as in this scenario? Step 1: Take out life-insurance on your family. Step 2: Kill them. Step 3:... Step 4: Profit!
Too bad a (large) number of Western banks voided their insurances, denied any knowledge about their clients, took their cash, and helped to sell the property stolen from them. But otherwise it was a great plot, to have Hitler kill them all off just so they the survivors could collect life-insurance.
Note to AC: if you want to avoid the flamebait moderation, perhaps you should qualify your writings a bit more. As it stands, it is antisemitic bullshit.
I had to laugh out loud at first, when reading your arguments. Unfortunately, that was before I realized some people actually took them as serious information.
First off: the chance of getting pregnant with just the pill, is 0.5% per *year*. Not for each time having sex (otherwise my wife and I would be having a full house by now). So when you just use the pill and are active sexually from age 18 until age 45 (after that fertility becomes very low in females), you get a total chance of a pregnancy of around 12,65%. Using only a condom would result in a 95% protection rate. In this case you can combine the chances so using both would result in a pregnancy rate of around 0.025% per year, resulting in a total chance of getting pregnant that is around 0.7% over the entire fertile life of the female.
So the real reason has nothing to do with all that evil free sex going on, but is about the right for women to decide over what happens to their bodies, as opposed to those who consider them property - basically, an unruly variation of the couch and other furniture. So you'd better be silent about morals - you should not speak of them when you have the morals of a slave-owner.
Yeah, I should totally jump through hoops to improve their ability to sell to me. Just because it would make the programmers lives easier:)
No, if Netflix wants to sell more, they should follow up on that recommendation and make it very very easy to have multiple identities on a given account and a button on the page to switch them.
The reason is that there is a difference between the information needs of the administration of purchases (tied to an account in a 1:1 relationship) and the information needs of the marketing department (tied to people, who can be tied to an account in a many:1 relationship, or a 1:1, or 1:many relationship as well). If you put a one-size-fits-all discipline in there (as lots of IT-departments are unfortunately wont to do), you lose information.
"Anyone who opposes a dictator harms him simply by breathing."
Kadyrov is not an idiot. He's a shrewd politician and won't do anything without clear advantage for him.
And there are lot of people opposing Kadyrov now. He hasn't got absolute power and if you think he can just come and shoot everyone he doesn't like then you're stupid.
Also, so called "human rights groups" like "Memorial" have almost no power and influence in Russia, they are gnats. And that's because they've managed to thoroughly alienate themselves by supporting almost exclusively only Chechens during the war in Chechnya and other events (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis ).
Kadyrov may be shrewd, but it is common knowledge he considered Natalia Estemirova to be his personal enemy (and said so publicly). Considering what he has been responsible for so far, killing someone you don't like seems more like an afterthought to me. True, he can't shoot *everyone* because there are other factions that also have weaponry. But a lone, unarmed and isolated human rights activist doesn't sound like a hard target to me.
As for human rights organizations supporting Chechens: you can hardly expect anyone to cry over the Chechen assaults on the theater, when most of the dead were caused by the Russians gassing the theater in the first place and the assault was a direct result of the Russian invasion. Since Russia considers civilians as "just Chechens" and indiscriminately bombs/shoots/rapes them, there is no reason at all to expect the Chechen resistance to do better. However, I agree that didn't endear them to the Russian public. The alternative would have been to either equate a genocidal invasion, displacing about a third of the population, with a minor incident in a theater, or to say that gosh darnit, Russian lives are worth much much more than Chechen lives and 'we're all in the wrong here'. That won't do. The Russians are the aggressor, and the Chechens have the right to resist.
Or at least, they had the right to resist until the West discovered it needed the Russians more than the Chechens.
In Germany, researchers into didactics (teaching) of computer science (Informatik) have done some work on this topic. I recently found it when I was looking into materials for the computer science course in the Netherlands (seeing if I could do better).
