The bits of Canada I've been to, you can get arrested for speaking English in the wrong place. You think I'm kidding? Try renting an English language video in Quebec.
Not wanting to run down the reputation of Indians (I've worked with several good ones) there can be communication problems when phone/email is the only source of communications. Many Indians are not very forthcoming, if there are problems, they will tell you half the problem, then quickly back off and promise to solve it themselves, when what is really needed is someone who will dig their heels in and say "No, I CAN'T JUST DO IT, I NEED A F**KING DEBUGGER!"
This can be a major problem with remote management, the severity of problems doesn't get through to the manager, so they go unresolved for far too long.
If you want programmers who are cheaper than yanks, and willing to tell you to get f**ked (when you really need to be told) hire Aussies.
The time-zones work well too, especially if you're on the West Coast, there are a few hours each day that are "office hours" in both sites, so you don't have to stay up till midnight to make your phone calls.
#define BLATANT_SELF_PROMOTION_MODE ON
I'm working on a project for a US based company now, part of a team of 6, and it's going well.
In fact, the project I'm on will be finishing very soon, and I know several good people I can recommend, so if you're interested, drop me a line. #define BLATANT_SELF_PROMOTION_MODE OFF
Did you catch the not-so-subtle dig at Hollywood?
on
Enigma
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· Score: 1
In the film there's a character who refers to the incident where the Royal Navy boarded a U-boat in an attempt to get a navy-style Enigma. This is the incident that Hollywood 'corrected' by making the heroes good-old-yankee-boys.
Reminds me of the old movie about the life of Alexander Graham Bell, where James Stewart played the title role, with no attempt at a Scots accent.
My 74 year old Scottish father recently spent 6 weeks in hospital (including 10 days in a 'coma') with the dreaded 'big P'. It's what a lot of old people die of.
Dads home now, and expected to make a full recovery, hopefully the other "Scotty" will be just as lucky. Maybe it'll give him the few years more work he'd need to get the scots accent right:-)
Especially when directed at someone who is probably not a native English speaker (Mandrake are based in France)
Re:Seen as a bumper sticker...
on
How to Save PGP
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· Score: 1
Well, if Israel continues it's nasty habit of launching air and artillery attacks on refugee camps, "targetted killings" of known Palestinian leaders by firing rockets at their cars as they drive through the local market, etc etc ad nauseum, I doubt if they'll be able to claim the bulk of their victims are "military"
Of course, in Israeli military parlance, "terrorist" and "Palestinian" are synonyms.
The original PC came with a choice of 3 operating systems, CPM/86, Windoze (a cheap knockoff of CPM) and UCSD P system. It was _not_ 'designed' to Microsofts specs.
The software designers were (as usual) not consulted, and had to work with what they were given.
I work with embedded systems, and those mistakes keep getting made. Hardware designers design minimum-cost boards, without consulting the softies at all. We're presented with a finished board, and told to put s/w on it. I've seen hundreds of man-hours wasted on working around design decisions that saved 5 cents a board, and we typically ship in quantities of 100-200 boards per project.
The solution, of course, is to have a prolonged session with the hardware designers and a large bit of 4 by 2, but management doesn't see it that way.
I'm not from Australia originally, and I've lived in the USA, Canada, and several European countries, but none of them comes close to Oz for Freedom, Safety, and Quality of Life.
Oz Compared to the USA...
My government doesn't tell me which countries I'm allowed to holiday in.
Or what brand of cigars I'm allowed to buy.
It didn't ask me my political affiliations before it allowed me to come here to live.
And the police don't point a gun at the back of my head when I'm pulled over for speeding (yes, this happened to me in the USA)
The USA has 6 times the murder rate, and 20 times the imprisonment rate of Australia. I don't have figures for homelessness, but a walk down the street of any US city would indicate that's also way higher in the USA.
How any country with over 2% of its population in prison (as opposed to Australias 0.1%) can call itself "Land of the Free" is beyond me.
It's not some 'kid' typo-squatting for the helluvit. For a start, there are over 40 of them, which is a fairly substantial $$ investment.
