Pardon me, but this is public data. The internet is public. Anything posted on the public internet is public. So *my* follow-on question is, Why does everyone thinks it's OK to bitch about things they have posted in the most public forum in human history becoming...well, public? How can this be considered spying? If you write something on your blog or in a comment on someone else's blog or on twitter or on youtube or *wherever on the internet* it *will* be public - can we please move past thinking otherwise?
How come nobody has given this lady a staunch "Hear hear!" yet? Is it because all the men are afraid it will ruin their careers??
In any case, "Hear hear!"
Sorry khasim, you seem like a reasonable fellow, but you've posted this so many times as if it is somehow the nail in the coffin of the argument that I think it deserves a response. Flatly, your statistics are complete bullshit.
First of all, the percentage of females in the FOSS community is completely irrelevant. If you get a group of dudes together in a room to talk shit about women, the fact that the percentage of women in the group is 0.00000% has no bearing on whether or not the group has sexist tendencies. The amount of sexism you are "allowed" in a group is not somehow proportional to the percentage of women in that group. I don't know what else to say about it than to reiterate that it is a completely irrelevant point.
The second part of your point is better - namely, you say that only 0.1% (totally made up number, but whatever) of the comments are sexist, and that's pretty good. I agree, if you're right that 0.1% of all FOSS related commentary is sexist, that is really pretty good, and while it's probably impossible to get the numbers to back it up, I'd say it's better than the population at large. However, this isn't a victory for the FOSS community, it's a defeat for the population at large. Being less bad than average does not make you good. We should strive for 0%, we should strive for 100% acceptance of all the various backgrounds of the members of our community. 99.9% is good, but it's not *that* good.
That's the REAL problem we'd like to solve. We'd like to do much better.
Hooray! Thank you for the first comment so far with real examples and a link we can check out for further research (for those of us who are curious about the issue and uninformed)
Sorry son, it is you who have been defeated by your own ignorance and closed-mindedness. You threw out one (dumb, totally invalid and irrelevant) analogy, somebody came back with a very proper analogy to something actually *related* to magnetism, and you shrugged it off as him not understanding magnetism. In fact, your narrow understanding of magnetism with your little coin analogy has been a convenient way to understand the concept for many years...until today. That's the point. Scientists have been researching monopoles for a long time, quite simply because the coin analogy never quite added up - there was no good reason why they *always* came as dipoles, besides that monopoles had never been observed. Now they have been, everything you know about magnets will probably be wrong once more data is gathered, and you will either have to take the scientists' word for it, or you will have continue using inaccurate mental models to make sense out of it for yourself.
You can't say that games like NHL, Madden, MLB The Show aren't quality games.
Watch this - Games like NHL, Madden, and MLB The Show aren't quality games. I did it! You said I couldn't and yet I did! It wasn't even that hard. Furthermore, I didn't even have to lie - those games suck, they are derivative, mindless, and boring. Plus, making the same game every year with slightly better graphics and an updated roster is brutally unimpressive. Why do the graphics even matter in sports games? You could see plenty enough detail to know what was going on in Tecmo Bowl for NES, let alone Madden around 98. All these enhancements are just icing, except even less filling.
No...this is my point, even for small things like that, insertion is still better. Same small code size, same memory footprint, much better best and average case performance. no point using bubble sort as far as I can see.
I dunno, I think that's why you learn insertion (is there really a case for bubble in some cases? Would be interesting news to me). You learn bubble as a basis for understanding other algorithms. Both are important.
Bah! Well first, thank you for a real response backed up by knowledge in the field, but still, bah! This is exactly the type of thing we don't like! Isn't it obvious that "assholes" are poison to a workforce? Was all this studying really necessary for that conclusion? If not, then the relevant portion of the study is how to "detect" assholes. So what's the answer from management types (I'm not trying to offend, just give a perspective) - paperwork! We'll make everybody take the same impersonal test asking dumb, subjective questions for which most people will just throw out whatever answer they think management is looking for. And this is astounding? Color me unconvinced. Everybody knows who the assholes are...or is the goal of these new-fangled psychological techniques to remove the necessity of a manager to actually interact with their employees and know who they are?
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I also don't understand what you mean. You say that managers need "constant training" but you don't say what kind of training. If you're talking about a willingness to keep learning about your employees and growing your leadership skills by analyzing which things you do that work and which that don't, then I understand. But this is more on par with building skill in a single technology, learning all the little quirks slowly. What I'm interested to know is if there is any analogue in management to a techie learning something completely new - we do it all the time to stay relevant, but what about managers?
Hi! (I'm trying to start with a friendly vibe because otherwise I'm afraid my comment might come off as sarcastic.) I think that the reason the slashdot community generally considers management to be a no-brainer (as evidenced very recently by your extremely underrated post) is that we all believe, often from first-hand experience, but also from hear-say, speculation, and exaggeration, that many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit to make them managers seem busy and justify their continued employment. I'm curious (seriously) what things you think managers need to keep up with that don't fall into that category.