Based on 15 criteria, they ranked 27 languages, ranging from Scheme to Haskell, ADA to Ocaml. The worst language for teaching was, by far, APL (scored a 5, which is the worst), followed closely by Perl. The best language for teaching was Algol 60 (1,50). Second best Python (1,66), 3rd place Ruby (1,88) and scraping in at a 4th spot was Pascal (2,14).
So to summarize: better dust off your Algol 60 books and compilers:P
Failing that, Python and Ruby are nice as well for just teaching programming (although if you want to show the distinction between imperative and functional programming I'm not altogether sure that Ruby would be enough).
(*): [LH02] I. Linkweiler, L. Humbert. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zur Eignung einer Programmiersprache fÂur die schnelle Softwareentwicklung â" kann der Informatikunterricht davon profitieren?, Didaktik der Informatik, UniversitÃt Dortmund, 2002.
There was even a Pokemon episode featuring the guy from Team Rocket suddenly getting large boobs. Cue lots of ah... coloured jokes. For some reason they deemed it okay for Japan, but not so much for other countries...:P
So lets see, the Chinese government won't let you have a class called a "death knight" while the government constantly celebrates the "great leap forward" which ended up killing a ton of its own citizens, celebrates the Chinese Civil War as some great achievement which ended up with millions dying. I really don't understand China's censorship, especially since this will give them lots of tax revenue.
I don't think you really mean that the Chinese government is celebrating the casualties. It is more the reverse - people who try to publicly remember the casualties from the Great Leap Forward can still get into some serious difficulties, if it is taken as an implicit criticism of the ruling party.
And Chinese censorship is pretty simple: anything someone *in power* might find objectionable will be censored. Lots of Chinese get creeped out by ghosts. Besides that, believing in ghosts is pretty much a non-materialist phenomenon, so they're not too happy with that purely on ideological grounds alone.
Is there a reason you couldn't work out the algorithm and design first, and then code different parts independently, and just review the other's work? As long as it matched the design and algorithm you developed, you should be good. And reviewing will be easier since you're familiar with the design, and you can unit test parts of the code separately.
On tricky algorithms you're probably much better off to have 4 eyes scanning the code while typing, because it prevents a lot of bugs. If one person goes off to do something else that won't work ofcourse.
I do completely agree with your statment about the hardworking student just doing all the work. He wants to get an F just to screw with the other lazy person, but we all know that he cares too much let it happen.
That was a misinterpretation of my post. I was suggesting the hardworking student complained about the lazy one. I've seen this happen. The lazy one either got an outright F, or had to redo it all - solo. The hardworking one was graded on the assignment normally.
Back to the OP: The only thing I ever figured out from 'pair programming' was how to burn time while we switched off coding the design we came up with together. Let the teams come up with a design together, but let them code it independently. If they have questions, they have the same design and can help each other out and be a resource for the other. Much more valuable if you ask me.
This really depends on how much time you want to spend fixing bugs as opposed to preventing them. It also depends on the complexity of the task at hand. Given that the material is new to the students, and for them complexity is high, the following quote might be applicable.
From 'The effectiveness of pair programming: A meta-analysis', by by: Jo E. Hannay, Tore DybÃ¥, Erik Arisholm, Dag I. SjÃberg.
"Several experiments on the effects of pair versus solo programming have been reported in the literature. We present a meta-analysis of these studies. The analysis shows a small significant positive overall effect of pair programming on quality, a medium significant positive overall effect on duration, and a medium significant negative overall effect on effort. However, between-study variance is significant, and there are signs of publication bias among published studies on pair programming. A more detailed examination of the evidence suggests that pair programming is faster than solo programming when programming task complexity is low and yields code solutions of higher quality when task complexity is high. The higher quality for complex tasks comes at a price of considerably greater effort, while the reduced completion time for the simpler tasks comes at a price of noticeably lower quality. We conclude that greater attention should be given to moderating factors on the effects of pair programming."
Not a complete vindication of what I wrote, but it provides some insight nevertheless.
Uh, no. You really think the hardworking student is going to allow himself to get an F?
