Here where I work, I see 30 people doing the work of 10
and every manager is always complaining about resource (skilled people)
shortage.
In part, the inefficiency is due to the staggering overhead of
SDLC - much of our time is spent writing documents, going to meetings
to talk about the documents, then writing up the meeting minutes and
revising the documents.
This "death by documents" culture is probably due to the idea of programmers
as a commodity. Yes, we also outsource extensively.
So, since programmers
are interchangeable pieces of a large machine, we have to specify every detail
of the design, without any interaction from seeing how our assumptions interact
in actual code, and break these specs into tiny pieces. These tiny pieces are
what the programmers are supposed to code from - better hope all possible questions
were already thought of and answered!
Our (manager) time is then spent defining elaborate specifications and breaking them down into many tiny pieces,
ensuring that those pieces are complete and none of them get lost, and managing the
flow and subsequent assembly of these pieces back into an integrated system.
Interaction with the clients (users), give and take on specs, dealing with concrete
examples rather than distant abstractions - ain't gonna happen, not on our watch!
Do our clients like what they end up with? We don't know, don't attempt to find out,
and certainly don't care - we fulfilled the spec!
Do we know or care how much the
business has changed in the year or more since we started this process? Once again,
it's the ignorance and apathy response: don't know, don't care.
But I'm not bitter to be spending the years of my intellectual peak shuffling papers,
oh no, not me.
Evidently you are unfamiliar with the customs of my country.
Here, when wealthy CEOs steal hundreds of millions of dollars from
their shareholders, we traditionally reward their perspicacity and daring
with media adulation, book contracts, speaking engagements, and the like.
So, for Mr. Kumar to get a jail sentence is unusual though, whether it
marks the start of a new trend or a blip in the old trend, remains to be seen.
A polygraph is probably most useful as a tool of intimidation. As a later poster opines, it may get the gullible to confess. What's more, it is a way to threaten people even if it's an empty threat.
just a quick note to let you know our plan to diminish (that means weaken)
the influence of science and rationality (smarts) is working real good,
at least judging from a sample of the more gullible segment of Slashdot (a site
on the internets).
We've got people, at least the simpler ones, thinking they can dismiss any science
they hear about as "having an agenda". This helps them avoid dealing with evidence
contrary (agin') to their delusions (beliefs).
The faith-based era is just around the corner: hallelujah!
I do this now for incidental scraps of paper - it's easier than jotting down
a note if it's more than a couple of lines.
Just last night my daughter asked
me to take pictures of her class schedules. Now they're right there in an e-mail
and she doesn't have to keep track of a couple of pieces of paper.
I use a camera with good low-light capability (Fuji Finepix F10 - the new F30's
even better) without a flash. I adjust the perspective in Paintshop Pro (to make
it look like I took the picture straight on) - or don't - it's readable either way.
It's much faster than a scanner. Also, OCR, as good as it's gotten, is no good for
much of what I save this way: handwritten notes, signs and maps, pages of books with
pictures or equations.
The subsequent burden of retrieval falls on having a good directory structure for my
needs (even though @#$%@ MS Windows doesn't give me linked files - which would allow
me to file in more than one place cheaply) and a good, descriptive name for the file.
I really don't understand two things - why most people, other than obsessive movie-watchers,
would subscribe to more than the one-at-a-time plan, and why people would both subscribe to
multiple-movies-at-a-time and let them sit unwatched?
Of course, I also don't understand people who don't read, who stand on escalators, and think
that more violence solves the problem of too much violence. OK, I guess that's more than two things.
I guess I'm just not very understanding.
FWIW, I subscribe to Netflix on the cheapest plan, one-at-a-time and watch only movies I want to
see within a few days of getting them. What's so bad about that? I still see one or two movies a
week for about $10 a month.
On a side note, does anyone remember the "Firefly" site that, years ago, recommended movies based on
your affinities with other people who liked the same movies you liked? They did a better job than
Netflix does at this but disappeared because they were going to go private during the dot-com years about
the time that all ended. I had the impression they thought they had really hot-shite algorithms for figuring
this stuff out. Doesn't seem like a very difficult problem, though.
