I agree that the government has no business to enter my private domain. No quartering of troops in my home; no crossing the threshold without a warrant. That's the supreme law of the land.
Which land?
Did merry England disallow quartering of troops in private homes after those of us on my side of the pond complained about it over 200 years ago? Or, were the British soldiers breaking their own laws at that time?
For example, some good employment opportunities. Something that makes being on welfare seem crappy in comparison.
That's easy - make welfare less attractive. It's not possible for everyone to have good jobs (someone has to clean up the crappers and people with IQ below 90 need jobs that suit their abilities).
Prison isn't the answer - "welfare" is probably cheaper.
Just set a lifetime limit of one year on welfare per person - and recipients who conceive while receiving benefits will forever be banned from receiving future benefits.
Anyone who has had one or no children and has exhausted their "one year" of welfare can apply for an extension of lifetime welfare benefits of ten more years -- but they must be surgically, and permanently, sterilized to qualify for the extension. Possible exception on one/no children rule for those who have twins (triplets etc) without the use of fertility drugs.
In order to catch men who apply for extensions falsely claiming they have no children, maintain a registry of parent/child relationships. At birth, do DNA testing of every baby and purported parents to verify parent/child relationships. If mother can't identify father, mother can never get a welfare extension. Also, take DNA of every male who dies (in case two months after cremation, a women claims the dead guy was the father).
Eeew... I don't know where you live, but in my experience, most chronic "IE welfare females" over about 25 (and many below that) aren't really women most nerds would want putting out to them.
If this works like where I live, the power company can get screwed by solar panel customers. This is because whenever the meter is "spinning backwards", the power company is forced to pay retail rates for this power when it would be cheaper to just buy the power at bulk "wholesale" rates -- possibly from equally "green" sources (such as geo thermal, hydro, or wind). Solar panel users can suck power at peak times (hot days for example when more cooling is needed) and then spin the meter backwards the next two days when it's cooler (but still clear). On the hot day, the utility is forced to buy power at high wholesale rates (possibly generated by relatively expensive natural gas peaker plants) due to demand while on the following cooler days they are forced to buy power, when demand is low and wholesale prices are low, at retail rates from the solar panel customer.
One reasonable solution to this problem might be to require solar customers who want to "spin the meter backwards" to install, at their own expense, sophisticated meters that track when and how much power (perhaps in ten minute intervals or whatever makes sense) the solar customer is pumping back and, at the end of the month, the solar customer is credited for the average wholesale price that the utility paid for power during each period.
"High Frequency Trader (HFT)" != "Market Maker" -- although I don't know that anything would prevent the same entity from being a Market Maker in a stock in which they also engage in HFT.
As far as I can tell from the brief article, the HFT discussed are not Market Makers.
A Market Maker for a stock have a contractual responsibility to provide liquidity in that stock. Roughly speaking, if there are only sellers and no buyers for the stock, the Market Maker must buy spending their own money and, conversely, if there are only buyers and no sellers, the Market Maker has to sell their stash. There are a bunch of rules around this - but even with these rules, a Market Maker can suffer huge losses in a few minutes because they are required to buy/sell stock that doesn't have a ready market.
These HFTs appear to be "day traders" (or, more precisely, "minute traders") with an inside track. I question if this is "good" for the market - not to say it shouldn't be legal, but it may actually drive the rest of the market down because such asymmetry will drive some investors to investments that are less "rigged" (such as bonds). It sounds like virtually every trade an HFT "gets in the middle of" would have occurred without the HFT and the HFT's skim would have gone to the "slower" buyer or/or seller instead.
Also, if one believes the article's claim of annual profits of $21 billion, HFTs skim a significant amount and since they just reduce profits for longer term (days, weeks, months, years) investors, it's not clear that they benefit the market in any way. HFTs appear to assume little risk and mostly just add friction. If the profits they skim were distributed across the US population (which, I know, may not be relevant as the market is worldwide), it would amount to about $70 for every adult and child in the US.
Isn't it likely that an fs developer who found themselves "sitting on their hands" might decide to go off and start working on the "big file system feature" so they can check it in a few days into the next release cycle (which is when checking of such "big" features seem to be encouraged)? I'd hope so. Although I have no first hand knowledge of OpenBSD's dev, I suspect a lot of short lived "branching" really does occur - but it's hidden out of sight of the cm system.