No, what I said was: the hardworking student will complain and have the OTHER student get an F. Ofcourse the one doing all the work would just get a normal grade.
Well, that'll teach me never to imply things on a slashdot posting:P
If they're really that bright, they'll probably realize quick enough that actually doing both assignments together increases the speed AND accuracy with which they'll complete them...
You assume the hardworking student will just let that happen... that's not my experience (i had 4 years of compsci study where every programming course was done in pairs. This was in the late 80's). When one of the pair was slacking, the other one tended to either do the same (and both failed the exercise), or just do everything himself and complain to the assistents about it, generally leaving the other with an F.
In general pair programming is a best practice for programming. If you need to explain what you're doing, you tend to avoid a lot of bugs before you even write the code.
I take it you don't know much about pair programming. It is not 'to drag down the brighter students', it is a best practice for programming that has been used at least since the middle of the 1980's when teaching programming. Later on it became a staple of the 'extreme programming' method that gave us a few other useful things such as testing frameworks etc.
I tried to introduce it to my workplace, but (and this wasn't a surprise) the worst programmers didn't want it because 'they didnt like people looking over their shoulder'. The good ones didn't need it as much, so it was out again.
Summary: this is not so much to help the bad students, as it is to help everyone program both faster and with less mistakes, i.e. more productivity. Similar to teaching them not to use 'goto' statements.
There are a few other requirements, if i read the relevant caselaw correctly: * Does the other side have to undergo something that could be considered a negative experience. Running very fast over a long distance might be considered as such. * Would you gain a material benefit? Not in this case, but if you sold something and said: "the first person to buy this will get his money back" then this clause would be valid. * Is the statement intended to be taken serious or could it be considered as such? With just "20 bucks" that might be easier than with 20000, so you're at risk there. * Is acceptance of the contract indicated in some way? In the textbook case, showing up and claiming was considered acceptance.
If you did this at random for no apparent reason, clause 2 and 3 would probably not apply. If you were a hotdogseller however, they would apply and I think you could be taken to court with a moderate chance of success for the claimant.
Summary: be carefull what you ask - you might get it:)
If it was only IE6 that had problems it wouldn't be so bad. I think he finds when they move to IE8 that IE8 has a number of issues trying to load the javascript Slashdot's using as well. And try browsing with ads enabled for a change, you get some really weird results on a few pages now and then.
In your point of view South African blacks were racist for fighting their white oppressors ('they were all white! You're just a bunch of anti-white racists'). There's a description for your point of view: it's called 'blaming the victim'.
If the shop you work for has cowards in the management then nothing can save it. However, I worked for a different company, with a different culture (*) when I told my boss I would advise to stop the project another department was working on (they had turned to us for advise and management saw it as an opportunity to get a foot in the door there). My advise wasn't popular but I could argue it convincingly when I presented it so we withdrew support. The other department continued and about a year later they cancelled it, having spent 500.000 euro in fees and nothing to show for it (they tried to connect 12 parties in a new system, several of those parties had a distinct business interest in getting the project to fail, and two of those parties were in fact key players for the project. The issues weren't technical at all, so the external nerds doing the project hadn't noticed the warning signs).
Later I repeated that one with a project that 'wasn't going too well' according to my manager, who asked me to join it and help out with phase II. Within 3 days I had to report back that the previous 8 months of work had basically been wasted. He wasn't too happy about it so he told me I'd better solve the problem - and I did:) But if I had convinced him it was a lost cause, i'm 100% sure we would have pulled out. Whatever the reasons I left them, it wasn't for incompetent management.
I once had a trainee colleague who came out of the psychology field and had retrained into IT. She was pretty bored by the whole IT thing after a month or 6, and she wasnt very good at her job either.
However, I ran into her about 10 years later, and she's an IT-manager now, appreciated by several good IT-folks as one of the best managers they ever had the pleasure to work with. She just had to find the place to apply her real skills.
You are assuming that the operator does not add any knowledge, such as the region of the caller and the date. My bet would be that an operator would quickly learn the topics that come up more than a few times.
