Unfortunately this just won't make people that much smarter... you can have access to all the information in the world, and it won't really help you to synthesize that information. You don't know how to look for patterns unless you've been taught how to process information and integrate it into what you already know -- so if you don't even know you knew something, it won't be so helpful in letting you come up with new connections and creative reworkings of previous ideas. This goes especially for the liberal arts, but even for mathematics like geometry -- I personally already know that I can look up the solution of complex integral formulae, but because I've used that as a crutch and not learned to manipulate the symbols well myself, I still need to work at integrating more complex formulae that involve substitutions. Only practice gets you that.
For that matter, so much of learning is about process. For instance, I know full well how to do multiplications of two digits by two digits. But, because I haven't put in the time and the experience to memorize those parts of the tables, I have to work it out. But I can't imagine that working it out is that much slower than fighting the slashdot effect when everybody in my class taking the same final exam tries to 'wget http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&q=25+times+37'... besides which, the latter isn't very likely to teach me anything. But if I work it out by hand enough, I'll learn not just what that particular product is, but I'll learn how to rely upon myself to do mathematics.
If anything this is a threat to primary education. Kids aren't challenged enough in these classes. I wish I'd been pushed more, and it's only getting worse.
If the Earth's population continues to explode at the current rate, the survival of our race may depend on an interplanetary colony in the future.
"An interplanetary colony in the future" -- by which you mean condoms, right?
Reasonable birth control education and access to enough security that people don't feel obliged to have twelve children so one survives are both much more feasible than colonizing space.
Who says it's poisoned fruit? I will bet you $50 right now that says India buys a whole lot more computers in about three years than they do now. (And probably at cheaper prices than in the US, too...)
That's the expansion of the market. Sure, they don't have the money yet -- because they'll have to accumulate the wage for a bit. But give it a very short bit of time...
Oh, absolutely a person like this is worth being loyal to. And I respect him as a person for this decision. I'm just saying that he cut it close, he took a course which very nearly cut him out of the market and the ability to make that decision again.
So, by that evolutionary process, good managers/owners are the ones who stick their neck out for their employees. They are also the ones who lose their jobs, however much we respect their values. There's a reason that they are so few these days.
I wish that there were more rewards for integrity in the world. It'd be a lot more commonplace then, maybe...
No, they are outsourcing because they THINK they can get the same work done for less money.
Well, I'm glad that you know better than they do the quality of work they're getting out of their investment. Good thing you did all the research that they didn't do before making this enormous and risky decision. Are they also interviewing you as a new CEO?
Look. We talk about there being lower quality or lower productivity from India/China/whatever. These are pretty old myths. Customer support people are pretty bad the world over (people in Omaha have been equally unhelpful for me over the phone as people in Calcutta) and surely everybody here knows that finding bad coders or ignorant IT people isn't a needle-in-a-haystack search... I've never read an article patting American IT workers on the back for a job well done, have you?
So you're right, the jury is still out. But a lot of people with a lot of very direct interest in the outcome of that bet are betting on the outsourced workers; keep that in mind.
He lost a ton of money because of it, but he didn't care what happened to him, his company and employees were more important. That's a guy that knows what he's doing.
No, that's a guy who doesn't have to answer to a Board and tons of shareholding jackals. Or, at least, who doesn't have them to use as an excuse for his self-serving actions, or who wasn't trained by the expectation of them to think that bottom line is the end-all.
But would you (and his workers) be praising him so highly if his company had gone into bankruptcy and never come back out? Lots more people would've lost their jobs then, no...?
Speaking as one of those "18 to Twenty-somethings" that you refer to here, I think you're overlooking an important point: people my age don't go to the cinema for the product, they go for the social experience. Music is different, yes. But, let's see, I went to maybe seven movies in 2003. In all but one of those cases (LOTR) it was because of the social environment -- it's an activity that you can do with people. I don't really care about what crap they produce -- maybe two or three good films a year, which I still don't care enough about to pay NY theatre prices for (again, excepting LOTR) -- but the opportunity to get out of the house and go to a social gathering place with a group of friends is what I wind up buying.