That ability to eat your own dogfood for real sounds pretty crucial to the strategy. Unfortunately, if one is developing software that they don't actually need to use extensively and continuously to get through each day, relying on developers for testing "by using it" is likely less reliable and/or predictable
For example, developers of software for set top cable DVRs (Motorola developers who write the crap Comcast downloads to my DVR - you know who you are!) may not even subscribe to cable -- and, presumably, even if they do, they have little time to watch it at the very time when it most needs testing.
While this can teach one to suffer fools kindly (or, end up on the news with neighbors and fellow students saying things like "I'm shocked. He was a quiet guy but he never seemed violent before."), the number of motivated and bright students you will find in a CC programming class is quite small. These people will mostly just "want to get the project over with and hope to get at least a 'B'" and will struggle at that. You may end up doing the entire project yourself to "get it done right". This may incorrectly lead you to conclude you're a 'lone wolf hacker' when in fact, you would be a good team player if you could pick a good team.
(and, it's more fun in addition to being quick, easy, and quite convincing - although it can call attention to you if you live in an apartment or townhouse!)
The entire government in California is run by chimpanzees - there can't possibly be enough left over to run even one DMV office in Florida, let alone the whole organization.
(Although, California is running out of bananas - some of their government chimpanzees may be migrating East soon -- be afraid, be very afraid).
That's difficult for most employees to get. Usually the options vest immediately only if the employee is not offered a job of similar responsibility with the new company. There are of course any number of variations on this - it's not unusual for the options to fully vest after working for the new employer for one year (or if they are let go without cause during that year). In this case, it is likely that many who were let go vested immediately because they were not offered similar jobs w/Oracle - the options available to all but the founders (who mostly actually still own a percentage of the company), the CEO, and maybe VP Sales/Eng/Marketing are usually chump change anyway.
Key employees will almost never get an "instant vest on change of control" because if your key employees are able to bail upon acquisition with vested options, it's very hard to find someone who wants to buy the company as an ongoing concern (vs. just for its IP). Indeed, most deals don't get announced until the most key employees already have signed employment contracts with the acquiring company (assuming the company wants to keep the people - which, in this case, it seems Oracle didn't have a lot of interest in this) and deals are sometimes contingent on some percentage of a list of other personnel accepting their offers with the acquiring company (these are employees who are not sufficiently high to be told about the pending deal, so the deal gets announced without these employees having been approached about an offer with the acquiring company).
It may be possible to get this arrangement if one is not an important player and who would almost certainly become redundant in the event of a takeover (perhaps a receptionist or a facilities manager or something like that), but those individuals have options on such a small percentage of the company, they don't matter much.
I hear this story over and over -- it's SO sad that the system flushes out teachers who "get it" while leaving the sludge in the teaching pool.
There are certainly some good teachers that stick it out and I don't blame anyone for bailing out of an untenable situation, but society has got to recognize that education is important, equality should be about opportunity not outcome, working hard is an important component to success, and teachers should be accountable (and not "entitled" to their job just because they have seniority).
Oh, and and parents have to realize that just because they were clever (or careless) enough to figure out how to spawn, it doesn't mean their children are perfect angels entitled to whatever they want without hard work.
However, I think it's unfair to specifically single out these groups without including what seems to me to be a "lax" attitude by parents (including college educated parents) in middle-class homes where the kid's great-grandparents (or earlier) lived in the US (having immigrated or having been born in the US). In the public middle-class schools these kids go to, parents complain that poor Jason just doesn't have enough time after school for all his activities and his life is so stressful so the schools should cut back on expectations (including the amount of homework). Or, when their sweet Heather is called out at school for behavior problems, her parents raise a ruckus about how the teacher picks on poor Heather (when I was a kid [get off my lawn] it was assumed it was me who had the problem, not the teacher -- unless a lot of parents were complaining bitterly about one particular teacher).
Of course, all this has given us public school teachers who are willing to accept this lax attitude and have low achievement expectations -- which results in a vicious cycle.
From a practical standpoint, the primary source of effective practicing engineers and scientists is going to be middle class households with educated parents -- unfortunately, many of these families are/have raised soft kids who feel entitled to get whatever they want just because "I want it" and don't expect to "work" for it.
