You know that performance is tracked. That's only the the first step, though. You need to know how your performance is being tracked. Are you being graded on the number of bugs you solve? On the number of variances in the product? On what new features you implement? This is even more critical to know if your manager gives you a non-answer like, "We take into account a variety of factors." Ask around. Try to discover what those factors are. This isn't so that you "game" the system. This is so that you'll know what to spend time on, and what factors are of lesser importance. Spending a few hours writing great documentation isn't going to help you if your boss doesn't recognize the effort. That effort can be spent where it will be recognized, like getting started on the next bug.
Yeah, in an ideal world, you would be recognized for every activity that contributes to the product, whether its writing documentation, or fixing a bug. But you and I both know that in the real world, some things count more than others. Its important to figure what those things are and optimize your efforts for them.
This P-value and the P-value you're thinking of aren't the same. Ordinarily, when we think of P-value, we're thinking of errors caused by statistical chance, errors in the data and so on. However, in quantum computing, even purely mathematical computations have a probability of correctness. In other words, when you add 2 + 2 with a quantum computer, you don't get 4. You get 4 (p=.95). When you evaluate the mathematical function, you get the result, plus a probability of that result being the correct result.
As I understand it, there's a trade-off between uncertainty and speed in quantum computing. You can get results faster, but you'll have a higher probability that your machine returns 2+2=5.
I agree 100%. However, one must acknowledge that Greece would not be in the pickle that it is today if it were not for multiple Grecian governments borrowing and spending money that they could not effectively repay. In other words, there wouldn't be any civil unrest if Greece had taken into account the long term consequences of the contracts it was entering into with investors.
Our markets had this feature (I believe its called a "circuit breaker") added after the massive crashes of the '80s. In this case, however, the price declines were not large enough in either velocity or magnitude to trip these automatic safeguards.
You have to note that General Motors entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, rather than Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. In Chapter 11, the company gets a court supervised reprieve from debt payments in order to renegotiate those payments with its suppliers and bondholders. Whether the shareholders get wiped out or not depends on whether the bondholders insist that they be wiped out.
If in another five years, GM is trading a lot higher than it did during Chapter 11, you should be ready to explain to your father in law why you advised against a great deal on depressed stock.
The problem I have with the "blame high frequency trading" narrative is that it doesn't explain all the other times when high frequency trading could have done even more damage, but didn't. If these algorithms are so sensitive that a tiny fluctuation can set them off, then why didn't markets tank even harder in response to truly monumental events, like Lehman going bankrupt, or the House of Representatives' initial rejection of the TARP? I mean, you would have figured that the same algorithms would have kicked in for those events too.
And, on the unlikely event that it *is* true, its all the more reason to HAVE a hearing because anyone can legitimately crash the stock market by simply making a trade.
You seem to have a misconception as to what the market is. It is simply a room (either physical, electronic, or both) in which buyers and sellers make trades. That's all it is. So, saying its unreasonable for a single trade to crash the stock market is a bit like saying its unreasonable for a single command like "sudo rm -rf/" to crash your computer.
Even when you retire, its not like you cash out all your securities in one day. You sell them off over time, as you need them. So, if the market swings like this for one day, you'll still be fine. Its when the markets swing for months at a time, due to the overleveraging of certain investment banks *cough*Lehman*cough* that you should start to worry.
If you take the entire global climate change (uh, climates change... ISTR being taught how several deserts in the world used to be quite lush) or global warming picture as a whole, you can trace it back to see where it started, where scientific "consensus" began to be encouraged *cough*extorted*cough*, where evil rich people who consume much much more, and subsequently excrete a larger "carbon footprint," than the average citizen they vilify stand to make millions upon millions of dollars. You know, at some point it sounds quite reasonable that human arrogance reigns supreme on several fronts.
So, how much have you paid this year in carbon taxes? If Global Climate Change theory is a conspiracy to extort billions from the first world, its doing an extraordinarily poor job of it.
Governments the world around are throwing money at the "problem", if for no other reason than to get off the hook with voters. Private people and organizations have sent money out the ass to them, and that carbon credit thingy seems to have taken off. The money is there - it's not being spent wisely.
I keep hearing that from all the climate change skeptics. "Climate change is just a scheme for them to make money. Yet, I never get any specification of who that amorphous "them" is, and even when some names are thrown around (e.g. UN, government, financial entities), I never see any hard numbers saying how much money these bodies are making. So, Runaway1956, can you tell me specifically, who is making money from "climate change", and how much (as specified in billions of US dollars)?
FFS, we have ample evidence that dinosaurs roamed the norther part of the United States, and that they lived in jungles and rain forests. Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, not to mention the southern tier of states, have so many fossils, you can't help stumbling over them!