Spot her a rook or a queen depending on the skill difference - or she can spot you.
There's also a variant I used to play with my daughter when I was teaching her. We
call it "chess by chance".
You use an ordinary deck of playing cards and take turns drawing a card from the
top of the deck to determine which piece you may move.
Ace through Eight are the 8 pawns numbered from left to right.
Nine, Ten, and Jack are Rook, Knight, and Bishop.
The Queen is the Queen and the King is the King.
If it's impossible to move the piece indicated by the card, draw again. For the rook,
knight, and bishop cards, you may move either one of (the pair of) the type selected.
In this version, you are allowed to move into check - in fact, you may be forced
to - because the subsequent capture of the King is uncertain. You win by capturing your
opponent's King.
You can also play a variation where you deal each player a hand of five cards to
allow some choice of moves.
> What was the final tally of recounts there? 3? 4?
No, the number of recounts was zero. There was an attempt to
count ballots rejected due to machine errors - aka the infamous
"hanging chad" - but "recount" is a deliberate mis-characterization
of this effort to make it seem trivial and un-warranted.
In the past few years, for example, epidemiologists have confirmed that people with high literacy and IQ cope better with the progress of Alzheimer's disease. They also recover from stroke, head injury, intoxication and poisoning with neurotoxins more rapidly than the average person.
The article goes on to mention a 1992 study at Columbia University which found, based on direct measurement of blood flows in the brain, that those who had received more education also had more severe brain pathology.
Since then, there has been more evidence of a "cognitive reserve" that helps better-educated people cope for a given level of brain damage. Colette Fabrigoule, a psychologist at the French University of Bordeaux, asserts
that people who are highly educated are better at recruiting alternative neuronal networks to compensate for the deterioration of their cortical areas, which deal with complex behaviour and thought. This, Fabrigoule believes, is what cognitive reserve is about. "Once you have a lesion or an insult, from a neurochemical point of view the network won't work normally," she explains. "Better-educated, intelligent people are better at recruiting compensatory mechanisms."
The Columbia scientist, Yaakov Stern, who did the 1992 study, believes that cognitive reserve is also enhanced by efficiency in processing information. He found that people with higher IQs didn't have to work their brains as hard as those with lower IQs to solve a set of problems.
This article doesn't appear to mention the New York study cited in the Bloomberg article.
> But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
> It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
Umm, not necessarily (though I tend to agree that the apocalypse is over-sold).
There's a lot of reasons why this hasn't happened. For one thing, the open interest (=number of contracts on the market) on futures more than a few months out is negligible. Part of this is due to the short-term nature of futures contracts which are often traded to hedge near-term, anticipated buys or sells of a commodity.
The other thing is that, while you could be correct with a futures bet that oil will cost over, say, $500/barrel in 2010, the price fluctuations between now and then could wipe you out.
Actually, it looks like the lead-in may be deceptive. At the end of the article, it says
Jiang's team made improvements to the computer software used to process the electron microscopy images
so it may just be image processing work, not microscope control.
As for a few lines, it would be nice to have that quantified as a few lines in
Perl is not the same as a few lines in C.
If software seems maddeningly inconsistent and is difficult to figure out, that's because it really is: it's not because you're stupid.
People (and 'bots) on Slashdot tend to be so immersed in the arbitrariness and foibles of technology that we don't see how opaque and difficult it is. Take a look at (Wall Street Journal's) Walter Mossberger's disclaimer and the start of Cooper's book ahref=http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsl etters/2004_issue02/Inmates_Foreword_excerpt.aspre l=url2html-17034http://www.cooper.com/content/insi ghts/newsletters/2004_issue02/Inmates_Foreword_exc erpt.asp>
to get an idea of some things you should keep in mind.
Mossberger's Disclaimer
Attention, Nontechies
Don't be embarrassed by your problems with computers. Just remember: you're not a "dummy," no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who, though technically expert, couldn't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it.
(Also from Mossberger recently (Protecting Your Computer/January 12, 2006; Page B3): There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers.)
