What planet do you live on, freak? This is the same old mindless rant/diatribe that is posted every few weaks. Everyone to be an entrepreneur?
Yes, seriously. If the popular conception is right that the top 1% in corporations are colluding to siphon away all the income of the productive body of a corporation, why don't the workers break off and start their own companies? It's a more self-determined path than a labor union. If the new company succeeds, those in charge are free to distribute the wealth as they see fit. Working for a corporation is a voluntary affair.
This country was not established so corporations - which only exist within the security of the nation - could enjoy the fruits and benefits of this country - while trashing its citizenry by taking advantage of them -- then shipping their jobs off to the least-cost labor market
That's really a value statement, and doesn't translate into policy. The legal system is comprised of hundreds of laws made over many years, none of which individually determines the outcome. The economy is an emergent property, constantly changing to maximize revenue. Trying to legislate corporations to do something as general as "employ only Americans" and "pay them well" is just like trying to write a program with advanced AI, or keeping people from downloading copyrighted files from the Internet, or ensuring that NTSB regulations guarantee a terrorist will never strike again. There will be always be legitimate reasons for corporations to hire overseas, so you'll never be able to plug the leak. There are always loopholes in a complex system. Beyond this, laws which attempt to redistribute wealth change the equation altogether. You can't assume that there would be as much wealth to distribute in the new system, since the dynamics are different.
The only sure way to earn what you deserve is to either find a company whose leaders you don't think are "wrong", or do it yourself. I'm not arguing that I think it's good or right for the rich to be rich or the poor to be poor. I worked in a grocery store for a decade, and I didn't like it. I'm simply being pragmatic.
The government shouldn't meddle in the staffing of private corporations, and corporations do pay taxes for the right to exist in the country. It's not a freebie. And once again, if you all believe that corporations are free rides to wealth, start one. It's easier to do so in this country than in almost any other.
On a final note, I do agree with some others here that healthcare is the responsibility of government, as it is for the common good. How to best accomplish that is debatable, but it should be guaranteed to all citizens in some fashion.
Almost like clockwork, every couple of weeks we get another article about outsourcing (or global warming, or voting systems), and everyone wrings their hands about it. "The rich are seeking slavery" versus "you can't ignore the free market."
What I find most disconcerting among the con camp is the tired sense of entitlement. It is believed that corporations should pay a premium to a given employee because "it's fair". Americans fret about losing any percentage of the well-beyond survival level of wealth we enjoy. It's not that we worry about living in huts and going hungry, but that we'll have to buy a Hyundai instead of a Toyota, or maybe a smaller house, eat out less, etc. Our expectations are very high.
That's fine, as long as we're willing to do what it takes to generate that wealth. If you believe that you're so talented, but your employer doesn't appreciate it, start your own company. IT is one of the few fields with minimal startup costs. Our country was founded upon the idea of entrepreneurship, and it was those original risk-takers that lead our nation to greatness. People weren't as locked into the cycle of college > corporation meritocracy as we seem to be today. We play it safe, and have the inviolate expectation that we deserve a given salary by law because we've done what was rewarded in the past. This isn't a socialist country, though. Companies are free to pay market wages, and the market keeps getting bigger. We can either accept this, and take personal responsibility for our own success, or continue to complain that things are changing, and try to manipulate the system to mitigate the change.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have some measures to protect workers, and as a country we do, but we have to recognize that there is a cost for having such protections, and that is the economic disadvantage it puts us in relative to those in developing economies. We can't have the best of both worlds.
This was my immediate thought. If medical science can devise much more targeted and refined methods of removing cancer, it would enable us to turn off this broad, overkill method. The same goes for other systems. Overactive immune response is shaping up to be a much bigger culprit in heart disease and depression than previously thought. If we can modulate the immune response down while mitigating the legitimate hazards they attack, we could alleviate the systemic damage caused by the inflammation. Now that man has a greater understanding of our hardware, we can hopefully use intelligence to compensate for evolution's haphazard shotgun approaches.
Scary to think how much production code gets action with wizard generated code and developers have no idea what that code is actually doing other than maybe a cursory overview, if that.
Isn't it? I often feel like perhaps I'm a mediocre programmer, as I read books and articles about "the best" ways to structure code or use patterns, and assume that everyone is on top of their game, while I'm still reading the stuff. I know that there are corners I cut for the sake of time, and things I could have done better. It bothers me.
