The definition of success has changed over the past 15 years. In the past, requirements would change without a change in deadline. Now with real project management, such as PMI/PMP, becoming more popular, requirements changes are costed. It's obviously easier to meet the latter definition of success.
There have been some bona fide improvements in software development over the past 15 years: longer variable names, language-supported encapsulation, and inline documentation tags that allow for larger teams and for attrition; and code reviews, pair programming, and unit testing frameworks that make the work of mediocre programmers more repeatable.
Put a fraud alert on your credit file. You may have to give a reason, such as that you have reason to believe someone you don't trust has gotten access to your identifying information, or that you accidentally responded to a phishing attack. I've never had to make up a reason -- I always get a false charge on my credit cards at least once a year. The fraud alert lasts for a year, and anytime any company wants to extend you credit, they have to call the phone number associated with the fraud alert (hint: give the credit agency your cell phone number when you establish the fraud alert). Note that this can be a pain. You may miss the call. Or worse, when you call back it goes to a general phone number and no one knows what the heck you're talking about. Or worse, the company extending the credit (e.g. perhaps a cell phone company) may just not be set up to handle credit files with fraud alerts.
Alternatively, or in addition, pay Equifax their extortion money of $130/year for their 3-in-1 monitoring. Any activity on your credit file at any of the big three credit agencies causes an e-mail to be sent to you. Account creations are sent within a day or two. But balance changes on existing accounts are sent only once per month -- which is next to worthless since you can just check your monthly statements.
For brokerage accounts, get two-factor authorization (i.e. an RSA SecureID token). It's often free, depending upon your balance.
Pay in cash at restaurants, and as much as possible elsewhere.
Use TrueCrypt for electronic documents.
Use a locking file cabinet (keeps guests out, even though it's worthless against burglars).
But if you prevent millions of Internet Explorer users from being infected with spyware, you deserve to at least get paid what Bill Gates earns in the time it took you to read this sentence.
I deserve to get paid for reading that rambling story that contained no useful information past the summary.
Are PowerPoint presentations better than detailed reports?
It depends upon the attention span and desire for entertainment of the reader.
On another note, one of the minor reasons I stopped blogging years ago was that I realized I was tempted to break up stories into multiple posts just to increase traffic. It is was getting to be one fact per blog post -- completely incoherent.
As a result of the whistleblower, Roger Barnes, within Fannie Mae, OFHEO (the U.S. government agency in charge of overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) conducted a top to bottom review of Fannie Mae practices. They found many, many things -- not just what Roger Barnes reported, and not just what was reported in media soundbites. The $1 billion error due to End User Computing has gone underreported in the media.
Just look at the table of contents. The paragraph you highlighted was specific to accounting irregularities. The sentence I highlighted was specific to failure of senior management to respond in a timely and effective 2004 warning by OFHEO regarding end-user computing, as it had already resulted in a $1 billion error. (The software best practices I mentioned were not mandated until extremely late -- specifically, not until this 2006 report came out.) And there are many more types of irregularities described in that long document.
I thought I was clear when I stated that only $1 billion of the $6.3 billion earnings writeoff was due to the end-user computing error. But I guess media-inspired preconceived notions got in the way.
The purpose of a math degree used to be 20% about the material actually learned and 80% learning how to analyze problems, recognize symmetry and patterns, identify constraining factors, prove assertions, and in so proving optimizing proofs to their bare essence.
No more. Now students just look up the answers on Google.
It's like trying to train to be a survivalist by looking up photos of Yosemite.
(In-class tests are the usual response of teachers to Google, but this is a poverty. Previously, math tests were almost univerally take-home because the problems required such deep thinking that hours were required. In-class tests allow only simpler problems and reward shallow quick thinkers who have mastered the art of test-taking.)
Of the $6.3 billion that Fannie Mae had to restate to the SEC in 2006 (covering the 1998-2006 timeframe), $1 billion was due to "End User Computing", presumably an error in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet:
OFHEO expressed concerns about Fannie Mae's reliance on end-user computing systems and the lack of strong controls that led to the $1 billion computational error and directed the Enterprise to take remedial action.
Fannie Mae now requires its IT department to develop applications and has made mandatory many best practices that were previously recommended, such as unit tests, strict source code control, strict deployment control, and a software management process modeled after PMI.
Yes, no nation ever took on debt to finance a war when there was a gold standard
There hasn't been a true gold standard (with no fractional reserve banking) for the past 400 years. Prior to that, governments tended to dilute the gold out of coins, i.e., they went off the gold standard to finance a war. Or they didn't pay the troops.
