The truth is we don't have a need for a large number of astronomers. If we did then there would be more job prospects... Those less committed can go make themselves more useful elsewhere. Supply and demand is not just a good idea, it's the law.
That's all well and good until "supply and demand" shows us that we don't have a large need for anything except slave labor and uber-rich finance guys. Then you start to realize that it's not really about supply-and-demand in the sense of "what we need and what would serve us."
I think the problem has to do with this being applied too broadly to expect that everyone should work 80 hours a week. Working 60-80 hour work weeks is becoming expected. Managers get it in their heads that anyone unhappy about working 80 hours a week for terrible pay is not "committed" or "a team player". Suddenly everyone feels the pressure to stick around the office until 8pm, even if they're just looking at Facebook, because the first person to leave the office is viewed as "lazy".
And you know what? It's not even good for productivity. All it does is damage the worker's lifestyle.
Microsoft is setting itself up for a massive backlash with this device.
I'm not sure there will be much of a backlash on this. Maybe. It depends on how confused people are. But really I think Apple has helped to set the stage for people to accept this sort of thing, since the iPad similarly runs a modified version of OSX that doesn't run normal OSX applications.
The idea is that, though you can't control all the variables of manufacturing, if you have a bunch of disks made with the same machinery at the same time, many of those variables will be the same and so they have an increased chance of failing at the same time-- especially since the increased activity of rebuilding a failed array can sometimes trigger additional failures.
So if you want to be safe, buying from different batches is preferable, even if you buy the same brand of functionally identical drives. I don't know if anyone does it anymore, but some manufacturers used to do this for you when you bought a new server with a big RAID.
Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment
IIRC, Special Relativity was an attempt to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, so I'm not sure that exactly counts as a test. In fact, it's kind of begging the question.
I don't know what the case was with Cosco in this instance, but sometimes it's better business to please many customers with small orders than to please 1 customer with a huge order. Even if it comes out to selling more drives in the short term, if it means developing a reputation from your regular customers for not having what they need, it may not be good for business to sell out.
Well when you call it "illegal importing", you're kind of begging the question, aren't you?
That means this isn't really a case about reselling your car, but about whether private citizens can buy a bunch of stuff abroad and re-sell it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad.
Yes, that's how a lot of businesses make money. I mean, every store is making money by buying things under conditions that are cheaper and then re-selling it for a profit. Everyone who imports anything is "buying a bunch of stuff abroad and re-selling it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad." Every manufacturer with factories overseas is doing the same exact thing.
That was sarcasm, and you've illustrated my point. I *don't* carry around my helmet all day, but I would pretty much have to if I were going to wear a helmet when I rode my bike.
Because they've decided to push people toward Metro (or whatever they're calling it now). Probably so that they can try to horn themselves into the tablet market, as well as pushing people to using their own app store.
Because with minimal inconvenience, you could go around your whole life wearing a helmet and pads. You could just not ride a bike. You could *always* make it safer up until the point where you're wrapped in a protective little bubble and never go anywhere or do anything, at each step with minimal inconvenience.
Or, you could accept that nobody makes it out of life alive, and decide to live your life rather than hiding in a bubble.
I'm not saying that you can't take reasonable safety precautions, but let's not overreact and pretend that riding a bicycle 10mph is a horribly dangerous activity.
No, I recognize that it's about risk level. My point is, to some degree, that we do things of varying risk level all the time. Crossing the street is riskier than walking on the sidewalk. Climbing stairs is riskier than walking around normally. People slip and fall in the shower all the time.
So it's a bad argument to say, "I could be injured while doing this activity, so I must wear protective gear" unless you want to wear protective gear all the time. If you say, "It's about risk level," then you're just raising the question of "How are we measuring when the risk level is high enough to warrant protective gear?" which is exactly the point I meant to raise.
Everything is dangerous. We don't wear protective gear all the time. Why do people think that riding a bicycle is so dangerous that they take for granted that a helmet is necessary?