Given the fact every question and answer is logged, it's not that hard to have experts on agriculture look at the questions every week and improve the set of answers. Basically, this would be an expert learning system with a human operator as interface and google to get 'starting answers' that can be refined by experts. Actually, this might not be such a bad model for the initial feeding of expert systems either.
As for the accomplishments of the Germans, I have several Jewish friends who would disagree with the notion of German cultural, moral, and social superiority.
See if you can guess why?
I know. I didn't like Goethe either.
There, that should teach you not to ask rhetorical questions on Slashdot:)
I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Me neither. Besides, do we need MORE of Visual Basic programmers?
The problem is not that the interface is graphical and interesting. As long as the programming abilities are equivalent to other languages there is no issue. The issue arises when people think that because they can arrange blocks or click through a wizard, they can model and then code the flow of information in a company. There is a subtle difference between the two, but it has little to do with Visual Basic per se.
Given ten co-workers, 9 out of 10 without formal computer science education, which would you rather have: all of them programming in C++ and you're the guy left to debug the whole mess or see what they make of your precious architecture, or use Visual Basic and make the bugs that much easier to find and solve. You don't give powertools to kids, you give them tools that have some safeties built in.
Congratulations, you've cought out everyone that day who forgot to take out his or her cash:)
As long as people don't do this every day for weeks on end, they won't get caught.
Although I find it unlikely that there is no counting mechanism in an ATM - they need to be able to count the bills to give out. Could be done by a distribution mechanism though, and returned bills just go into a stack? Input from experts would be appreciated:)
Slashdot Mirror
Gaaaah, slashdot removed my /sarcasm tags - sorry for that, my sarcasm-recognition-impaired fellow humans.
You mean,
as in this scenario? ...
Step 1: Take out life-insurance on your family.
Step 2: Kill them.
Step 3:
Step 4: Profit!
Too bad a (large) number of Western banks voided their insurances, denied any knowledge about their clients, took their cash, and helped to sell the property stolen from them. But otherwise it was a great plot, to have Hitler kill them all off just so they the survivors could collect life-insurance.
Note to AC: if you want to avoid the flamebait moderation, perhaps you should qualify your writings a bit more. As it stands, it is antisemitic bullshit.
I had to laugh out loud at first, when reading your arguments. Unfortunately, that was before I realized some people actually took them as serious information.
First off: the chance of getting pregnant with just the pill, is 0.5% per *year*. Not for each time having sex (otherwise my wife and I would be having a full house by now). So when you just use the pill and are active sexually from age 18 until age 45 (after that fertility becomes very low in females), you get a total chance of a pregnancy of around 12,65%. Using only a condom would result in a 95% protection rate. In this case you can combine the chances so using both would result in a pregnancy rate of around 0.025% per year, resulting in a total chance of getting pregnant that is around 0.7% over the entire fertile life of the female.
So the real reason has nothing to do with all that evil free sex going on, but is about the right for women to decide over what happens to their bodies, as opposed to those who consider them property - basically, an unruly variation of the couch and other furniture. So you'd better be silent about morals - you should not speak of them when you have the morals of a slave-owner.
Yeah, I should totally jump through hoops to improve their ability to sell to me. Just because it would make the programmers lives easier :)
No, if Netflix wants to sell more, they should follow up on that recommendation and make it very very easy to have multiple identities on a given account and a button on the page to switch them.
The reason is that there is a difference between the information needs of the administration of purchases (tied to an account in a 1:1 relationship) and the information needs of the marketing department (tied to people, who can be tied to an account in a many:1 relationship, or a 1:1, or 1:many relationship as well). If you put a one-size-fits-all discipline in there (as lots of IT-departments are unfortunately wont to do), you lose information.
Ada.
There :)
"Anyone who opposes a dictator harms him simply by breathing."
Kadyrov is not an idiot. He's a shrewd politician and won't do anything without clear advantage for him.
And there are lot of people opposing Kadyrov now. He hasn't got absolute power and if you think he can just come and shoot everyone he doesn't like then you're stupid.