We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the sales of games and movies might be significantly higher.
We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be that the sales of games and movies might be significantly lower.
I'm not gonna say "fixed that for you" because it could be either your way or my way based on the evidence in your post. If you're going to say something like "we have no idea", you can't then posit that one thing "might very well be" without recognizing that the other thing could also very well be. If you think one way is more likely than the other, then you have to say why that is.
I don't think universities should end up being glorified trade schools, which is in essence what you are suggesting. I don't like the idea of only learning things that we will "use" in our "careers", because I think that's the road to being very single-faceted and unable to adapt. We'll never be able to teach or learn everything that we will confront outside of school, so learning only one thing will cripple us when the new things come along. Higher education should at its core be about teaching people to think critically, independently, and creatively, and I think many engineering curricula utterly fail at this, largely because they *only* require 25% of those extra classes. The hard part is figuring out what else is worthwhile to teach. You think finance is worthwhile because it will be useful in a career setting - I think finance is bullshit because it's all about memorizing what the system is like so that you can exploit it to your own advantage, and not at all about education. You think things like philosophy and psychology are bullshit, probably because at most schools they aren't taken seriously, particularly by the engineering students, and the expectations of what will be gotten out of those classes are absurdly low. I think that psychology and philosophy could be some of the most useful classes when done properly. What could be better for anyone in any field than a truly deep understanding of human behavior? Wouldn't we write better software if we knew our users better? Most schools take a policy of allowing the students to choose where they spend their extra time, which I think is the right policy, but most students choose to spend their extra time taking easy classes where they won't learn a thing. This is another aspect of our entrenched anti-intellectualism, even those of us who don't reject math and science have a tendency to arrogantly reject everything else. True anti-anti-intellectualism embraces all learning.
Have you ever thought about how as software engineers, if we are completely replaced by software then that means we have hit the singularity and the whole world will be in upheaval one way or another? Because once computers can completely program themselves, nothing will be the same.
Geez you've got me there. I haven't even been able to convince a few of my closest friends who are part and parcel to this mindset. They just think I'm weird.
I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me, but this is public data. The internet is public. Anything posted on the public internet is public. So *my* follow-on question is, Why does everyone thinks it's OK to bitch about things they have posted in the most public forum in human history becoming...well, public? How can this be considered spying? If you write something on your blog or in a comment on someone else's blog or on twitter or on youtube or *wherever on the internet* it *will* be public - can we please move past thinking otherwise?
You sir, are full of it.
How come nobody has given this lady a staunch "Hear hear!" yet? Is it because all the men are afraid it will ruin their careers?? In any case, "Hear hear!"
Sorry khasim, you seem like a reasonable fellow, but you've posted this so many times as if it is somehow the nail in the coffin of the argument that I think it deserves a response. Flatly, your statistics are complete bullshit.
First of all, the percentage of females in the FOSS community is completely irrelevant. If you get a group of dudes together in a room to talk shit about women, the fact that the percentage of women in the group is 0.00000% has no bearing on whether or not the group has sexist tendencies. The amount of sexism you are "allowed" in a group is not somehow proportional to the percentage of women in that group. I don't know what else to say about it than to reiterate that it is a completely irrelevant point.
The second part of your point is better - namely, you say that only 0.1% (totally made up number, but whatever) of the comments are sexist, and that's pretty good. I agree, if you're right that 0.1% of all FOSS related commentary is sexist, that is really pretty good, and while it's probably impossible to get the numbers to back it up, I'd say it's better than the population at large. However, this isn't a victory for the FOSS community, it's a defeat for the population at large. Being less bad than average does not make you good. We should strive for 0%, we should strive for 100% acceptance of all the various backgrounds of the members of our community. 99.9% is good, but it's not *that* good.
That's the REAL problem we'd like to solve. We'd like to do much better.
Hooray! Thank you for the first comment so far with real examples and a link we can check out for further research (for those of us who are curious about the issue and uninformed)
Hear, hear! Thank you for the appropriate and physically literate statement of what I would have liked to tell GP.
Sorry son, it is you who have been defeated by your own ignorance and closed-mindedness. You threw out one (dumb, totally invalid and irrelevant) analogy, somebody came back with a very proper analogy to something actually *related* to magnetism, and you shrugged it off as him not understanding magnetism. In fact, your narrow understanding of magnetism with your little coin analogy has been a convenient way to understand the concept for many years...until today. That's the point. Scientists have been researching monopoles for a long time, quite simply because the coin analogy never quite added up - there was no good reason why they *always* came as dipoles, besides that monopoles had never been observed. Now they have been, everything you know about magnets will probably be wrong once more data is gathered, and you will either have to take the scientists' word for it, or you will have continue using inaccurate mental models to make sense out of it for yourself.
You can't say that games like NHL, Madden, MLB The Show aren't quality games.
