You forget the whole "relative to their economy" part. If you paid a Western worker and, say an Indian/Chinese worker exactly the same amount in monetary value for exactly the same work and hours, the Western worker (say, for a low end job) would have a life with a bit of a struggle to get by. The Indian/Chinese worker would have renumeration within their economy similarly to a very well paid job. Large corporations make the saving by leveraging money in a strong economic region, and source labour in a weak economic region; the worker gets a fair deal for their work, and the corporation gets cheap workers. If you live in a strong economic regions, you will never be able to match prices for basic hourly rate with a weak economic area, because you'd starve. It's not what your time is worth in hard money, it's what your time is worth compared to the costs of living in your local/regional economy. China itself has the kind of arrangement that the French do. Massive employment figures, though quite a lot of people don't have much of a "real job" to do. The government makes something up for them to do, and they go and do it and get paid a salary. Most of their time is spent talking, with work being done as they need to take the slack up from others. It's a form of welfare in a way, but they do an honest day's work (if not a particularly taxing one) to earn it. The French system is somewhat the same. They place the living of life above the metrics of more money; the cost of living there is relatively quite high, but they have an extremely enviable work/life balance. They're neither stupid, or lazy, but as a nation do what works for them.
That was exactly what was said of the US about a century or so ago. It was notorious for not following copyright, or any other form of IP protection, and spawned many a copy of works. Then when it had become established and used its own internal knowledge to create new variants, it used foreign legal systems to prevent the idea being used there, and thus stay ahead. It worked for the US. It worked for Japan. It's a proven strategy that'll work for China too.. Last time I was there, I saw what looked like a sizeable town being built in the rural backroads.. I was informed it was a new university campus being built, and that it was far from the only one. China understands that the way to growth and development is education and work combined. They're slowly insourcing all the key components to let it succeed. When they have the R&D, the specialists and the production all done locally, that's when the MBAs will suddenly wake up and realise that the really simple thing to insource is the management.
Meritocracy would mean that if the elites kept training their line to be elite, and the youngsters could still be better than anyone else, then they'd still keep on rising. So, it's technically feasible that someone who is "the best" in their field spends a large fraction of their gains on the next generation to ensure their young are also the best (as far as their abilities go; if the youngster doesn't want to learn, or just isn't that good, then they'll face the hard facts of meritocracy). However, I've known some people from quite disadvantaged backgrounds that really are quite exceptional, both in their talent and their drive. In a meritocracy, they'd rise to be amongst the elite by merit.
You'll note that this "derogatory term" was penned by a VERY left wing Labour MP. The fear was that a world led by the brightest would mean that the not very talented would necessarily revolt, which is a complete fallacy. We currently live in a world (in the west) where the greatest resources are spent on the less well able, and almost none on the brightest (as they can 'make the average grade on their own'); this means a complete waste of talent. China and countries like that are following the route of meritocracy, and finding they do actually produce some of the brightest people that way, and certainly get the most out of them. The alternative to meritocracy is having people who aren't the best person for the job making decisions about how to run things (everyone must be equal). Which is blatantly wrong.
The example given is MBAs still gathering in cliques.. Well, that's nothing to do with a meritocracy. That's a bunch of people ganging together and using regular political power to gain money. And using that money to their own ends.. I've met many an MBA that I've run circles around in a business environment (I was brought up in a family that ran a small business, and when I graduated, I started my own small company that did very well), and I've known more than one MBA in a prominent position that couldn't run a business to save his life. I've also known fantastic business people from walks of life completely away from the MBA scene. In a meritocracy, it wouldn't matter that you had an MBA, it would matter how well you used it. The energy ministers wouldn't be politicians who think they may have a bright idea, which the people who know the area can prove won't work, but the minister will override them anyway. Politics wouldn't be about "who has the best soundbite to capture an audience for a vote", it would be about who has proven they would be best suited to do the job to further society and life in general. So, all the "best person for the job" stuff is something to be scared of? Well, I'd much prefer that to Mediocracy, which seems to be the way we're headed. Rule by people who can kind of muddle through somehow, who don't necessarily have any skill or talent in what they're doing, and doesn't need to have. I wouldn't trust my doctor to be selected by that fashion; why should it be acceptable to have politicians making decisions about things that they know nothing about when it affects the whole operation of a country?
