My experience with standards is also that they are living things. Some of them are OC established and stable but some of them are developing and by nature of things - if you are developing some new area and aim for functioning interwork between items coming from different vendors then standards are of great value also when they change constantly. You can ignore them and hope that the interwork issues are of no importance or that the rest of the world will adjust to your concept and thus forming de facto standards (also called industry standards). You can leave it at that too. You can see the consequences of both approaches in mobile telephony. US has usually much better technology but it was singular in this sense that only some of the operators used it and no interwork was possible. Europe took different approach and with ITU established a common platform which allowed them the following: provide customers with smooth switching between networks, reuse of equipment across boarders etc and thus most importantly rapid growth. US had better technology but because the guys on the market could not agree on any common standard the result was a mess. I guess you still have problems there with handover? OC web development is different in that it does not follow any regulations and thus allows a lot of crap to prevail. It is indeed miserable experience to use web applications for years now and seeing your approach this is not going to change.
While we have machines getting better at understanding the gibberish humans produce we may try to get a machine to convince people to get over the gibberish in the first place. This could involve significant simplifications to our speech patterns down to say: 'yes, sir', 'no, sir', 'I do not know sir' and "I have not understood the order sir'. If we are not allowed to respond in any other way this can increase meaningful content in an average speech sample.
As a citizen of a country that broke free from a tyrant 20 years ago trough public unrest etc I can say that this is incorrect. People majority of them do not care about freedom of speech because in majority of cases they use speech to communicate with their peers about things that matter most: family, health, job, money etc.
If you provide the majority the possibility to support the family and live in relative peace I can guarantee you that majority will not care about abstract freedoms like this as they consider them nice to have but must have. This changes when no job, no women and alco is available for a huge population of young men especially if they are not educated well as they do not even consider such abstract things like freedom to be needed and may accept another thief and murderer instead of the new one.
To this I have one question: how much power one indihvidual sank in a ocean of US (or any other western) democracy actually has - I reckon not very much. You can scream as much as you want and even have reasonable arguments but still end up having to accept what they decided for you. The difference is of course that once in a while you can replace old asshole with a new one so damage per asshole is relatively small. This advantage proves to be diminishing with increasing number of assholes. Still that is the right neither NK's nor Libya's citizens have.
The reasons as always are many but I can imagine that dutch government does something between going to brothels (legal) and enjoying occasional joint (decriminalized) and put some rules on the industry. I know I know not only they are immoral and disgusting abusers of female and male prostitutes, not only they smoke grass (and other drugs and inevitable die of OD soon) - that is the same in US only there it is all illegal - the difference is that they are OMG commies as they are not afraid to regulate sensibly t he markets. You may ask what this has t o do with anything? Well When I lived in NL the broadband did not exist yet. I learned however that telecos were obliged by virtue of the licenses allowing them to operate to provide service to all citizens wherever they would be. Not providing the service could result in hefty fines. Of course it is easier to have a cable laid between a-dam and small village 10km away than between de-industrialized and depopulated centers of say Chicago but the difficulty level is small. I guess if US were not so abusive against any 'community' idea they could have better service and less bureaucracy than they have in many other areas not only broadband. But they are leaders anyway and can send marines to anybody who claims otherwise unless they are in NK, China or Iran (well I do not think you will try Iran again would you?).
I observe the debates in US for quite some time and I cannot avoid an impression that the heated discussions very often if not almost always completely miss the point and the results (if any) are more bureaucracy than in red tape Europe and this all in the country of the free etc with free market and everybody believing in small state etc. This somehow reminds me about Germany - I guess there is a size factor - if country is big enough the fat cats are so fat that they can bribe anybody and there are a lots of them so gov officials have no time for normal people at all. In Holland this seems to stay under control i.e. corruption in high places is limited and they actually do something also for common men.
It can also be that the dutch are just more pragmatic than the rest of humanity. There surely must be a reason why the country is so well off and this wealth is spread to majority of population thus reducing social tensions and allowing for relatively reasonable decision making. Of course signs of decay are all there too - after all this is a western society....
I lived there few years and hated every joint I smoked (but did not inhale - I did not want to offend locals:)
That is interesting approach. It actually could work also if company considers outsourcing/offshoring your job to Zamunda - as the work environment change is imminent the company may consider one that is less stressful and less negatively impacting relationship with a customer. Of course you could do it and still have to do what they want even if it is silly - after all new idea to save money has always a guy who gets a bonus when it is implemented. The usually negative costs of such exercises are seen months after bonus is consumed.
