PCI DSS isn't a law, it's a set of standards that the card industry wants you to follow if you're going to handle credit cards. There are no fines, you just lose your right to do CC business if you can't pass the audit. And the audits aren't perfect.
Actually, the studies that I have seen are looking at expenditures on care, and resulting outcomes of the patients that received the care. The outcomes are largely uncorrelated with variations in spending across the US, which vary by almost 100% from lowest to highest, and are universally somewhat worse than similar outcomes from the Canadian, British or French systems for similar cases. They're not horrible, but they aren't the best despite radically higher spending on a case by case basis in the countries with the evil commie plans.
GP talks about government waste. Medicare, the US government run health system for the elderly, has about half the administrative cost load of private insurance companies, and aggressive negotiates for lower treatment costs. It could have been a force for lowered drug costs, but Congress specifically prohibited that. The government waste tends to come from Congress, not the rank and file.
I'm just curious...why are tax revenues so bad in the state where a company like MS is employing what I could guess is a good number of people and what I would guess were pretty good salaries/bill rates? What is the state income tax like there? What is the sales tax there? What is the property tax there?
Washington doesn't have an income tax, and doesn't charge sales tax on food, services, health/medical services, tuition, or most goods purchased over the internet or out of state. So while MSFT employees earn large salaries and historically have made billions in stock gains, Washington doesn't see much of that. A primary revenue source for the state is the Business and Occupation tax, which MSFT is avoiding through this measure.
Or, to be slightly more robust, windows or linux on redundant commodity boxes, with mid grade disk and network components, set up in redundant locations, will serve a lot of needs for lower cost. Not to go all MBA on you or anything, but a smart management team would look at the cost of providing the last 9 of reliability, against the cost of x days of outage, multiplied by some reasonable percentage of the likelihood of the outage, and then ask, does it make financial sense to ensure against the extremely improbable. I'll get flamed for saying this, but I don't think it makes economic sense to protect against ALL possible disasters, as some are just not economically perfectly mitigatable. The present value of the saved expense may well exceed the present value of the expected loss of business. An HR system -can- be down for 3 days without killing a business, while Amazon's web presense/order system probably can't. But without working the numbers, you can't know. Coming up with a stated approach without working the numbers is voodoo planning.
I don't expect any management team to not fire an IT manager that did this thinking, but that is how I would run my own business.
You're a fucking idiot if you don't recognize that this -is- a technical skill. You are no different than the Dilbert comic about designing a world wide client server network in seven minutes. Your comment is equivalent to calling you out because you use a device driver to access a disk without being intimate with it's code.
The solution is to teach students to do it by hand first, and then teach them how to use calculators to do the same thing.
I took physics in high school, in 1975, and that's how we did it then. Did something change? I can remember arguing the benefits of RPN with my class mates.
I have a TI-89. I don't think it's all that incredibly powerful. There are just a lot of simple functions that are a great platform for doing complicated things.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that is precisely what power is. That is how I think of Linux and open source.
"Seriously, who remembers the day when a GB was an unimaginably large amount of disk space?"
I can remember spending $800 for a 10 MB hard disk for my PC, and thinking I got a good deal. Yes, MB. Around that time, we spent $10,000 to upgrade the mini-computer at work ( a Basic-Four) from 4 kb to 8kb main memory. Yes, you read that right.
Citation please. My own perception is the creativity and competitiveness are separate, unrelated traits. Seve Ballesteros, the golfer, was incredibly competitive, and quite creative in his approach to the game. Dale Chiluly, the glass artist, is by all accounts highly competitive in his field.
I've turned down jobs at IBM. They aren't -that- selective.
and they expire the account if you don't log in every 30 days. Which you don't if you did it right the first time. Which happened to me yesterday. And cost us 9 hrs of customer visible downtime until the drone in distributed systems management could reset the account. Who was out on a dental appt. Whose backup didn't have a login on the system. Because of an expired account. No shit.
Hm-m-m, I don't think I'm the one who is caring deeply about the subject.
I took the OS class about 10 years before either Windows or Linux was available to study. As such, graphical display engines, for example, weren't part of the material.
So, yeah, I'd love to go back and study a current state of the market commerical OS. I'd like to see how good, or not good, the MSFT guys are.
I agree. For office productivity suite style work, it's hard to beat the features of windows based software. I don't think Open Office meets the mark yet, and since my marginal cost for MSFT Office is nil, that's what I use. For development, I prefer Linux. For an execution platform I prefer Linux. For a browser appliance, I'd like to prefer linux, but the wireless and flash plugins still Don't Work.