We're not talking about people riding motorcycles, though. We're talking about people riding a bicycle at maybe 10mph. It's not that much more energy than if you're jogging.
Putting on a helmet when using stairs isn't a big imposition or inconvenience but the potential for a bad accident is somewhat higher than when walking on flat ground. So wear a helmet when you use the stairs?
I actually think programming would be relatively easy to measure results, as long as you're not focused on "metrics". The focus on "metics", e.g. measuring programmers on the number of lines they code, is a similar problem to measuring them based on the number of hours they work.
It's much better to look at something like "the finished product" if you want to look at results. Like, ok, you've just been asked to code something-- did you finish on time? Does it do what it's supposed to do? Will other programmers be able to maintain the code, or is it an unholy mess of spaghetti? Have a manager actually look at the end result and use some judgement instead of relying on bare statistics all the time.
Here's the problem with your example: You could injure yourself crossing the street, too. You could trip and fall. You could get hit by a car. Your story could have just as easily been about when you tripped and fell down the stairs and hit your head on a radiator.
Does that mean we should wear protective gear everywhere at all times? Or could we maybe accept that life isn't a completely safe activity?
When you were working at your call center, did you have to figure out anything clever or do anything creative? Did you have to focus deeply on a problem and develop a new solution?
Generally speaking, if you need people to do something mindless and mechanical, you can push them harder and get increased productivity. Even with that, though, it's deceptive. If you push someone to work all day long without breaks, day in and day out, sooner or later you get diminishing returns. It depends on the kind of work, but making someone work 10 hours without a break might result in so many mistakes that the last 3 hours are just redoing the work of the prior 4 hours which was done improperly. In other words, forcing people to work twice as long does not result in twice as much work, and more work doesn't always mean more productivity.
But all of those are vague generalities. A bigger issue is that when you get into more complex work, it's harder to say what's a "waste of time". I won't tell the whole story, but just as an example, I once worked at a helpdesk where someone almost got into trouble because he wasn't closing as many tickets per hour as others on the team. Then they guy went on vacation and tickets/hour of everyone else on the team dropped. Apparently the "poor performer" had been helping to manage the team and keeping everyone in line, helping teammates with more difficult tickets, etc. He was more than earning his salary, but the metrics just didn't capture it.
I wanted to say something along these lines. Be a little careful in your metrics and incentives.
Part of the problem is, if you make people account for all of their time, you hurt morale. When morale is low, people are less productive. Attempts to keep track of everything and crack the whip on those who aren't performing might result in worse performance. Plus, as you point out, tracking time takes time. If someone spends an hour a day trying to keep track of how they're spending their time, that's 1 hour fewer open to being productive. And don't make the mistake thinking that tracking time only takes the 10 minutes of filling out the paperwork-- needing to track your time means there's one more thing vying for focus, one more thing to pay attention to.
Aside from that, it's important to note that if you hire someone for a 40 hour work week, you're not going to get 40 hours of productive work from them. You're just not. Believe it or not, getting 25 hours of real productive work in a 40 hour work week is pretty normal. People don't really work productively for 8 hours straight. To some extent, the time wasting can be beneficial. It can let people recharge a little and talk to each other. Sometimes when you're having a hard time figuring something out, it's helpful to take a break. Having a little chit-chat with your coworkers can lead to better teamwork and collaboration. Sometimes you get things like, Employee A and Employee B have been working on similar problems, and only when they have some down-time for a casual chat do they realize that they can help each other solve the problem.
I honestly think that many businesses focus too much on squeezing productivity out of people. They'd do better to focus on hiring good people, treating those people well, and letting those people motivate themselves.