Meritocracy would work, but it would be uncomfortable for some perhaps (they wouldn't have authority they wanted; the fact they were actually the worst person to wield certain types of authority would be something they didn't want to acknowledge). Mediocracy would have the mediocre quite happy, as they could wield authority they were ill equipped for to the same extent as someone who actually had true talent and learning, so happy mediocre people, and unhappy suppressed talented people.
So, yeah, I scream meritocracy. And I think the chap who coined it is a Mediocrat. And yes, occasionally, I may want things I'm not good enough to get, but hey.. That's life.
From an outsider's perspective, one of the real advantages of the US is that people from all over the world will come and work in the US. The same can't be said for China
Strange, the amount of tech campuses being built in China is pretty large (I saw some on my last visit there a few years ago), and the amount of people that are more than happy to work in China is similarly pretty huge.
I saw porn as a kid initially because some blew into my Grandparents' back garden from a neighbour who'd had his stash ripped up.. Probably some domestic there, but I can remember wondering why the women were wearing pretend beards in strange places. I thought it was funny and an oddity.. Couldn't have been more than 6 at the time.. Then a few years later (still sub 10), one of my friends uncovered his dad's stash.. There was the thrill of doing something I knew I wasn't meant to be doing, but nothing out of the ordinary. No ill effects, apart from the fallout from having my folks hit the roof when they found out about it.. A few years later, I watched a horror movie (that would be considered tame by today's standards) and I didn't sleep properly for weeks, and I remember being so nervous and anxious for ages.. Hey, I got over that too.. But from my perspective and recall, being exposed to horror and violence is far more damaging to a young psyche than porn.. But being young, you get over it. Now for real problems, you just have to step over into a third world country where death is common and visible, people you know are abducted and killed. Disease is rife and a killer. And yet some of them are far more well adjusted than a lot of the people I've seen raised in 'safe' environments...
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
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· Score: 5, Insightful
No, it's definitely not. Opinions have information. The sign of someone who really knows what they're on about is the person who listens, sifts, and then makes a decision based on that. Listening doesn't mean rule by committee; it just means you're acting with all the information you can get, which leads to a more informed choice. The person that "knows" what to do can get it disastrously wrong, and frequently does.
Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
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· Score: 1
The best device? That's a moveable feast, and pretty much something you'll have a hard job selling to the public. A solid camera isn't the big thing. Wireless charging? That'll take a while to catch on, and a lot of people are quite happy with their multiple charging points. It'll become more important over time, but won't sell many on it. High PPI? Well, there's more than good enough (iPhone etc.) and there's un-noticably better.. It may be a superior hardware platform, but hey, betamax did so well from that, didn't it?
The expansion of WP8 is pure conjecture. You're saying "If you build it, they'll come", despite most being quite heavily entrenched in purchases of apps already on smartphones (it's one of the things that I have to consider jumping from my current platform). And the good developers go where they'll make good money. Currently WP8 is niche (very) and you'd be betting good time and money to develop just for that. Maybe you will see a lot of good apps, but it'll have to tempt people away from _existing_ good apps they've already paid for. Microsoft relies on that in the fight to keep the desktop from going to other Operating Systems (there have been some good contenders, and Microsoft has always brought out the "Does it work with your existing applications that you know? No! Don't buy it!".. And that's already been shown to be a persuasive argument.
Having 100k apps doesn't mean that it's 100k apps that will sell, or do what people want to a sufficient level to chuck what they have and re-invest in completely new apps.. Or that the apps are actually decent in the first place.
Yes, having competition is good, but the arguments you pose are very subjective, and rely on others having your own tastes.. Most probably don't.. Still, I'm waiting to see what happens with interest. I like Nokia (my earlier phones were almost exclusively Nokia because of the quality), and I only switched because smartphones did what I wanted, and Nokia didn't have any.
WP8 doesn't look bad; that's not my beef with it.. It's just that it's not good enough to make me swap what I have, and have to replace a load of apps I use a lot (my dive log, gas mix calculators, music aides, work tools etc.) with new ones that I'll have to buy again and hope have the same functionality (and transcribe all the data for again!).. If it ever is, I'll jump, but that day isn't here, and WP8 isn't that OS. And I know I'm not alone in that, software history showing the trends of inertia in the market (BeOS, OS2 etc.).