This concern is alleviated by talking to other coders. When I've known something for a long time, I assume that everyone else knows it too. If it's out there, and has been for a while, why wouldn't they? And yet, it's not uncommon for me to talk to a web developer who has never heard of AJAX or stored procedures or even MVC. Particularly with ASP.NET, there is a tendency for some to consider comprehending the wizards a plateau. Sure, they can save time for certain tasks, but if you need to do anything deviant from them, it would take you just as much time to simply roll your own than to figure out how to do it within the wizard framework.
I started out using wizards when I was new to ASP, and it helped me get some results quickly, but I found over time that I often ended up having to go back and rewrite those sections when requirements changed, or I was just dissatisfied with the structure. I also found that when I wrote all the code myself, it took marginally more, or the same time to produce behavior, and I had a better mental image of the program since I had written the logic. My code was leaner, since it wasn't burdened with the generality of wizards, and more comprehensible.
By the time a candidate gets to the interview stage, the company has a pretty good idea (eg from the resume, etc) that the candidate is probably "good enough" technically and the interview is to make sure the resume wasn't padded and that the candidate will fit in with the existing employees.
This is what I assume is the case. My primary limitation in this topic is that I've never worked for a large company. I work in a very small operation where each member must be pulling their weight. Your statements are informative, and worry me. If I ever do want to work for a large corporation, I have no real experience working in teams. I'm sure I could adapt, but I'm also sure there will be someone else as qualified who has such experience. I'm not as socially inept as my prior arguments might suggest, and relate quite easily to people professionally. Perhaps the advantage of a personal interview is that I can demonstrate such abilites in person, though I may not have a demonstrable history of doing so. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to share your experience with me. Slashdot has proven a great resource for picking people's brains.
It seems like every time some hack reporter or "inside" blogger comes up with stuff like this, it ends up on Slashdot. It's not news, it's speculation, and dodgy speculation. It reminds me of other invented news, like groundless top ten lists or supposedly new trends. Nothing more than one person's interpretation of a mixed bag of news and opinions. Real news is something like this. An event or fact of some sort is related. It's discrete. Stories such as this Microsoft takeover are simply conjecture. There's certainly a place for conjecture, and some is more informed than others. Rumors about the AMD/ATi deal were correct, and were also more plausible. That the Microsoft post itself acknowledges how entirely unlikely it is, I have to wonder... why then was it passed on?
Well, yes, you need people who are able to work in a group. An interview, however, is much different than such groups. In the group, you've already been accepted, likely have some familiarity with the other members, and have further understanding of the processes, values, and expectations of those involved. In an interview, you typically do not know the interviewer, are in the spotlight, and have not yet been accepted. Much like the interaction between two people on a first date is stilted and awkward, the interaction between married couples is much more fluid and indicative of the members' everyday nature. I also didn't mean to say that all coders are socially inept, just more than in the population at large. Being a business, as you say, it's ultimately your choice as to what qualities you evaluate in potential employees. I can't argue against that any more than I can argue that Arrested Development is a hilarious show. I don't really have significant experience in being responsible for finding staff, and doing so efficiently. I have no business experience, per se, and I appreciate (literally and figuratively) those who do. I do know programming, however, and I have experienced and been witness to many speciously good interviewees with strong social skills gain employment where more deeply talented but awkward people have failed. I'm sure the businesses absorb whoever they get, and things still proceed profitably. Big companies can do this. Along with gender, weight, age, appearance, and race bias in interviews, social skills are just one of many areas which obscure pure merit. I'm surprised more companies don't employ rigorous application tests and psychological evaluations to replace the caprice of the varied interviewers. It would potentially save time and money, while providing a more standard yardstick to measure applicants. Again, I'm not addressing this to you specifically. I read your web page, and you are a card-carrying computer geek. I'm just surprised by the relative lack of thought and resources applied to such an important aspect of building a business.