At this point, I fear the US's only hope is the legal immigrants from India and China (in particular, due to their numbers) whose parents actually believe that their childrens' main "job" is getting a good education and don't mind that the kids sometimes feel some stress about it. This is not a terrible thing except that as the US builds up more and more deadwood (all of whom get to vote, but most of whom will pay few taxes due to their limited income producing potential) we cross the tipping point where 5% are paying the other 95% to exist - and the 95% keep trying to get more from the 5% until it all collapses when a few of the 5% say "screw it, I'm not going to work this hard to give most of my earnings to someone else. Don't oppose generous issuance of H1Bs to well educated individuals - we need them to help keep Medicare (and the whole government bubble) propped up for a few more years - we need to keep this Ponzi scheme afloat...
Depends on the caps... Comcast gives me 250GB per month, I'm pretty happy with that. I can download several Linux distros a month with no worry. (Even with Patch Tuesday for several machines and a few hours a day of browsing)
My only big gripe is that they don't give me a way to monitor usage and that (AFIK) giant ping packets that get dropped by my router still get charged to me (that's a flaw as one person with a grudge against me and access to corporate level internet access could screw me royally).
Well, the guy who values his 2 minutes a day is probably a busy guy whose time is valuable - valuable enough that he will pay more for a service to save him some time (not unlike why someone may pay someone to clean their house).
All I was trying to express is that most people who buy residential high speed broadband want it NOT because they can't download all the bytes they want every month even if they run 7/24 - rather that when they are using the connection, they want it to be faster to save them time or perhaps they want sufficient speed for good video streaming. These people are very content with caps and limited traffic shaping and willing to accept those because that means they can pay less for their connection.
I couldn't care less what the guy in the basement is serving up on his server that's pegging his bandwidth 7/24 - I just picked porn because it's a/. meme. I almost said Warez, but that sounded so 90's unlike porn which will never be out of date (although, the styles of course change).
By the way, you might want to consider some professional help. It is true that some people's time has value (since you don't understand this, obviously your's doesn't) and that does not make them a "damn crack dealing perv".
By your own admission, you have at least four choices for internet access (plus possibly a business class option with your cable company). You looked at all the options and picked one that was fairly fast and fairly inexpensive.
If your cable company introduces caps or traffic shaping (or, perhaps, even per byte pricing w/premium pricing for "prime time" bytes?), you say you have "no other choice" but to drop them and go with some other worse option -- why would you switch to a worse option? Do you mean slower? Do you mean more expensive?
Would you rather that your cable broadband base rate just increased $10/month so the cable company could avoid caps and traffic shaping to accommodate the guy in his mom's basement down the street who supplies the world with porn 7/24. Even if you prefer an across the board rate increase over a targeted cap/shaping strategy (perhaps because you are the guy down the street), what about the other guy down the street who spends 30 minutes a day checking email and reading a couple blog or news sites but is so busy that he doesn't want that to be 32 minutes so he subscribes to the high speed option? Probably not so much.
Who is accountable? The CODER and the FORMAL REVIEWER!
It's fine to "reduce risk" by "over the shoulder" reviews, but, in the end, no one is accountable and no one has a clue if the software is of adequate quality unless there is more formal tracking, resource allocation, and accountability. As a software development manager, I figure that reviewing code properly typically requires 20%+ of the resources to write the code (the 20% is assuming a domain expert reviewer). The reviewer is as responsible for the correctness (not the style of code or algorithms) as the coder is!
It completely depends on the impact of a software failure...
Critical Space Shuttle software and Medical Radiotherapy software which can kill people and politically poison useful programs - yes.
DBMS core which can corrupt data and/or return wrong results resulting in millions of dollars of cost to a customer - yes.
A GUI component which at worst will leave a few pixels of GUI Poo on an in-house application or require backing down to the prior release - not so much (well, probably not at all).
So, this implies that this is how they teach Elementary and High School Math in China and India? My impression, albeit a few years out of date that they are both much more oriented towards "Drill and Kill" than the US system has been for many years. Of course, by doing this from an early age, those that have natural talent then have the materials necessary to move on to the next stage.