Except: 1) The Big Bang theory is something that arises from the study of physics. Saying it's "evil" says that the fundamentals of theoretical physics are evil. Of course physics will be affected if some idiot with a bit of power starts mouthing off that people studying the origins of the universe are evil. Some of those people are quite devout Christians.. Think it doesn't affect them and their state of mind, which affects their work? Technology arises due to knowledge of physics; they're very tightly interlinked. Railing against one part of it has knock on effects everywhere.
2) Saying evolution (which has been observed) is not important? Hello? There's no problem with having a design base? Well, hey, no problem with doing theology as long as you don't have anything to do with God I guess.. It's a part of Biology, and explains much about how things have arisen, the interactions, and why things have become the way they have.
No, America isn't anti science. The guy that's the subject of this is, quite frankly, and idiot. He's a member of a scientific board. What should happen is everyone calmly sits down and says "Interesting postulation. Lets see your working, experimental evidence and ensure it's repeatable in objective controlled environments. If it can't be proved, or disproved, it has no place in this environment, and you don't have the beginnings of an understanding of science, so please give up your post on this board, as you have no right to be here".
I've hired plenty of developers in the past (and other technical, such as Admins, DBAs, technicians and so on). It's a case of horses for courses. If I'm after someone who can do what they're told in a narrow field, for a fixed length of time, I'm not so bothered about the degree. Experience counts, and an interview test will filter out the stylistic elements to give me an idea of the quality of work people will turn out. However, I don't tend to hire many people who do only what they're told; I want people who know how to learn and research. A reasonable way to determine that someone knows how to research is whether or not they have a degree. This is a 'fast and loose' method, but I've not really been let down by it. Interviews will usually point out the scammers who use all the HR check marks without knowing anything about theory (and a fair few of my questions are about the mental processes people use to arrive at designs and solutions, rather than how they express it in code; the code part is easy to improve on, the mental processing.. Not so much).
From my side, I was self taught (programming at age 10, back in 1979 on a commodore PET), then went on to get a BSc in Real Time Systems as a focussed concentration on the parts of comp sci I was interested in (i.e. AI, robotics etc.). Spending that time in an academic environment taught me a lot about research, and having a network of peers to check work, share ideas with and generally improve a larger scope than just the individual. I'm not looking for the "lone hero" coder; I'm looking for a team of heroes that know how to push things forward as a group, cover their weak points, and utilise their combined strengths to the best advantage, focussing team researches on areas that are needed. That kind of dynamic I find far more prevalent in degree educated individuals than I do in self taught, which is why, by and large, I ask for a degree in the important tasks.
That's the thing about "not doing anything retarded". There's a lot of things that can fit that description. The frame problem is what killed classic AI, and it's exactly the core of this problem. And it's probably more a problem for financial trading than it is for avionics. To get around that, you need a base set of heuristics from the experts. That's what a spec document is for, to determine the limits and boundaries along with the exact operation. I suspect that a fair bit of this gets rushed through in the attempt to get an algorithm out that's better able to play your opposition before your opposition gets their own one out that'll toast yours. Political pressure comes from on high to "get things moving now, what's the hold up?", and pressure is applied to the front lines to move it. Which comes back to a management failure. Some things take time to get right, and you have the option of managing the environment to allow for the latency until things come out right (which is a fairly meaty task, but means you largely go from stable state to stable state), or you can utilise politics to speed things up (and this frequently means corners are cut; always a risk, hopefully calculated, frequently not). This often means going from a stable state to an uncertain one, with the hope that things won't go bad enough, and you can fix stuff on the fly. Programmers aren't the ones in complex enterprises that should decide what's sane and what's not. That's for the people who have the experience in the field. If that info doesn't get passed on, it's pointless blaming a programmer (hey, go program exactly what I'm thinking of without telling you, and get it right!). Doing things the right way takes time and money. Financials are usually willing to spend money, but they're very used to getting things "now". That's something they may need to re-evaluate, and go back to the more old fashioned way of doing things, and taking time to ruminate, and double check.. They'll lose the maximum possible profit point, but keep things stable and still profitable.. Alas, many of them don't consider that acceptable, and want it all, and want it now.
I'm a firm fan of his work.. The "Night's Dawn Trilogy" is a good fun read, and the "Commonwealth Saga" is intriguing.. Misspent Youth is a really interesting read, and had me snickering a few times and thinking "Yep, I can see that!".. The Greg Mandel series (his first, I think) were good too.. Well worth picking up..