100h/week that translates into almost 14h/day on each and every day of these 4months. This I consider hardly doable. I had myself a hard (over)time once. 3 or 4 months of 10h/day 5 and few hours on sundays (I do not ever work on days of Saturn). I recall that I was dizzy when going home. We are talking about actual working time excluding lunch and BSing at the coffee machine but including discussions about technical details at the same machine.
I did not think I could do more back then. But I had a colleague of whom I found out that he reported 160h overtime a month for a year or two. I had a closer look how he did it. He did not do much over the working day - waking around, mailing , browsing etc. His main job was executed in the afternoons, evenings and nights when there was nobody disturbing. Mngtm team considered overblown reporting as a way to give him more money without increasing his hourly rate which was controlled from HQ. I have not seen anybody yet that for prolonged period of time worked longer then 60-80h a week. I mean effective work here not standby times.
I also realized that nothing justifies such lengthy swats of work. Not even your productivity as it does not increase this much and when you are tired you make more mistakes so it is questionable that this makes sense to work so hard. OC if this additional work is cleaning up your office and toilets so activity that is different from developing and not requiring much brain effort of the same time you need when doing a serious application then it may actually make sense for the company if they are stressed with money. Only why - if you have to do such thing for a company you do not own and control then it is a serous mistake.
On top of this after 20years of working experience I know that if your ob requires such commitment then unless you are a president of a country or member of a board of directors such a 'need' means two things:
there has been a serious f.up
the work env. is so messed up that the chances that somebody has actually any use of your additional productivity (if it at all exists) are small.
From all this I gather that unless it is to save us from domination of an green assholes tribe from mars there is always a better argument against.
As to original post - what the boss actually asked for is to reduce manhour price as all of the working folk is salary people. I would start looking for another job as all others suggested.
well this is hopeless - sex discussion on/. and on top an attempt to divulge into the world of other physical activity - I mean how theoretical can you get?
yes you are right I meant here 'correct' in context of correct play-out i.e. best possible play and not in context of rules i.e. what is/is not a legal move. The problem or issue seen by some as a problem is that we humans cannot really determine whether a play shown by players in such play-out case is really the best. This has for some a consequence that such play-out is pointless and 'wrong'. This goes into direction where ambiguity of so called japanese rules i.e. ones used most of players in Europe is or is not invalidating the rules - I think I can live with this even if in some cases this may strip me a win in an important game. There are people that do not accept this. For me this ambiguity even if unpleasant is still a valid part of the game and another mirror of reality on the board - as the game is an abstracted struggle of two armies etc.
Is US still #1 in manufacturing??? Well maybe it is but even if it were for how long would that be - other big countries grow fast very fast. Not that this is a good or bad thing it is just a fact - manufacturing output of US in long term has been in decline. If it were to fall further then it still has a long way down but that is how long term trend is looking like.
Well let them fix that period at which to trade alone - introduce transaction tax (small but for any transaction on financial market) and this run for microseconds will cease.
You will not see it happening any day soon of course for obvious reasons.
I do not mind much HFT albeit I question its usefulness for the society and economy at large. HFT is pointless but it is legal and it may stay so. The problem lies elsewhere actually - if you look at the system in general - it does not have built in controls at all - the only thing that prevents it from violent movements is its mass. It works well most of the time providing monies to HFT masters but when all goes wrong then we are all sorry and guess who is going to salvage the financial institutions?
I guess some sort of negative feedback loop needs to be built in - transaction tax would help I think this run to microseconds while providing money that could be used if financial systems crash which they do from time to time anyway. I think this is undoable though as this would mean that rules setters would refuse money from the HFT masters which is unlikely.
Well it is a game with full information which means if you knew all there would not be a point in playing. I guess so called Go Gods would not need play then as all would be clear to them from the onset. This particular property of the game is especially visible in determination of so called Komi which is a number of points White gets for having to start as a second.
Playing till the end is one way of ensuring that the result is correct and this is I think foreseen in some rule-sets that if players do not agree on status of some groups at the end of the game then they have to play out the game. This still does not guarantee that the result of such play-out is correct. One of fascinating things about this game is how it is similar to problems we encounter in our lives where complete information even if seemingly available (as with all stones on the board) still the knowledge what the status is, is not available. Why should it be? Looking at this from another angle do you think that Monte Carlo bots that seem to be approaching level of profi players or any hypothetical software that could win against strongest human know anything about the game?