Different people have different ways of understanding but don't underestimate the value of simple diagrams. Also, it's helpful to repeat things in slightly varying ways as some people will understand one phrasing but not another. Re-iterating an important point with a few examples also helps drive it home because multiple views of the same thing help place it in perspective. A multi-media approach might prove its worth because some people have visual memories whereas others remember more "by ear".
Specific things to point out are issues like (when entering information):
Case sometimes matters but sometimes doesn't
AND
Spaces and punctuation can be inordinately important
[aside] Why do web pages asking for credit card numbers usually refuse to accept it in the more-readable and easily-checkable format as it appears on my card? Many forms require the number to be entered with no internal spaces - is it really so hard to have the code deal with these? [\aside]
There's probably only one or two things you'll be doing with your computer and you can learn those things even if it's by rote.
Lastly, but most importantly, find someone who understands this better than you do and pay him lots of money. Worship him like a god.
Foreigners are expected to be very sensitive to Chinese feelings, but don't expect the same in return. A common belief is that "you as a barbarian owe China something for past transgressions." McGregor says that the Chinese love to kick off negotiations with an "it's-all-your-fault" preamble and follow with a "you-don't-understand-China" refrain when they want to reject your proposals. from this book review:
ahref=http://online.barrons.com/article/SB11359882 5320735233.html?mod=9_0030_b_this_weeks_magazine_c olumnsrel=url2html-20454http://online.barrons.com/ article/SB113598825320735233.html?mod=9_0030_b_thi s_weeks_magazine_columns>
Have the Mythbusters considered taking on more controversial topics?
While issues like global warming or fake debates like ID versus evolution are too complex or philosophical to be simply tested on TV, how about something on the efficacy of various alternative medical therapies?
On completely unrelated topics, how about the myth that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would pierce someone's skull or the one that rice causes pigeons to explode?
Re:Everything bad for you is good for you again
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 1
Since this scheme may take advantage of local knowledge - i.e. distinguish between a Greek deli and a Jewish one - there may be some barrier to entry, at least across cultures.
Of course, this makes the assumption that quality matters and they care enough to verify the inputs they're getting. In any case, the future of unskilled labor in G7 countries may be low-paid piece-work with no benefits. Sounds like a wealthy conservative's wet dream.
Slashdot Mirror
he can afford to throw away a PC when it becomes overrun by malware and buy a new one every few months.
Or maybe he's just a bad dad.
Here where I work, I see 30 people doing the work of 10 and every manager is always complaining about resource (skilled people) shortage.
In part, the inefficiency is due to the staggering overhead of SDLC - much of our time is spent writing documents, going to meetings to talk about the documents, then writing up the meeting minutes and revising the documents.
This "death by documents" culture is probably due to the idea of programmers as a commodity. Yes, we also outsource extensively.
So, since programmers are interchangeable pieces of a large machine, we have to specify every detail of the design, without any interaction from seeing how our assumptions interact in actual code, and break these specs into tiny pieces. These tiny pieces are what the programmers are supposed to code from - better hope all possible questions were already thought of and answered!
Our (manager) time is then spent defining elaborate specifications and breaking them down into many tiny pieces, ensuring that those pieces are complete and none of them get lost, and managing the flow and subsequent assembly of these pieces back into an integrated system.
Interaction with the clients (users), give and take on specs, dealing with concrete examples rather than distant abstractions - ain't gonna happen, not on our watch!
Do our clients like what they end up with? We don't know, don't attempt to find out, and certainly don't care - we fulfilled the spec!
Do we know or care how much the business has changed in the year or more since we started this process? Once again, it's the ignorance and apathy response: don't know, don't care.
But I'm not bitter to be spending the years of my intellectual peak shuffling papers, oh no, not me.
Our motto is:
Evidently you are unfamiliar with the customs of my country.
Here, when wealthy CEOs steal hundreds of millions of dollars from their shareholders, we traditionally reward their perspicacity and daring with media adulation, book contracts, speaking engagements, and the like.
So, for Mr. Kumar to get a jail sentence is unusual though, whether it marks the start of a new trend or a blip in the old trend, remains to be seen.
A polygraph is probably most useful as a tool of intimidation. As a later poster opines, it may get the gullible to confess. What's more, it is a way to threaten people even if it's an empty threat.