"Forge of God".. The latter books kind of dilute the story somewhat.. But that book as a standalone.. Very gritty and probably exactly what would happen.
And to study anything, you need a grasp of how math functions, otherwise you don't really grasp the path on how to gather correlations. Removing algebra means you can look at things, and draw wild conclusions with no basis in reality or logic (and make wildly impassioned stories around it, which seems to constitute "talent" in politics), without actually understand what you're doing, or looking at, or what it really entails.
Which goes back to it only being the best business desktop because most businesses use MS office (thus run windows, thus have the install base to maximise profit on a dev platform). In an ab-initio race with today's platforms, I think we'd see something like the home computer market in the 80s. Very diverse. Any evolutionaly system can achieve a false maxima, which is the niche that Windows occupies at the moment. It may not be the most effective tool to bring to bear in many situations these days, but it has the most momentum, so it gets used.
Weird, I've worked in lots of enterprises over the years, and largely, I've found that the real techs prefer automation (we're not paid for what we've already done, we're paid for what we do next). Automation is the only way to get time to do what needs doing next. Unless, of course, your basement is the infrastructure you're running.
Same here.. I once took up the post of a cleaner in a homeless hostel.. And that was a crap (literally, at times) job. Paid a pittance, but when I absolutely needed to get by (paying my way through Uni), it had to be done. Anything that brought the money in. Put it this way, I'd rather be treated as a sex object (though at my stage in life, that's just not going to happen) or even an object of derision than that job. It was tough. There again, I knew what I was getting into when I took the job. There are jobs like that out there if someone doesn't want to be a booth babe; they just take longer to make the same money, and they mean getting a lot dirtier, doing a lot harder work, and taking a lot more risks.
Slashdot Mirror
In the name of "Law". Nobody (especially Lawyers) pretends it's a system of Justice.
You forget the whole "relative to their economy" part.
If you paid a Western worker and, say an Indian/Chinese worker exactly the same amount in monetary value for exactly the same work and hours, the Western worker (say, for a low end job) would have a life with a bit of a struggle to get by. The Indian/Chinese worker would have renumeration within their economy similarly to a very well paid job.
Large corporations make the saving by leveraging money in a strong economic region, and source labour in a weak economic region; the worker gets a fair deal for their work, and the corporation gets cheap workers. If you live in a strong economic regions, you will never be able to match prices for basic hourly rate with a weak economic area, because you'd starve. It's not what your time is worth in hard money, it's what your time is worth compared to the costs of living in your local/regional economy.
China itself has the kind of arrangement that the French do. Massive employment figures, though quite a lot of people don't have much of a "real job" to do. The government makes something up for them to do, and they go and do it and get paid a salary. Most of their time is spent talking, with work being done as they need to take the slack up from others. It's a form of welfare in a way, but they do an honest day's work (if not a particularly taxing one) to earn it. The French system is somewhat the same. They place the living of life above the metrics of more money; the cost of living there is relatively quite high, but they have an extremely enviable work/life balance. They're neither stupid, or lazy, but as a nation do what works for them.
That was exactly what was said of the US about a century or so ago. It was notorious for not following copyright, or any other form of IP protection, and spawned many a copy of works. Then when it had become established and used its own internal knowledge to create new variants, it used foreign legal systems to prevent the idea being used there, and thus stay ahead.
It worked for the US. It worked for Japan. It's a proven strategy that'll work for China too.. Last time I was there, I saw what looked like a sizeable town being built in the rural backroads.. I was informed it was a new university campus being built, and that it was far from the only one.
China understands that the way to growth and development is education and work combined. They're slowly insourcing all the key components to let it succeed. When they have the R&D, the specialists and the production all done locally, that's when the MBAs will suddenly wake up and realise that the really simple thing to insource is the management.
Meritocracy would mean that if the elites kept training their line to be elite, and the youngsters could still be better than anyone else, then they'd still keep on rising.
So, it's technically feasible that someone who is "the best" in their field spends a large fraction of their gains on the next generation to ensure their young are also the best (as far as their abilities go; if the youngster doesn't want to learn, or just isn't that good, then they'll face the hard facts of meritocracy).