Also, so called "human rights groups" like "Memorial" have almost no power and influence in Russia, they are gnats. And that's because they've managed to thoroughly alienate themselves by supporting almost exclusively only Chechens during the war in Chechnya and other events (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis ).
Kadyrov may be shrewd, but it is common knowledge he considered Natalia Estemirova to be his personal enemy (and said so publicly). Considering what he has been responsible for so far, killing someone you don't like seems more like an afterthought to me. True, he can't shoot *everyone* because there are other factions that also have weaponry. But a lone, unarmed and isolated human rights activist doesn't sound like a hard target to me.
As for human rights organizations supporting Chechens: you can hardly expect anyone to cry over the Chechen assaults on the theater, when most of the dead were caused by the Russians gassing the theater in the first place and the assault was a direct result of the Russian invasion. Since Russia considers civilians as "just Chechens" and indiscriminately bombs/shoots/rapes them, there is no reason at all to expect the Chechen resistance to do better. However, I agree that didn't endear them to the Russian public. The alternative would have been to either equate a genocidal invasion, displacing about a third of the population, with a minor incident in a theater, or to say that gosh darnit, Russian lives are worth much much more than Chechen lives and 'we're all in the wrong here'. That won't do. The Russians are the aggressor, and the Chechens have the right to resist.
Or at least, they had the right to resist until the West discovered it needed the Russians more than the Chechens.
In Germany, researchers into didactics (teaching) of computer science (Informatik) have done some work on this topic. I recently found it when I was looking into materials for the computer science course in the Netherlands (seeing if I could do better).
Based on 15 criteria, they ranked 27 languages, ranging from Scheme to Haskell, ADA to Ocaml. The worst language for teaching was, by far, APL (scored a 5, which is the worst), followed closely by Perl. The best language for teaching was Algol 60 (1,50). Second best Python (1,66), 3rd place Ruby (1,88) and scraping in at a 4th spot was Pascal (2,14).
So to summarize: better dust off your Algol 60 books and compilers :P
Failing that, Python and Ruby are nice as well for just teaching programming (although if you want to show the distinction between imperative and functional programming I'm not altogether sure that Ruby would be enough).
------
This was found in a (Dutch language) PDF: http://www.utwente.nl/elan/huidige_studenten/overig/OvO/OvO-inf/Eindverslag%20INF.pdf (see page 8 for the German criteria, and page 9 for the results). See the original research (*) here: http://subs.emis.de/LNI/Proceedings/Proceedings22/GI-Proceedings.22-12.pdf (German language document)
(*): [LH02] I. Linkweiler, L. Humbert. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zur Eignung einer Programmiersprache fÂur die schnelle Softwareentwicklung â" kann der Informatikunterricht davon
profitieren?, Didaktik der Informatik, UniversitÃt Dortmund, 2002.
There was even a Pokemon episode featuring the guy from Team Rocket suddenly getting large boobs. Cue lots of ah... coloured jokes. For some reason they deemed it okay for Japan, but not so much for other countries... :P
So lets see, the Chinese government won't let you have a class called a "death knight" while the government constantly celebrates the "great leap forward" which ended up killing a ton of its own citizens, celebrates the Chinese Civil War as some great achievement which ended up with millions dying. I really don't understand China's censorship, especially since this will give them lots of tax revenue.
I don't think you really mean that the Chinese government is celebrating the casualties. It is more the reverse - people who try to publicly remember the casualties from the Great Leap Forward can still get into some serious difficulties, if it is taken as an implicit criticism of the ruling party.
And Chinese censorship is pretty simple: anything someone *in power* might find objectionable will be censored. Lots of Chinese get creeped out by ghosts. Besides that, believing in ghosts is pretty much a non-materialist phenomenon, so they're not too happy with that purely on ideological grounds alone.
Is there a reason you couldn't work out the algorithm and design first, and then code different parts independently, and just review the other's work? As long as it matched the design and algorithm you developed, you should be good. And reviewing will be easier since you're familiar with the design, and you can unit test parts of the code separately.