Yeah, and think about the math on this for Windows since XP. Let's say you bought a subscription for free upgrades when XP was released in 2001. That means you would have to pay the subscription for 4 years before you saw any benefit to the "free upgrades". At that point, you could upgrade to Windows Vista, which honestly you wouldn't want to. That means you'd be waiting another 4 years or so for Windows 7. So that's roughly 8 years of paying for a subscription, by which point you'd probably be in the market for a new computer that would come with the newest version of Windows anyway. That's a pretty crappy deal.
And that's what Microsoft is like when they're trying to sell you on their upgrades.
But honestly, what really worries me about subscription models is that it also kind of assumes there'll be some kind of DRM that will kick in and turn off your functioning software if you don't renew your subscription. The idea of my software having a kill switch rubs me the wrong way. And what happens to that software when Microsoft doesn't want to maintain the software and the DRM scheme? Most likely, you lose that software.
If OS X and iOS are bad then iTunes is a crime against humanity. And I think that's because the original program came from outside Apple [wikipedia.org].
I don't think that's the problem. I'm not sure what your qualms are with iTunes, but in my opinion the problem is that they've just crammed too much into it over the years.
It started as iTunes-- iTunes-- because it was a pretty simple music player. It organized your library and played music, and you could use it to sync your iPod. That was about it. Over the years, they've added other media types, including TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, and educational material. They've also added a store to buy all that stuff, and a social network to talk about it. And since iTunes plays all of this media, it also has features to share and stream the media to other devices.
But then, because it was used to put content on your iPod, it also became the way that you managed the iPod and applied updates. That lead to them including applications for iPods, iPhones, and iPads to the store. That also means that iTunes is responsible for managing those applications and installing them.
Frankly, at this point, it doesn't make a lot of sense that it's called iTunes anymore. If they'd known that iTunes was going to end up doing all of this, I'd expect they'd call it something closer to "iMedia", except that I think if they knew it was going to end up doing all of this, they wouldn't have built it this way. Jobs seemed to favor having applications limited to doing a single thing, and not trying to slam everything into one application, like how OSX has a separate mail, calendar, and address book instead of putting it all together Outlook-style. I think iTunes only bypassed that because it happened piecemeal, where Apple would add just one more feature, and then just one more, and suddenly you find it includes the kitchen sink. When they released iTunes, nobody thought you'd have the massive media store delivering content to iPhones.
So many things to criticize about Apple's UI direction (the tabletization of OS X, for example)
There's nothing really wrong with the tabletization of OSX. I'm sure the reason they're introducing tablet UI design is they're opening the door to one day having a tablet running a full version of OSX. And it's not like they're forcing you to use Launchpad. If they start doing to OSX what Microsoft is doing in Windows 8, then I'm really going to be annoyed.
They say they're going to add new features, but I don't see how they can add $100 worth of new features every year. Heck, office 2004 still gets my jobs done. I don't see what features they could possibly have added over the last 8 years that would be worth $800.
Worse, if enough people go for this new scheme, then it lessens Microsoft's financial incentive to come up with meaningful upgrades. If you already own Office now, they can't get more money from you without convincing you that they have a new version that's substantially better. With a subscription model, they don't need a new version. You just have to keep paying every year even if they don't release a single new improvement.
So if you think Microsoft hasn't offered big improvements over the last 8 years, then what's going to happen when they make money regardless of whether they improve their product?
Well it depends on what you mean. In a sense, distances actually do become shorter when you travel faster. But I'm not sure exactly what part of my post you're responding to.
Ok, if it's not hard, give me the calculations. Remember to factor in acceleration. Tell me where each ship will be, in each frame, at various stages of the journey.
I can't even remember where do begin on doing those calculations. Regardless, it's conceptually difficult. Here's part of the problem-- you go out on your trip, and when you start out, time is passing normally on the stationary ship. As you accelerate, time on the stationary ship slows to a crawl. You get near the end of your trip and it's time to decelerate, but the ship passing in the other direction has barely started its journey. So as you're slowing your ship down, the other ship has not yet started to slow down. In fact, it's going faster and faster.