The problem with evaluating someone's execution phase of development in an interview is, as others have said, it is totally out of context. Sure, the coder should be able to write meta-code, but not everyone is able to perform as well in a Jeopardy-style situation. It usually takes me a little while to come up with an algorithm or class system, but I usually come up with good ones. I also find it awkward to write code outside of an editor, especially if someone were grading me on it. You'd be too hesitant to write a line, for fear of having to erase it in front of the person, and appear unsure. When coding, I commonly find myself moving code, correcting syntax, etc. If your focus in an interview is to see who can come up with answers quickly, and pencil code easily, you'll miss those who, though they don't perform well under social pressure, might be brilliant when allowed some time alone. You'll weed out the social phobics and autistics, who represent a disproportionate number of coders. I've only interviewed 6 or 8 people in my life, and my focus was primarily in determining how intelligent the person was and how interested they were in programming. I really don't care about their knowledge of a particular language, or their ability to impress me. I just wanted people I knew would be smart/logical enough to solve a problem, and who also had the enthusiasm and pride in their work to see them through. Probably the only specific thing I gave credence to was their job history. If they tended to hop from job to job constantly, I considered that relative to the other applicants.
I took a trip to Iceland a few years ago, and I was surprised to see that the majority of cars were manual transmission (and small). Almost all of the cars you see here in the US are large(r) automatics. You don't often hear it touted, but I've read that a properly operated manual can get 10% better mileage (and are more fun to drive:) than the equivalent standard. I was also surprised, as I mentioned, by the size of many of the cars. You simply can't get a car much smaller than a Mini Cooper here, which is sort of a novelty car. Some might say that this is proof of European sensibility, but I imagine it's largely a product of economic necessity.
looking at the current state of string theory, qunatum theory, etc etc, we seem to have a bunch of complex equations that mostly work as advertised, but we dont really know why
Indeed. We have a fairly gross understanding of "nature." As you say, physics has made impressive progress in formulating equations to describe the behavior we see, but it is only that. Much like a autistic person may know thousands of trivial facts and details about a topic without actually understanding it, quantum physics is knowledge without understanding. This isn't a condemnation of physicists, but a limitation of our design. We're wired to think in terms of macro/Newtonian physics, a meta-level of understanding relevent to our scale. Obviously energy can be created somehow, or our Universe wouldn't be here (or it always was). What is matter/energy, though? What is space? Try to imagine what existance was before the Big Bang... you can't. We can only comprehend concepts by relating them to prior ones, and some concepts simply have no representation/handle to work from. Perhaps we'll never be able to create energy, but we may find sources we had never appreciated before. Early man utilized fire without understanding the chemical reactions involved, so perhaps we'll stumble onto something outside our current horizon of comprehension that will serve us similarly.
Ahh... a coward after my own heart. I've labored on many occasions to illustrate the fact that whatever people do, it is literally natural. To assume anything else would be placing us in the realm of (again, literally) the supernatural. So whether we destroy the planet, live in wigwams, colonize Mars, or genetically engineer a mouse that glows in the dark, the result is no more unnatural than a beaver damming up a culvert. There is no grand evolultionary, Gaia-mind plan that we run the risk of mucking up. The laws of nature simply play themselves out wordlessly and aimlessly. Isn't that comforting?
Au contraire. Microsoft is releasing a browser plugin (currently called "WPF/Everywhere") which will enable XAML/C# sandboxed apps to run on the Mac, and possibly even Linux. It won't be the full WPF model, but it will cover just about everything aside from 3D and local resource access. Call me crazy, but I'm gambling on this big time. Have you played with the.NET 3.0 dev resources? XAML wraps classes intuitively and directly, and the layout model is so much easier to work with than CSS. No more hidden spacer divs and z-index problems with various controls. It's also free. woot!
I'm surprised no one has posted something about this elegent little gem. If you're an ASP.NET coder, this is a very lightweight system that allows you to treat server-side page methods as javascript-accessible. Simply add an attribute and declare it public. The framework allows you to return the usual variables (int, string, XML), as well as DataSets, ArrayLists, generic lists, DateTimes, and any class or struct composed of such. They're automatically converted into JavaScript objects via back-end JSON translation. I actually found this framework easier to work with than ATLAS. Check out the quick guide to see how simple and extensible it is. And it's free!
Yeah, yeah. What would a reporter expect him to say? Considering that the console is due on the scene in only 4 months, I would hope that developers had all the tools they needed by now. This isn't realy much of a statement, and actually seems like a backhanded admission that things haven't been going well up to now. "All the pieces of the puzzle are there..." To dust off an old chestnut, do you want a cookie or something? Why is this worthy of Slashdot news?
In essense, we've all been overcomplicating matters to try and fit with the way we "perceive" reality when, in fact, reality doesn't work at all like we experience it mentally. Again, I don't necessarily agree with this theory, but it is interesting.
