Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This absolutely accurate in a general sense. My field is Electrical Engineering and I have seen managers of the latter type, where "programmer" can be replaced with "engineer". An ignorant manager is an irresponsible and shortsighted way to do the job.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've read these arguments and I must disagree. Though I'm not in IT, I still can say with confidence it requires more than managing the people above to be a good manager. TFA is pointing out that it is unlikely some MBA fellow is going to realistically engage with line level employees. How does he know what tools and materials they needs to do their job? He doesn't. Had he done their job before, as that company does, then yes he does understand and should also be able to comprehend how it needs to change in order to remain competitive. Does he need to be a star coder? Not really. With those prior skills the hardest part will be for him not to micromanage. Beyond that, whatever it takes to keep his people happy and motivated defines a good line manager.
Word. Whenever that happens to me these days I laugh and read this xkcd strip: http://xkcd.com/386/.
Then maybe spread some lovin' if it's worth it. Cheers. =)
Dualities are so rare it's best not to assume that any exist in nature. Grouping a whole set of people into two groups and then covering either one with verbal poop means nothing and does nothing but divide. We all say divisive like we know what it means, but really it's inflammatory posts that rile people emotions instead of appealing to our sense of logic and reasoning that are part of this divide. So please stop calling names like "liberal" and "conservative" without actually specifying the idea you're critiquing.
Sure, the whole of the left-wing moon bats destroy environment more than 1 SUV. Pardon me while I take offense to being put into a group, to which I so obviously "belong" because I merely disagree with you, even though I don't piss birth control into our water because I happen to be the other gender.
Fallacy of your argument should be easy to see if we restate your premise. Sierra Club and MoveOn don't have birth control piss water in their mission statements (radar), therefore it's okay to spill gasoline on small animals and shoot them with assault rifles then teach children the "abstinence" method of BC, causing a surge of teenage pregnancy (thank you Britany, Paris) and a sudden increase in sales of wire coat hangers and the resulting trips to the ER where the finish the mangled abortion anyway. What the fuck. Is this any way to have a conversation? Not really. It just pisses people off and solves nothing.
Not to mention your blame is misguided. Those are special interest groups. They have money. They have the donation lists for each party. You want elected via an R or D party? You get money from those groups, plain and simple. Does it excuse their actions? NO. Does it mean everyone who votes for one or the other believes everyone, 100%, that the party stands for? NO. So stop whining like it does. Yes we all care about water purity, except we're talking about a Digital Presidency and improving communications between the Chief and the people.
My salty advice to you: RTFA. Stop being a dualist. Talk about issues and not talking points with loaded questions. Less terrible logic on tangents that excuse your vices and more analysis with a focus on the topic at hand. Peace.
Hmm... I think you're confusing copyright with patents. Or perhaps we are confusing the difference. I see the original intent of copyright as a means for the original author to benefit from and be recognized for his creative content. Likewise for patents, to allow the Davids of inventing to slay the Goliaths of the market.
At some point the problem becomes one like the US Military's: you will pay whatever price so long as it works. If copies become free then yes, Dassault and company will go out of business without a major business model change. However, with a few improvements in their licensing scheme and some server upgrades you've got a viable system again and people we be paying 10k per seat again. Why? Because Dassault and MS have the money to make the licensing work. Security is the natural answer to the problem. And everyone knows that no lock is impenetrable, so it is effectively the complexity of the lock that determines the length of protection for your IP. Why waste the time and money of our government with what we can do on our own for less cost and better results?
We don't need the TSA to do this. Every able-bodied citizen of America who experienced 9-11 will now and forever watch and notice these attributes of their fellow travelers. 9-11 can never happen exactly the same again. However, newer unconventional methods may be used but the trick has been done and the magician won't be performing it again for this audience. They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.
If the ignorant and the wise have an argument, who wins?
Where do scientists come from? Is their job not but to find technical truth?
I suppose you didn't look at the exit polls as I suggested. The information is delicate and nuanced. I have definitely missed some points worth making. Regardless, if you actually look at the statistics for what I was talking about, you'd see this largely applied to those educated beyond the 4 year programs of BA, BS, etc. such as people with MS, PhD, etc. But even so, it's a slight majority. Look at the source, make your own conclusions. Share them if you wish.