Did it ever occur to you that continental drift is real? That what we consider to be in the north was not always so? There are fossils of tropical plants in Antarctica too. That's not because the Earth was that much massively warmer in the past. It was because Antarctica (at the time) was much closer to the Equator.
I'm not a fan of kicking the elderly into the streets either. That said, the US spends the most and gets the least out its health care system, as compared with other industrialized countries. Our per-capita costs are the highest in the world, while our outcomes are amongst the worst in the industrialized world.
If government spending bothers you, you might want to look into downsizing the US's preposterously large military.
Its always easy and fun to bash the military, but the fact remains that military and VA spending accounts for only about 23% of the overall federal budget. The lion's share goes to Social Security and Medicare. Between the two of them, they're taking about 40% of the budget.
It's possible that the best place to cut expenses is the place where the money is being squandered.
By all means. The places where the money is being squandered are Medicare and Social Security.
Even if the machine is never physically in the office, it has the potential to access and store data the moment the employee accesses the company network via VPN. Given the level of employee stupidity out there with regard to data security practices, its a lot safer to have a blanket policy of "full disk encryption, 100% of the time", than it is to try to define all the cases where such encryption may or may not be necessary.
That said, I do agree with other posters that are questioning why the user wants to do work on a personal machine. The way I see it, if the company needs me to work at home, they can give me the tools to do so. If its not worth it for them to spend $600 or so getting me a laptop, the task isn't worth my personal time either.
Pseudo-code only runs in your head, which is different to my head.
Not necessarily. After all, mathematics has developed a fairly standard set of symbols and forms that allow mathematicians to communicate theorems and proofs without ambiguity. Why can't we develop such a system for algorithms?
Well, presumably, there would be a certified compiler or interpreter that would be used to run the code in question, and only results from the certified compiler would be acceptable to the SEC.
I see this as a horrible idea. The moment Python becomes codified as an official standard, innovation will stop. The risk of introducing a new language feature that alters behavior critical to a company's SEC filing would be too great. At best you'd see very carefully vetted security updates, but the freewheeling, innovative Python culture that we have today would die a quick death.
The way I see it, the government should use the language that it invented for critical applications: Ada.
Now, think about it, how better to describe an algorithm than an actual working program?
Pseudo-code is far better for describing an algorithm than actual running code. If one uses "production" code to express an algorithm, then one has to also accept the limitations imposed by the language and programming environment.
For example, if the demonstration code takes into account the possibility of integer overflows, that check becomes part of the "official" algorithm. While this may be okay as long as the algorithm remains implemented in a single language/environment, it becomes a problem when one needs to implement the algorithm in another environment.
At the very least, there should be multiple sample implementations, so that one can see what features are intrinsic to the algorithm, and what features are imposed by the external programming environment.
There might be crazy paperwork for a super-duper-reverse-amortizing-interest-only-ARM, but a standard 30-year fixed rate mortgage isn't so hard to understand. You look at the amortization schedule, and it tells you how much of the payment is going towards principal and how much is going to interest. In other words, you can see how much of your house you own at the end of each payment.
There are two types of 'closed door' sessions. The first is like the one GP described. The public is not invited in, but the session is still recorded, and those recordings and transcripts are made available to the public. The purpose of these sessions is to allow representatives to discuss issues without having anyone try to play to a visible peanut gallery.
The second type of closed door session is where issues of National Security are discussed. As far as I know, these sessions take place in secure rooms and any recordings or transcripts are classified, due to the nature of the material being discussed.
Every single one of them can leave their job if they disagree with it.
Okay, well, lets say your CEO decides that America's drug laws are outdated and decides to start distributing marijuana with company resources. It can't be wrong, since you always have the option to quit, right?
Well, building a tower on the moon is really easy, given that gravity is only 1/6 as strong. Couple with the fact that there's no atmosphere (no wind) and the fact that the moon isn't geologically active means that you can build a very tall tower very cheaply because you don't need nearly as much bracing.
In many ways, the moon is far more inhospitable than Mars. Its lack of atmosphere means that there isn't any radiation shielding or thermal moderation. The only reason the moon is "easier" to live on than Mars is because the moon is three days away whereas Mars is a three month journey.
Well, I'm not sure that UbiSoft has done any formal calculations regarding the costs versus the benefits of this scheme. It may be the fact that some executive at the company saw a fancy sales pitch and foisted the system onto the developers. The problem with this marginal gain/marginal loss theory is that it assumes that corporations are rational. They're not. At least, they're no more rational or irrational than any individual person.