So we may not even be endorsing the films we watch. They're just there as background noise, to provide an alternative to the bar scene.
Meanwhile, the grandparent mentioned that Hollywood will pump ad money into its movies. This is true. But if my experience is typical (which it may not be) this money doesn't effectively advertise individual movies. Rather, it advertises going to the movies as a viable option for a social outing. Hollywood advertises for the cinema industry, which (given the predominantly social character of going to a movie theatre) is much more important for the theatres than what our tastes are.
Also, don't forget that sometimes people see movies expressly because they're awful...:) But to the point, there's more forces at work than just "those ignorant tasteless kids" buying up whatever schlock you splat at a screen for them. If anything, art films might be worse than Hollywood crap for the purposes that people use it for (an insightful movie might be a distraction somehow). Though I'll be happy to rent it eventually.
the IT profession (which I will work hard to become a member of).
Ahh, you don't already work with computers for a living.
Well, I do. Matter of fact, I write knowledge-management perl scripts, basically munging xml files from one format to another, day-in day-out (when I'm not reading slashdot). Let me tell you, it's not because of Excel and Access that you need scripts. Data isn't inconvenient because of applications, it's inconvenient because that's the nature of data. Sure, there are things you can do to make it much, much easier to parse through $toolOfChoice, and Excel isn't very convenient if $toolOfChoice eq perl (csv format? nausea). But so long as people want to do lots of different, new, creative things with their data (and they always will, even if it's just turning it from one format to another) there will be a need to fiddle and rewrite and make changes to program logic. The fact that I've written a couple reasonably generic tools to parse my company's internal xml formats doesn't mean that all anybody needs to do is snap their fingers and get the data. There's still the problems of using and interpreting that data.
And another thing -- don't underestimate the ability of a good, well-trained Excel user to get the information s/he needs quickly. Sure, it ain't regexes, and odds are somebody who's good at it should've been learning real programming. But don't assume that a tool is nerfed just because you don't know how to use it. (I don't bother with the MS stuff myself, but I've had coworkers who were pretty impressive with it.) And for that matter, a lack of information-sharing (creating "irreplaceable employees") can happen just as easily in a shell/perl/whatever-scripted environment as opposed to one with Office macros. That's not because of Microsoft, it's because that's the nature of people. (Or have you ever tried to read an obscure and poorly commented perl script?)
to actually bring back efficiency and dignitiy to the human race by expressing human thought in a burst of insightful code ONCE, instead of mindless clicks and grunts every month, an endless cycle of futility.
... ok, you did not just imply that the dignity of the human race is somehow dependent on parsing text files.
The upside is that the fbi will need more manpower , and reduce the unemployment.;)
Yeah, unfortunately FBI clerks don't add to the GDP, so they won't be improving our standards of living any -- might as well just send the new paper pushers some welfare checks. At least then nobody'd be snooping in my financial information...
Well the US Govt has a stance of trust nobody, my question is whats going to stop a guy with three suitcases full of plastic explosives walking into an Airport and making a crater out of it.
The same thing that keeps us safe from "threatening" international travellers today, ie. superior airport security in their Countries of Origin...
get_random_old_english_text is rather unlikely to produce any Shakespeare. Old English is far removed from the language of Elizabethan England, by numerous grammatical and vocabulary features as well as thousands of years.
More to the point, if there is an is_shakespeare function, then you're still trying to reproduce the texts. You're just reproducing them in a vastly more inefficient manner (BogoMonkeys) instead of an efficient manner (DecompressZip). The only reason you'd need a reference text is for reproduction purposes; if the algorithm were producing Shakespeare it wouldn't need to check whether it'd gotten it right.
Yes, rhyme and rhythm are good tools for limiting the range of possible completions in order to restrict the sorts of errors that can occur.