On tricky algorithms you're probably much better off to have 4 eyes scanning the code while typing, because it prevents a lot of bugs. If one person goes off to do something else that won't work ofcourse.
I do completely agree with your statment about the hardworking student just doing all the work. He wants to get an F just to screw with the other lazy person, but we all know that he cares too much let it happen.
That was a misinterpretation of my post. I was suggesting the hardworking student complained about the lazy one. I've seen this happen. The lazy one either got an outright F, or had to redo it all - solo. The hardworking one was graded on the assignment normally.
Back to the OP: The only thing I ever figured out from 'pair programming' was how to burn time while we switched off coding the design we came up with together. Let the teams come up with a design together, but let them code it independently. If they have questions, they have the same design and can help each other out and be a resource for the other. Much more valuable if you ask me.
This really depends on how much time you want to spend fixing bugs as opposed to preventing them. It also depends on the complexity of the task at hand. Given that the material is new to the students, and for them complexity is high, the following quote might be applicable.
From 'The effectiveness of pair programming: A meta-analysis', by by: Jo E. Hannay, Tore DybÃ¥, Erik Arisholm, Dag I. SjÃberg.
"Several experiments on the effects of pair versus solo programming have been reported in the literature. We present a meta-analysis of these studies. The analysis shows a small significant positive overall effect of pair programming on quality, a medium significant positive overall effect on duration, and a medium significant negative overall effect on effort. However, between-study variance is significant, and there are signs of publication bias among published studies on pair programming. A more detailed examination of the evidence suggests that pair programming is faster than solo programming when programming task complexity is low and yields code solutions of higher quality when task complexity is high. The higher quality for complex tasks comes at a price of considerably greater effort, while the reduced completion time for the simpler tasks comes at a price of noticeably lower quality. We conclude that greater attention should be given to moderating factors on the effects of pair programming."
Not a complete vindication of what I wrote, but it provides some insight nevertheless.
Uh, no. You really think the hardworking student is going to allow himself to get an F?
No, what I said was: the hardworking student will complain and have the OTHER student get an F. Ofcourse the one doing all the work would just get a normal grade.
Well, that'll teach me never to imply things on a slashdot posting :P
If they're really that bright, they'll probably realize quick enough that actually doing both assignments together increases the speed AND accuracy with which they'll complete them...
You assume the hardworking student will just let that happen... that's not my experience (i had 4 years of compsci study where every programming course was done in pairs. This was in the late 80's). When one of the pair was slacking, the other one tended to either do the same (and both failed the exercise), or just do everything himself and complain to the assistents about it, generally leaving the other with an F.
In general pair programming is a best practice for programming. If you need to explain what you're doing, you tend to avoid a lot of bugs before you even write the code.
What?
I take it you don't know much about pair programming. It is not 'to drag down the brighter students', it is a best practice for programming that has been used at least since the middle of the 1980's when teaching programming. Later on it became a staple of the 'extreme programming' method that gave us a few other useful things such as testing frameworks etc.
I tried to introduce it to my workplace, but (and this wasn't a surprise) the worst programmers didn't want it because 'they didnt like people looking over their shoulder'. The good ones didn't need it as much, so it was out again.
Summary: this is not so much to help the bad students, as it is to help everyone program both faster and with less mistakes, i.e. more productivity. Similar to teaching them not to use 'goto' statements.
If I see a clown, I'm outta here
Better be sure and shoot them on sight. :P
There are a few other requirements, if i read the relevant caselaw correctly:
* Does the other side have to undergo something that could be considered a negative experience. Running very fast over a long distance might be considered as such.
* Would you gain a material benefit? Not in this case, but if you sold something and said: "the first person to buy this will get his money back" then this clause would be valid.
* Is the statement intended to be taken serious or could it be considered as such? With just "20 bucks" that might be easier than with 20000, so you're at risk there.
* Is acceptance of the contract indicated in some way? In the textbook case, showing up and claiming was considered acceptance.