I,too, have spent hours trying to get Ubuntu to work on my newish Toshiba laptop, and Fedora, and a couple others, without success. That f'ing atheros chipset is just a pain in the nether regions.
Complicating the discussion is what the author of this book found. A study showed that reading a book on cognitive behavior modification exhibited the same effectiveness as antidepressants and talk therapy.
BTW, if you are depressed, I highly recommend this book. It works better than drugs for me.
I don't agree. If this were true, then the foosball table in our kitchen wouldn't be busy all the time.
I think it's a subtler truth here. Many technical folks are more comfortable on working technical problems than people problems. Tech problems have at least one right answer that is unambiguous. People problems may not.
I think the way to keep tech people happy is to give them good problems to work on, serve as a diplomatic layer to insulate them from the annoying people surrounding them in the world, and facilitate making the rules clear on the floor to minimize conflict among the team. And provide free pop.
What I always found very interesting about ensemble methods is that they effectively contradict Occam's razor, in that the end result of an ensemble is not a single theory that predicts the data well, but a whole set of mutually contradicting theories that each hold some of the truth. The ensemble result might actually be huge, even when the system is simple.
Well put. We have some software that does predictive modeling/data mining using ensemble techniques. The ensemble models dependably work better, with less data preparation effort than the logistic regression models that the financial industry uses on the same sets of data. We have a hard time selling into the lending industry, because the complexity of the resulting ensemble models does not lend themselves well to being explained to regulators, even though the models themselves perform very well on holdout sets.
My sympathies. I watched my father die from melanoma. Actually, he died from starvation. After months of intractable pain, he quit eating and starved himself to end his pain.
There is -no- handgun that is adequate for bear protection, IMHO. The.500 is too big for me to shoot comfortably, and you need to be comfortable with any gun you are going to carry. I am quite comfortable with a.44. As I said, though, I don't delude myself that the.44 is going to stop a charging bear.
A grizzly bear can function for multiple seconds after a direct shot to the heart - they have incredible anerobic capability. To take down a bear, you need to break the shoulders, hit the brain, or hit the spine. A 12 gauge with 3 inch shells and slugs is sort of the entry price to that level of power.
We carried handguns to use on the bear that is mauling someone else. If a bear is charging you, you need a shotgun with slugs, or a 30-06 or better. We carried a shotgun on every raft, plus other assorted hardware. If a bear is already charging you though, odds are that your goose is cooked. You need someone else to have a gun, so he can kill the bear before the bear finishes killing you.
At the end of the day though, we used good camp discipline, traveled in pairs, making lots of noise, and never had an issue. Lots of good stories, though.
Linux has had an in here for some years now, due to earlier 64 bit support, and better/earlier support for large numbers of files in a directory. I work for a division of a fortune 500 that does datamining/text mining. Windows lost us in about 2004 for these two reasons, and there hasn't been any reason to go back. Cost wasn't the original reason, but cost keeps us from changing. $800 a machine adds up when you are looking at dozens or hundreds of rendering/compute servers. Linux has also proven to be easier for command and control of the jobs. The one thing that I long for is the full featured user identification/authentication support that Active Directory has.
I guided fishing trips in Alaska for 10 years. And have been mauled by a bear, but that is another story. In Alaska the wisdom is, if you carry a.44 magnum, which I did, you should file the front sight down, so it doesn't hurt so bad when the bear stuffs it up your ass. I had a.44 magnum Ruger redhawk with a 7" barrel in a shoulder holster, but I always figured that was for getting even rather than protecting myself.
We carried 12 gauge shotguns, with a firecracker shell as the first load, a slug as the second shell, followed by 00 buckshot. In 3" magnum. We used the firecracker shells often, never used anything after. A lot us also carried handguns, but we didn't delude ourselves that they were sufficient for primary protection.
It's not a teeny minority. IBM, all the banks, all financial firms, most manufacturers, most construction jobs, all transportation jobs (truck drivers) require drug testing and often background checks. I had to take a pee test when our small software company got bought by one of the fortune 500. When I got a job offer with IBM years back, I had to take a drug test. It's pretty common.
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PCI DSS isn't a law, it's a set of standards that the card industry wants you to follow if you're going to handle credit cards. There are no fines, you just lose your right to do CC business if you can't pass the audit. And the audits aren't perfect.