But I've been a member of groups that have a substantial oral tradition. Even regularly reinforced community memorization, with the aid of rhythm, rhyme, and tune, can lead to plenty of spurious versions and confusion as to the "correct" version of a canon. I'm not denying that they make it much easier to remember huge amounts of material, just that they are in no sense proof against alteration, even over the extremely short term, let alone over centuries and centuries of repetitions.
As to the assertion that the Iliad and Odyssey probably changed very little before they were written, that's likely mistaken. First, large portions of the texts as we have received them were probably composed at the time of writing. Second, there's a lot of research that demonstrates that the oral poetic tradition relied heavily on improvisation accompanied with the use of stock phrases. There was probably a different version of the Iliad for every nobleman's house Homer visited, as he tried to flatter his current host, and used objects in the home as memory aids or as subjects in that particular telling of the poem. One might as well assume that Coltrane played the same solo every night.
'I don't agree with the ethical stance my company is taking'.
What makes you think this is so bulletproof? If you'll leave somebody else for their unethical behavior, you'll leave me for my unethical behavior too, which really just means I can't trust you at my company.
And yes, every company is doing something or another unethical. So we'd rather you were obedient to our company's decisions than unwavering from your personal code of ethics, especially when those are an unknown quantity that could flare up at an inopportune moment.
Well, first off, the question is misguided -- software development usually does involve consumer testing and feedback at every stage of the process (at least, good software development for a specific user-client; the user never wants what they tell you, nor do you build exactly what they tell you anyway).
More to the point, though, a lot of commercial software would be loads better if it had a more thorough testing process. But this would result in such poor times-to-market that the market would've already been cornered by the piece of crap that was released first and patched in the upgrade.
So yes, this would result in better software, provided you don't mind hamstringing the developers (with tons of new user requests) and the sales staff (when they have a product they can never, ever deliver on time).
Incidentally, sometimes the end-user's ability to use software other than it was exactly intended can be useful, to a sufficiently creative and powerful user... for over-the-counter commercial software anyway...
Somebody has to link audiences and artists. Record companies do that (as you put it: they make winners). If you want to support your favourite artist: go to a concert. Record companies (both large and small) makes it possible for you to know that your favourite artists exist. That's how they stay in business. There's actually a need (AKA market) for them.
However, there are plenty of user-opinion bulletin boards that could serve this purpose quite well (epinions.com, consumerreview.com, consumersearch.com, you get the idea) -- and, as they are widely participatory rather than being controlled by the same people who have financial interest in their recommendations, they could serve this purpose much more effectively than a top-down record company. Who would you trust when asking for cool goth music -- alt.goth.music or Sony? Who would you ask about cool new electronica -- the Time Warner electronica unit, or a quality web board? Obviously the record co. division will have some knowledge of the product, but not as much as the collective body of the listening audience.
The advent of electronic distribution systems will render the RIAA-members' categorization/criticism/filtering business as obsolete as their distribution business.
Note also that this is an excellent potential niche for a user-participation music news site... anybody running slashmusic.org or spindot.org yet??
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just hope that 'SCO is DYING!!' is a little more accurate hm?
Unfortunately this just won't make people that much smarter... you can have access to all the information in the world, and it won't really help you to synthesize that information. You don't know how to look for patterns unless you've been taught how to process information and integrate it into what you already know -- so if you don't even know you knew something, it won't be so helpful in letting you come up with new connections and creative reworkings of previous ideas. This goes especially for the liberal arts, but even for mathematics like geometry -- I personally already know that I can look up the solution of complex integral formulae, but because I've used that as a crutch and not learned to manipulate the symbols well myself, I still need to work at integrating more complex formulae that involve substitutions. Only practice gets you that.
e =UTF-8&q=25+times+37'... besides which, the latter isn't very likely to teach me anything. But if I work it out by hand enough, I'll learn not just what that particular product is, but I'll learn how to rely upon myself to do mathematics.