Watch this - Games like NHL, Madden, and MLB The Show aren't quality games. I did it! You said I couldn't and yet I did! It wasn't even that hard. Furthermore, I didn't even have to lie - those games suck, they are derivative, mindless, and boring. Plus, making the same game every year with slightly better graphics and an updated roster is brutally unimpressive. Why do the graphics even matter in sports games? You could see plenty enough detail to know what was going on in Tecmo Bowl for NES, let alone Madden around 98. All these enhancements are just icing, except even less filling.
tested rigorously != formally proven
Sounds impressive, but "part of the first Orange-book A1 level certification" != "formally proven".
Are you sure it was a "tip"? Are you sure it wasn't *nothing*?
That sucks! Where do you live? I'll make sure not to move there...
No...this is my point, even for small things like that, insertion is still better. Same small code size, same memory footprint, much better best and average case performance. no point using bubble sort as far as I can see.
Woah! ADD my friend. Apply that intellect of yours to one thing at a time!
I dunno, I think that's why you learn insertion (is there really a case for bubble in some cases? Would be interesting news to me). You learn bubble as a basis for understanding other algorithms. Both are important.
Bah! Well first, thank you for a real response backed up by knowledge in the field, but still, bah! This is exactly the type of thing we don't like! Isn't it obvious that "assholes" are poison to a workforce? Was all this studying really necessary for that conclusion? If not, then the relevant portion of the study is how to "detect" assholes. So what's the answer from management types (I'm not trying to offend, just give a perspective) - paperwork! We'll make everybody take the same impersonal test asking dumb, subjective questions for which most people will just throw out whatever answer they think management is looking for. And this is astounding? Color me unconvinced. Everybody knows who the assholes are...or is the goal of these new-fangled psychological techniques to remove the necessity of a manager to actually interact with their employees and know who they are?
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I also don't understand what you mean. You say that managers need "constant training" but you don't say what kind of training. If you're talking about a willingness to keep learning about your employees and growing your leadership skills by analyzing which things you do that work and which that don't, then I understand. But this is more on par with building skill in a single technology, learning all the little quirks slowly. What I'm interested to know is if there is any analogue in management to a techie learning something completely new - we do it all the time to stay relevant, but what about managers?
Hi! (I'm trying to start with a friendly vibe because otherwise I'm afraid my comment might come off as sarcastic.) I think that the reason the slashdot community generally considers management to be a no-brainer (as evidenced very recently by your extremely underrated post) is that we all believe, often from first-hand experience, but also from hear-say, speculation, and exaggeration, that many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit to make them managers seem busy and justify their continued employment. I'm curious (seriously) what things you think managers need to keep up with that don't fall into that category.
We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the sales of games and movies might be significantly higher.
We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be that the sales of games and movies might be significantly lower.
I'm not gonna say "fixed that for you" because it could be either your way or my way based on the evidence in your post. If you're going to say something like "we have no idea", you can't then posit that one thing "might very well be" without recognizing that the other thing could also very well be. If you think one way is more likely than the other, then you have to say why that is.
Pardon, what I meant was, the should *just* be using Matlab - what does FORTRAN do that Matlab can't?
Seems to me that if those are really their only requirements, they should be using Matlab.
I don't think universities should end up being glorified trade schools, which is in essence what you are suggesting. I don't like the idea of only learning things that we will "use" in our "careers", because I think that's the road to being very single-faceted and unable to adapt. We'll never be able to teach or learn everything that we will confront outside of school, so learning only one thing will cripple us when the new things come along. Higher education should at its core be about teaching people to think critically, independently, and creatively, and I think many engineering curricula utterly fail at this, largely because they *only* require 25% of those extra classes. The hard part is figuring out what else is worthwhile to teach. You think finance is worthwhile because it will be useful in a career setting - I think finance is bullshit because it's all about memorizing what the system is like so that you can exploit it to your own advantage, and not at all about education. You think things like philosophy and psychology are bullshit, probably because at most schools they aren't taken seriously, particularly by the engineering students, and the expectations of what will be gotten out of those classes are absurdly low. I think that psychology and philosophy could be some of the most useful classes when done properly. What could be better for anyone in any field than a truly deep understanding of human behavior? Wouldn't we write better software if we knew our users better? Most schools take a policy of allowing the students to choose where they spend their extra time, which I think is the right policy, but most students choose to spend their extra time taking easy classes where they won't learn a thing. This is another aspect of our entrenched anti-intellectualism, even those of us who don't reject math and science have a tendency to arrogantly reject everything else. True anti-anti-intellectualism embraces all learning.
Have you ever thought about how as software engineers, if we are completely replaced by software then that means we have hit the singularity and the whole world will be in upheaval one way or another? Because once computers can completely program themselves, nothing will be the same.
Geez you've got me there. I haven't even been able to convince a few of my closest friends who are part and parcel to this mindset. They just think I'm weird.
I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.