However, I've known some people from quite disadvantaged backgrounds that really are quite exceptional, both in their talent and their drive. In a meritocracy, they'd rise to be amongst the elite by merit.
You'll note that this "derogatory term" was penned by a VERY left wing Labour MP. The fear was that a world led by the brightest would mean that the not very talented would necessarily revolt, which is a complete fallacy. We currently live in a world (in the west) where the greatest resources are spent on the less well able, and almost none on the brightest (as they can 'make the average grade on their own'); this means a complete waste of talent. China and countries like that are following the route of meritocracy, and finding they do actually produce some of the brightest people that way, and certainly get the most out of them.
The alternative to meritocracy is having people who aren't the best person for the job making decisions about how to run things (everyone must be equal). Which is blatantly wrong.
The example given is MBAs still gathering in cliques.. Well, that's nothing to do with a meritocracy. That's a bunch of people ganging together and using regular political power to gain money. And using that money to their own ends.. I've met many an MBA that I've run circles around in a business environment (I was brought up in a family that ran a small business, and when I graduated, I started my own small company that did very well), and I've known more than one MBA in a prominent position that couldn't run a business to save his life. I've also known fantastic business people from walks of life completely away from the MBA scene. In a meritocracy, it wouldn't matter that you had an MBA, it would matter how well you used it. The energy ministers wouldn't be politicians who think they may have a bright idea, which the people who know the area can prove won't work, but the minister will override them anyway.
Politics wouldn't be about "who has the best soundbite to capture an audience for a vote", it would be about who has proven they would be best suited to do the job to further society and life in general.
So, all the "best person for the job" stuff is something to be scared of? Well, I'd much prefer that to Mediocracy, which seems to be the way we're headed. Rule by people who can kind of muddle through somehow, who don't necessarily have any skill or talent in what they're doing, and doesn't need to have.
I wouldn't trust my doctor to be selected by that fashion; why should it be acceptable to have politicians making decisions about things that they know nothing about when it affects the whole operation of a country?
Meritocracy would work, but it would be uncomfortable for some perhaps (they wouldn't have authority they wanted; the fact they were actually the worst person to wield certain types of authority would be something they didn't want to acknowledge). Mediocracy would have the mediocre quite happy, as they could wield authority they were ill equipped for to the same extent as someone who actually had true talent and learning, so happy mediocre people, and unhappy suppressed talented people.
So, yeah, I scream meritocracy. And I think the chap who coined it is a Mediocrat. And yes, occasionally, I may want things I'm not good enough to get, but hey.. That's life.
From an outsider's perspective, one of the real advantages of the US is that people from all over the world will come and work in the US. The same can't be said for China
Strange, the amount of tech campuses being built in China is pretty large (I saw some on my last visit there a few years ago), and the amount of people that are more than happy to work in China is similarly pretty huge.
A cheap sword cost as much as a house, by and large..
They were expensive things back in the day (which is why most soldiers had spears etc.)
I saw porn as a kid initially because some blew into my Grandparents' back garden from a neighbour who'd had his stash ripped up.. Probably some domestic there, but I can remember wondering why the women were wearing pretend beards in strange places. I thought it was funny and an oddity.. Couldn't have been more than 6 at the time..
Then a few years later (still sub 10), one of my friends uncovered his dad's stash.. There was the thrill of doing something I knew I wasn't meant to be doing, but nothing out of the ordinary. No ill effects, apart from the fallout from having my folks hit the roof when they found out about it..
A few years later, I watched a horror movie (that would be considered tame by today's standards) and I didn't sleep properly for weeks, and I remember being so nervous and anxious for ages.. Hey, I got over that too.. But from my perspective and recall, being exposed to horror and violence is far more damaging to a young psyche than porn.. But being young, you get over it.
Now for real problems, you just have to step over into a third world country where death is common and visible, people you know are abducted and killed. Disease is rife and a killer. And yet some of them are far more well adjusted than a lot of the people I've seen raised in 'safe' environments...
No, it's definitely not. Opinions have information. The sign of someone who really knows what they're on about is the person who listens, sifts, and then makes a decision based on that. Listening doesn't mean rule by committee; it just means you're acting with all the information you can get, which leads to a more informed choice.
The person that "knows" what to do can get it disastrously wrong, and frequently does.