So then the problem in its essence is finding the talent. Find someone who's disciplined and successful and is willing to forgo material wealth for the good of all, a crappy paycheck, and unlimited ridicule and we'll have the next great president, maybe. The problem is you won't find anyone quite like that, because they go for the money or they get disillusioned by the rest who only go for the money while supposedly serving the public interest.
Discipline is key to effectiveness. The "rational debate" of which you speak will not occur again until perhaps the irrational voices are squelched or the election has already run its course. But even then, we may still hear voices.
The Republican playbook is a general turn-off for me. Character assassination and fear mongering instead of forging plans for the future tends to be the dead giveaway. When Obama had more free reign over his campaign with all the candidates involved, he spoke of plans for the future that he was passionate about and which made sense to me in terms of feasibility. Hillary, for what little she's actually done, has little personality except for what she thinks will get her ahead.
She wants to garnish my wages if I can't afford medical insurance, eh? She wants to fight the war (any war) in XXXX (wherever) because she has vested interested in defense spending? She wants me to feel comforted in her experience by the fact that she's been cherry picked by her husband to be in positions of power for a shorter period of time that Obama has been doing public service-oriented work?
I'm sorry, her story just does not check out. I want nothing to do with her platform or her reforms. Her rhetoric reeks of a lack of substance and a motive for her own personal advancement.
Check the exit polls. The more educated, the more likely the vote was for Obama. This statement is not elitist and does not assume a college degree could trump reality or a good common sense, but the averages should speak for themselves. With a college education one ought to be able to seek truth more effectively. I've researched my candidates come to my own conclusions, and I wish everyone could do that, but that's just not realistic for 300 million people to do. So we rely on the media and the game and hope it all works out in the end.
If politics were about qualifications, I'd suspect we'd have heard more about Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich and a few others. I personally would prefer their going to the Whitehouse based off of solid records, good experience, and most important character trait a politician could have: they can't be bought. Obama has yet to be seen, though his discipline with his investments give me a good feeling. Hillary has been bought before, I'm sure it can and will happen again (keywords: walmart board labor union).
You misread the GP's post. He was explaining why they have two sets of voting in Texas, the Primary then the Caucus. The reason is such that there is less of a chance for the other party to sabotage the outcome because of the price paid, waiting in hot sweaty rooms for hours, is too high for the benefit of running against a weaker opponent.
Spot on. The argument before applied just as much to the moon missions and look how much pride we take for that. If anything, dump the money on NASA and get it done sooner than later so we can all start being proud about/something/ America is doing.
I agree that the algorithms are by no means a perfected art, yet. However, once they are chosen and run through the appropriate testing gauntlet for acceptance with respect to the requirements of the project, the software becomes firmware and semi-custom hardware. The embedded solutions are way more viable than running the dual quad core intel Xeon boxes with external generators, air conditioning units, Windows XP, etc. It's just a matter of getting the appropriate development time for getting the false positives and false negatives to an acceptable level.
Personally, I don't think stereo vision is the way to go. Get a single cheaper camera with better low light sensitivity and fuse the data with other sensors. That's a much simpler way to weed the false positives out. Use the camera for whatever it can do reliably: some limited object detection and line/lane following. The nice thing about cameras for vision is that it's a passive detection. The rest tend to be active which is vulnerable to jamming. Though cameras are also vulnerable to natural jamming: dust, rain, snow, fog, etc.
It's really a toss up. There is no perfect perception sensor or system that works ALL the time. You're basically faced with being affordable but vulnerable to something, or expensively outfitted with every sensor ever and still being vulnerable to some cases that will be impossible to test beforehand. All I can say is that there won't be any monolithic solutions to this problem. It will be very customized to the individual requirements of the autonomous vehicles.
This has little to do with Moore's and a lot to do with the fact that sensors do not follow Moore's law. We were using the same sensor technology as was available 15 years ago with marginal to no improvement on quality or capability.
