the sideline, not knowing what happens and when will they finally ship a keyboard with an "ANY" key.
And the journals love it because it gets Joe Sixpack to read them or browse their ad-ladden website.
That's, in a nutshell, how all the Cringelys and Dvoraks and other bullshitters in tech journalism stay in business.
Something Apple has been held to task for here before - the company is notoriously secretive and known for not sharing future product details, much to the displeasure of IT professionals. Yet now, preannouncing is a mistake.
Poor Apple. Can't have it both ways, and gets criticized no matter whether they announce ahead of time or on the day something ships.
You're kinda missing the important point that it's not the same people arguing the two sides, and it's for vastly different reasons. This time it's not someone whining "but I wanted (or didn't want) to know this early", but basically someone saying that Apple could have made more money by not pre-announcing this early. So lumping it all in a sort of a, "bah, people will whine no matter what Apple does" attitude is kinda missing the point.
Was pre-announcing the iPhone really a mistake? I guess we don't know yet. Sometimes pre-announcements and paper launches serve to keep people from buying the competitors' products. See MS who has a fine history of drumming up future products years in advance, and it actually worked. (Oh yeah, NT will be soo great. Any time now. Just wait for NT instead of buying OS/2 or a Novell server.) And recently both AMD and Intel, and both ATI and nVidia, are occasionally doing the same thing: pre-announcing things half a year in advance, or pretending to "launch" a product when noone except the review sites will be able to get one for the next half a year. Same idea. If you're busy waiting for Intel's next super-duper solves-all-worlds-problems CPU, you're not buying an AMD which is available right now, or viceversa.
Sure, you might lose a few customers who get bored and forget about your product in that time, as opposed to being able to buy it right now. But then, if it worked, you also gain a bunch of people who waited for your product instead of buying the competitions'.
Will it eat into iPod sales in this time? Obviously Jobs doesn't worry too much about that possibility, so maybe he knows better.
Will it give competitors the time to react? Maybe, but maybe not. The reason traditional phones do less isn't because the competition are drooling idiots. They've used a touch screen before, and the idea of a PDA phone isn't new either. The reason is: costs. Most phones are made for the larger market of people who want to get their phone for $1 with the contract, and sometimes get other freebies with it too. And there's only so much the telco will subsidize a phone. The iPhone is a rich nerd's high-tech toy, and it will be a niche product. Don't imagine that everyone who's on a McDonalds wage will blow half a grand on an iPhone and still end up with their arms and legs tied by a contract: they'll get a Nokia for $1 with the same contract. Think of iPhone vs mainstream phones a bit like in the graphics card arena: the 8800 GTX makes big headlines and pretty graphs on the news and review sites, but those slow 64 MB are what sells millions of chips and brings in the cash. Same here: just because Apple made an expensive high-end toy, doesn't mean everyone else will rush to replace their low end phones with expensive PDAs. Maybe they won't even react at all until they see how much of a market is there for such a toy.
Etc.
See? I'm not even a Mac fan, and it still wasn't too hard to come up with a smarter way of combatting TFA's worries than, basically, "people will whine about Apple either way.";)
quit and work for a real company with employees who don't believe published trade media "review" propaganda.
I can only wish it was that simple. But other than keeping quitting and moving to fresh small startups (which probably don't exactly pay a lot for an admin), it's not really practicable.
And even as a startup, if your work isn't purely developping your own product, you end up doing stuff for various clients. Which have their own ideas set in stone, based on reading some IT-for-retards ragazine or on a golf round with the nice salesman from MS/IBM/whatever. And we all know that you can't trust those techies with their techno-babble speak, whereas a salesman would never tell a lie;) So even at a startup you may not as shielded as you'd think.
An as soon as the company grows past a certain size, and doubly so for companies whose primary product aren't programs or IT services, well, my favourite metaphor is: clue is heavier than air. The higher you go up the hierarchy pyramid, the thinner it gets. If clue were oxygen, you'd see higher level managers blue in the face like they're Smurfs.
To their defense, it's not their job to know the finer points and differences between web servers, but then it also shouldn't be their job to take such low level decisions. So you have a bunch of people taking decisions about stuff that they knew nothing about, and it wasn't their job to know anything about. What really makes it worse is having several layers of shielding against the effects of bad decisions. He made some "strategic decision" to go all-IIS, and can claim credit for any positive results (even coincidental or immaginary), but it's _your_ fault if something goes wrong with it or it takes too long to port your application to it. And whenever such shielding is in place, out goes the incentive to get any real clue or to refrain from taking bad decisions.
But, to get back on topic, you'll find very few large companies where such shielding from responsibility isn't in place. So you're limiting your employment oportunities drastically if you only accept jobs from the few who aren't led by people who don't take their IT info from ads and salesmen.
Probably a more realistic thing to do is realize that, in the end, few things matter _that_ horribly much. Some people have a penchant for blowing minor differences out of proportion, and make mountains out of molehills. There _are_ product issues that matter, and there _are_ awfully bad management decisions, but there's also a lot of stuff which really isn't as critical as the "either something is perfect or it's complete crap" gang makes it sound. If some proxy is 5% faster than another, pfft, it doesn't even start to matter. You'll want plenty of margin for when you get slashdotted anyway, but 99% of the time it'll be _way_ under-used. Having 5% or even 10% less unused capacity isn't the end of the world.
And once you do a realistic assessment of how bad it really is, a lot of things aren't _that_ horrible after all. So management picked a less than optimal proxy. Who cares? Compared to some other decisions I've seen various managers take, this doesn't even start to matter. If you're going to quit a job solely because of something like that, methinks you need to rethink your standards. And maybe look for an OCPD support group in your area.
The standard deviation in the life expectancy of the general population is about 10 years (meaning - 2/3 people die between 67 and 87), although IIRC it's got a lot of skew.
Anyway, the smaller of the two samples is 135 people, so the error in the estimate of that mean is roughly 10 / sqrt(134) ~= 10/12, so two sigma is about 20 months, and the life expectancy difference is 24 months, so it's significant to 5%.
Well, then you've really made the point as to why the article is bogus, eh? Yes, they make a "nearly two years" claim at the top, but if you read a bit further: "The average lifespan for the nominees (including winners) was 76 years. Winners worldwide lived 1.4 years longer on average, and winners from the same country as non-winning nominees lived another two-thirds of a year, on average."
So lemme see. If you take the whole sample, the difference was 1.4 years, or 1.4 * 12 = 16.8 months. I'm still not done with the morning coffee, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but 16.8 months is a bit lower than the 20 months you've calculated for two sigma.
I find it more interesting when they restrict it to winners from the same country, since, well, only then it's really apples to apples. (You'd expect that someone from the USA would live longer than someone from, say, India. Doubly so when there's data from the early 1900's.) Then it's only 2/3 of a year, or 8 months difference. Quite a bit lower than 20 months, I would say. Plus, it's inherently a lot of smaller samples, so even the 20 months figure would become larger.
More importantly, that difference between "winners vs nominees everywhere" and "winners vs nominees from the same country" tells me that the first one might not be entirely unbiased as samples go. If, say, more winners come from the top industrialized nations with high standards of living, while the larger nominees sample include more people from some poorer countries too, that alone could account for the the 8.8 months difference in the two figures.
I haven't properly studied the names and countries of origin for everyone, but for physics and chemistry it sounds at least like a _believable_ kind of bias: you don't see third world countries building big cyclotrons (for advanced physics research) or having advanced big pharma companies (for advanced chemistry research.) Something like, say, the prize for literature might have been a less biased sample: you don't need lab equipment and funding in the billions to write a book. And if the only cause there is that winning a prize and resulting alpha-monkey status instantly gives you some extra months, then the effect should be the same there too.
This gets funnier when you add this quote into the mix: "Oswald and Rablen found that Nobel laureates in physics lived an average of almost a year longer than laureates in chemistry."