The best device? That's a moveable feast, and pretty much something you'll have a hard job selling to the public. A solid camera isn't the big thing. Wireless charging? That'll take a while to catch on, and a lot of people are quite happy with their multiple charging points. It'll become more important over time, but won't sell many on it. High PPI? Well, there's more than good enough (iPhone etc.) and there's un-noticably better.. It may be a superior hardware platform, but hey, betamax did so well from that, didn't it?
The expansion of WP8 is pure conjecture. You're saying "If you build it, they'll come", despite most being quite heavily entrenched in purchases of apps already on smartphones (it's one of the things that I have to consider jumping from my current platform). And the good developers go where they'll make good money. Currently WP8 is niche (very) and you'd be betting good time and money to develop just for that. Maybe you will see a lot of good apps, but it'll have to tempt people away from _existing_ good apps they've already paid for. Microsoft relies on that in the fight to keep the desktop from going to other Operating Systems (there have been some good contenders, and Microsoft has always brought out the "Does it work with your existing applications that you know? No! Don't buy it!".. And that's already been shown to be a persuasive argument.
Having 100k apps doesn't mean that it's 100k apps that will sell, or do what people want to a sufficient level to chuck what they have and re-invest in completely new apps.. Or that the apps are actually decent in the first place.
Yes, having competition is good, but the arguments you pose are very subjective, and rely on others having your own tastes.. Most probably don't..
Still, I'm waiting to see what happens with interest. I like Nokia (my earlier phones were almost exclusively Nokia because of the quality), and I only switched because smartphones did what I wanted, and Nokia didn't have any.
WP8 doesn't look bad; that's not my beef with it.. It's just that it's not good enough to make me swap what I have, and have to replace a load of apps I use a lot (my dive log, gas mix calculators, music aides, work tools etc.) with new ones that I'll have to buy again and hope have the same functionality (and transcribe all the data for again!).. If it ever is, I'll jump, but that day isn't here, and WP8 isn't that OS. And I know I'm not alone in that, software history showing the trends of inertia in the market (BeOS, OS2 etc.).
Considering God telling people to kill other people usually gets them locked up.. I'm not enturely sure they shouldn't have..
Except:
1) The Big Bang theory is something that arises from the study of physics. Saying it's "evil" says that the fundamentals of theoretical physics are evil. Of course physics will be affected if some idiot with a bit of power starts mouthing off that people studying the origins of the universe are evil. Some of those people are quite devout Christians.. Think it doesn't affect them and their state of mind, which affects their work? Technology arises due to knowledge of physics; they're very tightly interlinked. Railing against one part of it has knock on effects everywhere.
2) Saying evolution (which has been observed) is not important? Hello? There's no problem with having a design base? Well, hey, no problem with doing theology as long as you don't have anything to do with God I guess.. It's a part of Biology, and explains much about how things have arisen, the interactions, and why things have become the way they have.
No, America isn't anti science. The guy that's the subject of this is, quite frankly, and idiot. He's a member of a scientific board. What should happen is everyone calmly sits down and says "Interesting postulation. Lets see your working, experimental evidence and ensure it's repeatable in objective controlled environments. If it can't be proved, or disproved, it has no place in this environment, and you don't have the beginnings of an understanding of science, so please give up your post on this board, as you have no right to be here".
They can be. The first ever virus was written for UNIX.
You really don't get that whole progress through history thing, do you?
I've hired plenty of developers in the past (and other technical, such as Admins, DBAs, technicians and so on).
It's a case of horses for courses. If I'm after someone who can do what they're told in a narrow field, for a fixed length of time, I'm not so bothered about the degree. Experience counts, and an interview test will filter out the stylistic elements to give me an idea of the quality of work people will turn out.
However, I don't tend to hire many people who do only what they're told; I want people who know how to learn and research. A reasonable way to determine that someone knows how to research is whether or not they have a degree. This is a 'fast and loose' method, but I've not really been let down by it.
Interviews will usually point out the scammers who use all the HR check marks without knowing anything about theory (and a fair few of my questions are about the mental processes people use to arrive at designs and solutions, rather than how they express it in code; the code part is easy to improve on, the mental processing.. Not so much).
From my side, I was self taught (programming at age 10, back in 1979 on a commodore PET), then went on to get a BSc in Real Time Systems as a focussed concentration on the parts of comp sci I was interested in (i.e. AI, robotics etc.). Spending that time in an academic environment taught me a lot about research, and having a network of peers to check work, share ideas with and generally improve a larger scope than just the individual.