This is what I fear is the case. Looking down the evolutionary tree, we see that life forms have ever simpler (or plain different) means of perceiving the world. We're specifically adapted for the tasks of reproduction, and only abilities germaine to that task. We see a limited spectra of EMR, can sense the vibration of matter, and can distinguish certain chemicals important to our nourishment or relative toxicity. We're wired to think in terms of agents and causation, 3 dimensions, physical concepts dominant on our scale at the surface of the earth, and model everything in terms of discrete objects. All of our "artificial" advances are simply refinements or side effects of these abilities, limited in ways that we, by our very nature, will never appreciate. As you say, we can only hope to complete formulations of things which satisfy the limits of our design. It is a philosophical limitation, and therefore of no value in practical science. The difficult question is knowing what the most accurate abstraction of reality we are capable of is. Who would have guessed in 1820 that Relativity was on the way? Who knows what new rethinking may displace that in the future? I sometimes wonder if there may not be (or have been) someone whose superior ideas are so different from others (or just too poorly explained) that they are never appreciated and advanced. At the bleeding edge of physics, there are relatively few people who are capable of evaluating the merit of such ideas. As I recall someone else once writing, if Einstein were to suddenly become 50 times smarter than yourself, how could you tell?
It would seem that rotation could be broken down into the circular movements of myriad sub-elements, removing the rotation aspect. The earth rotates, but I would say that I am tracing out a circle in space as the earth moves me, and for that matter so does the rock at my feet, the dirt under that, etc. A circular path viewed at a small enough scale would look like straight-line movement. I imagine it all comes down to topology, which is baffling to me. Does anyone know a good lay treatment of the topic?
How is time treated in this framework? I've long had a rough mental image of space as simply an artifact of time. It appears that Pluto is farther away than Mars, but perhaps it's more valid to consider that it takes longer to get there. Space and time are directly related, ala Einstein. It takes longer for "distant" objects to interact. Being a human, I still get hung up on the concept of orientation/dimensionality, however. Why are some things behind me and others in front? What gives rise to this sense of geometry? I'm guessing that it's just another "intrinsic quality," but will we ever be able to fully appreciate these intrinsics, given that we're wired to build upon the input from our senses?
So given that there is no space, what explains the experiential artifact of space? Our known physical laws all operate in direct relationship to space. If everything follows the same rules and exists in a dimensionless void, what determines the apparent distortion in the way these particles interact? There is *something* different in the way the Earth interacts with the moon versus an asteroid in some other galaxy. Space has proven a useful concept in understanding the universe for some reason, and must be explained by some qualitatively similar property or force in a spaceless framework. For example, if I were to write a program that simulated the gravitational interactions of several bodies, the data would indeed exist in an irrelevant physical space, but I would need to store the values for each object's position and velocity. Does the universe have some type of data register for each particle? How do I conceptualize this?
I'm working with a Lattice-Boltzmann model, which, being a cellular automata, would benefit greatly from as many cores as possible. I'm currently using a dual-core Opteron, but I've seen the large speedup that GPUs can bring to such tasks, and have been looking into rewriting the code as Cg. Unfortunately, using shaders is proving to be a huge, hacky pain in the ass. With 8 cores, I think that a multithreaded C++ implementation would be faster than a shader, along with keeping the code sensible.
I often find that I encounter seemingly trivial setbacks that somehow end up taking forever to solve, such as an errant database connection or a z-index problem on a website or browser issues, etc. The documentation either doesn't address the issue or things simply don't work like they're supposed to. The snag isn't central to the actual project, but it ends up taking me forever to address, wasting hours of my time. Increasingly, I've begun to identify and define exactly what the issue is ("div over a windowed object"), and instead of continuing to work on it within the context of my project, I move on to something else. Later, at home, I create the simplest version of the snag possible, and solve it as an isolated puzzle. That's one of my typical productivity issues. The other is what I would call "overthinking" an issue. Too often, I find myself trying to think of the best possible abstraction for a system and end up avoiding the task because of the difficulty involved in trying to do so. The nebulousness of the problem doesn't allow me to solve it in a one or two hour session, so I put it off if it's almost lunchtime or if there's a meeting soon or if it's near quittting time, etc. In avoiding it, it only becomes more unworkable. I eventually am forced to make progress on it, and for some reason I then am able to break it down into smaller problems instead of being cowed by the abstract whole. The time pressure focuses me, as I no longer have a large amount of time to create the best solution, so I'm satisfied to produce a workable solution. This may just be unique to me. I don't know the idiosyncracies of other coders. Both of these boil down to the ability to break down your problem into workable pieces so that you can make progress regardless of limited time or perhaps just a bad day mentally. If you can budget your time into productive blocks (2+ hours at a minimum) and keep your brain sharp (get your sleep, eat right, exercise, regularly take any meds you may require) as well, you really can't do much else individually to improve things.