With a gold standard, Bush wouldn't have been able to wage the war for years on end with no progress and have been able to keep the troops paid -- even if he started to shave the gold coins as his Roman predecessors did.
3" CD-Singles were a big hit c. 1990, but the record industry killed them in order to sell more full-length CDs. Now it looks like they don't have a choice in the digital era but to sell singles.
Now: if you pegged a currency to a basket of useful commodities or social indexes: water, food, housing, textiles, domesticated wildlife, access to healthcare - the things that a person or society can actually *use* as primary units of biological energy and production - then you'd have a currency with *real* intrinsic value, and you could start talking about having a philosophy behind your money
There are two problems I see with that idea:
If the dollar is pegged to a tenth of a basket, and at that time a bottle of water happens to cost a dollar, and then a year later say the price of a bottle of water goes up to two dollars, then the dollar has to be re-pegged. What is the process of converting one year's dollars to the next year's dollars? What is the process of adjusting salaries -- would it be required by law?
Who would determine the basket? The federal government? That's led to a lot of problems now with cost-of-living increases. The federal government says inflation is 3% when it's really closer to 7%.
In short, your idea relies too much upon government. Gold would keep the government out of our money.
you've got a tautology here: you've just said here is that gold is valuable because we think gold is valuable
No, I said gold is and will be valuable because it has been valuable -- a prediction based upon a long-standing trend.
By all means base your currency on a physical object, or not, depending on your favourite economic theory, but you should probably use a basis that actually has intrinsic worth in its own right. Say, a fixed period of standardised human labour? The joule? A loaf of bread?
Silver has more intrinsic value than gold. That has created problems. When industry needs silver, the price -- compared to the three example commodities you provided -- goes through the roof. When there is a surplus, the price goes through the floor.
Lack of intrinsic value can be a benefit. The most important qualities for money are rarity, portability, anonymity, and verifiability. Gold satisfies those the best.
Why is referencing the value of a dollar to the value of gold somehow "better"? There's nothing magic about gold.. it's just rare.
Gold has the use as money, mystique and respect through the millenia.
As long as a dollar can be exchanged for things people want, it has value.
No, the value of the dollar comes from the IRS. Try using something other than a dollar as money, such as a gold coin. The IRS requires you to attach a fair market value in terms of dollars (Federal Reserve Notes, really), and then pay a tax in terms of FRNs. The IRS can, of course, employ armed marshals to seize property. So the value of FRNs comes from the threat of violence.
It's interesting that I was trying to do the same thing with C++ back in 2000, maybe even 1996.
The idea is based on the philosophy that numbers do not exist in isolation. It is possible to speak of, e.g., the number 5 as an abstract entity unto its own, but that should be rare. Most of the time, "5" refers to the ratio "5:1", where the "1" refers to something tangible. In science, the "1" is denoted with units. The problem is, starting with tabulating machines, then onto electronic calculators, and even multi-gigabyte computers, numbers are almost universally represented (erroneously) as the former -- purely abstract numbers. The units are stripped off.
As any struggling physics or chemistry student knows, one can fake one's way through a test by doing "dimensional analysis" on test questions. If the units cancel out properly and agree, you've probably got the right answer.
Compilers should be doing dimensional analysis at compile-time. I had originally hoped to create C++ templates -- which are evaluated at compile-time -- to do this, but I couldn't quite see how to get them to handle all the possible permutations of unit combinations and conversions -- at least not easily. It really needs to be built into the language.
With a compiler enforcing dimensional analysis, it would force programmers to think through every formula and calculation. Novel unit combinations would arise as a result of creating database reports. E.g. a payroll report might have $/2-week pay period. A conversion somewhere to $/year would be another unit, and the conversion between $/2-week pay period and $/year would be clearly definied in one place rather than sprinkled throughout the code.
Putting conversions in one place is the first thing I did when I cleaned up some pre-existing source code that I took over. I explicitly created three coordinate systems (device, world, and screen) and created two two-way conversions to go between the levels. Before that, there were conversions all over the place, each a little different, each with different handling of roundoffs and some even with hidden fudge factors. ("Conversions in one place" can be done without developing a units system, as it has its own benefits.)
I blame a lack of education on the philosophy of numbers for programming languages relying upon naked numbers for so many decades. Rote algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division taught in elementary school are the foundation of this vacuous philosophy.
It could even be responsible for the public's acceptance of no gold standard for the dollar. They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is.
And of course it's the Federal Reserve that can print endless money for the war in Iraq, thank to the lack of a gold standard.
So there you have it -- lack of units in programming languages and the war in Iraq have a common cause: the lack of correct philosophy on numbers taught in schools.
