_Whether it creates resentment or not_, the dedication and willingness to do the after hours work, or extra work, often helps companies succeed and helps people get promoted. It's part of the trade-offs of working. It's not merely in the corporate world, ask the self-employed or consultants, how their work hours tie to both income and to a competitive advantage.
The resentment you describe is real, and can itself cause problems. What are you suggesting instead? That students stop studying, so that less dedicated students can compete better against them? That we stop measuring performance in any way, and pay people based on how they identify the quality of their work?
True. This is what a good mentoring program is for. Computer science and software engineering don't have formal apprenticeship programs, and the informal ones are _invaluable_.
I'll admit that I've never seen a 4.0 average for anyone I interviewed, except for schools that grade on a 5.0 scale. If they received poor grades in subjects we were hiring for, I did ask why. If they were constantly on the edge of flunking out, and didn't have an _amazing_ excuse, I'd turn them down on the basis of having poor task management skills. Conversely, I made a job offer to a recent graduate who got a C in object oriented programming courses because he kept looking at lower levels of abstraction for performance improvements. When I asked to see one of the homework examples, i found that he had done the work _both_ ways, correctly, and been marked down for "ignoring the lesson".
I was _shocked_. The student had clearly mastered the material. I was very saddened that he didn't accept our offer, but instead took a better one of more interest to him.
> Did you ever work at a company where people were smart but still loved their work-life balance? Why do "smart" and "stays in the office till 8 pm" need to be tied together in US kultshah?
Because the combination is profitable, successful, and inspires loyalty to the same goals in others. It can be devastating to one's personal life and social integration. It's also at the root of the gender pay gap, since men more than women are generally willing to do that extra work for their careers.
Apple pays notably more than minimum wage at every Apple store I've visited, because they've been _good_ at their jobs, either as sales people or as people excited to learn about technologies and paying for their tuition. Yes, many have been fashion conscious and far, far younger than me, but they've been quite helpful. And when I have a problem beyond the tools in house, they've replaced it, once with an upgrade, _immediately_. I've found the service and general quality of their devices to justify the extra cost, when I can afford it. And I've in turn pointed their staff to local developer or technology groups in software or hardware they're interested in, and tried to inform them of the workarounds for problems I encounter so that they can use those solutions in their suite of "issue" handling tools.
I'm afraid they steal from businesses, including small businesses that pay for advertising work or web sites based on the number of clicks their web site receives. The fraud also distorts the market: hundreds of thousands of clicks on a type of website that has fraudulent traffic can reduce or erase the number of customers who actually want the product and encourage the advertising or genuine content to the fraudulent click targets. It can also overwhelm the website, forcing them to quite expensive lengths to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by the fraud.
While I may dislike a great deal of advertising, web-based advertising is one of the technologies I've often been paid to support as a part of simply doing business. So I'll admit that the website owners and advertisers are businesses being hurt by this kind of fraud.
There is a serious risk of "astroturfing" both for or against, a testing tool that costs $700 and competes for medical funding with other expensive tools.
I'm afraid that the updates are modest efficiency and cost improvements. Even if the hardware is free, yapping significant more wind energy, without significantly altering local ecologies and weather, sets physical limits on how much wind energy is available. Similar though not identical limitations exist for every energy resource. My concern for these renewable energy sources is that they have maximum limits within reach of our existing energy economy. Being natural, or "free" does not mean it's unlimited, and that is easy to lose track of.
> All science can have unintended consequences. That is the nature of science.
Yes, it's why I mentioned the potential damages of ethical research. Caution, and even a healthy level of paranoia, are needed for genetic work that may change a recipient's health, lifespan, and behavior decades after the original application of the technology. We're seeing this today, in mainland China, where genetic testing led parents living under the "one child" policies to abort female fetuses. While the policy has been relaxed somewhat in recent years, it is still in practice.
I also agree with the principle that taxpayer funded research should be free to the public. I'm a strong advocate of GPL software licenses, as well, for publicly funded research.
Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabled a non-profit service that helps scientific research around the world. He could have plugged his laptop into his own network connection at his office at Harvard, and instead chose to plug his laptop into a wiring closet at MIT and abuse their network resources and interfer with _their_ research. He faced criminal charges for his cowardly abuse, and took the coward's way out rather than face his day in court. He was the abuser, not the abused.
You are correct, from personal experience on projects I've worked with. How the work gets from NSF projects to industry products can involve fascinating bureaucracy.
I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
The idea is laudable. But organizing the information, and editing it or providing peer review to provide some credence to the published claims, can be difficult and even impossible without some money in the process. I'll be very interested to see if sch-hub manages to avoid flooding with what is essentially worthless or even fraudulent content.
VOIP systems can provide enough signal to run a fax/modem. No component of the system has to include real paper today, except perhaps a document scanner. Even signatures are being done with a touch screen and a stylus.