At least one of the alta-vista typo-sites advertises itself as "The Official Incest Website"
- not the kind of stuff unsuspecting surfers people should be ambushed with against their will, and not the kind of stuff the average kid out to make a fast $ from alta-vista is going to put on his site.
I didn't say the spoken forms weren't similar, I said they _sound_ different. The Norwegian accent can obscure the similarities if you're not used to it, getting it written down makes these similarities obvious.
I could pick up a Norwegian newspaper, and follow the stories fairly well, but I couldn't follow the news on the radio or TV. The accent was the problem.
BTW - I'm a glaswegian, when we first came to Australia, my dad sometimes had to resort to writing little notes to people, as they couldn't understand his strong Glasgow accent.
Perhaps I over-stated the difficulties of learning Chinese (I've never tried, so can't comment from first-hand experience).
And Yes, the English language is messy and inconsistent, both in spelling and sentence structure. I know several highly intelligent people who have lived in English speaking countries for over 10 years, and still don't speak it well.
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly. Or, to put it another way, if you have 6 hours on the plane with a phrase book, will you be able to find your way from the airport to the hotel, and then buy a meal in a restaurant that evening?
The things that are bad about English will not stop a foreigner from getting a meal, or finding his way back to the hotel afterwards. The things that are bad about Chinese will.
Over half of the worlds population use some variation of the Latin alphabet (I'm including the Russian and similar alphabets here). There would have to be a hell of a good reason for all those people to decide that the "world language" will be one that uses a completely different writing system, especially when that system is acknowledged to be difficult, even for a native speaker.
Personally, of the languages I've been exposed to while travelling, I'd say Spanish it is a better candidate for World Language than English. It's fairly consistent gramatically (too many irregular verbs, but hey, one irregular verb is one too many) and I _love_ the Spanish approach to spelling.
I don't believe you, but that's because I've been to Norway.
While the spoken form of Norwegian doesn't sound a lot like English, the similarities in the written form are uncanny, far closer than French is.
I've never been to Frisia, (a province of the Netherlands) but I'm told that's even closer.
English is basically a creole of various Nordic languages (Saxon, Danish, Anglian, Frisian, etc) and old French, with a little bit of the original Celtic, and a dash of just about every other language on earth thrown in.
Having travelled around quite a bit, and successfully bought meals/bus tickets etc in a variety of languages, I would make the following observations...
A hundred or so words in the local language go a very long way. This is true in any language.
It is not true, however, that all languages are equally easy in this regard.
Some languages are much more forgiving of bad pronunciation and syntax than others. I'm not talking about "rude french waiter" syndrome here, I mean that in some languages, small errors in syntax or pronunciation can cause the other party to genuinely misunderstand, or have no idea what you're saying.
English, because of it's origin as a creole of Saxon/Anglian/Danish/French/whatever is inherently quite forgiving of the kind of mangling that new learners are prone to.
Cantonese and Mandarin are not candidates for world languages, regardless of how influential China may become in future, because they're too frickin hard for foreigners to learn.
The majority of speakers of any 'world language' will speak it as their second (or more) language, and many will speak it badly. Some languages are more suited to this than others..
English, regardless of what you may thing of it's spelling and sloppy sentence structure, is easy to speak badly. You can jumble the syntax, and mis-pronounce it barbarously, and an English speaker who is paying attention will (usually) understand you fairly well. A Russian armed with an English phrase-book can fairly successfully buy bus-tickets, tell the cab-driver where he wants to go, etc..
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words. A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences, that sounded identical to me (even when I got him to repeat them several times, and listened really carefully). One was an ordinary innocuous sentence you might use while shopping, the other was grossly offensive - the worst thing you can possibly say about someones mother! There's no way a tourist with a phrase-book is going to get the pronunciation accurate enough to communicate reliably.
On top of that, there is the problem with the written form. Again, any language with a non-phonetic writing style is inherently more difficult for a foreigner to learn. The one thing people complain about most often when learning English is the inconsistent spelling, imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!.
Um, I know it's a waste of electrons responding to trolls, but...