With all due respect for Robert: his work mostly concernes rules and faults built within and is most useful for coders of GO software and professional players. Other than that majority of players in Europe does use a system of counting that they think is based on Japanese rules yet it is not. Fascinating is that it still works for them so maybe the problem is not so widespread as some people like to think.
Privacy??? Who do you think care - do you think FB guys do? Reveal all and complain when it is too late that how humans work. It is of course good that there is a bit more privacy out there but I would not get all excited about this small little thing.
some humans are. There are many reasons why this is not prevalent state of affairs of course. Some inherent to human nature of course: minority benefits paid by majority means that motivation to act and participate in political process is big in this minority as ROI is huge because the benefits for these few are paid by many. The motivation of the members of majority is much smaller because their personal losses are small or unlikely albeit taken in absolute numbers massive. This leads to unbalanced policies as the authorities are put under pressure by the militant minority while majority does not even look. There are other reasons of course too - incompetent authorities - these are the essence of the society and society at large has no capability to understand issues more complex than 'this is my beer it is free'. But even with these limitations sometimes we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into something good. The American Revolution is a good example (while of course US is a good example that greatness once is not a guarantee for greatness forever).
these are apparently well skilled people that possibly may stay longer and create prosperity in the visited country also when they stop visiting and become citizens for real. What is wrong with that? It is definitely better than having unskilled immigrants polluting labor market at low end.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all as they required:
understanding of the tested subject
ability to solve puzzles related to subject
And as such exams are time limited no dead tree or electronic material can really help you solve the task in time if you have no clue. These were exams I actually enjoyed as I could pass (albeit not w/o difficulties) and majority of my colleagues (the cheaters and those that learned by the letter) needed few more attempts usually.
You realize of course that branding have more often than not these days not much to do with what is sold with it. The car industry is a perfect example: you buy a car and you think it is German - not so: it may have been produced in Poland, Czech Republic, France, Belgium or Spain in a factory owner partially by competitors. This means however that when you buy say Mercedes it does not mean that the car is produced in Stuttgart.
OTOH people fly with jets that carriers bought and hope the authorities control the market well enough so that landing are more or less controlled i.e. you purchase the whole flight experience not start only. Not all Chinese companies produce crap.
It is not as much of an economic threat as it seems or at least not in the way you seem to realize. China is a huge country and dominated trade, inventions and economy in the world for significant amount of time. Only in relatively recent history had the west a chance to be up front. Now this is changing again and not really due to better Chinese economy or intelligence (which btw is what Chinese seem to think) but due to the fact that the country is so darned big and for once has independent and kinda unified government that leads the way. I find interesting that with all the shouting that Chinese party and military officials do there is still much for them to do before they can substantially dominate anything. The problem for US is that for a change there is a country that is selling stuff to US but is not buying weaponry (or much else for that matter) there which causes great imbalance in trade. This is bound to cause trouble sooner or later. Current shouting by Chinese finance minister is just a show - they are scared shitless that this pile of dollars that they gathered will be worthless before they can buy stuff with it and even more scared that suddenly there is less places they can sell their shit to. for the US the problem is how not to destroy the country by printing $$.
the engine market is not dominated by RR this much. General Electric is bigger and Pratt & Whitney is also huge.
All this enthusiasm in air transport does not seem to take into account the problems with fossil fuels and their availability in the future. I wonder how the air transportation will look like in 50 years. I am sure alternatives will be found but they will not be cheap. This does not mean one should not invest but I think a second thought should be spent on sustainability (both in terms of economics as well as environment) in this particular industry
Slashdot Mirror
I work in telecom for quite some years now and the outages are not as common in industrialized world. Perhaps you live in non-industrialized one?
My experience with standards is also that they are living things. Some of them are OC established and stable but some of them are developing and by nature of things - if you are developing some new area and aim for functioning interwork between items coming from different vendors then standards are of great value also when they change constantly. You can ignore them and hope that the interwork issues are of no importance or that the rest of the world will adjust to your concept and thus forming de facto standards (also called industry standards). You can leave it at that too. You can see the consequences of both approaches in mobile telephony. US has usually much better technology but it was singular in this sense that only some of the operators used it and no interwork was possible. Europe took different approach and with ITU established a common platform which allowed them the following: provide customers with smooth switching between networks, reuse of equipment across boarders etc and thus most importantly rapid growth. US had better technology but because the guys on the market could not agree on any common standard the result was a mess. I guess you still have problems there with handover? OC web development is different in that it does not follow any regulations and thus allows a lot of crap to prevail. It is indeed miserable experience to use web applications for years now and seeing your approach this is not going to change.