> SNR (and hence, dynamic range) of CD is always 96 dB
I do believe that you've inverted your model. The dynamic range of digital signals from a CD, from one bit to 16 bit signals, is 96 dB. Signal to noise is often far less, because the processing signal fed to the system often has more than one dB of noise and because of signal filtering, which tends to smooth out low amplitude signals accompanied by high amplitude signals.
That they "have to interact with governments" is not the only reason they use them. The paper copy helps provide an invaluable paper trail, and can last much longer than a more easily deleted computer record.
I've seen the skew that can occur for scientific research, both for physically testable results and for socially interpreted data. In at least some cases where results were replicated and failed, there was a subtle distinction in the experimental setup that skewed the results. I've personally exposed such a situation, where the equipment was not used consistently due to availability. When I reviewed the data, I found that the correlation being reported had almost nothing to do with what they thought they were measuring, and was overwhelmed by the status of the measurement equipment. I was also _blessed_ that my supervisor recorded _everything_, and the original data had not been pruned of "irrelevant" information.
The same occurs in the software world: casual speed tests of small samples of data. Data that is often selected for optimum qualities, do not scale up reliably. It's especially true for personal skunkworks projects that deal with none of the exceptional cases.
How would you access the file, without modifying the file, for backup operations of a read-only filesystem? This happens enough that I cannot see supporting the change.
A good precedent is the Morris Worm, the first major worm attack against UNIX systems. Published on Nov. 2, 1988, the worm used known vulnerabilities in popular UNIX tools such as sendmail, and also cracked weak passwords. Defenders effectively _broke_ the early Internet to contain the Morris Worm and while they frantically applied patches they'd considered risks to production systems before that day. Its author was eventually convicted, but Robert Tappan Morris had the best "get out of jail free" card one could imagine. His father was the head of the NSA. He is now a professor of computer science at MIT, and his current projects are listed at https://www.csail.mit.edu/pers... .
Perhaps in the first 4900 years of culture, there was no central authority. In every tribe and every family that I knew of, in most families and tribes, the leader limited the size of exchanges, exchange rates, and in many cases whether the the transaction would occur at all.
Slashdot Mirror
_Whether it creates resentment or not_, the dedication and willingness to do the after hours work, or extra work, often helps companies succeed and helps people get promoted. It's part of the trade-offs of working. It's not merely in the corporate world, ask the self-employed or consultants, how their work hours tie to both income and to a competitive advantage.
The resentment you describe is real, and can itself cause problems. What are you suggesting instead? That students stop studying, so that less dedicated students can compete better against them? That we stop measuring performance in any way, and pay people based on how they identify the quality of their work?
True. This is what a good mentoring program is for. Computer science and software engineering don't have formal apprenticeship programs, and the informal ones are _invaluable_.
I'll admit that I've never seen a 4.0 average for anyone I interviewed, except for schools that grade on a 5.0 scale. If they received poor grades in subjects we were hiring for, I did ask why. If they were constantly on the edge of flunking out, and didn't have an _amazing_ excuse, I'd turn them down on the basis of having poor task management skills. Conversely, I made a job offer to a recent graduate who got a C in object oriented programming courses because he kept looking at lower levels of abstraction for performance improvements. When I asked to see one of the homework examples, i found that he had done the work _both_ ways, correctly, and been marked down for "ignoring the lesson".
I was _shocked_. The student had clearly mastered the material. I was very saddened that he didn't accept our offer, but instead took a better one of more interest to him.
> Did you ever work at a company where people were smart but still loved their work-life balance? Why do "smart" and "stays in the office till 8 pm" need to be tied together in US kultshah?
Because the combination is profitable, successful, and inspires loyalty to the same goals in others. It can be devastating to one's personal life and social integration. It's also at the root of the gender pay gap, since men more than women are generally willing to do that extra work for their careers.
Apple pays notably more than minimum wage at every Apple store I've visited, because they've been _good_ at their jobs, either as sales people or as people excited to learn about technologies and paying for their tuition. Yes, many have been fashion conscious and far, far younger than me, but they've been quite helpful. And when I have a problem beyond the tools in house, they've replaced it, once with an upgrade, _immediately_. I've found the service and general quality of their devices to justify the extra cost, when I can afford it. And I've in turn pointed their staff to local developer or technology groups in software or hardware they're interested in, and tried to inform them of the workarounds for problems I encounter so that they can use those solutions in their suite of "issue" handling tools.
I'm afraid they steal from businesses, including small businesses that pay for advertising work or web sites based on the number of clicks their web site receives. The fraud also distorts the market: hundreds of thousands of clicks on a type of website that has fraudulent traffic can reduce or erase the number of customers who actually want the product and encourage the advertising or genuine content to the fraudulent click targets. It can also overwhelm the website, forcing them to quite expensive lengths to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by the fraud.