Err... wait a minute. Let's do some maths there, then. Assuming there have been roughly as many winners in physics and chemistry, to keep the average, then the 16.8 months figure becomes something like 22.8 months for physics and 10.8 months for chemistry. It may look like now the physics number is finally signifficant, but it also means half the sample, so sigma is 120 months / sqrt(67) ~= 120 / 8 = 15 months, so two sigma is 30 months. Hmm, now even the figure for physicists is still less significant, and the figure for chemists is outright useless.
Let's apply that piece of wisdom for the "winners vs nominees from the same country", since, again, that's really the only one which doesn't have a built-in bias. To keep the 8 month average and assuming again equal numbers from the same country it becomes 14 months for the physicists and 2 months for the chemists. Frankly, living 2 months longer as a chemistry winner already starts to sound thoroughly insignifficant. But probably that 1 year difference doesn't apply here too, or is proportioanlly reduced too, so let's ignore this.
Next, you glibly reference Galileo who has come to represent the 'Scientific David' vs. the 'religiously dogmatic Goliath'. If you care to take a look in the history books, you might be a little surprised to find out that the Church had historically been a huge supporter of science; The thinking being that because God created the universe then by learning about the natural world one could begin to understand Gods divine plan. Obviously back in those days instrumentation was not of the quality that we have today. Owing to this substandard equipment and observation, all the evidence more closely matched the churches version. Galileo didn't accept this and it was in fact he who dogmatically pursued his vision. Frankly, if it wasn't for the fact that the process of science eventually proved him right, he would be a just another in a long line of daft old coots.
Heh. You'll notice that what I've _actually_ written there is about Galileo versus the dogmatism of the Aristotelian science ivory tower, _not_ about Galileo vs the church. Yes, Galileo vs the church was a different story, and it's the story of Galileo flaming the pope and putting the pope's words in the mouth of a character whose name sounds like "The Stupid." But that's not the story I'm talking about. So please spare me the faithful defenses of the church, since I'm not talking about that at all.
Do you even understand how the Aristotelian system worked, when you talk about evidence? Not needing much evidence was the whole point there. The doctrine was basically that you can just think about it, trust your higher intellect and common sense, and postulate how things obviously work, without needing any actual experiments. They had a ton of things that were as bogus as it gets, just because they looked "obvious" or "common sense." E.g., they actually believed that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast, because, duh, it's just common sense. E.g., they actually believed that dropping something from the mast of a moving ship would fall in a vertical straight line, thus lagging behind the ship. Again, duh, it's just common sense. E.g., they considered it only common sense that there's be only 7 planets and no satellites, because 7 is such a perfect number and reflected in so many things of God's creation, that it should be obvious to any educated man that satellites and extra planets would only ruin that perfection, thus God would never have created them. Don't laugh, an actual "scientist" from back then actually wrote exactly that idiocy as obvious disproof for that crazy new satellite idea.
To his defense, Aristotle himself did at least once say one should collect data before drawing conclusions... but then mostly ignored his own advice and proceeded to postulate whole sets of natural laws without _any_ evidence or measurement. He inferred that since all celestial bodies are made of the weightless element "fire", for example, it stood to reason that the Moon is populated by creatures of fire. Ok, maybe there he lacked the experimental data. But he also postulated such stuff as human males having more teeth than the females, when half a day of counting on a random sample would have provided all the proof to the contrary. He was more concerned with formalizing logic and logical thinking than with actually collecting evidence to apply it on. He was more concerned with doing a thoroughly correct "A => B, B => C, therefore on the basis of A we can state that C is true" kind of inferrence, than with bothering to actually measure or prove A. Medieval and renaissance "science" however, devolved even further in his name.
That's the whole point: it's not that they had some mountains of evidence to support the old "science", it's that it was a system that worked on _dogma_ instead of evidence. They had their set of dogmas and stuff that was considered "obvious" and "common sense", and the whole "science" was inferring stuff from those, not trying to disprove or refine them. The whole point is that the
"Shut up or we're all doomed" is a prime example of a classic fallacy, namely the Appeal To Consequences fallacy: pretending that something is "proven" or "disproven" by how desirable or undesirable the consequences are. It, and the other many fallacies employed in the climate debate, however, don't "prove" or "disprove" anything: they're just bad pseudo-logic.
It's basically perfectly on par with (a few years back) saying "the dams near New Orleans are proven strong enough, because it would lead to so awful consequences if they aren't." Would such an argument actually have made the dams stronger? Nope. Would silencing critics have prevented the catastrophe? Nope.
And censoring scientists is a stupid idea anyway. Science just builds a model and makes some predictions. How you act upon them, is the domain of engineering and/or politics. Go vote for someone else if you want action, not try to force scientists to start spouting dogma instead of science.
Let me remind you that this topic isn't about reminding Tom, Dick and Harry that their coffeetable (or slashdot) discussion isn't proper science, up to academic standards. It's about an idea as stupid as outright de-certifying anyone who dares think otherwise.
Pray tell, once that is achieved, _what_ value do peer reviews serve any more? Once you've decreed that the only peers are those who have complete faith in the dogma and know it's not their place to question it, peer-review becomes little more than a self-perpetuating system to ensure that future work toes the party line too.
"Peer review" just doesn't work in a closed dogmatic system. Remember Galileo being "reviewed" by the true believers of the Aristotelian system. Did they really prove him wrong or contributed anything to the progress of science.
_All_ that science is about at any level is accomodating a multitude of views, including that your pet theory might be false. Everything is and should be judged only by their experimental data and error bar. And if you think you've found new data, a better theory, or whatever, that invalidates it, please do say so. We'll judge your hypothesis too by the same standards.
Science is not religion, it's not about authority figures telling you what to believe and what's punishable heresy. That's the domain of religion. Science is just a _method_.
And this guy proposing to basically introduce heresy and excommunication in science (if you dare question the dogma, we'll de-certify you) is contrary to that whole method. It just shows that it's he who has no fucking clue what science is all about. Maybe someone should start by de-certifying him.
It's still the wrong way, because it's one more step towards blurring the distinction between science and bullshit in the minds of Jack Sixpack and Jane Housewife.
You can't say that proper science and skepticism should be limited to an ivory tower clique of chosen ones, and everyone else should just get dogma, because:
1. Even those scientists got there from being Joe Schoolkid and Cecilia Nerdygirl who liked to discover how things really worked, and apply critical thinking the quick fairy-tale explanations their parents gave them to "why is the sky blue?" or "what _is_ the rainbow?" The more you dumb society down and teach more people to not use their brains, the less of a recruiting pool you have for that chosen ones gang. If you actually managed to get everyone to stop using their brains, stop questioning the dogma, discourage everyone from being skeptics or debating anything unless they're a cardinal (or whatever other badge of "ok, now you can discuss the dogma" badge), and persecute everyone who dares step out of line, etc, well, you can already know how much scientific progress that produced in the middle ages.
2. Because those scientists will need funding and other support from the likes of Tom CEO, Dick Marketeer and Harry Journalist. Once you taught _those_ and their customers/readers/etc that science is just about enforcing a dogma, what's to stay in the way of them just funding pseudo-science by PR. Not that it doesn't already happen, but going that way full time is not an improvement.
If anything I'd remind more that you _can't_ do science by PR, or in the words of Feynman, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Teaching more people that science is just about who gets to set the official dogma, is just as step towards more thinking "fuck you, I have the money, so I'll set my own dogma by PR." And more down the pyramid accepting it, because if they're going to accept one dogma unthinkingly anyway, hey, they might as well go for the one with more marketting behind it.
Technically each of us could be outsourced, no problem, even the ones who don't telecommute. That's pretty much a normal implication of having an architecture, interfaces and code that are easy to understand and maintain. If they can give your code to someone else to maintain after you've been run over by a truck, they can give your code to someone else to maintain when you haven't. If someone can maintain your code after you've moved to another job, without having to track you down for a whiteboard discussion, then that someone can just as well be in India or at home.