I think you'll find the brits never held SW Africa (aka Namibia).
It went straight from German control (pre WWI) to South African control (post WWI), and after a long and bloody guerilla war finally achieved independance sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.
#define TROLL_MODE_ON
The USA couldn't even hold The Phillipines, Palau, Vietnam, or Panama, to name a few.
Hell, they're struggling to hold Puerto Rico (and parts of LA)
#define TROLL_MODE_OFF
Debate about whether Colossus was a 'real computer' (was it reconfigurable, stored-program, Turing complete, etc) should understand the wartime context.
My uncle was a tech (not a 'boffin') working on Radar in the UK at about the same time. He told me that the 3 priorities they had were...
1. It should work.
2. It should be finished yesterday.
3. It should use only standard off-the-shelf components.
There were LOTS of improvements that the boffins and techs knew they could make, but with bombs raining down on cities nightly, delays caused by making up custom components were just not acceptable.
I assume the same sort of priorities applied to Colossus. It was not an academic excersize, it was a code-breaking project, of vital military importance. National survival was at stake. If you could make it general-purpose in 3 days, or hard-wire it in an hour, well you bloody-well hard-wired it!
The bottom line is, Colossus worked. It did the job of automating what would otherwise have been an impossibly laborious calculation process. That makes it a computer in my book, arguements about technical trivialities seem pretty pointless.
As for whether Colossus was 'first', and whether the various pre-Colossus machines (at last count, Russia, Poland, USA, and Germany all have pre-Colossus claimants to the title) were 'computers' - well, I'll leave that to people who know something about those machines. I don't.
I reckon they need to be tortured slowly to death.
on
Typosquatting
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· Score: 1
The other day I mis-typed the name of one of the popular search engines (I was on a workmates PC, so didn't have a bookmark) and the typo-squatter it took me to was running what was proudly proclaimed to be "The Official Internet Incest Site"
Now lets leave aside the legalities for the moment (I had broken local law just by visiting the site), I figure people have a right to surf the web without being ambushed this way.
That's the problem with typo-squatting, it's basically fraud. It's like a retailer putting up false signs outside their stores, bait to get you in, then hit you with a hard sell once you're inside. It's deception, it's theft of my time and bandwidth.
If these people were providing something people actually wanted to find, they wouldn't have to ambush you, you'd go to their site voluntarily.
Phew, that was a nice rant, I feel much better now, thank you.
I've been on both ends of the outsourcing deal, and have the following observations....
1. No-one I've ever spoken to has ever ended up happy with the results of outsourcing, the usual gripes are poor quality, loss of control over the project, and lack of ongoing support.
2. When working for an outsourcing company, they would make an initial bid of about 75% of their estimated cost, thus ensuring they'd win the contract. Once work had commenced, they'd look for every ambiguity or oversight in the specs, and charge big $$$ for them as "variations" to the project. There are always changes to any non-trivial project spec. The client usually ended up paying at least twice the original quote.
The bottom line is, if you out-source a project, the out-sourcing company will end up with all the expertice, while you are stuck with a system you can't possibly maintain without them. They own you, you'll never be able to get rid of them, and the ongoing cost will be far more than it would have cost you to do it yourself.
I make 2 predictions.....
(1) Not a single hit on Europe or North America.
(2) A bonanza for space souvenier hunters in outback Australia, just like Skylab.
When will the space cowboys realise we aussies don't like having other peoples space junk dropped on us ?
Um, I believe the "I" you refer to stands for "Institute" as in
"Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" A US-based body - check www.ieee.org for confirmation.
Is POSIX an IEEE standard ? Didn't know that.... (time passes, looks up POSIX on search-engine of choice) Yup, you're right. Learn something new every day.
Slashdot Mirror
The bits of Canada I've been to, you can get arrested for speaking English in the wrong place.
You think I'm kidding?
Try renting an English language video in Quebec.
Not wanting to run down the reputation of Indians (I've worked with several good ones) there can be communication problems when phone/email is the only source of communications. Many Indians are not very forthcoming, if there are problems, they will tell you half the problem, then quickly back off and promise to solve it themselves, when what is really needed is someone who will dig their heels in and say "No, I CAN'T JUST DO IT, I NEED A F**KING DEBUGGER!"