Speaking as the father of one...
> If you aren't capable of making the distinction between fantasy and real life,
How would you know this?
GW -
just a quick note to let you know our plan to diminish (that means weaken) the influence of science and rationality (smarts) is working real good, at least judging from a sample of the more gullible segment of Slashdot (a site on the internets).
We've got people, at least the simpler ones, thinking they can dismiss any science they hear about as "having an agenda". This helps them avoid dealing with evidence contrary (agin') to their delusions (beliefs).
The faith-based era is just around the corner: hallelujah!
Love,
Karl
What's wrong with you people?
Are we even looking at the same picture?
Look, on the near side is the chin, up from there is the nose, up from there are the other two noses and to the right of these is the telepathy patch.
You people are just too cynical for your own good.
...keep fingers over eyes and in ears and keep saying
La la la - I can't hear you...
I do this now for incidental scraps of paper - it's easier than jotting down a note if it's more than a couple of lines.
Just last night my daughter asked me to take pictures of her class schedules. Now they're right there in an e-mail and she doesn't have to keep track of a couple of pieces of paper.
I use a camera with good low-light capability (Fuji Finepix F10 - the new F30's even better) without a flash. I adjust the perspective in Paintshop Pro (to make it look like I took the picture straight on) - or don't - it's readable either way.
It's much faster than a scanner. Also, OCR, as good as it's gotten, is no good for much of what I save this way: handwritten notes, signs and maps, pages of books with pictures or equations.
The subsequent burden of retrieval falls on having a good directory structure for my needs (even though @#$%@ MS Windows doesn't give me linked files - which would allow me to file in more than one place cheaply) and a good, descriptive name for the file.
Of course, I also don't understand people who don't read, who stand on escalators, and think that more violence solves the problem of too much violence. OK, I guess that's more than two things.
I guess I'm just not very understanding.
FWIW, I subscribe to Netflix on the cheapest plan, one-at-a-time and watch only movies I want to see within a few days of getting them. What's so bad about that? I still see one or two movies a week for about $10 a month.
On a side note, does anyone remember the "Firefly" site that, years ago, recommended movies based on your affinities with other people who liked the same movies you liked? They did a better job than Netflix does at this but disappeared because they were going to go private during the dot-com years about the time that all ended. I had the impression they thought they had really hot-shite algorithms for figuring this stuff out. Doesn't seem like a very difficult problem, though.
I read this in a recent issue of Science News but the link is only reachable by subscibers (20060610 issue). Here's another link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=1993859.
If we abstain, the terrorists win!!
Spot her a rook or a queen depending on the skill difference - or she can spot you.
There's also a variant I used to play with my daughter when I was teaching her. We call it "chess by chance".
You use an ordinary deck of playing cards and take turns drawing a card from the top of the deck to determine which piece you may move.
If it's impossible to move the piece indicated by the card, draw again. For the rook, knight, and bishop cards, you may move either one of (the pair of) the type selected.
In this version, you are allowed to move into check - in fact, you may be forced to - because the subsequent capture of the King is uncertain. You win by capturing your opponent's King.
You can also play a variation where you deal each player a hand of five cards to allow some choice of moves.
> What was the final tally of recounts there? 3? 4?
No, the number of recounts was zero. There was an attempt to count ballots rejected due to machine errors - aka the infamous "hanging chad" - but "recount" is a deliberate mis-characterization of this effort to make it seem trivial and un-warranted.
The article goes on to mention a 1992 study at Columbia University which found, based on direct measurement of blood flows in the brain, that those who had received more education also had more severe brain pathology.
Since then, there has been more evidence of a "cognitive reserve" that helps better-educated people cope for a given level of brain damage. Colette Fabrigoule, a psychologist at the French University of Bordeaux, asserts
The Columbia scientist, Yaakov Stern, who did the 1992 study, believes that cognitive reserve is also enhanced by efficiency in processing information. He found that people with higher IQs didn't have to work their brains as hard as those with lower IQs to solve a set of problems.
This article doesn't appear to mention the New York study cited in the Bloomberg article.