Telecommuting doesn't really add much there. IMHO not being able to telecommute because everything needs a lengthy whiteboard explanation, and it's needed 5 days a week, should in fact tell any employer that something's wrong with that project. If you can't do much work with a phone and email and need that guy in person full time, what are you going to do when he moves to another job or drives his car into a tree, and you can't even use phone and email to talk to him?
Basically, the only way to be non-outsourceable is to obfuscate and, basically, sabotage your employer. Which is dishonest and hardly reason for professional pride. Still, even then, now they're finally getting rid of my good coleague Wally, after they had to rewrite the little work he did and thoroughly obfuscated. So even that's not as guaranteed.
Either way, I'd rather be less replaceable because I do good work fast, than because of needing to come to my desk every day and need whiteboard drawings to understand how to use my code.
Assuming you're refering to what I called a straw man in the first pgph of my post, of course it's a straw man; it's a statement of subjective experience placed out as evidence to the contrary of a position. There's nothing wrong with it being a straw man argument, just that this case may or may not be a border condition, depending on the results of actual research
Umm, well, now I understand what you mean, but then it's a bit mis-leading: that's not what a Straw Man fallacy means. A Straw Man is when you deliberately mis-represent the opponent's position, and then proceed to fight that imaginary point of view instead of what he said. E.g., if I were to pretend that your post is about denying global warming or gay marriage and proceed to demolish it based on that, that would be a straw man.
Accusing someone of using straw men is kinda impolite, unless they actually do and it's of some importance to their point. It's accusing them of deliberate handwaving, smoke and mirrors and sophistry, which tends to not be OK even in informal discussions.
I think what you mean is more along the lines of the Hasty Generalization fallacy, which is just that: extrapolating from one example or too few examples to being a rule. Maybe also a bit of Biased Sample, as in, for example, picking one's examples in a primarily telecommuted company and extrapolating them to everything else.
These are are really only "mortal sins" in academic papers, not in a discussion among friends or on slashdot. In informal discussions we all use such samples and generalization at some point, so pointing out the exceptions or limits is also OK.
Sorry if it sounds like a lecture, but, well, just as information.
1. Your whole game theory application starts at "it may be provable that, all other things being equal, having an office presence provides social connectivity, allowing the player to advance more easily in his chosen direction" (my emphasis), and then proceeds to build something that sounds suspiciously like certainties on it. It's as if "may be provable" turned into "already proven" somewhere along the way, and I don't see any such proof. If something only "may be provable", but isn't actually proven, then anything built upon it is equally something that may be true or not.
2. It's also suspiciously skipping over such important notions as constraints. "All other things being equal" pretty much means that you found one axis that is completely independent from the others, and you can maximize without touching the others, which tends to never be true. At some point enough social connectivity is enough, and you can't increase it more without losing something else. And I know for example first hand that the guy going around all day long finding someone to talk to, precisely because all else isn't equal: all else pretty much hit zero. It's an extreme case, but it serves to illustrate that those variables aren't that independent. If you change one, all else usually doesn't remain the same.
As you undoubtedly know, min-maxing in an optimal solution in pretty much any space _can_, in fact, reduce the value on one axis, to gain more on another that matters more. In cases of planning what you do in an X hour day, there'll always be constraints: you can't say you're doing the same work _and_ adding a social and networking component for free. In practice, every hour spent socializing and networking is an hour when you're not actually programming. As in any min-maxing problem, you have to find some happy balance, not pretend that all cases get the same of one component, while the other is for free. Sometimes you actually have to reduce that social component a _lot_ to actually get some work done and show some technical achievement.
3. Not _all_ advancement directions have similar requirements. Min-maxing an optimal solution on for one problem or goal can actually mean cutting down on something that was part of the ideal solution to another. Even assuming that the same space and general rules apply, some directions, such as just proving you're a smart programmer, in fact need more proving technical skill. I might actually be better served by spending an hour learning some new technology or technique, than spending an hour commuting so my boss will see my face again. While other directions, such as branching into marketting or becoming some sort of manager, require a lot more social presence and networking.
4. There are problems and factors which you seem to not even consider at all in your ill-described model, since in practice they don't actually depend at all on impressing your co-workers and boss. Quality of life, for example, is something that isn't achieved by impressing the boss, but more often by knowing when to stop impressing the boss and just have a life.
Ok, so they're not quite as binary, but again, you end up with constraints. If nothing else, a day still has 24 hours, and you can't really get that much for free. Every extra overtime hour put into impressing the boss and co-workers, is one hour you're not doing something else in. Every hour spent commuting is an hour you're neither doing anything for your quality of life, nor impressing the boss and co-workers. As with any other min-maxing problem, you have to reduce X to get more on Y and Z, or reduce Y to get more of the other two.
Two solutions to two different problems can end up _very_ different, once you throw those into the mix and give them wildly different weights in the desired result. Someone's optimal solution may involve doing 80 hour weeks to impress the boss and get any promotion at any cost, while someone else's optimal solution will be spending as muc
I'm not telecommuting at the moment, and living fairly close to the office, I'm not really trying to anyway, but... somehow I'm not seeing that as so critical. I have co-workers who are here 3 days a week, and, honestly, there are whole weeks when they're hardly actually needed. You'll want _some_ face time, but I'm not sure that even 2-3 days a week are necessary every week.
Going around and asking in person only works that well for a small company anyway. For example here I ended up maintaining the truly awful code of someone whose office is now at the other end of the city. If I wanted to talk to him, I'd have to set an appointment and drive there, which probably isn't any better from the office than from home. In fact, from home I'd actually be closer to his office.
Half the time we _do_ use email anyway, and the other half we just reach for the phone. Why wouldn't it work just as well from home? And since everything is in the same CVS, if you need any clarifications, you can just tell the other guy which project, file and function or line number you're interested in. Having to actually go to another department and ask in person is person is more the exception when phone and email failed, rather than having a permanent exodus of people going to paint something on other people's whiteboards.
Ditto for guys whose code we use, or guys using our code. Heck, some of the frameworks I've had to work with were from companies not even in the same city, or the same country altogether. Some of the guys whose code is being maintained don't even work here any more.
All in all, while I don't deny that sometimes it _is_ an advantage, I see more value in having good and clearly defined architectures and interfaces. That will keep serving you well even when the whole original team moved on to other jobs. It's not a theoretical situation, we actually have one framework here where that's exactly what happened over time.
And when they didn't yet, knowing (or having a way to find out quickly) who to phone or email if you have questions. If the architecture and interfaces are well designed and documented, and you have competent people at both ends of the line, chances are there won't be a whole tome of an explanation you need, so telephone and email work just as well. And when someone new to it needs a more thorough crash course, an appointment can be arranged... which is exactly what we're doing right now anyway, even without telecommuting.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I wonder, though: on who will it be used?
On enemy soldiers? If someone is dead set on ventilating your brain, what's to stop them from using some kind of shielding? If it's millimeter wave, it's still possible to block it, for example, with a fine enough metal mesh. You can see through it (poorly) to aim the gun. Plus, guiding a weapon via a periscope isn't exactly a new idea. Any tank or APC includes such devices.
Will it protect against a sniper in Iraq? Well, no, because if you knew where the sniper is, and had LOS for such a device, then you also have LOS to counter-snipe him. In practice they can still shoot once or twice with impunity, then be gone before you even figure out where he was.
So they're going to help, how? Preemptively microwave everything in sight, including kids, pets, retired seniors and everything, just so a possible sniper gets inconvenienced too? Not entirely practicable or sane.
It seems to me like this kind of thing is only useful for one thing: against demonstrators which weren't armed to start with. Yeah, giving a few of those burns will soo make it clear that the USA is there just to bring them democracy and freedom of speech.
Still... I can't really stop being disgusted by such PR trolling and pseudo-science. They could have called it a "top 10 high-tech cities" or whatever, and I wouldn'd have minded it. After all, that's what they really measure there.