Requiring politics to only be conducted by experts has been tried before, and still is the default option in many places of the world. It's gone by various names: monarchy, aristocracy, dictatorship.
You know, I wrote a lengthy response in defense of the vapidity of celebrities, but eventually saw that it was a value judgement. In condemning the visible mouthpieces of political pablum I was ignoring the other million people who put them there and choose to listen to them. Regardless of how I feel, a value judgement cannot truly be argued, so I concede the point. Of course, in the spirit of your own argument, my opinions have equal merit to anyone elses. Not being a celebrity, I voice them on Slashdot.:)
Ehh. Just because something is theoretically possible (or non-negatable) doesn't mean it's any more likely than the trillion other such potentialities. Sure, the Universe could be a simulation run by "higher" species, but that seems a limited, humanist way of viewing reality. The laws of nature are indeed, for all practical purposes, simulations. Stephen Wolfram subscribes to this idea that the universe acts much like a big computer automata, in essence computing the myriad interactions of whatever fundamental rules it is employing. Thinking of this too literally, though, is misleading, I believe. It assumes the primacy of some sort of "being," which is a very specific formulation. It seems too consciousness-centered, which is not surprisingly at the core of our own concepts of self. It seems too much like an artifact of our animal brains, much like aliens are often envisioned as being bipedal humanoids, or god as being a man. In this regard it smacks of religion, pushing off the ontological difficulty of explaining existance by invoking an artifical, intelligent endpoint. It seems most likely that existance just is, with no fathomable reason. Perhaps we're in a simulation, as are our simulators, etc. At some point, however, there is no further understanding, but a proverbial black hole. It exists and we experience it, but we'll never know what makes it tick. A lot of existential arguments get tangled up in the supremacy of consciousness, but I don't see the reasoning (there often is none). Consciousness is simply a byproduct of a naturally occuring, critical system, like the vortices spinning off of a jet. They look complex, but they're just following the path of least resistance. So too is life, a fleeting phenomena which occurs under the right conditions, no more important than the supernova or the freezing of water.
People, by their very nature, cannot truly produce randomness. Everything we output is laden with the associations and processes inherent in the brain. Jackson Pollack apparently painted with a certain fractal regularity that he wasn't conscious of. I imagine that Van Gough didn't intend to depict turbulence per se, he just painted that way, and others percieve the mechanics.
Why is he suddenly getting so philosophical? Has he just gotten too old to make any advances in physics and decided to move on to metaphysics? First his urgent call for space colonies, now this. It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway. It also reminds me of the late career wanderings of other greats like Linus Pauling or Cary Mullis or Issac Newton. idk, I guess he's entitled to muse about whatever he wants, but it's weird to hear him waxing about humanity like a college girl.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, seriously. If the popular conception is right that the top 1% in corporations are colluding to siphon away all the income of the productive body of a corporation, why don't the workers break off and start their own companies? It's a more self-determined path than a labor union. If the new company succeeds, those in charge are free to distribute the wealth as they see fit. Working for a corporation is a voluntary affair.
That's really a value statement, and doesn't translate into policy. The legal system is comprised of hundreds of laws made over many years, none of which individually determines the outcome. The economy is an emergent property, constantly changing to maximize revenue. Trying to legislate corporations to do something as general as "employ only Americans" and "pay them well" is just like trying to write a program with advanced AI, or keeping people from downloading copyrighted files from the Internet, or ensuring that NTSB regulations guarantee a terrorist will never strike again. There will be always be legitimate reasons for corporations to hire overseas, so you'll never be able to plug the leak. There are always loopholes in a complex system. Beyond this, laws which attempt to redistribute wealth change the equation altogether. You can't assume that there would be as much wealth to distribute in the new system, since the dynamics are different.
The only sure way to earn what you deserve is to either find a company whose leaders you don't think are "wrong", or do it yourself. I'm not arguing that I think it's good or right for the rich to be rich or the poor to be poor. I worked in a grocery store for a decade, and I didn't like it. I'm simply being pragmatic.