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The truth is we don't have a need for a large number of astronomers. If we did then there would be more job prospects... Those less committed can go make themselves more useful elsewhere. Supply and demand is not just a good idea, it's the law.
That's all well and good until "supply and demand" shows us that we don't have a large need for anything except slave labor and uber-rich finance guys. Then you start to realize that it's not really about supply-and-demand in the sense of "what we need and what would serve us."
I think the problem has to do with this being applied too broadly to expect that everyone should work 80 hours a week. Working 60-80 hour work weeks is becoming expected. Managers get it in their heads that anyone unhappy about working 80 hours a week for terrible pay is not "committed" or "a team player". Suddenly everyone feels the pressure to stick around the office until 8pm, even if they're just looking at Facebook, because the first person to leave the office is viewed as "lazy".
And you know what? It's not even good for productivity. All it does is damage the worker's lifestyle.
Microsoft is setting itself up for a massive backlash with this device.
I'm not sure there will be much of a backlash on this. Maybe. It depends on how confused people are. But really I think Apple has helped to set the stage for people to accept this sort of thing, since the iPad similarly runs a modified version of OSX that doesn't run normal OSX applications.
The idea is that, though you can't control all the variables of manufacturing, if you have a bunch of disks made with the same machinery at the same time, many of those variables will be the same and so they have an increased chance of failing at the same time-- especially since the increased activity of rebuilding a failed array can sometimes trigger additional failures.
So if you want to be safe, buying from different batches is preferable, even if you buy the same brand of functionally identical drives. I don't know if anyone does it anymore, but some manufacturers used to do this for you when you bought a new server with a big RAID.
Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelson–Morley experiment
IIRC, Special Relativity was an attempt to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, so I'm not sure that exactly counts as a test. In fact, it's kind of begging the question.
I don't know what the case was with Cosco in this instance, but sometimes it's better business to please many customers with small orders than to please 1 customer with a huge order. Even if it comes out to selling more drives in the short term, if it means developing a reputation from your regular customers for not having what they need, it may not be good for business to sell out.
Well when you call it "illegal importing", you're kind of begging the question, aren't you?
That means this isn't really a case about reselling your car, but about whether private citizens can buy a bunch of stuff abroad and re-sell it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad.
Yes, that's how a lot of businesses make money. I mean, every store is making money by buying things under conditions that are cheaper and then re-selling it for a profit. Everyone who imports anything is "buying a bunch of stuff abroad and re-selling it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad." Every manufacturer with factories overseas is doing the same exact thing.
That was sarcasm, and you've illustrated my point. I *don't* carry around my helmet all day, but I would pretty much have to if I were going to wear a helmet when I rode my bike.
Because they've decided to push people toward Metro (or whatever they're calling it now). Probably so that they can try to horn themselves into the tablet market, as well as pushing people to using their own app store.
Because with minimal inconvenience, you could go around your whole life wearing a helmet and pads. You could just not ride a bike. You could *always* make it safer up until the point where you're wrapped in a protective little bubble and never go anywhere or do anything, at each step with minimal inconvenience.
Or, you could accept that nobody makes it out of life alive, and decide to live your life rather than hiding in a bubble.
I'm not saying that you can't take reasonable safety precautions, but let's not overreact and pretend that riding a bicycle 10mph is a horribly dangerous activity.
No, I recognize that it's about risk level. My point is, to some degree, that we do things of varying risk level all the time. Crossing the street is riskier than walking on the sidewalk. Climbing stairs is riskier than walking around normally. People slip and fall in the shower all the time.
So it's a bad argument to say, "I could be injured while doing this activity, so I must wear protective gear" unless you want to wear protective gear all the time. If you say, "It's about risk level," then you're just raising the question of "How are we measuring when the risk level is high enough to warrant protective gear?" which is exactly the point I meant to raise.
Everything is dangerous. We don't wear protective gear all the time. Why do people think that riding a bicycle is so dangerous that they take for granted that a helmet is necessary?