If a classroom of eighth graders can't figure out how long each piece would be if you took a rope 12 feet long and cut it into three equal length pieces, they are not yet ready for "free form" and "semester long projects" in math the next year (and, sadly, probably never will be as their counterparts in India likely could easily solve this problem instinctively in third grade as probably virtually everyone reading this could have).
You may have a Utopian view of what the typical student in the US has learned by the time they enter High School:)
I suspect the greatest difference between our failing education system and the best of China and India are that in those cultures from an early age, those who are pursuing academic pursuits are pretty much told that they must achieve to succeed and don't really have a lot of input into how to accomplish that. They also probably don't spend a whole lot of time "hanging out at the mall" or "just chilling" -- instead spending that time studying. This focus on education is not immediately lost when families arrive on our shores - but American parents and teachers have, by and large, have gotten soft - this is an interesting read...
If standardized tests in math and science, for example, are testing only for knowledge, that's wrong -- skills (as I said) or ability (as you said) are important.
A standardized test in math shouldn't ask for the formula for computing the area of a triangle, it should ask the test taker to compute it given a triangle. In your view, is just "knowledge" required to solve this problem? Seems to me that it requires both knowledge and (admittedly simple in this case) skill/ability.
Similarly, a standardized test in math should require actual computation of compounded interest given a real world example -- not just regurgitation of the formula.
The teachers are not the only ones being evaluated by standardized testing - administrators all the way up the line are as well. If test scores for students at an entire school or in an entire department show poor progress, it's pretty hard to blame the teachers solely or even mostly. However, when standardized test scores show students in one teacher's classes progress slower than those in another teacher's classes when those classes are the same or similar and the students are drawn from substantially the same student population, it's time to look at the under performing teacher more closely.
It's not possible to solve all the problems (esp. the "parent problem"). However, without data, how can you tell if progress is being made on solving any problem? Standardized testing is just one tool that gives us data to figure out how to fix the problems that can be fixed.
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I agree that the government has no business to enter my private domain. No quartering of troops in my home; no crossing the threshold without a warrant. That's the supreme law of the land.
Which land?
Did merry England disallow quartering of troops in private homes after those of us on my side of the pond complained about it over 200 years ago? Or, were the British soldiers breaking their own laws at that time?
For example, some good employment opportunities. Something that makes being on welfare seem crappy in comparison.
That's easy - make welfare less attractive. It's not possible for everyone to have good jobs (someone has to clean up the crappers and people with IQ below 90 need jobs that suit their abilities).
Prison isn't the answer - "welfare" is probably cheaper.
Just set a lifetime limit of one year on welfare per person - and recipients who conceive while receiving benefits will forever be banned from receiving future benefits.
Anyone who has had one or no children and has exhausted their "one year" of welfare can apply for an extension of lifetime welfare benefits of ten more years -- but they must be surgically, and permanently, sterilized to qualify for the extension. Possible exception on one/no children rule for those who have twins (triplets etc) without the use of fertility drugs.
In order to catch men who apply for extensions falsely claiming they have no children, maintain a registry of parent/child relationships. At birth, do DNA testing of every baby and purported parents to verify parent/child relationships. If mother can't identify father, mother can never get a welfare extension. Also, take DNA of every male who dies (in case two months after cremation, a women claims the dead guy was the father).
Eeew... I don't know where you live, but in my experience, most chronic "IE welfare females" over about 25 (and many below that) aren't really women most nerds would want putting out to them.
If this works like where I live, the power company can get screwed by solar panel customers. This is because whenever the meter is "spinning backwards", the power company is forced to pay retail rates for this power when it would be cheaper to just buy the power at bulk "wholesale" rates -- possibly from equally "green" sources (such as geo thermal, hydro, or wind). Solar panel users can suck power at peak times (hot days for example when more cooling is needed) and then spin the meter backwards the next two days when it's cooler (but still clear). On the hot day, the utility is forced to buy power at high wholesale rates (possibly generated by relatively expensive natural gas peaker plants) due to demand while on the following cooler days they are forced to buy power, when demand is low and wholesale prices are low, at retail rates from the solar panel customer.
One reasonable solution to this problem might be to require solar customers who want to "spin the meter backwards" to install, at their own expense, sophisticated meters that track when and how much power (perhaps in ten minute intervals or whatever makes sense) the solar customer is pumping back and, at the end of the month, the solar customer is credited for the average wholesale price that the utility paid for power during each period.