But handwaving a "you're stupid if you don't give us lots of money" prestidigitation is lame. Real lame. Preying on some mothers' fears to sell them snake oil ("auugh, my kid will grow up dumb if the community doesn't dump all its funds into upgrading broadband"), is lame. We're already out of the realm of normal marketting, and straight into the world of con men, snake oil peddlers, and generally low lives. I'd rather not encourage them any more, God knows they breed like rabbits already.
Plus, the quality of education and the culture's slide into "being dumb is good, being a nerd is unfashionable" is already an issue by its own, and schools are underfunded and badly staffed as it is. Highjacking it for some personal "see, you should give us more money instead of giving them to the schools, if you really want to be intelligent" agenda is... I don't know, I find it as abhorrent as it gets. It's one thing to rob from the rich, Robin Hood style, and it's another to try to steal from the poor and divert money from the schools. I mean, what next? Rob an orphanage? FFS...
Here's a novel idea: the same content, and sometimes even better is available at your local library. Yet I don't see the number and quality of libraries mentioned in their measure of intelligence. People have been using their brains before YouTube too, you know.
;) Lots of, ahem, "educational" videos on _that_ kinda topic.
Language? I learned English from tapes and books, and then from a teacher. I got taught French by my grandma using Pif comics. You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it. Even if (for whatever psychiatric reason) you're absolutely _only_ able to do it over the Internet, you don't absolutely need broadband for that: to learn to read you only need a freakin' ASCII file, and to hear it you need an MP3. Trust me, you can squeeze those even through an analog modem if you really want to, especially since you don't need to stream them in real time: you can download them in advance just as well.
Learn to play an instrument? How about getting one of the about a million books on the topic? Again, chances are your local library carries several. I know a ton of people who've learned to play the guitar without broadband.
Etc.
Plus, as the unused libraries prove, there's a heck of a difference between something being available and people actually using it. Just because a community has broadband, it doesn't mean automatically everyone starts using it to learn stuff. Except if by "learn" you mean, "my word, I didn't know a double anal penetration was even possible."
Now I'm not against broadband or anything, but measuring a community's intelligence by the available megabits per second is at best PR trolling (seeing as the "independent think tank" is actually just a lobby group to push for more subsidized broadband), and at worst genuine techo-utopian stupidity.
Even if we're to spend tax money to improve intelligence (a good idea, by all means), I'm still waiting for any study to show that broadband is the best return on investment. How about investing half that amount in improving the schools, for example? A good teacher can help more than just upgrading someone's internet connection. How about, political correctness and feel-good education be damned, someone actually make a class out of the nerdiest kids who actually want to learn? And I mean really learn stuff, not get some watered-down bullshit and "brain gym" pseudo-education.
Are kids that much more likely to learn foreign languages well on the Internet than from a teacher, for example? Really? Because so far I've seen people even forgetting whatever proper English they knew after a couple of years on MMOs. The English I could learn on, say, City of Heroes, is of the caliber of, "soz m8, g2g, got skewl 2moz". (Translation for those who aren't fluent in l33t: "sorry mate, got to go, got school tomorrow." Yeah, I know, it made me go cross-eyed trying to decode it too.) Genuine quote off one of the UK servers. No kidding. I swear to God, someone actually typed that abhomination.
There's a whole generation by now who's learned to write badly not even in the name of typing speed, but out of some idiotic notion that writing "skewl" instead of "school" is somehow cool, hip, elite, or whatever. And it's contagious. People who _are_ capable of writing proper English and typing fast enough, end up getting that idea too. I was shocked to discover that a middle-aged mid-level manager I know had started to type like that on a MMO. That's broadband intelligence for you.
It still makes me wonder. Sun has been known to do crass benchmarketting before.
E.g., when Hotspot first came around, it claimed to accelerate some benchmarks thousands of times, which was already suspect. It turns out that in one popular benchmark at the time, it completely elliminated the loop. Which in and by itself would be a valid optimization, if it were on the general case. But it turned out that as little as changing an "if (A == B)" to "if (B == A)" was enough to disable that optimization. Sun's smart guys literally recognized and elliminated the _exact_ bytecode sequence of that particular benchmark. In actual programs the gains and ability to recognize dead code were _much_ lower.
Not to say IBM doesn't do the same thing, but I'd take such claims with a grain of salt. If on one particular benchmark Sun is doing twice as well, but not on the general case, well, you know what I'll suspect.
1. About "no brainers", lots of things looked like "no brainers" at various points, and turned up to be false. E.g., at some point it looked like a no brainer that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast. That's why we still do studies to try to prove or disprove it.
2. Teenagers and kids pick the bad habbits of their parents, and are fed by their fat parents, so it's not exactly that independent.
E.g., I can tell you that both me and my brother got to eat a lot of fat and sugar as kids, because that's what both our parents liked. And I mean pretty much literally everything made with very fat meat, fried in lots of fat, and pretty much everything doused in lots of fat as served. Then came mom's cakes which, delicious as they were, were an exercise in eating a lot of butter with a heck of a lot of sugar.
Mom turned from a slim girl into, well, something resembling the dwarf females in WoW even without living in the suburbs. She also destroyed her liver by now (though her taking generous doses antibiotics for anything and everything probably also helped.)
Guess what? So does everyone in the family, because we all were stuffed with the same things. Worse yet, taste is an educated thing, so my brother still swears by foods doused in generous amounts of fat. He got asked by his doctor around the age of 30 if he's an alcoholic, after seeing his liver numbers. The guy pretty much doesn't drink. He's also overweight.
I tried to resist, and in fact dinner time was pretty much the only conflict I had with my parents, but they weren't going to accept my being fussy at the dinner table. No, young man, you're gonna eat that big chunk of fat if you want any dessert. And you're going to finish everything on that heaped plate, at that. Figures. Other kids get told to eat their veggies.
Still, I had eventually at least managed to get them to heap my plate less. Most kids probably don't even put that kind of a resistance. My brother, for example, just gave up after a desperate last stand where he just stopped eating at all. And I'm not talking a rebellious teenager, but a primary school kid. You have to get one really desperate to do something like that. But after he got out of hospital, he just fell in line. Still, as I was saying, at least I had negotiated some half-way truce with my parents.
But then came a whole summer vacation at my grandma from dad's side, when I was about 10 years old. (Guess where dad had learned to like such foods?) She stuffed me into such a nice round shape, that you could swear I'm a South Park character. Literally. I ran around the garden and stuff all day long (not out of some clever plan to burn calories, but because that's what kids do), but the calories intake was just so hideously high, that nothing could get rid of them. The shock of seeing me literally beachball shaped was such that, well, let's just say my parents never left me in her care ever again.
Thank goodness, I did finally switch to eating half-way sane (well, I still like sugar) after moving away, so I'm the only one whose liver still sorta works. As I was mentioning, my brother didn't.
Anyway, sorry if this extreme example sounds like whining about my family, the point I'm trying to illustrate is actually: kids and teenagers don't have control over more things than where they live. It's not like those kids in the suburbs get otherwise free hand over what they eat. If their parents eat crap, the kids eat crap too, and learn to like eating crap. If their parents' idea of a family evening out is going to McDonald and eating a mayo-doused burger, the kids grow up with the idea that mayo is good food and that being taken to a junk food joint is good times, or even a sort of a reward. It gets associated, Pavlov-style, with doing something together with the parents and getting lots of dad's attention, which is good times for a kid. If the parents' idea of a family evening together is sitting together in front of the idiot box, the kids too get the idea that that's what you do in the evenings.
So, yes, the fatsoes who moved to the suburbs so don't even have to walk to the corner store, raise their kids to be fat too. How's that for a different causation?
I meant it's marketting/advertising/PR, by any other name. It's not that everyone uses _only_ those 8800 GTX benchmarks to choose a lower end card, it's that it's there to bombard you with "company X is better/cooler/higher-tech/whatever than company Y" until it hopefully starts to create a subconscious bias. It's not the only criterion, but for enough people it ends up being _a_ criterion whether they acknowledge it or not.