The software side of this DARPA Urban Challenge should consist of no more than an enormous, but straightforward, state machine that contains all the logic for traffic decisions. Plug that into a simulator and you've got the main software part done.
The problem everyone had out in the field for the qualifiers (I was on one of the teams) was perception. How do you know what you see is an obstacle? And how do you deal with false positives, and more importantly, false negatives? Some people believe in cross referencing sensor data, which is called sensor fusion. It is difficult, to say the least, to characterize every possible obstacle that ought to be considered a true obstacle if it lies on your vehicles path, let alone have a 10^-6 failure rate for improper detection.
The highway lane following has been solved since the 70s, check out R.E. Fentons work on Automated Highways in Transportation Science (1970). We had some "recent" developments in the early 1990s where we got some autonomous vehicles to do the autobahn at 100mph with more modern sensors and vehicles, but really didn't improve that much because the sensors aren't there yet.
Your sensor choice goes something like this:
$75k for a Velodyne 3D laser system
$5k for the SICK 2D (planar) lasers
~$25k for stereo vision cameras (per set)
~$1k for radar
$75K for the Applanix integrated GPS and IMU
The Velodyne is a spinning set of 64 lasers, with 64 photodiodes. Each manually placed so that the photodiodes are aimed precisely where the lasers are pointed. The entire head of the unit spins at ~2Hz and generates 1 million points per second. Most of the teams that bought one mounted it on top of their vehicle. This sensor is great if you have infinite processing power available to crunch the data and turn it into cost maps. It however has some serious problems: it's very expensive, it's not mass manufacturable, the point data for a rock and a shrub are indistinguishable (a weakness of all lasers), some obstacles we're interested in absorb laser or reflect it away from the photodiodes, it has too much information, and it has moving parts.
The SICK 2D planar lasers have more or less the same problems, except there's less data to crunch of course. These lasers also have moving parts internally, which spin a mirror at maybe ~20Hz to get distance data over a 2D plane. Same issues as the Velodyne, except it's manufacturable (has been for 15 years now).
Stereo vision is really hard to do right. When you have roughly a year to develop the platform and the algorithms, I don't expect much, and I didn't see much. This may be the answer in the future for passive detection, but I don't see it working at the moment.
RADAR is the right sensor for this type of work. It gives you distance and speed. If you're clever it also gives you the "cost" of a particular object. Radar is how you can tell the difference between a shrub and rock, or a car and a plastic fence. The real cost in the RADAR is not the sensor, but the $100k guy who knows RADAR well enough to set it up right and get good data out of it.
The Applanix GPS and IMU with 200k RPM laser gyros are not manufacturable and not practical for autonomous vehicles because of the cost. Perhaps the MEMs solutions will catch up and make IMUs cheaper, but in the mean time we're stuck with these systems if you care about your position.
That's my take on it. Improve the sensors and we'll get autonomous vehicles. Buy another Cray, strap on a generator and a multi-ton air conditioner is not the solution. We need to reliably and cheaply generate cost maps that are relevant to the vehicle that's being automated. Once that's been done reliably, we will have autonomous vehicles. Cheers.
Don't use Word or OO for manuscripts. Both suck. LaTeX or TeX ftw! Don't mix formatting with content creation. Create the content, then do the layout and do it well. All numbering, indexing, tables of contents, and other dynamic referential data can be automated--later. Or, if format or layout dictates to some extent your content, do that first, then fill in content separately. Thinking and fighting with automagic "I fixed this for you" behavior from MS or OO is a waste of thought process when you're trying to decide what to say and how to say it. And yes, I'm a Knuth fanboy. Sue me.
Even if you had a right to jury nullification (which you don't) Emphasis, mine. Say what now? Since when do jurors not have that particular de facto right? It's inherent to the system.
Slashdot Mirror
This absolutely accurate in a general sense. My field is Electrical Engineering and I have seen managers of the latter type, where "programmer" can be replaced with "engineer". An ignorant manager is an irresponsible and shortsighted way to do the job.
