That's a very interesting suggestion. It sounds like you want thought police.
How about 'the time to punish someone is after they've done something wrong, or when in possession of ample evidence that they are in the process of doing something wrong.
Nothing against the rest of your post, but I think you're wrong here. Grandparent wasn't talking about punishment (or thought police!), he was talking about preemptively limiting power; that is, taking power away from an entity before that entity proves that they have been corrupted by it. This is very different than preemptive punishment and it is a Good Thing. Thus we have the checks and balances of the US government and other various power limitation mechanisms throughout governments and organizations all across the globe. You don't need proof that they have been corrupted by their power, only the usually correct assumption that they will be.
The definition of a legal war (in the US) is one which has been voted on and approved by the legislative branch of government, rather than being signed off on and run purely from the executive.
You also don't want mechanical engineers designing bridges or civil engineers designing engines, despite the fact that they are both PEs. Not saying I disagree with you, just saying that 'Engineer' is not as specific a term as 'Doctor'.
I would say things like learning how to use gimp and open office, Thunderbid/Firefox instead of Outlook/IE, learning the differences in the locations of various files and menus, etc. Again, a lot of us take some of that for granted, but none of it is trivial.
Great post!
Speaking as a young, dumb programmer who almost definitely wouldn't pass your little tests - we have lots to learn, and your experience is (or should be) invaluable to us while we grow up.
You totally missed the point of my comment. My point is that many people don't pay anything for health care under the current system. For instance, I haven't spent more than perhaps 50 dollars on health care in the past year because I simply haven't had any reason to go to a doctor. On the other hand, my roommate has spent upwards of 80,000 dollars on his illnesses. Another of my roommates has spent around 2000 dollars on doctors visits and prescriptions. If the three of us were our own country, our per capita cost of health care would be $27,350, but the majority of us actually paid substantially less than that, with the median being $2000. So maybe under a nationalized health care system we could negotiate the average cost down a ton, and end up with an admirably low per capita cost of $15,000. To make this work, we all now have to pay that 15,000 to the government each year, so now my health care costs have increased by 30,000%, and one of my roommates' costs have gone up 750%.
I'm just saying per capita costs don't tell the whole story, and neither does "more for administrative overhead and drugs" - even allowing for huge price cuts, health care is more expensive for many under a socialized system than it would otherwise be.
I've always been curious about these statistics. The per capita figure is a mean calculation, and it seems to be thrown around a lot as the only meaningful measure of cost. I'd be very interested to see a comparison of the median health costs for a few different countries. Could these statistics be victims of the type of "above average number of legs" distortion that the mean is known to be sensitive to? Perhaps the per capita expense is higher in privatized health systems, but do most people really spend more?
Funny, I've been reading this thread thinking that I would have to post about Bob Dylan if nobody else did. He's the first artist who should have been discussed, as he is the only one in any of the (many) comparison posts in this thread who was both a contemporary of the Beatles and substantially better than them, both musically and music-historically. Having said that, just because there are people who were/are better/more important doesn't mean that the Beatles aren't also those things. It's analog, not binary, like everything in real life outside the shiny metal magic-boxes on our desks.
Just saw and flipped all the way through this book for the first time today. Looked *fantastic* - written from the view point that anybody with interest can learn how a computer works, rather than the high-horse view that those few and proud chosen ones hold the keys of knowledge. Only $12.99, I bought one for every non technical person in my family (not my girlfriend though, she'd just roll her eyes)
Good response. However I fail to see how timezones and daylight savings time helps with transportation schedules. Fiddling with times makes those things harder, not easier. People tell incorrect times to be picked up, miss meetings, etc. because of these unnecessary time calculations that are easily mistaken.
Mod parent up. Grandparent defeated his own argument with his own example. Those people in the call centers in India are not in the 9-5 of the states when they are answering our calls, nor are they in the 9-5 of Europe when they are answering their calls, they have to determine the times in their own country that correspond to those times in ours. Not a hard calculation, but the system achieves nothing here.
Oh boy! I love it when people ask (or state) leading questions that are actually easy to answer!
Firstly, you get people who decide they don't need to go to work nearly half as often as their co-workers and you wind up with people passing the buck.
Firstly, if this is a problem you have, then your management system is busted. People should have goals and time periods with which to achieve them, and good explanations or repercussions when they fail to do so. This may be harder to manage than saying "Sit at your desk during these time periods on these days and I'll know you're working," but will lead to more productivity and higher employee morale (not unrelated). Harder for management maybe, but good for the company and good for the employees.
Secondly, what happens when a customer expects you to be there at 9:30 but nobody feels like coming in until 11?