If you did this at random for no apparent reason, clause 2 and 3 would probably not apply. If you were a hotdogseller however, they would apply and I think you could be taken to court with a moderate chance of success for the claimant.
Summary: be carefull what you ask - you might get it :)
If it was only IE6 that had problems it wouldn't be so bad. I think he finds when they move to IE8 that IE8 has a number of issues trying to load the javascript Slashdot's using as well. And try browsing with ads enabled for a change, you get some really weird results on a few pages now and then.
That was a pretty lethal article you linked there. If I were Fairey i'd be moving to another country in shame.
In fact, I say we look him up with some tar and feathers. There's nothing I can stand less than a hypocrite.
In your point of view South African blacks were racist for fighting their white oppressors ('they were all white! You're just a bunch of anti-white racists'). There's a description for your point of view: it's called 'blaming the victim'.
If the shop you work for has cowards in the management then nothing can save it. However, I worked for a different company, with a different culture (*) when I told my boss I would advise to stop the project another department was working on (they had turned to us for advise and management saw it as an opportunity to get a foot in the door there). My advise wasn't popular but I could argue it convincingly when I presented it so we withdrew support. The other department continued and about a year later they cancelled it, having spent 500.000 euro in fees and nothing to show for it (they tried to connect 12 parties in a new system, several of those parties had a distinct business interest in getting the project to fail, and two of those parties were in fact key players for the project. The issues weren't technical at all, so the external nerds doing the project hadn't noticed the warning signs).
Later I repeated that one with a project that 'wasn't going too well' according to my manager, who asked me to join it and help out with phase II. Within 3 days I had to report back that the previous 8 months of work had basically been wasted. He wasn't too happy about it so he told me I'd better solve the problem - and I did :) But if I had convinced him it was a lost cause, i'm 100% sure we would have pulled out. Whatever the reasons I left them, it wasn't for incompetent management.
(*) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Hofstede for information about a very influential writer on business culture. It's a good place to start.
I once had a trainee colleague who came out of the psychology field and had retrained into IT. She was pretty bored by the whole IT thing after a month or 6, and she wasnt very good at her job either.
However, I ran into her about 10 years later, and she's an IT-manager now, appreciated by several good IT-folks as one of the best managers they ever had the pleasure to work with. She just had to find the place to apply her real skills.
You are assuming that the operator does not add any knowledge, such as the region of the caller and the date. My bet would be that an operator would quickly learn the topics that come up more than a few times.
Given the fact every question and answer is logged, it's not that hard to have experts on agriculture look at the questions every week and improve the set of answers. Basically, this would be an expert learning system with a human operator as interface and google to get 'starting answers' that can be refined by experts. Actually, this might not be such a bad model for the initial feeding of expert systems either.
As for the accomplishments of the Germans, I have several Jewish friends who would disagree with the notion of German cultural, moral, and social superiority.
See if you can guess why?
I know. I didn't like Goethe either.
There, that should teach you not to ask rhetorical questions on Slashdot :)
I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Me neither. Besides, do we need MORE of Visual Basic programmers?
The problem is not that the interface is graphical and interesting. As long as the programming abilities are equivalent to other languages there is no issue. The issue arises when people think that because they can arrange blocks or click through a wizard, they can model and then code the flow of information in a company. There is a subtle difference between the two, but it has little to do with Visual Basic per se.
Given ten co-workers, 9 out of 10 without formal computer science education, which would you rather have: all of them programming in C++ and you're the guy left to debug the whole mess or see what they make of your precious architecture, or use Visual Basic and make the bugs that much easier to find and solve. You don't give powertools to kids, you give them tools that have some safeties built in.
Congratulations, you've cought out everyone that day who forgot to take out his or her cash :)
As long as people don't do this every day for weeks on end, they won't get caught.
Although I find it unlikely that there is no counting mechanism in an ATM - they need to be able to count the bills to give out. Could be done by a distribution mechanism though, and returned bills just go into a stack? Input from experts would be appreciated :)