The government shouldn't meddle in the staffing of private corporations, and corporations do pay taxes for the right to exist in the country. It's not a freebie. And once again, if you all believe that corporations are free rides to wealth, start one. It's easier to do so in this country than in almost any other.
On a final note, I do agree with some others here that healthcare is the responsibility of government, as it is for the common good. How to best accomplish that is debatable, but it should be guaranteed to all citizens in some fashion.
Almost like clockwork, every couple of weeks we get another article about outsourcing (or global warming, or voting systems), and everyone wrings their hands about it. "The rich are seeking slavery" versus "you can't ignore the free market."
What I find most disconcerting among the con camp is the tired sense of entitlement. It is believed that corporations should pay a premium to a given employee because "it's fair". Americans fret about losing any percentage of the well-beyond survival level of wealth we enjoy. It's not that we worry about living in huts and going hungry, but that we'll have to buy a Hyundai instead of a Toyota, or maybe a smaller house, eat out less, etc. Our expectations are very high.
That's fine, as long as we're willing to do what it takes to generate that wealth. If you believe that you're so talented, but your employer doesn't appreciate it, start your own company. IT is one of the few fields with minimal startup costs. Our country was founded upon the idea of entrepreneurship, and it was those original risk-takers that lead our nation to greatness. People weren't as locked into the cycle of college > corporation meritocracy as we seem to be today. We play it safe, and have the inviolate expectation that we deserve a given salary by law because we've done what was rewarded in the past. This isn't a socialist country, though. Companies are free to pay market wages, and the market keeps getting bigger. We can either accept this, and take personal responsibility for our own success, or continue to complain that things are changing, and try to manipulate the system to mitigate the change.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have some measures to protect workers, and as a country we do, but we have to recognize that there is a cost for having such protections, and that is the economic disadvantage it puts us in relative to those in developing economies. We can't have the best of both worlds.
This was my immediate thought. If medical science can devise much more targeted and refined methods of removing cancer, it would enable us to turn off this broad, overkill method. The same goes for other systems. Overactive immune response is shaping up to be a much bigger culprit in heart disease and depression than previously thought. If we can modulate the immune response down while mitigating the legitimate hazards they attack, we could alleviate the systemic damage caused by the inflammation. Now that man has a greater understanding of our hardware, we can hopefully use intelligence to compensate for evolution's haphazard shotgun approaches.
Isn't it? I often feel like perhaps I'm a mediocre programmer, as I read books and articles about "the best" ways to structure code or use patterns, and assume that everyone is on top of their game, while I'm still reading the stuff. I know that there are corners I cut for the sake of time, and things I could have done better. It bothers me.
This concern is alleviated by talking to other coders. When I've known something for a long time, I assume that everyone else knows it too. If it's out there, and has been for a while, why wouldn't they? And yet, it's not uncommon for me to talk to a web developer who has never heard of AJAX or stored procedures or even MVC. Particularly with ASP.NET, there is a tendency for some to consider comprehending the wizards a plateau. Sure, they can save time for certain tasks, but if you need to do anything deviant from them, it would take you just as much time to simply roll your own than to figure out how to do it within the wizard framework.
I started out using wizards when I was new to ASP, and it helped me get some results quickly, but I found over time that I often ended up having to go back and rewrite those sections when requirements changed, or I was just dissatisfied with the structure. I also found that when I wrote all the code myself, it took marginally more, or the same time to produce behavior, and I had a better mental image of the program since I had written the logic. My code was leaner, since it wasn't burdened with the generality of wizards, and more comprehensible.
You know, I've never noticed that about myself, but after reading your comment I find everyone does indeed space their paragraphs. Point taken.
This is what I assume is the case. My primary limitation in this topic is that I've never worked for a large company. I work in a very small operation where each member must be pulling their weight. Your statements are informative, and worry me. If I ever do want to work for a large corporation, I have no real experience working in teams. I'm sure I could adapt, but I'm also sure there will be someone else as qualified who has such experience. I'm not as socially inept as my prior arguments might suggest, and relate quite easily to people professionally. Perhaps the advantage of a personal interview is that I can demonstrate such abilites in person, though I may not have a demonstrable history of doing so.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to share your experience with me. Slashdot has proven a great resource for picking people's brains.