Actually, the studies that I have seen are looking at expenditures on care, and resulting outcomes of the patients that received the care. The outcomes are largely uncorrelated with variations in spending across the US, which vary by almost 100% from lowest to highest, and are universally somewhat worse than similar outcomes from the Canadian, British or French systems for similar cases. They're not horrible, but they aren't the best despite radically higher spending on a case by case basis in the countries with the evil commie plans.
GP talks about government waste. Medicare, the US government run health system for the elderly, has about half the administrative cost load of private insurance companies, and aggressive negotiates for lower treatment costs. It could have been a force for lowered drug costs, but Congress specifically prohibited that. The government waste tends to come from Congress, not the rank and file.
I'm just curious...why are tax revenues so bad in the state where a company like MS is employing what I could guess is a good number of people and what I would guess were pretty good salaries/bill rates? What is the state income tax like there? What is the sales tax there? What is the property tax there?
Washington doesn't have an income tax, and doesn't charge sales tax on food, services, health/medical services, tuition, or most goods purchased over the internet or out of state. So while MSFT employees earn large salaries and historically have made billions in stock gains, Washington doesn't see much of that. A primary revenue source for the state is the Business and Occupation tax, which MSFT is avoiding through this measure.
Or, to be slightly more robust, windows or linux on redundant commodity boxes, with mid grade disk and network components, set up in redundant locations, will serve a lot of needs for lower cost. Not to go all MBA on you or anything, but a smart management team would look at the cost of providing the last 9 of reliability, against the cost of x days of outage, multiplied by some reasonable percentage of the likelihood of the outage, and then ask, does it make financial sense to ensure against the extremely improbable. I'll get flamed for saying this, but I don't think it makes economic sense to protect against ALL possible disasters, as some are just not economically perfectly mitigatable. The present value of the saved expense may well exceed the present value of the expected loss of business. An HR system -can- be down for 3 days without killing a business, while Amazon's web presense/order system probably can't. But without working the numbers, you can't know. Coming up with a stated approach without working the numbers is voodoo planning.
I don't expect any management team to not fire an IT manager that did this thinking, but that is how I would run my own business.
You're a fucking idiot if you don't recognize that this -is- a technical skill. You are no different than the Dilbert comic about designing a world wide client server network in seven minutes. Your comment is equivalent to calling you out because you use a device driver to access a disk without being intimate with it's code.
The solution is to teach students to do it by hand first, and then teach them how to use calculators to do the same thing.
I took physics in high school, in 1975, and that's how we did it then. Did something change? I can remember arguing the benefits of RPN with my class mates.
I have a TI-89. I don't think it's all that incredibly powerful. There are just a lot of simple functions that are a great platform for doing complicated things.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that is precisely what power is. That is how I think of Linux and open source.
And what was writing a successful spoof program? I think the OP met, at least in some meta level, the educational goals of the class.
"Seriously, who remembers the day when a GB was an unimaginably large amount of disk space?"
I can remember spending $800 for a 10 MB hard disk for my PC, and thinking I got a good deal. Yes, MB. Around that time, we spent $10,000 to upgrade the mini-computer at work ( a Basic-Four) from 4 kb to 8kb main memory. Yes, you read that right.
Yeah, I'm a little grey around the muzzle.
Citation please. My own perception is the creativity and competitiveness are separate, unrelated traits. Seve Ballesteros, the golfer, was incredibly competitive, and quite creative in his approach to the game. Dale Chiluly, the glass artist, is by all accounts highly competitive in his field.
I've turned down jobs at IBM. They aren't -that- selective.
and they expire the account if you don't log in every 30 days. Which you don't if you did it right the first time. Which happened to me yesterday. And cost us 9 hrs of customer visible downtime until the drone in distributed systems management could reset the account. Who was out on a dental appt. Whose backup didn't have a login on the system. Because of an expired account. No shit.
But I rant...
Hm-m-m, I don't think I'm the one who is caring deeply about the subject.
I took the OS class about 10 years before either Windows or Linux was available to study. As such, graphical display engines, for example, weren't part of the material.
So, yeah, I'd love to go back and study a current state of the market commerical OS. I'd like to see how good, or not good, the MSFT guys are.
I agree. For office productivity suite style work, it's hard to beat the features of windows based software. I don't think Open Office meets the mark yet, and since my marginal cost for MSFT Office is nil, that's what I use. For development, I prefer Linux. For an execution platform I prefer Linux. For a browser appliance, I'd like to prefer linux, but the wireless and flash plugins still Don't Work.
I,too, have spent hours trying to get Ubuntu to work on my newish Toshiba laptop, and Fedora, and a couple others, without success. That f'ing atheros chipset is just a pain in the nether regions.