"High Frequency Trader (HFT)" != "Market Maker" -- although I don't know that anything would prevent the same entity from being a Market Maker in a stock in which they also engage in HFT.
As far as I can tell from the brief article, the HFT discussed are not Market Makers.
A Market Maker for a stock have a contractual responsibility to provide liquidity in that stock. Roughly speaking, if there are only sellers and no buyers for the stock, the Market Maker must buy spending their own money and, conversely, if there are only buyers and no sellers, the Market Maker has to sell their stash. There are a bunch of rules around this - but even with these rules, a Market Maker can suffer huge losses in a few minutes because they are required to buy/sell stock that doesn't have a ready market.
These HFTs appear to be "day traders" (or, more precisely, "minute traders") with an inside track. I question if this is "good" for the market - not to say it shouldn't be legal, but it may actually drive the rest of the market down because such asymmetry will drive some investors to investments that are less "rigged" (such as bonds). It sounds like virtually every trade an HFT "gets in the middle of" would have occurred without the HFT and the HFT's skim would have gone to the "slower" buyer or/or seller instead.
Also, if one believes the article's claim of annual profits of $21 billion, HFTs skim a significant amount and since they just reduce profits for longer term (days, weeks, months, years) investors, it's not clear that they benefit the market in any way. HFTs appear to assume little risk and mostly just add friction. If the profits they skim were distributed across the US population (which, I know, may not be relevant as the market is worldwide), it would amount to about $70 for every adult and child in the US.
Isn't it likely that an fs developer who found themselves "sitting on their hands" might decide to go off and start working on the "big file system feature" so they can check it in a few days into the next release cycle (which is when checking of such "big" features seem to be encouraged)? I'd hope so. Although I have no first hand knowledge of OpenBSD's dev, I suspect a lot of short lived "branching" really does occur - but it's hidden out of sight of the cm system.
That ability to eat your own dogfood for real sounds pretty crucial to the strategy. Unfortunately, if one is developing software that they don't actually need to use extensively and continuously to get through each day, relying on developers for testing "by using it" is likely less reliable and/or predictable
For example, developers of software for set top cable DVRs (Motorola developers who write the crap Comcast downloads to my DVR - you know who you are!) may not even subscribe to cable -- and, presumably, even if they do, they have little time to watch it at the very time when it most needs testing.
If only those that "didn't get it", got out...
Instead, too many struggle by and end up thinking someone should hire them to code.
While this can teach one to suffer fools kindly (or, end up on the news with neighbors and fellow students saying things like "I'm shocked. He was a quiet guy but he never seemed violent before."), the number of motivated and bright students you will find in a CC programming class is quite small. These people will mostly just "want to get the project over with and hope to get at least a 'B'" and will struggle at that. You may end up doing the entire project yourself to "get it done right". This may incorrectly lead you to conclude you're a 'lone wolf hacker' when in fact, you would be a good team player if you could pick a good team.
One word: Thermite
(and, it's more fun in addition to being quick, easy, and quite convincing - although it can call attention to you if you live in an apartment or townhouse!)
I call B.S.
The entire government in California is run by chimpanzees - there can't possibly be enough left over to run even one DMV office in Florida, let alone the whole organization.
(Although, California is running out of bananas - some of their government chimpanzees may be migrating East soon -- be afraid, be very afraid).
That's difficult for most employees to get. Usually the options vest immediately only if the employee is not offered a job of similar responsibility with the new company. There are of course any number of variations on this - it's not unusual for the options to fully vest after working for the new employer for one year (or if they are let go without cause during that year). In this case, it is likely that many who were let go vested immediately because they were not offered similar jobs w/Oracle - the options available to all but the founders (who mostly actually still own a percentage of the company), the CEO, and maybe VP Sales/Eng/Marketing are usually chump change anyway.
Key employees will almost never get an "instant vest on change of control" because if your key employees are able to bail upon acquisition with vested options, it's very hard to find someone who wants to buy the company as an ongoing concern (vs. just for its IP). Indeed, most deals don't get announced until the most key employees already have signed employment contracts with the acquiring company (assuming the company wants to keep the people - which, in this case, it seems Oracle didn't have a lot of interest in this) and deals are sometimes contingent on some percentage of a list of other personnel accepting their offers with the acquiring company (these are employees who are not sufficiently high to be told about the pending deal, so the deal gets announced without these employees having been approached about an offer with the acquiring company).