It seems like every time some hack reporter or "inside" blogger comes up with stuff like this, it ends up on Slashdot. It's not news, it's speculation, and dodgy speculation. It reminds me of other invented news, like groundless top ten lists or supposedly new trends. Nothing more than one person's interpretation of a mixed bag of news and opinions. Real news is something like this. An event or fact of some sort is related. It's discrete. Stories such as this Microsoft takeover are simply conjecture. There's certainly a place for conjecture, and some is more informed than others. Rumors about the AMD/ATi deal were correct, and were also more plausible. That the Microsoft post itself acknowledges how entirely unlikely it is, I have to wonder... why then was it passed on?
Well, yes, you need people who are able to work in a group. An interview, however, is much different than such groups. In the group, you've already been accepted, likely have some familiarity with the other members, and have further understanding of the processes, values, and expectations of those involved. In an interview, you typically do not know the interviewer, are in the spotlight, and have not yet been accepted. Much like the interaction between two people on a first date is stilted and awkward, the interaction between married couples is much more fluid and indicative of the members' everyday nature. I also didn't mean to say that all coders are socially inept, just more than in the population at large.
Being a business, as you say, it's ultimately your choice as to what qualities you evaluate in potential employees. I can't argue against that any more than I can argue that Arrested Development is a hilarious show. I don't really have significant experience in being responsible for finding staff, and doing so efficiently. I have no business experience, per se, and I appreciate (literally and figuratively) those who do. I do know programming, however, and I have experienced and been witness to many speciously good interviewees with strong social skills gain employment where more deeply talented but awkward people have failed. I'm sure the businesses absorb whoever they get, and things still proceed profitably. Big companies can do this.
Along with gender, weight, age, appearance, and race bias in interviews, social skills are just one of many areas which obscure pure merit. I'm surprised more companies don't employ rigorous application tests and psychological evaluations to replace the caprice of the varied interviewers. It would potentially save time and money, while providing a more standard yardstick to measure applicants.
Again, I'm not addressing this to you specifically. I read your web page, and you are a card-carrying computer geek. I'm just surprised by the relative lack of thought and resources applied to such an important aspect of building a business.
The problem with evaluating someone's execution phase of development in an interview is, as others have said, it is totally out of context. Sure, the coder should be able to write meta-code, but not everyone is able to perform as well in a Jeopardy-style situation. It usually takes me a little while to come up with an algorithm or class system, but I usually come up with good ones. I also find it awkward to write code outside of an editor, especially if someone were grading me on it. You'd be too hesitant to write a line, for fear of having to erase it in front of the person, and appear unsure. When coding, I commonly find myself moving code, correcting syntax, etc. If your focus in an interview is to see who can come up with answers quickly, and pencil code easily, you'll miss those who, though they don't perform well under social pressure, might be brilliant when allowed some time alone. You'll weed out the social phobics and autistics, who represent a disproportionate number of coders.
I've only interviewed 6 or 8 people in my life, and my focus was primarily in determining how intelligent the person was and how interested they were in programming. I really don't care about their knowledge of a particular language, or their ability to impress me. I just wanted people I knew would be smart/logical enough to solve a problem, and who also had the enthusiasm and pride in their work to see them through. Probably the only specific thing I gave credence to was their job history. If they tended to hop from job to job constantly, I considered that relative to the other applicants.
I took a trip to Iceland a few years ago, and I was surprised to see that the majority of cars were manual transmission (and small). Almost all of the cars you see here in the US are large(r) automatics. You don't often hear it touted, but I've read that a properly operated manual can get 10% better mileage (and are more fun to drive :) than the equivalent standard. I was also surprised, as I mentioned, by the size of many of the cars. You simply can't get a car much smaller than a Mini Cooper here, which is sort of a novelty car. Some might say that this is proof of European sensibility, but I imagine it's largely a product of economic necessity.
Indeed. We have a fairly gross understanding of "nature." As you say, physics has made impressive progress in formulating equations to describe the behavior we see, but it is only that. Much like a autistic person may know thousands of trivial facts and details about a topic without actually understanding it, quantum physics is knowledge without understanding. This isn't a condemnation of physicists, but a limitation of our design. We're wired to think in terms of macro/Newtonian physics, a meta-level of understanding relevent to our scale.
Obviously energy can be created somehow, or our Universe wouldn't be here (or it always was). What is matter/energy, though? What is space? Try to imagine what existance was before the Big Bang... you can't. We can only comprehend concepts by relating them to prior ones, and some concepts simply have no representation/handle to work from.