Why bother when you can use a better documented operating system, which has nothing obstructing the free dissemination of the source code?
Because it allows you to apply scrutiny to the windows kernel, similar to what we do to linux?
I'd love to have a chance to poke around in the kernel, and see what it looks like, and see what the MSFT programming practices are like.
Complicating the discussion is what the author of this book found. A study showed that reading a book on cognitive behavior modification exhibited the same effectiveness as antidepressants and talk therapy.
BTW, if you are depressed, I highly recommend this book. It works better than drugs for me.
Adultery? You mean like using your other hand?
He didn't say, "with other people".
I don't agree. If this were true, then the foosball table in our kitchen wouldn't be busy all the time.
I think it's a subtler truth here. Many technical folks are more comfortable on working technical problems than people problems. Tech problems have at least one right answer that is unambiguous. People problems may not.
I think the way to keep tech people happy is to give them good problems to work on, serve as a diplomatic layer to insulate them from the annoying people surrounding them in the world, and facilitate making the rules clear on the floor to minimize conflict among the team. And provide free pop.
What I always found very interesting about ensemble methods is that they effectively contradict Occam's razor, in that the end result of an ensemble is not a single theory that predicts the data well, but a whole set of mutually contradicting theories that each hold some of the truth. The ensemble result might actually be huge, even when the system is simple.
Well put. We have some software that does predictive modeling/data mining using ensemble techniques. The ensemble models dependably work better, with less data preparation effort than the logistic regression models that the financial industry uses on the same sets of data. We have a hard time selling into the lending industry, because the complexity of the resulting ensemble models does not lend themselves well to being explained to regulators, even though the models themselves perform very well on holdout sets.
My sympathies. I watched my father die from melanoma. Actually, he died from starvation. After months of intractable pain, he quit eating and starved himself to end his pain.
There is -no- handgun that is adequate for bear protection, IMHO. The .500 is too big for me to shoot comfortably, and you need to be comfortable with any gun you are going to carry. I am quite comfortable with a .44. As I said, though, I don't delude myself that the .44 is going to stop a charging bear.
A grizzly bear can function for multiple seconds after a direct shot to the heart - they have incredible anerobic capability. To take down a bear, you need to break the shoulders, hit the brain, or hit the spine. A 12 gauge with 3 inch shells and slugs is sort of the entry price to that level of power.
We carried handguns to use on the bear that is mauling someone else. If a bear is charging you, you need a shotgun with slugs, or a 30-06 or better. We carried a shotgun on every raft, plus other assorted hardware. If a bear is already charging you though, odds are that your goose is cooked. You need someone else to have a gun, so he can kill the bear before the bear finishes killing you.
At the end of the day though, we used good camp discipline, traveled in pairs, making lots of noise, and never had an issue. Lots of good stories, though.
Windows server wouldn't run 64 bit Java in 2004, which is why we went to Linux. Whose fault that was, MSFT or Sun doesn't matter. Linux Just Worked.
Linux has had an in here for some years now, due to earlier 64 bit support, and better/earlier support for large numbers of files in a directory. I work for a division of a fortune 500 that does datamining/text mining. Windows lost us in about 2004 for these two reasons, and there hasn't been any reason to go back. Cost wasn't the original reason, but cost keeps us from changing. $800 a machine adds up when you are looking at dozens or hundreds of rendering/compute servers. Linux has also proven to be easier for command and control of the jobs. The one thing that I long for is the full featured user identification/authentication support that Active Directory has.
I guided fishing trips in Alaska for 10 years. And have been mauled by a bear, but that is another story. In Alaska the wisdom is, if you carry a .44 magnum, which I did, you should file the front sight down, so it doesn't hurt so bad when the bear stuffs it up your ass. I had a .44 magnum Ruger redhawk with a 7" barrel in a shoulder holster, but I always figured that was for getting even rather than protecting myself.
We carried 12 gauge shotguns, with a firecracker shell as the first load, a slug as the second shell, followed by 00 buckshot. In 3" magnum. We used the firecracker shells often, never used anything after. A lot us also carried handguns, but we didn't delude ourselves that they were sufficient for primary protection.
It's not a teeny minority. IBM, all the banks, all financial firms, most manufacturers, most construction jobs, all transportation jobs (truck drivers) require drug testing and often background checks. I had to take a pee test when our small software company got bought by one of the fortune 500. When I got a job offer with IBM years back, I had to take a drug test. It's pretty common.