This can be a major problem with remote management, the severity of problems doesn't get through to the manager, so they go unresolved for far too long.
If you want programmers who are cheaper than yanks, and willing to tell you to get f**ked (when you really need to be told) hire Aussies.
The time-zones work well too, especially if you're on the West Coast, there are a few hours each day that are "office hours" in both sites, so you don't have to stay up till midnight to make your phone calls.
#define BLATANT_SELF_PROMOTION_MODE ON
I'm working on a project for a US based company now, part of a team of 6, and it's going well.
In fact, the project I'm on will be finishing very soon, and I know several good people I can recommend, so if you're interested, drop me a line.
#define BLATANT_SELF_PROMOTION_MODE OFF
Reminds me of the old movie about the life of Alexander Graham Bell, where James Stewart played the title role, with no attempt at a Scots accent.
My 74 year old Scottish father recently spent 6 weeks in hospital (including 10 days in a 'coma') with the dreaded 'big P'. It's what a lot of old people die of.
:-)
Dads home now, and expected to make a full recovery, hopefully the other "Scotty" will be just as lucky. Maybe it'll give him the few years more work he'd need to get the scots accent right
Especially when directed at someone who is probably not a native English speaker (Mandrake are based in France)
Well, if Israel continues it's nasty habit of launching air and artillery attacks on refugee camps, "targetted killings" of known Palestinian leaders by firing rockets at their cars as they drive through the local market, etc etc ad nauseum, I doubt if they'll be able to claim the bulk of their victims are "military"
Of course, in Israeli military parlance, "terrorist" and "Palestinian" are synonyms.
Gates didn't design the hardware.
The original PC came with a choice of 3 operating systems, CPM/86, Windoze (a cheap knockoff of CPM) and UCSD P system. It was _not_ 'designed' to Microsofts specs.
The software designers were (as usual) not consulted, and had to work with what they were given.
I work with embedded systems, and those mistakes keep getting made. Hardware designers design minimum-cost boards, without consulting the softies at all. We're presented with a finished board, and told to put s/w on it. I've seen hundreds of man-hours wasted on working around design decisions that saved 5 cents a board, and we typically ship in quantities of 100-200 boards per project.
The solution, of course, is to have a prolonged session with the hardware designers and a large bit of 4 by 2, but management doesn't see it that way.
Speaking as someone who's about to celebrate his 16th wedding anniversary, I can tell you
... and do exactly what she says !
The Secret of a successful marriage
Make it clear right at the start who is boss
All the best !
Actually, geometric means tend to reduce the impact of one "outstanding" result.
A quick example, 3 data points, values (2,2,16)
The arithmetic mean is (2+2+16)/3=20/3=6.66666
The geometric mean is (2*2*16)^(1/3)=64^(1/3)=4
They've used the geometric mean precicely because it doesn't skew the entire result if one test improves greatly.
So, what is your attitude when the US government tries to tell Canadian retailers they're not allowed to sell Cuban-made clothing ?
The US government thinks it can apply US law around the world, so why shouldn't the French government play the same game ?
I'm not from Australia originally, and I've lived in the USA, Canada, and several European countries, but none of them comes close to Oz for Freedom, Safety, and Quality of Life.
...
Oz Compared to the USA
My government doesn't tell me which countries I'm allowed to holiday in.
Or what brand of cigars I'm allowed to buy.
It didn't ask me my political affiliations before it allowed me to come here to live.
And the police don't point a gun at the back of my head when I'm pulled over for speeding (yes, this happened to me in the USA)
The USA has 6 times the murder rate, and 20 times the imprisonment rate of Australia. I don't have figures for homelessness, but a walk down the street of any US city would indicate that's also way higher in the USA.
How any country with over 2% of its population in prison (as opposed to Australias 0.1%) can call itself "Land of the Free" is beyond me.
It's not some 'kid' typo-squatting for the helluvit. For a start, there are over 40 of them, which is a fairly substantial $$ investment.