We're not talking about people riding motorcycles, though. We're talking about people riding a bicycle at maybe 10mph. It's not that much more energy than if you're jogging.
Putting on a helmet when using stairs isn't a big imposition or inconvenience but the potential for a bad accident is somewhat higher than when walking on flat ground. So wear a helmet when you use the stairs?
I actually think programming would be relatively easy to measure results, as long as you're not focused on "metrics". The focus on "metics", e.g. measuring programmers on the number of lines they code, is a similar problem to measuring them based on the number of hours they work.
It's much better to look at something like "the finished product" if you want to look at results. Like, ok, you've just been asked to code something-- did you finish on time? Does it do what it's supposed to do? Will other programmers be able to maintain the code, or is it an unholy mess of spaghetti? Have a manager actually look at the end result and use some judgement instead of relying on bare statistics all the time.
Here's the problem with your example: You could injure yourself crossing the street, too. You could trip and fall. You could get hit by a car. Your story could have just as easily been about when you tripped and fell down the stairs and hit your head on a radiator.
Does that mean we should wear protective gear everywhere at all times? Or could we maybe accept that life isn't a completely safe activity?
When you were working at your call center, did you have to figure out anything clever or do anything creative? Did you have to focus deeply on a problem and develop a new solution?
Generally speaking, if you need people to do something mindless and mechanical, you can push them harder and get increased productivity. Even with that, though, it's deceptive. If you push someone to work all day long without breaks, day in and day out, sooner or later you get diminishing returns. It depends on the kind of work, but making someone work 10 hours without a break might result in so many mistakes that the last 3 hours are just redoing the work of the prior 4 hours which was done improperly. In other words, forcing people to work twice as long does not result in twice as much work, and more work doesn't always mean more productivity.
But all of those are vague generalities. A bigger issue is that when you get into more complex work, it's harder to say what's a "waste of time". I won't tell the whole story, but just as an example, I once worked at a helpdesk where someone almost got into trouble because he wasn't closing as many tickets per hour as others on the team. Then they guy went on vacation and tickets/hour of everyone else on the team dropped. Apparently the "poor performer" had been helping to manage the team and keeping everyone in line, helping teammates with more difficult tickets, etc. He was more than earning his salary, but the metrics just didn't capture it.
I wanted to say something along these lines. Be a little careful in your metrics and incentives.
Part of the problem is, if you make people account for all of their time, you hurt morale. When morale is low, people are less productive. Attempts to keep track of everything and crack the whip on those who aren't performing might result in worse performance. Plus, as you point out, tracking time takes time. If someone spends an hour a day trying to keep track of how they're spending their time, that's 1 hour fewer open to being productive. And don't make the mistake thinking that tracking time only takes the 10 minutes of filling out the paperwork-- needing to track your time means there's one more thing vying for focus, one more thing to pay attention to.
Aside from that, it's important to note that if you hire someone for a 40 hour work week, you're not going to get 40 hours of productive work from them. You're just not. Believe it or not, getting 25 hours of real productive work in a 40 hour work week is pretty normal. People don't really work productively for 8 hours straight. To some extent, the time wasting can be beneficial. It can let people recharge a little and talk to each other. Sometimes when you're having a hard time figuring something out, it's helpful to take a break. Having a little chit-chat with your coworkers can lead to better teamwork and collaboration. Sometimes you get things like, Employee A and Employee B have been working on similar problems, and only when they have some down-time for a casual chat do they realize that they can help each other solve the problem.
I honestly think that many businesses focus too much on squeezing productivity out of people. They'd do better to focus on hiring good people, treating those people well, and letting those people motivate themselves.
Yeah, and think about the math on this for Windows since XP. Let's say you bought a subscription for free upgrades when XP was released in 2001. That means you would have to pay the subscription for 4 years before you saw any benefit to the "free upgrades". At that point, you could upgrade to Windows Vista, which honestly you wouldn't want to. That means you'd be waiting another 4 years or so for Windows 7. So that's roughly 8 years of paying for a subscription, by which point you'd probably be in the market for a new computer that would come with the newest version of Windows anyway. That's a pretty crappy deal.