Sure, we all like to pretend that we're, like, all intelligent and stuff, and would never let advertising rule our lives. In practice, we already know that marketting works.
See for example Coca Cola's "New Coke" disaster for the prime example of how much of a bias marketting can produce. It surprised even Coca Cola.
You can read a more detailed account on Snopes, for example, but basically it goes like this: in double-blind taste tests, not knowing which is which, the vast majority of people preferred the New Coke taste. It would stand to reason, then, that they'd go buy the drink whose taste they prefer, right? Well, wrong, as Coca Cola discovered. When they _did_ know which is which, the majority demanded the old Coke back. A helluva lot decided that they hate the New Coke without even tasting it, just because it wasn't the product that ads had told them to prefer, year after year.
So, well, maybe you are one of the select few who genuinely aren't swayed by marketting. Kudos and more power to you, then. But in more average people marketting can and does create pretty strong biases.
And benchmarketting is just one way to fight that war for mindshare, really.
If you look at the vast majority of chips either ATI or nVidia sell, they're actually pretty efficient.
But they invariably _have_ to have some benchmark-breaking super-card to grab the headlines with. The way it works is that while only a minority of people will actually buy the top-end graphics card, there are millions of people who just need a reminder that "nVidia is fast" or "ATIs are fast". They'll go to some benchmark site to see some "nVidia's 8800 GTX is faster than ATI's X1900XTX!" article (not entirely unexpected, it's one generation ahead), end up with some vague "nVidia is faster than ATI" idea, then go buy a 5200. Which is the lowest end of two generations behind the ATI, or 3 behind that 8800 GTX.
Both ATI and nVidia even went through times of not even trying to produce or sell much of their headline-grabbing card. And at least ATI always introduces their latest technology in their mid-range cards first, and they tend to be reasonably energy efficient cards too. But it's like a chicken contest: the one who pulls out loses. The moment one of them gave up on having an ultra-high end card at all, the benchmark sites and willy-waver forums would proclaim "company X loses the high performance graphics battle!"
I don't think Intel will manage to restore sanity in that arena, sadly. Most likely Intel will end up playing the same game, with one overclocked noisy card to grab the headlines for their saner cards.
Offtopic, but from my experience, the worst PHBs I've met were former brilliant nerds, one was even a Ph.D., who got hit with the Peter's Principle stick. They got promoted (or promoted themselves by starting their own company) to a management position that they thoroughly didn't understand, didn't like, and didn't have the social skills for.
At least two (one I've actually worked for, one I've had to do business with and heard stories from one ex-employee) ended up the worst kind of control freaks, as a result of not being able to realistically plan, control or set their expectations, and unable to motivate anyone. So they backed out into the only way out they could see, personally annoying everyone to make them work to those unrealistic plans and expectations.
For example, we all can remember some unrealistic "bah, I can do that in a day" we've said, which in practice turned out to be a week. Sometimes it was a superficial underestimation of the specification, sometimes wrongly omitting the interruptions and time to debug, etc. It happens. And we're all very quick to find excuses for ourselves afterwards. Both these guys ended up taking such guesses and holding others responsible to always finish within those unrealistic schedules, and with unrealistic optimization expectations at that.
And, oh, when I've mentioned that someone once told me, "wth do you need free Sundays for? You'd sit in front of a computer anyway." It was one of these guys, not an MBA. Damn glad I don't work for him any more. The other was known to pull such faux pas as calling one Russian employee to his office to translate an email in Russian another employee had sent to his wife from work. It just said he's going to be late for dinner because he's got to finish something. Both employees quit after that incident.
A third ended up, well, basically doing his best not to manage. He was the perfect yesman in _both_ directions, and just avoided taking any decisions, or attracting any attention from either superiors or subordinates. It sounds like fun to work for him, but unmanaged chaos is hardly actually that much fun in practice. A dose of laissez faire is good, complete chaos isn't. We ended up pretty much electing a team member to coordinate the project inofficially instead.
Thing is, none of the three was happy either. They had moved from doing a nerd's work that they loved, to doing a manager's work that they didn't like and didn't have much achievements either.
So basically, well, while we all like to think that one guy who's been on the receiving end of it would surely know better than to repeat the same mistakes he's been a victim of, that's hardly guaranteed. I'm glad that it worked for you, but for other people it doesn't.
Just as a clarification, in addition to what was already said: the tragedy of the commons is _not_ a generic wildcard for any tragedy in any kind of communal resource.
The essay is on a very specific scenario: over-utilization of an unmanaged resource.
The original example was this: you have an unmanaged piece of grassland, where all the villagers can bring their cows to graze. For each of the individual farmers, adding one more cow means more profits. Unfortunately the same applies to everyone, so everyone will keep adding just one more cow until that pasture can't possibly support them all and is even over-grazed into uselessness. Essentially the incentive is there for a course of action which will be very detrimental in the long run, but in the short run the pressure is to stay the course and keep doing it.
Real tragedies of the commons do spring in all sorts of places, some even in the last places you'd expect to find them. But some tragedies are an entirely different scenario. Again, "tragedy of the commons" is _not_ a generic all-size-fits-all wildcard for any tragedy on any common resource. If a resource is managed to start with, it's pretty much by definition not a tragedy of the commons. If it's not possible to "overgraze"/saturate it, it's also not a tragedy of the commons.
That's not to say it can't be a tragedy anyway, but then it's another kind of tragedy altogether. Lumping everything together in the same "tragedy of the commons" pot, is about as useful as starting calling all car malfunctions a "transmission problem" or starting caling all diseases "flu".
Heh. Actually surviving through the stomach is the _whole_ idea, since these bacteria are supposed to help in your intestines, not in your stomach. Noone found a bacteria that's useful in the stomach yet, unless maybe if you're a cow.
The short answer there is that there is no universal short answer. It depends on the market.
:P
;)
For the graphics cards it certainly works that way. Those sexy ultra-fast 8800 GTXs and whatnot are used to grab the headlines, rather than as the cash cow. People see some benchmark saying something like "the nWidia 8800 GTX is twice as fast as ATI's X1900XTX!" (not that unexpected, since it's one generation ahead), a lot of them end up with "nVidia is faster than ATI" from there, and then they go and buy an old 5200. It's got to be fast, because it's nVidia, right? And the bulk of the market are the corporate computers anyway, where noone in their right mind buys top-end gaming rigs for their secretaries and admins and whatnot.
For other things, like whole computers, it may or may not work like that. Apple certainly makes a tidy profit recently, but others haven't been so lucky. Just having a high priced product doesn't automatically put one in a position to also enjoy high margins.
E.g., Sun Microsystem and their even more expensive computers makes mostly losses for the last few years. Even when it announced a profit briefly in one 2005 quarter, it was almost 30 time less than either Dell or Apple, and followed by another loss in the next quarter. And a quick look on their site, well, let's just say their good news for the first 2007 fiscal quarter (which actually ended on October 1, 2006) is that they only lost 56 millions, as opposed to 123 millions a year before. So much for high prices meaning high profit, eh?
E.g., Digital. Not many people even remember the guys who were once the number one in the minicomputer arena. If anyone who's not at least in the 40's even remembers them at all, it will be more likely because of the Alpha microprocessor, not because of their once profitable minis. Sticking to their big, expensive, high margin boxes for too long was actually the beginning of the end for Digital, as cheap PCs ate right into that market fast.
At any rate, I'll grant you that: the commodity PC market is a _weird_ place to be in at the moment, and not a comfortable one either. I'm not surprised that Dell is starting to see somewhat of a soft cap on their profits. But then again, at half a billion dollars profit per quarter, they're not exactly in a bad position either. There are people and companies doing worse than that, you know what I mean?