At least one of the alta-vista typo-sites advertises itself as
"The Official Incest Website"
- not the kind of stuff unsuspecting surfers people should be ambushed with against their will, and not the kind of stuff the average kid out to make a fast $ from alta-vista is going to put on his site.
I didn't say the spoken forms weren't similar, I said they _sound_ different. The Norwegian accent can obscure the similarities if you're not used to it, getting it written down makes these similarities obvious.
I could pick up a Norwegian newspaper, and follow the stories fairly well, but I couldn't follow the news on the radio or TV. The accent was the problem.
BTW - I'm a glaswegian, when we first came to Australia, my dad sometimes had to resort to writing little notes to people, as they couldn't understand his strong Glasgow accent.
Perhaps I over-stated the difficulties of learning Chinese (I've never tried, so can't comment from first-hand experience).
And Yes, the English language is messy and inconsistent, both in spelling and sentence structure. I know several highly intelligent people who have lived in English speaking countries for over 10 years, and still don't speak it well.
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly. Or, to put it another way, if you have 6 hours on the plane with a phrase book, will you be able to find your way from the airport to the hotel, and then buy a meal in a restaurant that evening?
The things that are bad about English will not stop a foreigner from getting a meal, or finding his way back to the hotel afterwards. The things that are bad about Chinese will.
Over half of the worlds population use some variation of the Latin alphabet (I'm including the Russian and similar alphabets here). There would have to be a hell of a good reason for all those people to decide that the "world language" will be one that uses a completely different writing system, especially when that system is acknowledged to be difficult, even for a native speaker.
Personally, of the languages I've been exposed to while travelling, I'd say Spanish it is a better candidate for World Language than English. It's fairly consistent gramatically (too many irregular verbs, but hey, one irregular verb is one too many) and I _love_ the Spanish approach to spelling.
I don't have the actual figures to hand, but from memory, about 3/4 of the worlds English-speakers have learned it as a second (or more) language.
I don't believe you, but that's because I've been to Norway.
While the spoken form of Norwegian doesn't sound a lot like English, the similarities in the written form are uncanny, far closer than French is.
I've never been to Frisia, (a province of the Netherlands) but I'm told that's even closer.
English is basically a creole of various Nordic languages (Saxon, Danish, Anglian, Frisian, etc) and old French, with a little bit of the original Celtic, and a dash of just about every other language on earth thrown in.
Having travelled around quite a bit, and successfully bought meals/bus tickets etc in a variety of languages, I would make the following observations...
A hundred or so words in the local language go a very long way. This is true in any language.
It is not true, however, that all languages are equally easy in this regard.
Some languages are much more forgiving of bad pronunciation and syntax than others. I'm not talking about "rude french waiter" syndrome here, I mean that in some languages, small errors in syntax or pronunciation can cause the other party to genuinely misunderstand, or have no idea what you're saying.
English, because of it's origin as a creole of Saxon/Anglian/Danish/French/whatever is inherently quite forgiving of the kind of mangling that new learners are prone to.
Cantonese and Mandarin are not candidates for world languages, regardless of how influential China may become in future, because they're too frickin hard for foreigners to learn.
.
The majority of speakers of any 'world language' will speak it as their second (or more) language, and many will speak it badly. Some languages are more suited to this than others..
English, regardless of what you may thing of it's spelling and sloppy sentence structure, is easy to speak badly. You can jumble the syntax, and mis-pronounce it barbarously, and an English speaker who is paying attention will (usually) understand you fairly well. A Russian armed with an English phrase-book can fairly successfully buy bus-tickets, tell the cab-driver where he wants to go, etc.
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words. A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences, that sounded identical to me (even when I got him to repeat them several times, and listened really carefully). One was an ordinary innocuous sentence you might use while shopping, the other was grossly offensive - the worst thing you can possibly say about someones mother! There's no way a tourist with a phrase-book is going to get the pronunciation accurate enough to communicate reliably.