I've read these arguments and I must disagree. Though I'm not in IT, I still can say with confidence it requires more than managing the people above to be a good manager. TFA is pointing out that it is unlikely some MBA fellow is going to realistically engage with line level employees. How does he know what tools and materials they needs to do their job? He doesn't. Had he done their job before, as that company does, then yes he does understand and should also be able to comprehend how it needs to change in order to remain competitive. Does he need to be a star coder? Not really. With those prior skills the hardest part will be for him not to micromanage. Beyond that, whatever it takes to keep his people happy and motivated defines a good line manager.
Thanks! How user-friendly of them... =)
How does one change this setting?
Well put. Thus it is up to us to create pockets of greatness by assembling those who do not subscribe to the culture of incompetence.
Word. Whenever that happens to me these days I laugh and read this xkcd strip: http://xkcd.com/386/.
Then maybe spread some lovin' if it's worth it. Cheers. =)
Dualities are so rare it's best not to assume that any exist in nature. Grouping a whole set of people into two groups and then covering either one with verbal poop means nothing and does nothing but divide. We all say divisive like we know what it means, but really it's inflammatory posts that rile people emotions instead of appealing to our sense of logic and reasoning that are part of this divide. So please stop calling names like "liberal" and "conservative" without actually specifying the idea you're critiquing.
Sure, the whole of the left-wing moon bats destroy environment more than 1 SUV. Pardon me while I take offense to being put into a group, to which I so obviously "belong" because I merely disagree with you, even though I don't piss birth control into our water because I happen to be the other gender.
Fallacy of your argument should be easy to see if we restate your premise. Sierra Club and MoveOn don't have birth control piss water in their mission statements (radar), therefore it's okay to spill gasoline on small animals and shoot them with assault rifles then teach children the "abstinence" method of BC, causing a surge of teenage pregnancy (thank you Britany, Paris) and a sudden increase in sales of wire coat hangers and the resulting trips to the ER where the finish the mangled abortion anyway. What the fuck. Is this any way to have a conversation? Not really. It just pisses people off and solves nothing.
Not to mention your blame is misguided. Those are special interest groups. They have money. They have the donation lists for each party. You want elected via an R or D party? You get money from those groups, plain and simple. Does it excuse their actions? NO. Does it mean everyone who votes for one or the other believes everyone, 100%, that the party stands for? NO. So stop whining like it does. Yes we all care about water purity, except we're talking about a Digital Presidency and improving communications between the Chief and the people.
My salty advice to you: RTFA. Stop being a dualist. Talk about issues and not talking points with loaded questions. Less terrible logic on tangents that excuse your vices and more analysis with a focus on the topic at hand. Peace.
Hmm... I think you're confusing copyright with patents. Or perhaps we are confusing the difference. I see the original intent of copyright as a means for the original author to benefit from and be recognized for his creative content. Likewise for patents, to allow the Davids of inventing to slay the Goliaths of the market.
At some point the problem becomes one like the US Military's: you will pay whatever price so long as it works. If copies become free then yes, Dassault and company will go out of business without a major business model change. However, with a few improvements in their licensing scheme and some server upgrades you've got a viable system again and people we be paying 10k per seat again. Why? Because Dassault and MS have the money to make the licensing work. Security is the natural answer to the problem. And everyone knows that no lock is impenetrable, so it is effectively the complexity of the lock that determines the length of protection for your IP. Why waste the time and money of our government with what we can do on our own for less cost and better results?
burlout?
We don't need the TSA to do this. Every able-bodied citizen of America who experienced 9-11 will now and forever watch and notice these attributes of their fellow travelers. 9-11 can never happen exactly the same again. However, newer unconventional methods may be used but the trick has been done and the magician won't be performing it again for this audience. They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.
*Woosh* There went 8:00pm EST...
If the ignorant and the wise have an argument, who wins?
Where do scientists come from? Is their job not but to find technical truth?
I suppose you didn't look at the exit polls as I suggested. The information is delicate and nuanced. I have definitely missed some points worth making. Regardless, if you actually look at the statistics for what I was talking about, you'd see this largely applied to those educated beyond the 4 year programs of BA, BS, etc. such as people with MS, PhD, etc. But even so, it's a slight majority. Look at the source, make your own conclusions. Share them if you wish.