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You know that performance is tracked. That's only the the first step, though. You need to know how your performance is being tracked. Are you being graded on the number of bugs you solve? On the number of variances in the product? On what new features you implement? This is even more critical to know if your manager gives you a non-answer like, "We take into account a variety of factors." Ask around. Try to discover what those factors are. This isn't so that you "game" the system. This is so that you'll know what to spend time on, and what factors are of lesser importance. Spending a few hours writing great documentation isn't going to help you if your boss doesn't recognize the effort. That effort can be spent where it will be recognized, like getting started on the next bug.
Yeah, in an ideal world, you would be recognized for every activity that contributes to the product, whether its writing documentation, or fixing a bug. But you and I both know that in the real world, some things count more than others. Its important to figure what those things are and optimize your efforts for them.
This P-value and the P-value you're thinking of aren't the same. Ordinarily, when we think of P-value, we're thinking of errors caused by statistical chance, errors in the data and so on. However, in quantum computing, even purely mathematical computations have a probability of correctness. In other words, when you add 2 + 2 with a quantum computer, you don't get 4. You get 4 (p=.95). When you evaluate the mathematical function, you get the result, plus a probability of that result being the correct result.
As I understand it, there's a trade-off between uncertainty and speed in quantum computing. You can get results faster, but you'll have a higher probability that your machine returns 2+2=5.
I agree 100%. However, one must acknowledge that Greece would not be in the pickle that it is today if it were not for multiple Grecian governments borrowing and spending money that they could not effectively repay. In other words, there wouldn't be any civil unrest if Greece had taken into account the long term consequences of the contracts it was entering into with investors.
Our markets had this feature (I believe its called a "circuit breaker") added after the massive crashes of the '80s. In this case, however, the price declines were not large enough in either velocity or magnitude to trip these automatic safeguards.
Hint: investors are the economy. Without investment and trade, there is no economy to speak of.
You have to note that General Motors entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, rather than Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. In Chapter 11, the company gets a court supervised reprieve from debt payments in order to renegotiate those payments with its suppliers and bondholders. Whether the shareholders get wiped out or not depends on whether the bondholders insist that they be wiped out.
If in another five years, GM is trading a lot higher than it did during Chapter 11, you should be ready to explain to your father in law why you advised against a great deal on depressed stock.
The problem I have with the "blame high frequency trading" narrative is that it doesn't explain all the other times when high frequency trading could have done even more damage, but didn't. If these algorithms are so sensitive that a tiny fluctuation can set them off, then why didn't markets tank even harder in response to truly monumental events, like Lehman going bankrupt, or the House of Representatives' initial rejection of the TARP? I mean, you would have figured that the same algorithms would have kicked in for those events too.
And, on the unlikely event that it *is* true, its all the more reason to HAVE a hearing because anyone can legitimately crash the stock market by simply making a trade.
You seem to have a misconception as to what the market is. It is simply a room (either physical, electronic, or both) in which buyers and sellers make trades. That's all it is. So, saying its unreasonable for a single trade to crash the stock market is a bit like saying its unreasonable for a single command like "sudo rm -rf /" to crash your computer.
Even when you retire, its not like you cash out all your securities in one day. You sell them off over time, as you need them. So, if the market swings like this for one day, you'll still be fine. Its when the markets swing for months at a time, due to the overleveraging of certain investment banks *cough*Lehman*cough* that you should start to worry.
If you take the entire global climate change (uh, climates change... ISTR being taught how several deserts in the world used to be quite lush) or global warming picture as a whole, you can trace it back to see where it started, where scientific "consensus" began to be encouraged *cough*extorted*cough*, where evil rich people who consume much much more, and subsequently excrete a larger "carbon footprint," than the average citizen they vilify stand to make millions upon millions of dollars. You know, at some point it sounds quite reasonable that human arrogance reigns supreme on several fronts.
So, how much have you paid this year in carbon taxes? If Global Climate Change theory is a conspiracy to extort billions from the first world, its doing an extraordinarily poor job of it.
Governments the world around are throwing money at the "problem", if for no other reason than to get off the hook with voters. Private people and organizations have sent money out the ass to them, and that carbon credit thingy seems to have taken off. The money is there - it's not being spent wisely.
I keep hearing that from all the climate change skeptics. "Climate change is just a scheme for them to make money. Yet, I never get any specification of who that amorphous "them" is, and even when some names are thrown around (e.g. UN, government, financial entities), I never see any hard numbers saying how much money these bodies are making. So, Runaway1956, can you tell me specifically, who is making money from "climate change", and how much (as specified in billions of US dollars)?
FFS, we have ample evidence that dinosaurs roamed the norther part of the United States, and that they lived in jungles and rain forests. Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, not to mention the southern tier of states, have so many fossils, you can't help stumbling over them!