This can be really dangerous if a child is in the shopping cart, it's in a parking lot, and the cart is being pushed across a lane of traffic with approaching traffic when the cart pusher thought there was plenty of time to get across.
When the HP DeskJet was introduced in 1988, it was a low-cost alternative to laser. Now that laser printers cost so little ($60 for monochrome, $200 for color), why do people still buy ink jet? The only thing I can figure is 19 years of market momentum.
Then there are photo printers. Dye sublimation printers, which used to cost $5000, now cost $180. I know the reason there why people still buy ink jet. People say the ink jet has 4800x4800 resolution but the dye sub has only 300x300.
It's now out of style to display racks of stereo components. It's now fashionable to have hidden systems, even for home theater (helped in part by flat panel, the resurgence of front projection systems, and all manner of compact subwoofers that were not available 20 years ago).
Listening to high quality music on high quality ostentatious home systems is being replaced by:
Home theater (more emphasis on watching movies at home rather than listening to music)
iPods
Hidden, and thus slightly lower quality, music systems such as Sonos and Sondigo
Talk radio -- this is indirect. The lessening popularity of music is coincidental with the rise in talk radio starting after Sep. 11. Everyone's a political activist or blogger now. Lack of music listening on the car radio translates to fewer new CDs bought for the home. Talk radio has helped keep listeners off music stations by playing snippets of popular songs on the lead-ins and take-aways surrounding commercial breaks.
Pointless rude Slashdot barb:
You just keep bragging about your quadraphonic system with ported woofers.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
In analyzing the availability of the immunity offered by this provision, courts generally apply a three-prong test. A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:
The defendant must be a "provider or user" of an "interactive computer service."
The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must "treat" the defendant "as the publisher or speaker" of the harmful information at issue.
The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue.
The owner of the coutroom is the judge, and judges usually value decorum, try to prevent media circuses, and try to prevent cameras and audio recording. That the Paris Hilton hearing was a media circus including live blogging made it unusal. In fact, I'm not familiar of any other case of live blogging from a courtroom.
A movie that was merely pretty good, Home Alone, went to gross nearly half a billion dollars (third highest at the time) because it was just about the only family movie to be released around that time. Looks like the same thing happened with the Wii.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been some bona fide improvements in software development over the past 15 years: longer variable names, language-supported encapsulation, and inline documentation tags that allow for larger teams and for attrition; and code reviews, pair programming, and unit testing frameworks that make the work of mediocre programmers more repeatable.
"Collaborative filtering" didn't become popular until it was renamed "Web 2.0".
So "ubiquitous computing" won't become popular until someone can figure out how to reduce the syllable count.
Are PowerPoint presentations better than detailed reports?
It depends upon the attention span and desire for entertainment of the reader.
On another note, one of the minor reasons I stopped blogging years ago was that I realized I was tempted to break up stories into multiple posts just to increase traffic. It is was getting to be one fact per blog post -- completely incoherent.
As a result of the whistleblower, Roger Barnes, within Fannie Mae, OFHEO (the U.S. government agency in charge of overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) conducted a top to bottom review of Fannie Mae practices. They found many, many things -- not just what Roger Barnes reported, and not just what was reported in media soundbites. The $1 billion error due to End User Computing has gone underreported in the media.
Just look at the table of contents. The paragraph you highlighted was specific to accounting irregularities. The sentence I highlighted was specific to failure of senior management to respond in a timely and effective 2004 warning by OFHEO regarding end-user computing, as it had already resulted in a $1 billion error. (The software best practices I mentioned were not mandated until extremely late -- specifically, not until this 2006 report came out.) And there are many more types of irregularities described in that long document.
I thought I was clear when I stated that only $1 billion of the $6.3 billion earnings writeoff was due to the end-user computing error. But I guess media-inspired preconceived notions got in the way.
No more. Now students just look up the answers on Google.
It's like trying to train to be a survivalist by looking up photos of Yosemite.
(In-class tests are the usual response of teachers to Google, but this is a poverty. Previously, math tests were almost univerally take-home because the problems required such deep thinking that hours were required. In-class tests allow only simpler problems and reward shallow quick thinkers who have mastered the art of test-taking.)
With a gold standard, Bush wouldn't have been able to wage the war for years on end with no progress and have been able to keep the troops paid -- even if he started to shave the gold coins as his Roman predecessors did.
3" CD-Singles were a big hit c. 1990, but the record industry killed them in order to sell more full-length CDs. Now it looks like they don't have a choice in the digital era but to sell singles.