Very true, and no arguments against that. I was just pointing out that the whole going down to a "yeah, but they're unique when you consider the spin of the electrons" level was not what was meant by that metaphor.
If the only thing that makes two things different is that one contains an extra H2O2 molecule instead of a H2O, then that's already breaking even the original metaphor. You can find bigger differences than that in machine-stamped assembly-line-produced pieces, hence the concept of "tolerance" or the six sigma hype. Yet noone would consider them unique. I've yet to hear anyone say "I'm unique like a standardized run-of-the-mill 5mm radius, 31 teeth, brass cog." And if you heard someone saying that, you'd think of it as sarcasm at best.
You don't understand the media "pundits", grasshopper. Their job is solely to sound all smart and knowledgeable, make all sorts of comments on a know-it-all tone, make some wild predictions and take credit only for the ones that come true.
E.g., if you predicted that Apple will make a PDA... some 5 years ago, do take the iPhone as confirmation that you're smart and predict stuff like the Oracle of Delphi. If you predicted that Intel will buy Apple (don't laugh, one idiot predicted just that), well, carry on as if that never happened.
And most of all, never forget the first rule for prophecies: give them an event _or_ give them a date, but never both.
E.g., if you predicted that someone will die of a heart attack (the event), don't tell them when, so you can still take credit for it 50 years later... when they're run over by a truck. Ok, tech ragazines and pundits predict about technology, not people, but the same metaphor applies verbatim. If you predicted in the 80's that the Mac will die because noone wants a graphics interface, feel free to act as if you were right all along when the slump happened at the end of the 90's, for completely different reasons. If you predicted that nVidia would buy ATI, feel free to act like you told everyone so when they get bought by AMD half a decade later.
E.g., conversely if you predicted that something will happen in 6 months, don't tell them exactly what. As a practical example: in this case we know when the iPhone will actually hit the shelves, so this guy has the date set for him. So all that's left is to make some vague comments and avoid anything quantifiable or falsifiable. No matter how many iPhones will actually sell, he can still pretend that his prophecy was right and Apple would have sold more without a pre-announce.
And again, be sure to sound like you're smart, knowledgeable, and can play Sherlock Holmes and pick the hints that everyone else missed. That's the stuff that sells ragazines. The more cryptic, far-fetched and conspiracy-theory-like it sounds, the more Joe Sixpack loves it. It makes him feel like he's learned some fantastic thing about technology and the technology companies. He suddenly feels like he's in the loop. He's suddenly no longer some frustrated guy sitting on the sideline, not knowing what happens and when will they finally ship a keyboard with an "ANY" key.
And the journals love it because it gets Joe Sixpack to read them or browse their ad-ladden website.
That's, in a nutshell, how all the Cringelys and Dvoraks and other bullshitters in tech journalism stay in business.
You're kinda missing the important point that it's not the same people arguing the two sides, and it's for vastly different reasons. This time it's not someone whining "but I wanted (or didn't want) to know this early", but basically someone saying that Apple could have made more money by not pre-announcing this early. So lumping it all in a sort of a, "bah, people will whine no matter what Apple does" attitude is kinda missing the point.
Was pre-announcing the iPhone really a mistake? I guess we don't know yet. Sometimes pre-announcements and paper launches serve to keep people from buying the competitors' products. See MS who has a fine history of drumming up future products years in advance, and it actually worked. (Oh yeah, NT will be soo great. Any time now. Just wait for NT instead of buying OS/2 or a Novell server.) And recently both AMD and Intel, and both ATI and nVidia, are occasionally doing the same thing: pre-announcing things half a year in advance, or pretending to "launch" a product when noone except the review sites will be able to get one for the next half a year. Same idea. If you're busy waiting for Intel's next super-duper solves-all-worlds-problems CPU, you're not buying an AMD which is available right now, or viceversa.
Sure, you might lose a few customers who get bored and forget about your product in that time, as opposed to being able to buy it right now. But then, if it worked, you also gain a bunch of people who waited for your product instead of buying the competitions'.
Will it eat into iPod sales in this time? Obviously Jobs doesn't worry too much about that possibility, so maybe he knows better.
Will it give competitors the time to react? Maybe, but maybe not. The reason traditional phones do less isn't because the competition are drooling idiots. They've used a touch screen before, and the idea of a PDA phone isn't new either. The reason is: costs. Most phones are made for the larger market of people who want to get their phone for $1 with the contract, and sometimes get other freebies with it too. And there's only so much the telco will subsidize a phone. The iPhone is a rich nerd's high-tech toy, and it will be a niche product. Don't imagine that everyone who's on a McDonalds wage will blow half a grand on an iPhone and still end up with their arms and legs tied by a contract: they'll get a Nokia for $1 with the same contract. Think of iPhone vs mainstream phones a bit like in the graphics card arena: the 8800 GTX makes big headlines and pretty graphs on the news and review sites, but those slow 64 MB are what sells millions of chips and brings in the cash. Same here: just because Apple made an expensive high-end toy, doesn't mean everyone else will rush to replace their low end phones with expensive PDAs. Maybe they won't even react at all until they see how much of a market is there for such a toy.
Etc.
See? I'm not even a Mac fan, and it still wasn't too hard to come up with a smarter way of combatting TFA's worries than, basically, "people will whine about Apple either way."
I can only wish it was that simple. But other than keeping quitting and moving to fresh small startups (which probably don't exactly pay a lot for an admin), it's not really practicable.
And even as a startup, if your work isn't purely developping your own product, you end up doing stuff for various clients. Which have their own ideas set in stone, based on reading some IT-for-retards ragazine or on a golf round with the nice salesman from MS/IBM/whatever. And we all know that you can't trust those techies with their techno-babble speak, whereas a salesman would never tell a lie
An as soon as the company grows past a certain size, and doubly so for companies whose primary product aren't programs or IT services, well, my favourite metaphor is: clue is heavier than air. The higher you go up the hierarchy pyramid, the thinner it gets. If clue were oxygen, you'd see higher level managers blue in the face like they're Smurfs.
To their defense, it's not their job to know the finer points and differences between web servers, but then it also shouldn't be their job to take such low level decisions. So you have a bunch of people taking decisions about stuff that they knew nothing about, and it wasn't their job to know anything about. What really makes it worse is having several layers of shielding against the effects of bad decisions. He made some "strategic decision" to go all-IIS, and can claim credit for any positive results (even coincidental or immaginary), but it's _your_ fault if something goes wrong with it or it takes too long to port your application to it. And whenever such shielding is in place, out goes the incentive to get any real clue or to refrain from taking bad decisions.
But, to get back on topic, you'll find very few large companies where such shielding from responsibility isn't in place. So you're limiting your employment oportunities drastically if you only accept jobs from the few who aren't led by people who don't take their IT info from ads and salesmen.
Probably a more realistic thing to do is realize that, in the end, few things matter _that_ horribly much. Some people have a penchant for blowing minor differences out of proportion, and make mountains out of molehills. There _are_ product issues that matter, and there _are_ awfully bad management decisions, but there's also a lot of stuff which really isn't as critical as the "either something is perfect or it's complete crap" gang makes it sound. If some proxy is 5% faster than another, pfft, it doesn't even start to matter. You'll want plenty of margin for when you get slashdotted anyway, but 99% of the time it'll be _way_ under-used. Having 5% or even 10% less unused capacity isn't the end of the world.
And once you do a realistic assessment of how bad it really is, a lot of things aren't _that_ horrible after all. So management picked a less than optimal proxy. Who cares? Compared to some other decisions I've seen various managers take, this doesn't even start to matter. If you're going to quit a job solely because of something like that, methinks you need to rethink your standards. And maybe look for an OCPD support group in your area.
Well, then you've really made the point as to why the article is bogus, eh? Yes, they make a "nearly two years" claim at the top, but if you read a bit further: "The average lifespan for the nominees (including winners) was 76 years. Winners worldwide lived 1.4 years longer on average, and winners from the same country as non-winning nominees lived another two-thirds of a year, on average."