It may be possible to get this arrangement if one is not an important player and who would almost certainly become redundant in the event of a takeover (perhaps a receptionist or a facilities manager or something like that), but those individuals have options on such a small percentage of the company, they don't matter much.
I hear this story over and over -- it's SO sad that the system flushes out teachers who "get it" while leaving the sludge in the teaching pool.
There are certainly some good teachers that stick it out and I don't blame anyone for bailing out of an untenable situation, but society has got to recognize that education is important, equality should be about opportunity not outcome, working hard is an important component to success, and teachers should be accountable (and not "entitled" to their job just because they have seniority).
Oh, and and parents have to realize that just because they were clever (or careless) enough to figure out how to spawn, it doesn't mean their children are perfect angels entitled to whatever they want without hard work.
Agreed...
However, I think it's unfair to specifically single out these groups without including what seems to me to be a "lax" attitude by parents (including college educated parents) in middle-class homes where the kid's great-grandparents (or earlier) lived in the US (having immigrated or having been born in the US). In the public middle-class schools these kids go to, parents complain that poor Jason just doesn't have enough time after school for all his activities and his life is so stressful so the schools should cut back on expectations (including the amount of homework). Or, when their sweet Heather is called out at school for behavior problems, her parents raise a ruckus about how the teacher picks on poor Heather (when I was a kid [get off my lawn] it was assumed it was me who had the problem, not the teacher -- unless a lot of parents were complaining bitterly about one particular teacher).
Of course, all this has given us public school teachers who are willing to accept this lax attitude and have low achievement expectations -- which results in a vicious cycle.
From a practical standpoint, the primary source of effective practicing engineers and scientists is going to be middle class households with educated parents -- unfortunately, many of these families are/have raised soft kids who feel entitled to get whatever they want just because "I want it" and don't expect to "work" for it.
At this point, I fear the US's only hope is the legal immigrants from India and China (in particular, due to their numbers) whose parents actually believe that their childrens' main "job" is getting a good education and don't mind that the kids sometimes feel some stress about it. This is not a terrible thing except that as the US builds up more and more deadwood (all of whom get to vote, but most of whom will pay few taxes due to their limited income producing potential) we cross the tipping point where 5% are paying the other 95% to exist - and the 95% keep trying to get more from the 5% until it all collapses when a few of the 5% say "screw it, I'm not going to work this hard to give most of my earnings to someone else. Don't oppose generous issuance of H1Bs to well educated individuals - we need them to help keep Medicare (and the whole government bubble) propped up for a few more years - we need to keep this Ponzi scheme afloat...
Depends on the caps... Comcast gives me 250GB per month, I'm pretty happy with that. I can download several Linux distros a month with no worry. (Even with Patch Tuesday for several machines and a few hours a day of browsing)
My only big gripe is that they don't give me a way to monitor usage and that (AFIK) giant ping packets that get dropped by my router still get charged to me (that's a flaw as one person with a grudge against me and access to corporate level internet access could screw me royally).
Well, the guy who values his 2 minutes a day is probably a busy guy whose time is valuable - valuable enough that he will pay more for a service to save him some time (not unlike why someone may pay someone to clean their house).
/. meme. I almost said Warez, but that sounded so 90's unlike porn which will never be out of date (although, the styles of course change).
All I was trying to express is that most people who buy residential high speed broadband want it NOT because they can't download all the bytes they want every month even if they run 7/24 - rather that when they are using the connection, they want it to be faster to save them time or perhaps they want sufficient speed for good video streaming. These people are very content with caps and limited traffic shaping and willing to accept those because that means they can pay less for their connection.
I couldn't care less what the guy in the basement is serving up on his server that's pegging his bandwidth 7/24 - I just picked porn because it's a
By the way, you might want to consider some professional help. It is true that some people's time has value (since you don't understand this, obviously your's doesn't) and that does not make them a "damn crack dealing perv".
By your own admission, you have at least four choices for internet access (plus possibly a business class option with your cable company). You looked at all the options and picked one that was fairly fast and fairly inexpensive.