So then the problem in its essence is finding the talent. Find someone who's disciplined and successful and is willing to forgo material wealth for the good of all, a crappy paycheck, and unlimited ridicule and we'll have the next great president, maybe. The problem is you won't find anyone quite like that, because they go for the money or they get disillusioned by the rest who only go for the money while supposedly serving the public interest.
Discipline is key to effectiveness. The "rational debate" of which you speak will not occur again until perhaps the irrational voices are squelched or the election has already run its course. But even then, we may still hear voices.
In a word: vendor lock-in.
The Republican playbook is a general turn-off for me. Character assassination and fear mongering instead of forging plans for the future tends to be the dead giveaway. When Obama had more free reign over his campaign with all the candidates involved, he spoke of plans for the future that he was passionate about and which made sense to me in terms of feasibility. Hillary, for what little she's actually done, has little personality except for what she thinks will get her ahead.
She wants to garnish my wages if I can't afford medical insurance, eh? She wants to fight the war (any war) in XXXX (wherever) because she has vested interested in defense spending? She wants me to feel comforted in her experience by the fact that she's been cherry picked by her husband to be in positions of power for a shorter period of time that Obama has been doing public service-oriented work?
I'm sorry, her story just does not check out. I want nothing to do with her platform or her reforms. Her rhetoric reeks of a lack of substance and a motive for her own personal advancement.
Check the exit polls. The more educated, the more likely the vote was for Obama. This statement is not elitist and does not assume a college degree could trump reality or a good common sense, but the averages should speak for themselves. With a college education one ought to be able to seek truth more effectively. I've researched my candidates come to my own conclusions, and I wish everyone could do that, but that's just not realistic for 300 million people to do. So we rely on the media and the game and hope it all works out in the end.
If politics were about qualifications, I'd suspect we'd have heard more about Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich and a few others. I personally would prefer their going to the Whitehouse based off of solid records, good experience, and most important character trait a politician could have: they can't be bought. Obama has yet to be seen, though his discipline with his investments give me a good feeling. Hillary has been bought before, I'm sure it can and will happen again (keywords: walmart board labor union).
You misread the GP's post. He was explaining why they have two sets of voting in Texas, the Primary then the Caucus. The reason is such that there is less of a chance for the other party to sabotage the outcome because of the price paid, waiting in hot sweaty rooms for hours, is too high for the benefit of running against a weaker opponent.
I'm a personal fan of the honor system.
Spot on. The argument before applied just as much to the moon missions and look how much pride we take for that. If anything, dump the money on NASA and get it done sooner than later so we can all start being proud about /something/ America is doing.
Can I have a job? Seriously. I am going to try to move to Hinwil, Switzerland in ~8 months or so with my S.O. Anyone hiring EE's out there? =)
I agree that the algorithms are by no means a perfected art, yet. However, once they are chosen and run through the appropriate testing gauntlet for acceptance with respect to the requirements of the project, the software becomes firmware and semi-custom hardware. The embedded solutions are way more viable than running the dual quad core intel Xeon boxes with external generators, air conditioning units, Windows XP, etc. It's just a matter of getting the appropriate development time for getting the false positives and false negatives to an acceptable level.
Personally, I don't think stereo vision is the way to go. Get a single cheaper camera with better low light sensitivity and fuse the data with other sensors. That's a much simpler way to weed the false positives out. Use the camera for whatever it can do reliably: some limited object detection and line/lane following. The nice thing about cameras for vision is that it's a passive detection. The rest tend to be active which is vulnerable to jamming. Though cameras are also vulnerable to natural jamming: dust, rain, snow, fog, etc.
It's really a toss up. There is no perfect perception sensor or system that works ALL the time. You're basically faced with being affordable but vulnerable to something, or expensively outfitted with every sensor ever and still being vulnerable to some cases that will be impossible to test beforehand. All I can say is that there won't be any monolithic solutions to this problem. It will be very customized to the individual requirements of the autonomous vehicles.