I'm not looking for the "lone hero" coder; I'm looking for a team of heroes that know how to push things forward as a group, cover their weak points, and utilise their combined strengths to the best advantage, focussing team researches on areas that are needed. That kind of dynamic I find far more prevalent in degree educated individuals than I do in self taught, which is why, by and large, I ask for a degree in the important tasks.
No DRM, just 5 "installs"? Hmm.. Sounds like DRM to me....
No, it'll be a write off..
That's the thing about "not doing anything retarded". There's a lot of things that can fit that description. The frame problem is what killed classic AI, and it's exactly the core of this problem. And it's probably more a problem for financial trading than it is for avionics.
To get around that, you need a base set of heuristics from the experts. That's what a spec document is for, to determine the limits and boundaries along with the exact operation. I suspect that a fair bit of this gets rushed through in the attempt to get an algorithm out that's better able to play your opposition before your opposition gets their own one out that'll toast yours.
Political pressure comes from on high to "get things moving now, what's the hold up?", and pressure is applied to the front lines to move it.
Which comes back to a management failure. Some things take time to get right, and you have the option of managing the environment to allow for the latency until things come out right (which is a fairly meaty task, but means you largely go from stable state to stable state), or you can utilise politics to speed things up (and this frequently means corners are cut; always a risk, hopefully calculated, frequently not). This often means going from a stable state to an uncertain one, with the hope that things won't go bad enough, and you can fix stuff on the fly.
Programmers aren't the ones in complex enterprises that should decide what's sane and what's not. That's for the people who have the experience in the field. If that info doesn't get passed on, it's pointless blaming a programmer (hey, go program exactly what I'm thinking of without telling you, and get it right!).
Doing things the right way takes time and money. Financials are usually willing to spend money, but they're very used to getting things "now".
That's something they may need to re-evaluate, and go back to the more old fashioned way of doing things, and taking time to ruminate, and double check.. They'll lose the maximum possible profit point, but keep things stable and still profitable.. Alas, many of them don't consider that acceptable, and want it all, and want it now.
I'm a firm fan of his work.. The "Night's Dawn Trilogy" is a good fun read, and the "Commonwealth Saga" is intriguing..
Misspent Youth is a really interesting read, and had me snickering a few times and thinking "Yep, I can see that!"..
The Greg Mandel series (his first, I think) were good too.. Well worth picking up..
Wasn't so keen on the sequel, but Forge of God was a real "Oh... Crap.." moment.
"Forge of God".. The latter books kind of dilute the story somewhat.. But that book as a standalone.. Very gritty and probably exactly what would happen.
And to study anything, you need a grasp of how math functions, otherwise you don't really grasp the path on how to gather correlations.
Removing algebra means you can look at things, and draw wild conclusions with no basis in reality or logic (and make wildly impassioned stories around it, which seems to constitute "talent" in politics), without actually understand what you're doing, or looking at, or what it really entails.
Which goes back to it only being the best business desktop because most businesses use MS office (thus run windows, thus have the install base to maximise profit on a dev platform).
In an ab-initio race with today's platforms, I think we'd see something like the home computer market in the 80s. Very diverse. Any evolutionaly system can achieve a false maxima, which is the niche that Windows occupies at the moment. It may not be the most effective tool to bring to bear in many situations these days, but it has the most momentum, so it gets used.
Weird, I've worked in lots of enterprises over the years, and largely, I've found that the real techs prefer automation (we're not paid for what we've already done, we're paid for what we do next).
Automation is the only way to get time to do what needs doing next. Unless, of course, your basement is the infrastructure you're running.
He's never heard of Deep Vein Thrombosis, I suspect.
Same here.. I once took up the post of a cleaner in a homeless hostel.. And that was a crap (literally, at times) job. Paid a pittance, but when I absolutely needed to get by (paying my way through Uni), it had to be done. Anything that brought the money in.
Put it this way, I'd rather be treated as a sex object (though at my stage in life, that's just not going to happen) or even an object of derision than that job. It was tough. There again, I knew what I was getting into when I took the job. There are jobs like that out there if someone doesn't want to be a booth babe; they just take longer to make the same money, and they mean getting a lot dirtier, doing a lot harder work, and taking a lot more risks.