For that matter, so much of learning is about process. For instance, I know full well how to do multiplications of two digits by two digits. But, because I haven't put in the time and the experience to memorize those parts of the tables, I have to work it out. But I can't imagine that working it out is that much slower than fighting the slashdot effect when everybody in my class taking the same final exam tries to 'wget http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
If anything this is a threat to primary education. Kids aren't challenged enough in these classes. I wish I'd been pushed more, and it's only getting worse.
Geez, who do you think you are, Johnny Mnemonic or something?
...ok, I'm afraid I'm not bright enough to see it... what am I missing?
Reasonable birth control education and access to enough security that people don't feel obliged to have twelve children so one survives are both much more feasible than colonizing space.
Who says it's poisoned fruit? I will bet you $50 right now that says India buys a whole lot more computers in about three years than they do now. (And probably at cheaper prices than in the US, too...)
That's the expansion of the market. Sure, they don't have the money yet -- because they'll have to accumulate the wage for a bit. But give it a very short bit of time...
Oh, absolutely a person like this is worth being loyal to. And I respect him as a person for this decision. I'm just saying that he cut it close, he took a course which very nearly cut him out of the market and the ability to make that decision again.
So, by that evolutionary process, good managers/owners are the ones who stick their neck out for their employees. They are also the ones who lose their jobs, however much we respect their values. There's a reason that they are so few these days.
I wish that there were more rewards for integrity in the world. It'd be a lot more commonplace then, maybe...
Look. We talk about there being lower quality or lower productivity from India/China/whatever. These are pretty old myths. Customer support people are pretty bad the world over (people in Omaha have been equally unhelpful for me over the phone as people in Calcutta) and surely everybody here knows that finding bad coders or ignorant IT people isn't a needle-in-a-haystack search... I've never read an article patting American IT workers on the back for a job well done, have you?
So you're right, the jury is still out. But a lot of people with a lot of very direct interest in the outcome of that bet are betting on the outsourced workers; keep that in mind.
But would you (and his workers) be praising him so highly if his company had gone into bankruptcy and never come back out? Lots more people would've lost their jobs then, no...?
Speaking as one of those "18 to Twenty-somethings" that you refer to here, I think you're overlooking an important point: people my age don't go to the cinema for the product, they go for the social experience. Music is different, yes. But, let's see, I went to maybe seven movies in 2003. In all but one of those cases (LOTR) it was because of the social environment -- it's an activity that you can do with people. I don't really care about what crap they produce -- maybe two or three good films a year, which I still don't care enough about to pay NY theatre prices for (again, excepting LOTR) -- but the opportunity to get out of the house and go to a social gathering place with a group of friends is what I wind up buying.
:) But to the point, there's more forces at work than just "those ignorant tasteless kids" buying up whatever schlock you splat at a screen for them. If anything, art films might be worse than Hollywood crap for the purposes that people use it for (an insightful movie might be a distraction somehow). Though I'll be happy to rent it eventually.
So we may not even be endorsing the films we watch. They're just there as background noise, to provide an alternative to the bar scene.
Meanwhile, the grandparent mentioned that Hollywood will pump ad money into its movies. This is true. But if my experience is typical (which it may not be) this money doesn't effectively advertise individual movies. Rather, it advertises going to the movies as a viable option for a social outing. Hollywood advertises for the cinema industry, which (given the predominantly social character of going to a movie theatre) is much more important for the theatres than what our tastes are.
Also, don't forget that sometimes people see movies expressly because they're awful...
Well, I do. Matter of fact, I write knowledge-management perl scripts, basically munging xml files from one format to another, day-in day-out (when I'm not reading slashdot). Let me tell you, it's not because of Excel and Access that you need scripts. Data isn't inconvenient because of applications, it's inconvenient because that's the nature of data. Sure, there are things you can do to make it much, much easier to parse through $toolOfChoice, and Excel isn't very convenient if $toolOfChoice eq perl (csv format? nausea). But so long as people want to do lots of different, new, creative things with their data (and they always will, even if it's just turning it from one format to another) there will be a need to fiddle and rewrite and make changes to program logic. The fact that I've written a couple reasonably generic tools to parse my company's internal xml formats doesn't mean that all anybody needs to do is snap their fingers and get the data. There's still the problems of using and interpreting that data.