> But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
a /pages/futures.htmlrel=url2html-30752http://stloui sfed.org/publications/re/2002/a/pages/futures.html > for more on this with particular reference to oil futures.
> It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
Umm, not necessarily (though I tend to agree that the apocalypse is over-sold).
There's a lot of reasons why this hasn't happened. For one thing, the open interest (=number of contracts on the market) on futures more than a few months out is negligible. Part of this is due to the short-term nature of futures contracts which are often traded to hedge near-term, anticipated buys or sells of a commodity.
The other thing is that, while you could be correct with a futures bet that oil will cost over, say, $500/barrel in 2010, the price fluctuations between now and then could wipe you out.
Yet another reason is that futures markets don't provide very good predictions of the future. See ahref=http://stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2002/
Actually, it looks like the lead-in may be deceptive. At the end of the article, it says
Jiang's team made improvements to the computer software used to process the electron microscopy images
so it may just be image processing work, not microscope control.
As for a few lines, it would be nice to have that quantified as a few lines in Perl is not the same as a few lines in C.
If software seems maddeningly inconsistent and is difficult to figure out, that's because it really is: it's not because you're stupid.
People (and 'bots) on Slashdot tend to be so immersed in the arbitrariness and foibles of technology that we don't see how opaque and difficult it is. Take a look at (Wall Street Journal's) Walter Mossberger's disclaimer and the start of Cooper's book ahref=http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsl etters/2004_issue02/Inmates_Foreword_excerpt.aspre l=url2html-17034http://www.cooper.com/content/insi ghts/newsletters/2004_issue02/Inmates_Foreword_exc erpt.asp>
to get an idea of some things you should keep in mind.
Mossberger's Disclaimer
(Also from Mossberger recently (Protecting Your Computer/January 12, 2006; Page B3): There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers.)Different people have different ways of understanding but don't underestimate the value of simple diagrams. Also, it's helpful to repeat things in slightly varying ways as some people will understand one phrasing but not another. Re-iterating an important point with a few examples also helps drive it home because multiple views of the same thing help place it in perspective. A multi-media approach might prove its worth because some people have visual memories whereas others remember more "by ear".
Specific things to point out are issues like (when entering information):
Case sometimes matters but sometimes doesn't
AND
Spaces and punctuation can be inordinately important
[aside] Why do web pages asking for credit card numbers usually refuse to accept it in the more-readable and easily-checkable format as it appears on my card? Many forms require the number to be entered with no internal spaces - is it really so hard to have the code deal with these? [\aside]
There's probably only one or two things you'll be doing with your computer and you can learn those things even if it's by rote.
Lastly, but most importantly, find someone who understands this better than you do and pay him lots of money. Worship him like a god.
Foreigners are expected to be very sensitive to Chinese feelings, but don't expect the same in return. A common belief is that "you as a barbarian owe China something for past transgressions." McGregor says that the Chinese love to kick off negotiations with an "it's-all-your-fault" preamble and follow with a "you-don't-understand-China" refrain when they want to reject your proposals.2 5320735233.html?mod=9_0030_b_this_weeks_magazine_c olumnsrel=url2html-20454http://online.barrons.com/ article/SB113598825320735233.html?mod=9_0030_b_thi s_weeks_magazine_columns>
from this book review: ahref=http://online.barrons.com/article/SB1135988
I know one extrovert who apparently talks so much because that's how she figures out what she's thinking.
While issues like global warming or fake debates like ID versus evolution are too complex or philosophical to be simply tested on TV, how about something on the efficacy of various alternative medical therapies?
On completely unrelated topics, how about the myth that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would pierce someone's skull or the one that rice causes pigeons to explode?
As long as I get my daily dose, I can live with that.
Here's a couple of good cheat sheets to that end: Caffeine Content of Foods and Drugs ahref=http://www.cspinet.org/new/cafchart.htmrel=
"Better living through chemistry"
Of course, this makes the assumption that quality matters and they care enough to verify the inputs they're getting. In any case, the future of unskilled labor in G7 countries may be low-paid piece-work with no benefits. Sounds like a wealthy conservative's wet dream.