And that's what Microsoft is like when they're trying to sell you on their upgrades.
But honestly, what really worries me about subscription models is that it also kind of assumes there'll be some kind of DRM that will kick in and turn off your functioning software if you don't renew your subscription. The idea of my software having a kill switch rubs me the wrong way. And what happens to that software when Microsoft doesn't want to maintain the software and the DRM scheme? Most likely, you lose that software.
If OS X and iOS are bad then iTunes is a crime against humanity. And I think that's because the original program came from outside Apple [wikipedia.org].
I don't think that's the problem. I'm not sure what your qualms are with iTunes, but in my opinion the problem is that they've just crammed too much into it over the years.
It started as iTunes-- iTunes-- because it was a pretty simple music player. It organized your library and played music, and you could use it to sync your iPod. That was about it. Over the years, they've added other media types, including TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, and educational material. They've also added a store to buy all that stuff, and a social network to talk about it. And since iTunes plays all of this media, it also has features to share and stream the media to other devices.
But then, because it was used to put content on your iPod, it also became the way that you managed the iPod and applied updates. That lead to them including applications for iPods, iPhones, and iPads to the store. That also means that iTunes is responsible for managing those applications and installing them.
Frankly, at this point, it doesn't make a lot of sense that it's called iTunes anymore. If they'd known that iTunes was going to end up doing all of this, I'd expect they'd call it something closer to "iMedia", except that I think if they knew it was going to end up doing all of this, they wouldn't have built it this way. Jobs seemed to favor having applications limited to doing a single thing, and not trying to slam everything into one application, like how OSX has a separate mail, calendar, and address book instead of putting it all together Outlook-style. I think iTunes only bypassed that because it happened piecemeal, where Apple would add just one more feature, and then just one more, and suddenly you find it includes the kitchen sink. When they released iTunes, nobody thought you'd have the massive media store delivering content to iPhones.
So many things to criticize about Apple's UI direction (the tabletization of OS X, for example)
There's nothing really wrong with the tabletization of OSX. I'm sure the reason they're introducing tablet UI design is they're opening the door to one day having a tablet running a full version of OSX. And it's not like they're forcing you to use Launchpad. If they start doing to OSX what Microsoft is doing in Windows 8, then I'm really going to be annoyed.
They say they're going to add new features, but I don't see how they can add $100 worth of new features every year. Heck, office 2004 still gets my jobs done. I don't see what features they could possibly have added over the last 8 years that would be worth $800.
Worse, if enough people go for this new scheme, then it lessens Microsoft's financial incentive to come up with meaningful upgrades. If you already own Office now, they can't get more money from you without convincing you that they have a new version that's substantially better. With a subscription model, they don't need a new version. You just have to keep paying every year even if they don't release a single new improvement.
So if you think Microsoft hasn't offered big improvements over the last 8 years, then what's going to happen when they make money regardless of whether they improve their product?
Well it depends on what you mean. In a sense, distances actually do become shorter when you travel faster. But I'm not sure exactly what part of my post you're responding to.
Ok, if it's not hard, give me the calculations. Remember to factor in acceleration. Tell me where each ship will be, in each frame, at various stages of the journey.
I can't even remember where do begin on doing those calculations. Regardless, it's conceptually difficult. Here's part of the problem-- you go out on your trip, and when you start out, time is passing normally on the stationary ship. As you accelerate, time on the stationary ship slows to a crawl. You get near the end of your trip and it's time to decelerate, but the ship passing in the other direction has barely started its journey. So as you're slowing your ship down, the other ship has not yet started to slow down. In fact, it's going faster and faster.
Do you believe that Verizon's prices are determined by their costs?
Yes, that's the joke. Congratulations on identifying it.