So lemme see. If you take the whole sample, the difference was 1.4 years, or 1.4 * 12 = 16.8 months. I'm still not done with the morning coffee, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but 16.8 months is a bit lower than the 20 months you've calculated for two sigma.
I find it more interesting when they restrict it to winners from the same country, since, well, only then it's really apples to apples. (You'd expect that someone from the USA would live longer than someone from, say, India. Doubly so when there's data from the early 1900's.) Then it's only 2/3 of a year, or 8 months difference. Quite a bit lower than 20 months, I would say. Plus, it's inherently a lot of smaller samples, so even the 20 months figure would become larger.
More importantly, that difference between "winners vs nominees everywhere" and "winners vs nominees from the same country" tells me that the first one might not be entirely unbiased as samples go. If, say, more winners come from the top industrialized nations with high standards of living, while the larger nominees sample include more people from some poorer countries too, that alone could account for the the 8.8 months difference in the two figures.
I haven't properly studied the names and countries of origin for everyone, but for physics and chemistry it sounds at least like a _believable_ kind of bias: you don't see third world countries building big cyclotrons (for advanced physics research) or having advanced big pharma companies (for advanced chemistry research.) Something like, say, the prize for literature might have been a less biased sample: you don't need lab equipment and funding in the billions to write a book. And if the only cause there is that winning a prize and resulting alpha-monkey status instantly gives you some extra months, then the effect should be the same there too.
This gets funnier when you add this quote into the mix: "Oswald and Rablen found that Nobel laureates in physics lived an average of almost a year longer than laureates in chemistry."
Err... wait a minute. Let's do some maths there, then. Assuming there have been roughly as many winners in physics and chemistry, to keep the average, then the 16.8 months figure becomes something like 22.8 months for physics and 10.8 months for chemistry. It may look like now the physics number is finally signifficant, but it also means half the sample, so sigma is 120 months / sqrt(67) ~= 120 / 8 = 15 months, so two sigma is 30 months. Hmm, now even the figure for physicists is still less significant, and the figure for chemists is outright useless.
Let's apply that piece of wisdom for the "winners vs nominees from the same country", since, again, that's really the only one which doesn't have a built-in bias. To keep the 8 month average and assuming again equal numbers from the same country it becomes 14 months for the physicists and 2 months for the chemists. Frankly, living 2 months longer as a chemistry winner already starts to sound thoroughly insignifficant. But probably that 1 year difference doesn't apply here too, or is proportioanlly reduced too, so let's ignore this.
Was there some other difference between
Heh. You'll notice that what I've _actually_ written there is about Galileo versus the dogmatism of the Aristotelian science ivory tower, _not_ about Galileo vs the church. Yes, Galileo vs the church was a different story, and it's the story of Galileo flaming the pope and putting the pope's words in the mouth of a character whose name sounds like "The Stupid." But that's not the story I'm talking about. So please spare me the faithful defenses of the church, since I'm not talking about that at all.
Do you even understand how the Aristotelian system worked, when you talk about evidence? Not needing much evidence was the whole point there. The doctrine was basically that you can just think about it, trust your higher intellect and common sense, and postulate how things obviously work, without needing any actual experiments. They had a ton of things that were as bogus as it gets, just because they looked "obvious" or "common sense." E.g., they actually believed that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast, because, duh, it's just common sense. E.g., they actually believed that dropping something from the mast of a moving ship would fall in a vertical straight line, thus lagging behind the ship. Again, duh, it's just common sense. E.g., they considered it only common sense that there's be only 7 planets and no satellites, because 7 is such a perfect number and reflected in so many things of God's creation, that it should be obvious to any educated man that satellites and extra planets would only ruin that perfection, thus God would never have created them. Don't laugh, an actual "scientist" from back then actually wrote exactly that idiocy as obvious disproof for that crazy new satellite idea.
To his defense, Aristotle himself did at least once say one should collect data before drawing conclusions... but then mostly ignored his own advice and proceeded to postulate whole sets of natural laws without _any_ evidence or measurement. He inferred that since all celestial bodies are made of the weightless element "fire", for example, it stood to reason that the Moon is populated by creatures of fire. Ok, maybe there he lacked the experimental data. But he also postulated such stuff as human males having more teeth than the females, when half a day of counting on a random sample would have provided all the proof to the contrary. He was more concerned with formalizing logic and logical thinking than with actually collecting evidence to apply it on. He was more concerned with doing a thoroughly correct "A => B, B => C, therefore on the basis of A we can state that C is true" kind of inferrence, than with bothering to actually measure or prove A. Medieval and renaissance "science" however, devolved even further in his name.
That's the whole point: it's not that they had some mountains of evidence to support the old "science", it's that it was a system that worked on _dogma_ instead of evidence. They had their set of dogmas and stuff that was considered "obvious" and "common sense", and the whole "science" was inferring stuff from those, not trying to disprove or refine them. The whole point is that the
Sorry, science still doesn't work that way.
"Shut up or we're all doomed" is a prime example of a classic fallacy, namely the Appeal To Consequences fallacy: pretending that something is "proven" or "disproven" by how desirable or undesirable the consequences are. It, and the other many fallacies employed in the climate debate, however, don't "prove" or "disprove" anything: they're just bad pseudo-logic.
It's basically perfectly on par with (a few years back) saying "the dams near New Orleans are proven strong enough, because it would lead to so awful consequences if they aren't." Would such an argument actually have made the dams stronger? Nope. Would silencing critics have prevented the catastrophe? Nope.
And as if the existing handwaving, sophistry and fallacies weren't enough, now let's also add an unsubtle Argumentum Ad Baculum, a.k.a., appeal to force: I'm right because I can do nasty things to you if you say I'm not. Like get you de-certified. Nope, that still isn't actual scientific proof or disproof.
And censoring scientists is a stupid idea anyway. Science just builds a model and makes some predictions. How you act upon them, is the domain of engineering and/or politics. Go vote for someone else if you want action, not try to force scientists to start spouting dogma instead of science.
Let me remind you that this topic isn't about reminding Tom, Dick and Harry that their coffeetable (or slashdot) discussion isn't proper science, up to academic standards. It's about an idea as stupid as outright de-certifying anyone who dares think otherwise.
Pray tell, once that is achieved, _what_ value do peer reviews serve any more? Once you've decreed that the only peers are those who have complete faith in the dogma and know it's not their place to question it, peer-review becomes little more than a self-perpetuating system to ensure that future work toes the party line too.
"Peer review" just doesn't work in a closed dogmatic system. Remember Galileo being "reviewed" by the true believers of the Aristotelian system. Did they really prove him wrong or contributed anything to the progress of science.
_All_ that science is about at any level is accomodating a multitude of views, including that your pet theory might be false. Everything is and should be judged only by their experimental data and error bar. And if you think you've found new data, a better theory, or whatever, that invalidates it, please do say so. We'll judge your hypothesis too by the same standards.
Science is not religion, it's not about authority figures telling you what to believe and what's punishable heresy. That's the domain of religion. Science is just a _method_.
And this guy proposing to basically introduce heresy and excommunication in science (if you dare question the dogma, we'll de-certify you) is contrary to that whole method. It just shows that it's he who has no fucking clue what science is all about. Maybe someone should start by de-certifying him.
It's still the wrong way, because it's one more step towards blurring the distinction between science and bullshit in the minds of Jack Sixpack and Jane Housewife.
You can't say that proper science and skepticism should be limited to an ivory tower clique of chosen ones, and everyone else should just get dogma, because:
1. Even those scientists got there from being Joe Schoolkid and Cecilia Nerdygirl who liked to discover how things really worked, and apply critical thinking the quick fairy-tale explanations their parents gave them to "why is the sky blue?" or "what _is_ the rainbow?" The more you dumb society down and teach more people to not use their brains, the less of a recruiting pool you have for that chosen ones gang. If you actually managed to get everyone to stop using their brains, stop questioning the dogma, discourage everyone from being skeptics or debating anything unless they're a cardinal (or whatever other badge of "ok, now you can discuss the dogma" badge), and persecute everyone who dares step out of line, etc, well, you can already know how much scientific progress that produced in the middle ages.