While we have machines getting better at understanding the gibberish humans produce we may try to get a machine to convince people to get over the gibberish in the first place. This could involve significant simplifications to our speech patterns down to say: 'yes, sir', 'no, sir', 'I do not know sir' and "I have not understood the order sir'. If we are not allowed to respond in any other way this can increase meaningful content in an average speech sample.
As a citizen of a country that broke free from a tyrant 20 years ago trough public unrest etc I can say that this is incorrect. People majority of them do not care about freedom of speech because in majority of cases they use speech to communicate with their peers about things that matter most: family, health, job, money etc. If you provide the majority the possibility to support the family and live in relative peace I can guarantee you that majority will not care about abstract freedoms like this as they consider them nice to have but must have. This changes when no job, no women and alco is available for a huge population of young men especially if they are not educated well as they do not even consider such abstract things like freedom to be needed and may accept another thief and murderer instead of the new one.
To this I have one question: how much power one indihvidual sank in a ocean of US (or any other western) democracy actually has - I reckon not very much. You can scream as much as you want and even have reasonable arguments but still end up having to accept what they decided for you. The difference is of course that once in a while you can replace old asshole with a new one so damage per asshole is relatively small. This advantage proves to be diminishing with increasing number of assholes. Still that is the right neither NK's nor Libya's citizens have.
I observe the debates in US for quite some time and I cannot avoid an impression that the heated discussions very often if not almost always completely miss the point and the results (if any) are more bureaucracy than in red tape Europe and this all in the country of the free etc with free market and everybody believing in small state etc. This somehow reminds me about Germany - I guess there is a size factor - if country is big enough the fat cats are so fat that they can bribe anybody and there are a lots of them so gov officials have no time for normal people at all. In Holland this seems to stay under control i.e. corruption in high places is limited and they actually do something also for common men.
It can also be that the dutch are just more pragmatic than the rest of humanity. There surely must be a reason why the country is so well off and this wealth is spread to majority of population thus reducing social tensions and allowing for relatively reasonable decision making. Of course signs of decay are all there too - after all this is a western society....
I lived there few years and hated every joint I smoked (but did not inhale - I did not want to offend locals :)
That is interesting approach. It actually could work also if company considers outsourcing/offshoring your job to Zamunda - as the work environment change is imminent the company may consider one that is less stressful and less negatively impacting relationship with a customer. Of course you could do it and still have to do what they want even if it is silly - after all new idea to save money has always a guy who gets a bonus when it is implemented. The usually negative costs of such exercises are seen months after bonus is consumed.
I did not think I could do more back then. But I had a colleague of whom I found out that he reported 160h overtime a month for a year or two. I had a closer look how he did it. He did not do much over the working day - waking around, mailing , browsing etc. His main job was executed in the afternoons, evenings and nights when there was nobody disturbing. Mngtm team considered overblown reporting as a way to give him more money without increasing his hourly rate which was controlled from HQ. I have not seen anybody yet that for prolonged period of time worked longer then 60-80h a week. I mean effective work here not standby times.
I also realized that nothing justifies such lengthy swats of work. Not even your productivity as it does not increase this much and when you are tired you make more mistakes so it is questionable that this makes sense to work so hard. OC if this additional work is cleaning up your office and toilets so activity that is different from developing and not requiring much brain effort of the same time you need when doing a serious application then it may actually make sense for the company if they are stressed with money. Only why - if you have to do such thing for a company you do not own and control then it is a serous mistake.
On top of this after 20years of working experience I know that if your ob requires such commitment then unless you are a president of a country or member of a board of directors such a 'need' means two things:
From all this I gather that unless it is to save us from domination of an green assholes tribe from mars there is always a better argument against.
As to original post - what the boss actually asked for is to reduce manhour price as all of the working folk is salary people. I would start looking for another job as all others suggested.
well this is hopeless - sex discussion on /. and on top an attempt to divulge into the world of other physical activity - I mean how theoretical can you get?
so she will regret it and what then....????? Crie of course which leads to more sex and crying which leads to even more sex and more crying.
yes you are right I meant here 'correct' in context of correct play-out i.e. best possible play and not in context of rules i.e. what is/is not a legal move. The problem or issue seen by some as a problem is that we humans cannot really determine whether a play shown by players in such play-out case is really the best. This has for some a consequence that such play-out is pointless and 'wrong'. This goes into direction where ambiguity of so called japanese rules i.e. ones used most of players in Europe is or is not invalidating the rules - I think I can live with this even if in some cases this may strip me a win in an important game. There are people that do not accept this. For me this ambiguity even if unpleasant is still a valid part of the game and another mirror of reality on the board - as the game is an abstracted struggle of two armies etc.