And another thing -- don't underestimate the ability of a good, well-trained Excel user to get the information s/he needs quickly. Sure, it ain't regexes, and odds are somebody who's good at it should've been learning real programming. But don't assume that a tool is nerfed just because you don't know how to use it. (I don't bother with the MS stuff myself, but I've had coworkers who were pretty impressive with it.) And for that matter, a lack of information-sharing (creating "irreplaceable employees") can happen just as easily in a shell/perl/whatever-scripted environment as opposed to one with Office macros. That's not because of Microsoft, it's because that's the nature of people. (Or have you ever tried to read an obscure and poorly commented perl script?)
"What? No, honey, I was just visiting www.babe-licious.org to, umm. Help with the, er, research! Research on MD5 collisions! Yeah!"
get_random_old_english_text is rather unlikely to produce any Shakespeare. Old English is far removed from the language of Elizabethan England, by numerous grammatical and vocabulary features as well as thousands of years.
More to the point, if there is an is_shakespeare function, then you're still trying to reproduce the texts. You're just reproducing them in a vastly more inefficient manner (BogoMonkeys) instead of an efficient manner (DecompressZip). The only reason you'd need a reference text is for reproduction purposes; if the algorithm were producing Shakespeare it wouldn't need to check whether it'd gotten it right.
Yes, rhyme and rhythm are good tools for limiting the range of possible completions in order to restrict the sorts of errors that can occur.
But I've been a member of groups that have a substantial oral tradition. Even regularly reinforced community memorization, with the aid of rhythm, rhyme, and tune, can lead to plenty of spurious versions and confusion as to the "correct" version of a canon. I'm not denying that they make it much easier to remember huge amounts of material, just that they are in no sense proof against alteration, even over the extremely short term, let alone over centuries and centuries of repetitions.
As to the assertion that the Iliad and Odyssey probably changed very little before they were written, that's likely mistaken. First, large portions of the texts as we have received them were probably composed at the time of writing. Second, there's a lot of research that demonstrates that the oral poetic tradition relied heavily on improvisation accompanied with the use of stock phrases. There was probably a different version of the Iliad for every nobleman's house Homer visited, as he tried to flatter his current host, and used objects in the home as memory aids or as subjects in that particular telling of the poem. One might as well assume that Coltrane played the same solo every night.
And yes, every company is doing something or another unethical. So we'd rather you were obedient to our company's decisions than unwavering from your personal code of ethics, especially when those are an unknown quantity that could flare up at an inopportune moment.
The lesson here is, if you want your manuscript never to see the light of day, don't become a really good author.
Tens of thousands are already using this method, with great success!
Hey, that reminds me of this Slashdot story from last week.
*snicker*
Well, first off, the question is misguided -- software development usually does involve consumer testing and feedback at every stage of the process (at least, good software development for a specific user-client; the user never wants what they tell you, nor do you build exactly what they tell you anyway).
More to the point, though, a lot of commercial software would be loads better if it had a more thorough testing process. But this would result in such poor times-to-market that the market would've already been cornered by the piece of crap that was released first and patched in the upgrade.
So yes, this would result in better software, provided you don't mind hamstringing the developers (with tons of new user requests) and the sales staff (when they have a product they can never, ever deliver on time).
Incidentally, sometimes the end-user's ability to use software other than it was exactly intended can be useful, to a sufficiently creative and powerful user... for over-the-counter commercial software anyway...
The advent of electronic distribution systems will render the RIAA-members' categorization/criticism/filtering business as obsolete as their distribution business.
Note also that this is an excellent potential niche for a user-participation music news site... anybody running slashmusic.org or spindot.org yet??