If your cable company introduces caps or traffic shaping (or, perhaps, even per byte pricing w/premium pricing for "prime time" bytes?), you say you have "no other choice" but to drop them and go with some other worse option -- why would you switch to a worse option? Do you mean slower? Do you mean more expensive?
Would you rather that your cable broadband base rate just increased $10/month so the cable company could avoid caps and traffic shaping to accommodate the guy in his mom's basement down the street who supplies the world with porn 7/24. Even if you prefer an across the board rate increase over a targeted cap/shaping strategy (perhaps because you are the guy down the street), what about the other guy down the street who spends 30 minutes a day checking email and reading a couple blog or news sites but is so busy that he doesn't want that to be 32 minutes so he subscribes to the high speed option? Probably not so much.
You kids today... I've been hearing about the death of spinning platters for two decades.
Eventually they will virtually disappear as paper tape, cards and, more recently, floppies have -- but it will take a lot longer than most expect.
Now get off my lawn.
Who is accountable? The CODER and the FORMAL REVIEWER!
It's fine to "reduce risk" by "over the shoulder" reviews, but, in the end, no one is accountable and no one has a clue if the software is of adequate quality unless there is more formal tracking, resource allocation, and accountability. As a software development manager, I figure that reviewing code properly typically requires 20%+ of the resources to write the code (the 20% is assuming a domain expert reviewer). The reviewer is as responsible for the correctness (not the style of code or algorithms) as the coder is!
and this requires an answer? :)
If a "coder" fixes a bug it costs X.
if a "reviewer" catches a bug it costs 10X
if "QA" catches a bug it costs 100X
if a Customer catches a bug it costs 1000X
Oh... do I have stories from the crucible of systems development...
Huh?
It completely depends on the impact of a software failure...
Critical Space Shuttle software and Medical Radiotherapy software which can kill people and politically poison useful programs - yes.
DBMS core which can corrupt data and/or return wrong results resulting in millions of dollars of cost to a customer - yes.
A GUI component which at worst will leave a few pixels of GUI Poo on an in-house application or require backing down to the prior release - not so much (well, probably not at all).
So, this implies that this is how they teach Elementary and High School Math in China and India? My impression, albeit a few years out of date that they are both much more oriented towards "Drill and Kill" than the US system has been for many years. Of course, by doing this from an early age, those that have natural talent then have the materials necessary to move on to the next stage.
:)
If a classroom of eighth graders can't figure out how long each piece would be if you took a rope 12 feet long and cut it into three equal length pieces, they are not yet ready for "free form" and "semester long projects" in math the next year (and, sadly, probably never will be as their counterparts in India likely could easily solve this problem instinctively in third grade as probably virtually everyone reading this could have).
You may have a Utopian view of what the typical student in the US has learned by the time they enter High School
I suspect the greatest difference between our failing education system and the best of China and India are that in those cultures from an early age, those who are pursuing academic pursuits are pretty much told that they must achieve to succeed and don't really have a lot of input into how to accomplish that. They also probably don't spend a whole lot of time "hanging out at the mall" or "just chilling" -- instead spending that time studying. This focus on education is not immediately lost when families arrive on our shores - but American parents and teachers have, by and large, have gotten soft - this is an interesting read...
If standardized tests in math and science, for example, are testing only for knowledge, that's wrong -- skills (as I said) or ability (as you said) are important.
A standardized test in math shouldn't ask for the formula for computing the area of a triangle, it should ask the test taker to compute it given a triangle. In your view, is just "knowledge" required to solve this problem? Seems to me that it requires both knowledge and (admittedly simple in this case) skill/ability.
Similarly, a standardized test in math should require actual computation of compounded interest given a real world example -- not just regurgitation of the formula.
The teachers are not the only ones being evaluated by standardized testing - administrators all the way up the line are as well. If test scores for students at an entire school or in an entire department show poor progress, it's pretty hard to blame the teachers solely or even mostly. However, when standardized test scores show students in one teacher's classes progress slower than those in another teacher's classes when those classes are the same or similar and the students are drawn from substantially the same student population, it's time to look at the under performing teacher more closely.
It's not possible to solve all the problems (esp. the "parent problem"). However, without data, how can you tell if progress is being made on solving any problem? Standardized testing is just one tool that gives us data to figure out how to fix the problems that can be fixed.