- If the dollar is pegged to a tenth of a basket, and at that time a bottle of water happens to cost a dollar, and then a year later say the price of a bottle of water goes up to two dollars, then the dollar has to be re-pegged. What is the process of converting one year's dollars to the next year's dollars? What is the process of adjusting salaries -- would it be required by law?
- Who would determine the basket? The federal government? That's led to a lot of problems now with cost-of-living increases. The federal government says inflation is 3% when it's really closer to 7%.
In short, your idea relies too much upon government. Gold would keep the government out of our money.Lack of intrinsic value can be a benefit. The most important qualities for money are rarity, portability, anonymity, and verifiability. Gold satisfies those the best.
The idea is based on the philosophy that numbers do not exist in isolation. It is possible to speak of, e.g., the number 5 as an abstract entity unto its own, but that should be rare. Most of the time, "5" refers to the ratio "5:1", where the "1" refers to something tangible. In science, the "1" is denoted with units. The problem is, starting with tabulating machines, then onto electronic calculators, and even multi-gigabyte computers, numbers are almost universally represented (erroneously) as the former -- purely abstract numbers. The units are stripped off.
As any struggling physics or chemistry student knows, one can fake one's way through a test by doing "dimensional analysis" on test questions. If the units cancel out properly and agree, you've probably got the right answer.
Compilers should be doing dimensional analysis at compile-time. I had originally hoped to create C++ templates -- which are evaluated at compile-time -- to do this, but I couldn't quite see how to get them to handle all the possible permutations of unit combinations and conversions -- at least not easily. It really needs to be built into the language.
With a compiler enforcing dimensional analysis, it would force programmers to think through every formula and calculation. Novel unit combinations would arise as a result of creating database reports. E.g. a payroll report might have $/2-week pay period. A conversion somewhere to $/year would be another unit, and the conversion between $/2-week pay period and $/year would be clearly definied in one place rather than sprinkled throughout the code.
Putting conversions in one place is the first thing I did when I cleaned up some pre-existing source code that I took over. I explicitly created three coordinate systems (device, world, and screen) and created two two-way conversions to go between the levels. Before that, there were conversions all over the place, each a little different, each with different handling of roundoffs and some even with hidden fudge factors. ("Conversions in one place" can be done without developing a units system, as it has its own benefits.)
I blame a lack of education on the philosophy of numbers for programming languages relying upon naked numbers for so many decades. Rote algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division taught in elementary school are the foundation of this vacuous philosophy.
It could even be responsible for the public's acceptance of no gold standard for the dollar. They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is.
And of course it's the Federal Reserve that can print endless money for the war in Iraq, thank to the lack of a gold standard.
So there you have it -- lack of units in programming languages and the war in Iraq have a common cause: the lack of correct philosophy on numbers taught in schools.
What instructions?
This can be really dangerous if a child is in the shopping cart, it's in a parking lot, and the cart is being pushed across a lane of traffic with approaching traffic when the cart pusher thought there was plenty of time to get across.
Then there are photo printers. Dye sublimation printers, which used to cost $5000, now cost $180. I know the reason there why people still buy ink jet. People say the ink jet has 4800x4800 resolution but the dye sub has only 300x300.
Not to mention Big Brother surveillance/data mining -- government, corporate, and health care.
I guess a magazine intended to sell technology advertising can't talk about the negative aspects of technology.
Listening to high quality music on high quality ostentatious home systems is being replaced by:
- Home theater (more emphasis on watching movies at home rather than listening to music)
- iPods
- Hidden, and thus slightly lower quality, music systems such as Sonos and Sondigo
- Talk radio -- this is indirect. The lessening popularity of music is coincidental with the rise in talk radio starting after Sep. 11. Everyone's a political activist or blogger now. Lack of music listening on the car radio translates to fewer new CDs bought for the home. Talk radio has helped keep listeners off music stations by playing snippets of popular songs on the lead-ins and take-aways surrounding commercial breaks.
Pointless rude Slashdot barb:You just keep bragging about your quadraphonic system with ported woofers.
Now that's parking.
The owner of the coutroom is the judge, and judges usually value decorum, try to prevent media circuses, and try to prevent cameras and audio recording. That the Paris Hilton hearing was a media circus including live blogging made it unusal. In fact, I'm not familiar of any other case of live blogging from a courtroom.
Heck, we got more live updates from the Paris Hilton court hearing on tmz.com than we can get on an NCAA game.
Kindergarten Cop didn't come out until Christmas. Home Alone was a Thanksgiving movie and captured that audience.
A movie that was merely pretty good, Home Alone, went to gross nearly half a billion dollars (third highest at the time) because it was just about the only family movie to be released around that time. Looks like the same thing happened with the Wii.