Secondly, not everybody is in a customer-facing position, particularly in the technology-driven marketplace, which I believe most of the slashdot audience is a part of. Obviously those who are in customer-facing positions must be available at those times when their customers need them to be, but there is no point in requiring everyone else to be there as well.
We use ruby, we use rails, and we unit test everything with rspec. After careful consideration, we have decided to update to the newest version of rails. The guy in charge of the upgrade started out by simply upgrading rails and running all the tests to see what breaks. Sure enough, lots of stuff breaks, one of them being in a piece of my code that is currently running, but which has not needed maintenance in ages. Easy fix once it was caught, but would have been a giant pain if it were not. There's no way I or anyone would have thought to update that portion of the code without a unit test. Unit tests do catch bugs, what gets you into trouble is thinking that they catch *all* bugs.
I'm not a Ruby fanboy, but I do like Ruby, and I find it particularly useful in making less complex and thus more readable versions of everything I used to use Perl for. Fanboism aside (on both sides of the aisle), what do people use Perl for these days that could not be done as well in Ruby?
I know lots of people with CS degrees who aren't great programmers and I knew even more when I was in college. The main difference here is that this guy has enough self-awareness to admit it. I'm sure he knows how to program, which is what a CS education teaches you, but just doesn't think himself to be a very good programmer, which is something you become on your own. Good CS programs push you very hard in that direction, but good programmers write programs, read programming books, learn new languages, and read lots of other peoples' code in lots of languages and lots of different projects, and they do all this, not because it's assigned, but because they like it and it's interesting. People who don't do any of these things will generally go crazy with boredom and incompetence once they reach the workplace. Kudos to this guy for being honest with himself.
Hmmm, that's not a bad suggestion, it seems like a lot of Program Managers are people who are qualified on paper, but not good programmers.
This is not a good thing...
The important question is what are *you* good at and what do *you* enjoy, we can't answer that question for you. Do our suggestions have to be within the realm of computers? There are lots of things to do that require just any college degree. I think you're in the same position as basically any college graduate that isn't in a technical field...
Slashdot Mirror
Correct - as long as they are for-profit businesses, we are doomed to mediocrity.
Maybe we should stop running schools like businesses and start running them like schools.
That's a very interesting suggestion. It sounds like you want thought police.
How about 'the time to punish someone is after they've done something wrong, or when in possession of ample evidence that they are in the process of doing something wrong.
Nothing against the rest of your post, but I think you're wrong here. Grandparent wasn't talking about punishment (or thought police!), he was talking about preemptively limiting power; that is, taking power away from an entity before that entity proves that they have been corrupted by it. This is very different than preemptive punishment and it is a Good Thing. Thus we have the checks and balances of the US government and other various power limitation mechanisms throughout governments and organizations all across the globe. You don't need proof that they have been corrupted by their power, only the usually correct assumption that they will be.
The definition of a legal war (in the US) is one which has been voted on and approved by the legislative branch of government, rather than being signed off on and run purely from the executive.
Yes! I don't think this is discussed enough...
Of course certifications have a bit of a bad name in our community, so that's probably not the way to go either. What other options do we have?
You also don't want mechanical engineers designing bridges or civil engineers designing engines, despite the fact that they are both PEs. Not saying I disagree with you, just saying that 'Engineer' is not as specific a term as 'Doctor'.
I would say things like learning how to use gimp and open office, Thunderbid/Firefox instead of Outlook/IE, learning the differences in the locations of various files and menus, etc. Again, a lot of us take some of that for granted, but none of it is trivial.
ruby
str.split(/\s/).map { |c| c.hex.chr }.join
Great post! Speaking as a young, dumb programmer who almost definitely wouldn't pass your little tests - we have lots to learn, and your experience is (or should be) invaluable to us while we grow up.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
More scientific/electrical than mathematical, but the discussion of different base systems would have blown my hair back in high school.
You totally missed the point of my comment. My point is that many people don't pay anything for health care under the current system. For instance, I haven't spent more than perhaps 50 dollars on health care in the past year because I simply haven't had any reason to go to a doctor. On the other hand, my roommate has spent upwards of 80,000 dollars on his illnesses. Another of my roommates has spent around 2000 dollars on doctors visits and prescriptions. If the three of us were our own country, our per capita cost of health care would be $27,350, but the majority of us actually paid substantially less than that, with the median being $2000. So maybe under a nationalized health care system we could negotiate the average cost down a ton, and end up with an admirably low per capita cost of $15,000. To make this work, we all now have to pay that 15,000 to the government each year, so now my health care costs have increased by 30,000%, and one of my roommates' costs have gone up 750%.
I'm just saying per capita costs don't tell the whole story, and neither does "more for administrative overhead and drugs" - even allowing for huge price cuts, health care is more expensive for many under a socialized system than it would otherwise be.