On top of that, there is the problem with the written form. Again, any language with a non-phonetic writing style is inherently more difficult for a foreigner to learn. The one thing people complain about most often when learning English is the inconsistent spelling, imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!.
Um, I know it's a waste of electrons responding to trolls, but ...
I think you'll find the brits never held SW Africa (aka Namibia).
It went straight from German control (pre WWI) to South African control (post WWI), and after a long and bloody guerilla war finally achieved independance sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.
#define TROLL_MODE_ON
The USA couldn't even hold The Phillipines, Palau, Vietnam, or Panama, to name a few. Hell, they're struggling to hold Puerto Rico (and parts of LA)
#define TROLL_MODE_OFF
Debate about whether Colossus was a 'real computer' (was it reconfigurable, stored-program, Turing complete, etc) should understand the wartime context.
My uncle was a tech (not a 'boffin') working on Radar in the UK at about the same time. He told me that the 3 priorities they had were...
1. It should work.
2. It should be finished yesterday.
3. It should use only standard off-the-shelf components.
There were LOTS of improvements that the boffins and techs knew they could make, but with bombs raining down on cities nightly, delays caused by making up custom components were just not acceptable.
I assume the same sort of priorities applied to Colossus. It was not an academic excersize, it was a code-breaking project, of vital military importance. National survival was at stake. If you could make it general-purpose in 3 days, or hard-wire it in an hour, well you bloody-well hard-wired it!
The bottom line is, Colossus worked. It did the job of automating what would otherwise have been an impossibly laborious calculation process. That makes it a computer in my book, arguements about technical trivialities seem pretty pointless.
As for whether Colossus was 'first', and whether the various pre-Colossus machines (at last count, Russia, Poland, USA, and Germany all have pre-Colossus claimants to the title) were 'computers' - well, I'll leave that to people who know something about those machines. I don't.
The other day I mis-typed the name of one of the popular search engines (I was on a workmates PC, so didn't have a bookmark) and the typo-squatter it took me to was running what was proudly proclaimed to be
"The Official Internet Incest Site"
Now lets leave aside the legalities for the moment (I had broken local law just by visiting the site), I figure people have a right to surf the web without being ambushed this way.
That's the problem with typo-squatting, it's basically fraud. It's like a retailer putting up false signs outside their stores, bait to get you in, then hit you with a hard sell once you're inside. It's deception, it's theft of my time and bandwidth.
If these people were providing something people actually wanted to find, they wouldn't have to ambush you, you'd go to their site voluntarily.
Phew, that was a nice rant, I feel much better now, thank you.
Of course, one might find a use for superheated steam on a spaceship, just a few that come to mind are...
1. Propellant - make that quick getaway.
2. Use it to power a projectile weapon to use against your enemy.
3. Use it as the projectile weapon to use against your enemy. Sort of a super-heated water-cannon.
I've been on both ends of the outsourcing deal, and have the following observations ....
1. No-one I've ever spoken to has ever ended up happy with the results of outsourcing, the usual gripes are poor quality, loss of control over the project, and lack of ongoing support.
2. When working for an outsourcing company, they would make an initial bid of about 75% of their estimated cost, thus ensuring they'd win the contract. Once work had commenced, they'd look for every ambiguity or oversight in the specs, and charge big $$$ for them as "variations" to the project. There are always changes to any non-trivial project spec. The client usually ended up paying at least twice the original quote.
The bottom line is, if you out-source a project, the out-sourcing company will end up with all the expertice, while you are stuck with a system you can't possibly maintain without them. They own you, you'll never be able to get rid of them, and the ongoing cost will be far more than it would have cost you to do it yourself.
I make 2 predictions .....
(1) Not a single hit on Europe or North America.
(2) A bonanza for space souvenier hunters in outback Australia, just like Skylab.
When will the space cowboys realise we aussies don't like having other peoples space junk dropped on us ?
Um, I believe the "I" you refer to stands for "Institute" as in "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" A US-based body - check www.ieee.org for confirmation. ... (time passes, looks up POSIX on search-engine of choice) Yup, you're right. Learn something new every day.
Is POSIX an IEEE standard ? Didn't know that.