2. Because those scientists will need funding and other support from the likes of Tom CEO, Dick Marketeer and Harry Journalist. Once you taught _those_ and their customers/readers/etc that science is just about enforcing a dogma, what's to stay in the way of them just funding pseudo-science by PR. Not that it doesn't already happen, but going that way full time is not an improvement.
If anything I'd remind more that you _can't_ do science by PR, or in the words of Feynman, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Teaching more people that science is just about who gets to set the official dogma, is just as step towards more thinking "fuck you, I have the money, so I'll set my own dogma by PR." And more down the pyramid accepting it, because if they're going to accept one dogma unthinkingly anyway, hey, they might as well go for the one with more marketting behind it.
Technically each of us could be outsourced, no problem, even the ones who don't telecommute. That's pretty much a normal implication of having an architecture, interfaces and code that are easy to understand and maintain. If they can give your code to someone else to maintain after you've been run over by a truck, they can give your code to someone else to maintain when you haven't. If someone can maintain your code after you've moved to another job, without having to track you down for a whiteboard discussion, then that someone can just as well be in India or at home.
Telecommuting doesn't really add much there. IMHO not being able to telecommute because everything needs a lengthy whiteboard explanation, and it's needed 5 days a week, should in fact tell any employer that something's wrong with that project. If you can't do much work with a phone and email and need that guy in person full time, what are you going to do when he moves to another job or drives his car into a tree, and you can't even use phone and email to talk to him?
Basically, the only way to be non-outsourceable is to obfuscate and, basically, sabotage your employer. Which is dishonest and hardly reason for professional pride. Still, even then, now they're finally getting rid of my good coleague Wally, after they had to rewrite the little work he did and thoroughly obfuscated. So even that's not as guaranteed.
Either way, I'd rather be less replaceable because I do good work fast, than because of needing to come to my desk every day and need whiteboard drawings to understand how to use my code.
Umm, well, now I understand what you mean, but then it's a bit mis-leading: that's not what a Straw Man fallacy means. A Straw Man is when you deliberately mis-represent the opponent's position, and then proceed to fight that imaginary point of view instead of what he said. E.g., if I were to pretend that your post is about denying global warming or gay marriage and proceed to demolish it based on that, that would be a straw man.
Accusing someone of using straw men is kinda impolite, unless they actually do and it's of some importance to their point. It's accusing them of deliberate handwaving, smoke and mirrors and sophistry, which tends to not be OK even in informal discussions.
I think what you mean is more along the lines of the Hasty Generalization fallacy, which is just that: extrapolating from one example or too few examples to being a rule. Maybe also a bit of Biased Sample, as in, for example, picking one's examples in a primarily telecommuted company and extrapolating them to everything else.
These are are really only "mortal sins" in academic papers, not in a discussion among friends or on slashdot. In informal discussions we all use such samples and generalization at some point, so pointing out the exceptions or limits is also OK.
Sorry if it sounds like a lecture, but, well, just as information.
It seems to me that:
1. Your whole game theory application starts at "it may be provable that, all other things being equal, having an office presence provides social connectivity, allowing the player to advance more easily in his chosen direction" (my emphasis), and then proceeds to build something that sounds suspiciously like certainties on it. It's as if "may be provable" turned into "already proven" somewhere along the way, and I don't see any such proof. If something only " may be provable", but isn't actually proven, then anything built upon it is equally something that may be true or not.
2. It's also suspiciously skipping over such important notions as constraints. "All other things being equal" pretty much means that you found one axis that is completely independent from the others, and you can maximize without touching the others, which tends to never be true. At some point enough social connectivity is enough, and you can't increase it more without losing something else. And I know for example first hand that the guy going around all day long finding someone to talk to, precisely because all else isn't equal: all else pretty much hit zero. It's an extreme case, but it serves to illustrate that those variables aren't that independent. If you change one, all else usually doesn't remain the same.
As you undoubtedly know, min-maxing in an optimal solution in pretty much any space _can_, in fact, reduce the value on one axis, to gain more on another that matters more. In cases of planning what you do in an X hour day, there'll always be constraints: you can't say you're doing the same work _and_ adding a social and networking component for free. In practice, every hour spent socializing and networking is an hour when you're not actually programming. As in any min-maxing problem, you have to find some happy balance, not pretend that all cases get the same of one component, while the other is for free. Sometimes you actually have to reduce that social component a _lot_ to actually get some work done and show some technical achievement.
3. Not _all_ advancement directions have similar requirements. Min-maxing an optimal solution on for one problem or goal can actually mean cutting down on something that was part of the ideal solution to another. Even assuming that the same space and general rules apply, some directions, such as just proving you're a smart programmer, in fact need more proving technical skill. I might actually be better served by spending an hour learning some new technology or technique, than spending an hour commuting so my boss will see my face again. While other directions, such as branching into marketting or becoming some sort of manager, require a lot more social presence and networking.
4. There are problems and factors which you seem to not even consider at all in your ill-described model, since in practice they don't actually depend at all on impressing your co-workers and boss. Quality of life, for example, is something that isn't achieved by impressing the boss, but more often by knowing when to stop impressing the boss and just have a life.
Ok, so they're not quite as binary, but again, you end up with constraints. If nothing else, a day still has 24 hours, and you can't really get that much for free. Every extra overtime hour put into impressing the boss and co-workers, is one hour you're not doing something else in. Every hour spent commuting is an hour you're neither doing anything for your quality of life, nor impressing the boss and co-workers. As with any other min-maxing problem, you have to reduce X to get more on Y and Z, or reduce Y to get more of the other two.
Two solutions to two different problems can end up _very_ different, once you throw those into the mix and give them wildly different weights in the desired result. Someone's optimal solution may involve doing 80 hour weeks to impress the boss and get any promotion at any cost, while someone else's optimal solution will be spending as muc
I'm not telecommuting at the moment, and living fairly close to the office, I'm not really trying to anyway, but... somehow I'm not seeing that as so critical. I have co-workers who are here 3 days a week, and, honestly, there are whole weeks when they're hardly actually needed. You'll want _some_ face time, but I'm not sure that even 2-3 days a week are necessary every week.
Going around and asking in person only works that well for a small company anyway. For example here I ended up maintaining the truly awful code of someone whose office is now at the other end of the city. If I wanted to talk to him, I'd have to set an appointment and drive there, which probably isn't any better from the office than from home. In fact, from home I'd actually be closer to his office.
Half the time we _do_ use email anyway, and the other half we just reach for the phone. Why wouldn't it work just as well from home? And since everything is in the same CVS, if you need any clarifications, you can just tell the other guy which project, file and function or line number you're interested in. Having to actually go to another department and ask in person is person is more the exception when phone and email failed, rather than having a permanent exodus of people going to paint something on other people's whiteboards.
Ditto for guys whose code we use, or guys using our code. Heck, some of the frameworks I've had to work with were from companies not even in the same city, or the same country altogether. Some of the guys whose code is being maintained don't even work here any more.
All in all, while I don't deny that sometimes it _is_ an advantage, I see more value in having good and clearly defined architectures and interfaces. That will keep serving you well even when the whole original team moved on to other jobs. It's not a theoretical situation, we actually have one framework here where that's exactly what happened over time.
And when they didn't yet, knowing (or having a way to find out quickly) who to phone or email if you have questions. If the architecture and interfaces are well designed and documented, and you have competent people at both ends of the line, chances are there won't be a whole tome of an explanation you need, so telephone and email work just as well. And when someone new to it needs a more thorough crash course, an appointment can be arranged... which is exactly what we're doing right now anyway, even without telecommuting.