I've always been curious about these statistics. The per capita figure is a mean calculation, and it seems to be thrown around a lot as the only meaningful measure of cost. I'd be very interested to see a comparison of the median health costs for a few different countries. Could these statistics be victims of the type of "above average number of legs" distortion that the mean is known to be sensitive to? Perhaps the per capita expense is higher in privatized health systems, but do most people really spend more?
Funny, I've been reading this thread thinking that I would have to post about Bob Dylan if nobody else did. He's the first artist who should have been discussed, as he is the only one in any of the (many) comparison posts in this thread who was both a contemporary of the Beatles and substantially better than them, both musically and music-historically. Having said that, just because there are people who were/are better/more important doesn't mean that the Beatles aren't also those things. It's analog, not binary, like everything in real life outside the shiny metal magic-boxes on our desks.
Just saw and flipped all the way through this book for the first time today. Looked *fantastic* - written from the view point that anybody with interest can learn how a computer works, rather than the high-horse view that those few and proud chosen ones hold the keys of knowledge. Only $12.99, I bought one for every non technical person in my family (not my girlfriend though, she'd just roll her eyes)
Amarok can sync both iPods and iPhones. It is therefore a replacement by your working definition.
bash shells are generally in emacs mode by default. instead of history with grep, just do ctrl-r and start typing the command you're looking for.
Woah...that's a pretty convoluted scheme you've got there in that last paragraph. You must be a mad scientist.
Good response. However I fail to see how timezones and daylight savings time helps with transportation schedules. Fiddling with times makes those things harder, not easier. People tell incorrect times to be picked up, miss meetings, etc. because of these unnecessary time calculations that are easily mistaken.
Mod parent up. Grandparent defeated his own argument with his own example. Those people in the call centers in India are not in the 9-5 of the states when they are answering our calls, nor are they in the 9-5 of Europe when they are answering their calls, they have to determine the times in their own country that correspond to those times in ours. Not a hard calculation, but the system achieves nothing here.
Oh boy! I love it when people ask (or state) leading questions that are actually easy to answer!
Firstly, you get people who decide they don't need to go to work nearly half as often as their co-workers and you wind up with people passing the buck.
Firstly, if this is a problem you have, then your management system is busted. People should have goals and time periods with which to achieve them, and good explanations or repercussions when they fail to do so. This may be harder to manage than saying "Sit at your desk during these time periods on these days and I'll know you're working," but will lead to more productivity and higher employee morale (not unrelated). Harder for management maybe, but good for the company and good for the employees.
Secondly, what happens when a customer expects you to be there at 9:30 but nobody feels like coming in until 11?
Secondly, not everybody is in a customer-facing position, particularly in the technology-driven marketplace, which I believe most of the slashdot audience is a part of. Obviously those who are in customer-facing positions must be available at those times when their customers need them to be, but there is no point in requiring everyone else to be there as well.
We use ruby, we use rails, and we unit test everything with rspec. After careful consideration, we have decided to update to the newest version of rails. The guy in charge of the upgrade started out by simply upgrading rails and running all the tests to see what breaks. Sure enough, lots of stuff breaks, one of them being in a piece of my code that is currently running, but which has not needed maintenance in ages. Easy fix once it was caught, but would have been a giant pain if it were not. There's no way I or anyone would have thought to update that portion of the code without a unit test. Unit tests do catch bugs, what gets you into trouble is thinking that they catch *all* bugs.
I'm not a Ruby fanboy, but I do like Ruby, and I find it particularly useful in making less complex and thus more readable versions of everything I used to use Perl for. Fanboism aside (on both sides of the aisle), what do people use Perl for these days that could not be done as well in Ruby?
I know lots of people with CS degrees who aren't great programmers and I knew even more when I was in college. The main difference here is that this guy has enough self-awareness to admit it. I'm sure he knows how to program, which is what a CS education teaches you, but just doesn't think himself to be a very good programmer, which is something you become on your own. Good CS programs push you very hard in that direction, but good programmers write programs, read programming books, learn new languages, and read lots of other peoples' code in lots of languages and lots of different projects, and they do all this, not because it's assigned, but because they like it and it's interesting. People who don't do any of these things will generally go crazy with boredom and incompetence once they reach the workplace. Kudos to this guy for being honest with himself.
Hmmm, that's not a bad suggestion, it seems like a lot of Program Managers are people who are qualified on paper, but not good programmers.
This is not a good thing...
The important question is what are *you* good at and what do *you* enjoy, we can't answer that question for you. Do our suggestions have to be within the realm of computers? There are lots of things to do that require just any college degree. I think you're in the same position as basically any college graduate that isn't in a technical field...
Oops! Didn't mean to post anonymously, parent is me.