While I may dislike a great deal of advertising, web-based advertising is one of the technologies I've often been paid to support as a part of simply doing business. So I'll admit that the website owners and advertisers are businesses being hurt by this kind of fraud.
There is a serious risk of "astroturfing" both for or against, a testing tool that costs $700 and competes for medical funding with other expensive tools.
I do try to avoid using it in print, except as a quote. It lacks distinction, and is so over-used that has little impact.
I'm afraid that the updates are modest efficiency and cost improvements. Even if the hardware is free, yapping significant more wind energy, without significantly altering local ecologies and weather, sets physical limits on how much wind energy is available. Similar though not identical limitations exist for every energy resource. My concern for these renewable energy sources is that they have maximum limits within reach of our existing energy economy. Being natural, or "free" does not mean it's unlimited, and that is easy to lose track of.
> All science can have unintended consequences. That is the nature of science.
Yes, it's why I mentioned the potential damages of ethical research. Caution, and even a healthy level of paranoia, are needed for genetic work that may change a recipient's health, lifespan, and behavior decades after the original application of the technology. We're seeing this today, in mainland China, where genetic testing led parents living under the "one child" policies to abort female fetuses. While the policy has been relaxed somewhat in recent years, it is still in practice.
If done carefully and ethically, it can also destroy species and ecologies. Unintended consequences are inevitable.
I also agree with the principle that taxpayer funded research should be free to the public. I'm a strong advocate of GPL software licenses, as well, for publicly funded research.
Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabled a non-profit service that helps scientific research around the world. He could have plugged his laptop into his own network connection at his office at Harvard, and instead chose to plug his laptop into a wiring closet at MIT and abuse their network resources and interfer with _their_ research. He faced criminal charges for his cowardly abuse, and took the coward's way out rather than face his day in court. He was the abuser, not the abused.
> Vanity press has little to no quality threshold for publishing and advertises as such.
The same is true for some journals, particularly those involving "grievance studies". See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/1... .
You are correct, from personal experience on projects I've worked with. How the work gets from NSF projects to industry products can involve fascinating bureaucracy.
I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
The idea is laudable. But organizing the information, and editing it or providing peer review to provide some credence to the published claims, can be difficult and even impossible without some money in the process. I'll be very interested to see if sch-hub manages to avoid flooding with what is essentially worthless or even fraudulent content.
VOIP systems can provide enough signal to run a fax/modem. No component of the system has to include real paper today, except perhaps a document scanner. Even signatures are being done with a touch screen and a stylus.
> SNR (and hence, dynamic range) of CD is always 96 dB
I do believe that you've inverted your model. The dynamic range of digital signals from a CD, from one bit to 16 bit signals, is 96 dB. Signal to noise is often far less, because the processing signal fed to the system often has more than one dB of noise and because of signal filtering, which tends to smooth out low amplitude signals accompanied by high amplitude signals.
That they "have to interact with governments" is not the only reason they use them. The paper copy helps provide an invaluable paper trail, and can last much longer than a more easily deleted computer record.
I've seen the skew that can occur for scientific research, both for physically testable results and for socially interpreted data. In at least some cases where results were replicated and failed, there was a subtle distinction in the experimental setup that skewed the results. I've personally exposed such a situation, where the equipment was not used consistently due to availability. When I reviewed the data, I found that the correlation being reported had almost nothing to do with what they thought they were measuring, and was overwhelmed by the status of the measurement equipment. I was also _blessed_ that my supervisor recorded _everything_, and the original data had not been pruned of "irrelevant" information.
The same occurs in the software world: casual speed tests of small samples of data. Data that is often selected for optimum qualities, do not scale up reliably. It's especially true for personal skunkworks projects that deal with none of the exceptional cases.
How would you access the file, without modifying the file, for backup operations of a read-only filesystem? This happens enough that I cannot see supporting the change.
A good precedent is the Morris Worm, the first major worm attack against UNIX systems. Published on Nov. 2, 1988, the worm used known vulnerabilities in popular UNIX tools such as sendmail, and also cracked weak passwords. Defenders effectively _broke_ the early Internet to contain the Morris Worm and while they frantically applied patches they'd considered risks to production systems before that day. Its author was eventually convicted, but Robert Tappan Morris had the best "get out of jail free" card one could imagine. His father was the head of the NSA. He is now a professor of computer science at MIT, and his current projects are listed at https://www.csail.mit.edu/pers... .
Or high frequency trading, engaging in arbitrage.
Perhaps in the first 4900 years of culture, there was no central authority. In every tribe and every family that I knew of, in most families and tribes, the leader limited the size of exchanges, exchange rates, and in many cases whether the the transaction would occur at all.
Oh, my. Please excuse my cynicism, but I saw precisely what we heard as the dotcom bubble topped out.