Is US still #1 in manufacturing??? Well maybe it is but even if it were for how long would that be - other big countries grow fast very fast. Not that this is a good or bad thing it is just a fact - manufacturing output of US in long term has been in decline. If it were to fall further then it still has a long way down but that is how long term trend is looking like.
You will not see it happening any day soon of course for obvious reasons.
I guess some sort of negative feedback loop needs to be built in - transaction tax would help I think this run to microseconds while providing money that could be used if financial systems crash which they do from time to time anyway. I think this is undoable though as this would mean that rules setters would refuse money from the HFT masters which is unlikely.
You mean confusion stops at the point when you realize that the full understanding is impossible?
Playing till the end is one way of ensuring that the result is correct and this is I think foreseen in some rule-sets that if players do not agree on status of some groups at the end of the game then they have to play out the game. This still does not guarantee that the result of such play-out is correct. One of fascinating things about this game is how it is similar to problems we encounter in our lives where complete information even if seemingly available (as with all stones on the board) still the knowledge what the status is, is not available. Why should it be? Looking at this from another angle do you think that Monte Carlo bots that seem to be approaching level of profi players or any hypothetical software that could win against strongest human know anything about the game?
With all due respect for Robert: his work mostly concernes rules and faults built within and is most useful for coders of GO software and professional players. Other than that majority of players in Europe does use a system of counting that they think is based on Japanese rules yet it is not. Fascinating is that it still works for them so maybe the problem is not so widespread as some people like to think.
they should put this Shakespear where he belongs. American Congress would do I think, especially if they also were put where they belong...
Privacy??? Who do you think care - do you think FB guys do? Reveal all and complain when it is too late that how humans work. It is of course good that there is a bit more privacy out there but I would not get all excited about this small little thing.
some humans are. There are many reasons why this is not prevalent state of affairs of course. Some inherent to human nature of course: minority benefits paid by majority means that motivation to act and participate in political process is big in this minority as ROI is huge because the benefits for these few are paid by many. The motivation of the members of majority is much smaller because their personal losses are small or unlikely albeit taken in absolute numbers massive. This leads to unbalanced policies as the authorities are put under pressure by the militant minority while majority does not even look. There are other reasons of course too - incompetent authorities - these are the essence of the society and society at large has no capability to understand issues more complex than 'this is my beer it is free'. But even with these limitations sometimes we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into something good. The American Revolution is a good example (while of course US is a good example that greatness once is not a guarantee for greatness forever).
these are apparently well skilled people that possibly may stay longer and create prosperity in the visited country also when they stop visiting and become citizens for real. What is wrong with that? It is definitely better than having unskilled immigrants polluting labor market at low end.
And as such exams are time limited no dead tree or electronic material can really help you solve the task in time if you have no clue. These were exams I actually enjoyed as I could pass (albeit not w/o difficulties) and majority of my colleagues (the cheaters and those that learned by the letter) needed few more attempts usually.
You realize of course that branding have more often than not these days not much to do with what is sold with it. The car industry is a perfect example: you buy a car and you think it is German - not so: it may have been produced in Poland, Czech Republic, France, Belgium or Spain in a factory owner partially by competitors. This means however that when you buy say Mercedes it does not mean that the car is produced in Stuttgart. OTOH people fly with jets that carriers bought and hope the authorities control the market well enough so that landing are more or less controlled i.e. you purchase the whole flight experience not start only. Not all Chinese companies produce crap.
It is not as much of an economic threat as it seems or at least not in the way you seem to realize. China is a huge country and dominated trade, inventions and economy in the world for significant amount of time. Only in relatively recent history had the west a chance to be up front. Now this is changing again and not really due to better Chinese economy or intelligence (which btw is what Chinese seem to think) but due to the fact that the country is so darned big and for once has independent and kinda unified government that leads the way. I find interesting that with all the shouting that Chinese party and military officials do there is still much for them to do before they can substantially dominate anything. The problem for US is that for a change there is a country that is selling stuff to US but is not buying weaponry (or much else for that matter) there which causes great imbalance in trade. This is bound to cause trouble sooner or later. Current shouting by Chinese finance minister is just a show - they are scared shitless that this pile of dollars that they gathered will be worthless before they can buy stuff with it and even more scared that suddenly there is less places they can sell their shit to. for the US the problem is how not to destroy the country by printing $$.