Did it ever occur to you that continental drift is real? That what we consider to be in the north was not always so? There are fossils of tropical plants in Antarctica too. That's not because the Earth was that much massively warmer in the past. It was because Antarctica (at the time) was much closer to the Equator.
I'm not a fan of kicking the elderly into the streets either. That said, the US spends the most and gets the least out its health care system, as compared with other industrialized countries. Our per-capita costs are the highest in the world, while our outcomes are amongst the worst in the industrialized world.
If government spending bothers you, you might want to look into downsizing the US's preposterously large military.
Its always easy and fun to bash the military, but the fact remains that military and VA spending accounts for only about 23% of the overall federal budget. The lion's share goes to Social Security and Medicare. Between the two of them, they're taking about 40% of the budget.
It's possible that the best place to cut expenses is the place where the money is being squandered.
By all means. The places where the money is being squandered are Medicare and Social Security.
Even if the machine is never physically in the office, it has the potential to access and store data the moment the employee accesses the company network via VPN. Given the level of employee stupidity out there with regard to data security practices, its a lot safer to have a blanket policy of "full disk encryption, 100% of the time", than it is to try to define all the cases where such encryption may or may not be necessary.
That said, I do agree with other posters that are questioning why the user wants to do work on a personal machine. The way I see it, if the company needs me to work at home, they can give me the tools to do so. If its not worth it for them to spend $600 or so getting me a laptop, the task isn't worth my personal time either.
Pseudo-code only runs in your head, which is different to my head.
Not necessarily. After all, mathematics has developed a fairly standard set of symbols and forms that allow mathematicians to communicate theorems and proofs without ambiguity. Why can't we develop such a system for algorithms?
Well, presumably, there would be a certified compiler or interpreter that would be used to run the code in question, and only results from the certified compiler would be acceptable to the SEC.
I see this as a horrible idea. The moment Python becomes codified as an official standard, innovation will stop. The risk of introducing a new language feature that alters behavior critical to a company's SEC filing would be too great. At best you'd see very carefully vetted security updates, but the freewheeling, innovative Python culture that we have today would die a quick death.
The way I see it, the government should use the language that it invented for critical applications: Ada.
Now, think about it, how better to describe an algorithm than an actual working program?
Pseudo-code is far better for describing an algorithm than actual running code. If one uses "production" code to express an algorithm, then one has to also accept the limitations imposed by the language and programming environment.
For example, if the demonstration code takes into account the possibility of integer overflows, that check becomes part of the "official" algorithm. While this may be okay as long as the algorithm remains implemented in a single language/environment, it becomes a problem when one needs to implement the algorithm in another environment.
At the very least, there should be multiple sample implementations, so that one can see what features are intrinsic to the algorithm, and what features are imposed by the external programming environment.
There might be crazy paperwork for a super-duper-reverse-amortizing-interest-only-ARM, but a standard 30-year fixed rate mortgage isn't so hard to understand. You look at the amortization schedule, and it tells you how much of the payment is going towards principal and how much is going to interest. In other words, you can see how much of your house you own at the end of each payment.
My view is that there just is no substitute for a system of social morality like those in eastern cultures of old.
Is this the same "morality" that advocated blind obedience to a god emperor? No thanks, I'll keep my "decadent" Western ways, thanks.
There are two types of 'closed door' sessions. The first is like the one GP described. The public is not invited in, but the session is still recorded, and those recordings and transcripts are made available to the public. The purpose of these sessions is to allow representatives to discuss issues without having anyone try to play to a visible peanut gallery.
The second type of closed door session is where issues of National Security are discussed. As far as I know, these sessions take place in secure rooms and any recordings or transcripts are classified, due to the nature of the material being discussed.
Every single one of them can leave their job if they disagree with it.
Okay, well, lets say your CEO decides that America's drug laws are outdated and decides to start distributing marijuana with company resources. It can't be wrong, since you always have the option to quit, right?
Well, building a tower on the moon is really easy, given that gravity is only 1/6 as strong. Couple with the fact that there's no atmosphere (no wind) and the fact that the moon isn't geologically active means that you can build a very tall tower very cheaply because you don't need nearly as much bracing.
In many ways, the moon is far more inhospitable than Mars. Its lack of atmosphere means that there isn't any radiation shielding or thermal moderation. The only reason the moon is "easier" to live on than Mars is because the moon is three days away whereas Mars is a three month journey.
Well, I'm not sure that UbiSoft has done any formal calculations regarding the costs versus the benefits of this scheme. It may be the fact that some executive at the company saw a fancy sales pitch and foisted the system onto the developers. The problem with this marginal gain/marginal loss theory is that it assumes that corporations are rational. They're not. At least, they're no more rational or irrational than any individual person.