This has little to do with Moore's and a lot to do with the fact that sensors do not follow Moore's law. We were using the same sensor technology as was available 15 years ago with marginal to no improvement on quality or capability.
The software side of this DARPA Urban Challenge should consist of no more than an enormous, but straightforward, state machine that contains all the logic for traffic decisions. Plug that into a simulator and you've got the main software part done.
The problem everyone had out in the field for the qualifiers (I was on one of the teams) was perception. How do you know what you see is an obstacle? And how do you deal with false positives, and more importantly, false negatives? Some people believe in cross referencing sensor data, which is called sensor fusion. It is difficult, to say the least, to characterize every possible obstacle that ought to be considered a true obstacle if it lies on your vehicles path, let alone have a 10^-6 failure rate for improper detection.
The highway lane following has been solved since the 70s, check out R.E. Fentons work on Automated Highways in Transportation Science (1970). We had some "recent" developments in the early 1990s where we got some autonomous vehicles to do the autobahn at 100mph with more modern sensors and vehicles, but really didn't improve that much because the sensors aren't there yet.
Your sensor choice goes something like this:
$75k for a Velodyne 3D laser system
$5k for the SICK 2D (planar) lasers
~$25k for stereo vision cameras (per set)
~$1k for radar
$75K for the Applanix integrated GPS and IMU
The Velodyne is a spinning set of 64 lasers, with 64 photodiodes. Each manually placed so that the photodiodes are aimed precisely where the lasers are pointed. The entire head of the unit spins at ~2Hz and generates 1 million points per second. Most of the teams that bought one mounted it on top of their vehicle. This sensor is great if you have infinite processing power available to crunch the data and turn it into cost maps. It however has some serious problems: it's very expensive, it's not mass manufacturable, the point data for a rock and a shrub are indistinguishable (a weakness of all lasers), some obstacles we're interested in absorb laser or reflect it away from the photodiodes, it has too much information, and it has moving parts.
The SICK 2D planar lasers have more or less the same problems, except there's less data to crunch of course. These lasers also have moving parts internally, which spin a mirror at maybe ~20Hz to get distance data over a 2D plane. Same issues as the Velodyne, except it's manufacturable (has been for 15 years now).
Stereo vision is really hard to do right. When you have roughly a year to develop the platform and the algorithms, I don't expect much, and I didn't see much. This may be the answer in the future for passive detection, but I don't see it working at the moment.
RADAR is the right sensor for this type of work. It gives you distance and speed. If you're clever it also gives you the "cost" of a particular object. Radar is how you can tell the difference between a shrub and rock, or a car and a plastic fence. The real cost in the RADAR is not the sensor, but the $100k guy who knows RADAR well enough to set it up right and get good data out of it.
The Applanix GPS and IMU with 200k RPM laser gyros are not manufacturable and not practical for autonomous vehicles because of the cost. Perhaps the MEMs solutions will catch up and make IMUs cheaper, but in the mean time we're stuck with these systems if you care about your position.
That's my take on it. Improve the sensors and we'll get autonomous vehicles. Buy another Cray, strap on a generator and a multi-ton air conditioner is not the solution. We need to reliably and cheaply generate cost maps that are relevant to the vehicle that's being automated. Once that's been done reliably, we will have autonomous vehicles. Cheers.
If you can't see the Coral Cache, just use Tor:
http://tor.eff.org/
Don't use Word or OO for manuscripts. Both suck. LaTeX or TeX ftw! Don't mix formatting with content creation. Create the content, then do the layout and do it well. All numbering, indexing, tables of contents, and other dynamic referential data can be automated--later. Or, if format or layout dictates to some extent your content, do that first, then fill in content separately. Thinking and fighting with automagic "I fixed this for you" behavior from MS or OO is a waste of thought process when you're trying to decide what to say and how to say it. And yes, I'm a Knuth fanboy. Sue me.
Even if you had a right to jury nullification (which you don't)
Emphasis, mine. Say what now? Since when do jurors not have that particular de facto right? It's inherent to the system.