Perhaps we'll never be able to create energy, but we may find sources we had never appreciated before. Early man utilized fire without understanding the chemical reactions involved, so perhaps we'll stumble onto something outside our current horizon of comprehension that will serve us similarly.
Ahh... a coward after my own heart. I've labored on many occasions to illustrate the fact that whatever people do, it is literally natural. To assume anything else would be placing us in the realm of (again, literally) the supernatural. So whether we destroy the planet, live in wigwams, colonize Mars, or genetically engineer a mouse that glows in the dark, the result is no more unnatural than a beaver damming up a culvert. There is no grand evolultionary, Gaia-mind plan that we run the risk of mucking up. The laws of nature simply play themselves out wordlessly and aimlessly. Isn't that comforting?
Au contraire. Microsoft is releasing a browser plugin (currently called "WPF/Everywhere") which will enable XAML/C# sandboxed apps to run on the Mac, and possibly even Linux. It won't be the full WPF model, but it will cover just about everything aside from 3D and local resource access. Call me crazy, but I'm gambling on this big time. Have you played with the .NET 3.0 dev resources? XAML wraps classes intuitively and directly, and the layout model is so much easier to work with than CSS. No more hidden spacer divs and z-index problems with various controls. It's also free. woot!
I'm surprised no one has posted something about this elegent little gem. If you're an ASP.NET coder, this is a very lightweight system that allows you to treat server-side page methods as javascript-accessible. Simply add an attribute and declare it public. The framework allows you to return the usual variables (int, string, XML), as well as DataSets, ArrayLists, generic lists, DateTimes, and any class or struct composed of such. They're automatically converted into JavaScript objects via back-end JSON translation. I actually found this framework easier to work with than ATLAS. Check out the quick guide to see how simple and extensible it is.
And it's free!
Yeah, yeah. What would a reporter expect him to say?
Considering that the console is due on the scene in only 4 months, I would hope that developers had all the tools they needed by now. This isn't realy much of a statement, and actually seems like a backhanded admission that things haven't been going well up to now.
"All the pieces of the puzzle are there..."
To dust off an old chestnut, do you want a cookie or something? Why is this worthy of Slashdot news?
This is what I fear is the case. Looking down the evolutionary tree, we see that life forms have ever simpler (or plain different) means of perceiving the world. We're specifically adapted for the tasks of reproduction, and only abilities germaine to that task. We see a limited spectra of EMR, can sense the vibration of matter, and can distinguish certain chemicals important to our nourishment or relative toxicity. We're wired to think in terms of agents and causation, 3 dimensions, physical concepts dominant on our scale at the surface of the earth, and model everything in terms of discrete objects. All of our "artificial" advances are simply refinements or side effects of these abilities, limited in ways that we, by our very nature, will never appreciate. As you say, we can only hope to complete formulations of things which satisfy the limits of our design. It is a philosophical limitation, and therefore of no value in practical science. The difficult question is knowing what the most accurate abstraction of reality we are capable of is. Who would have guessed in 1820 that Relativity was on the way? Who knows what new rethinking may displace that in the future? I sometimes wonder if there may not be (or have been) someone whose superior ideas are so different from others (or just too poorly explained) that they are never appreciated and advanced. At the bleeding edge of physics, there are relatively few people who are capable of evaluating the merit of such ideas. As I recall someone else once writing, if Einstein were to suddenly become 50 times smarter than yourself, how could you tell?
It would seem that rotation could be broken down into the circular movements of myriad sub-elements, removing the rotation aspect. The earth rotates, but I would say that I am tracing out a circle in space as the earth moves me, and for that matter so does the rock at my feet, the dirt under that, etc. A circular path viewed at a small enough scale would look like straight-line movement.
I imagine it all comes down to topology, which is baffling to me. Does anyone know a good lay treatment of the topic?
How is time treated in this framework? I've long had a rough mental image of space as simply an artifact of time. It appears that Pluto is farther away than Mars, but perhaps it's more valid to consider that it takes longer to get there. Space and time are directly related, ala Einstein. It takes longer for "distant" objects to interact. Being a human, I still get hung up on the concept of orientation/dimensionality, however. Why are some things behind me and others in front? What gives rise to this sense of geometry? I'm guessing that it's just another "intrinsic quality," but will we ever be able to fully appreciate these intrinsics, given that we're wired to build upon the input from our senses?
So given that there is no space, what explains the experiential artifact of space? Our known physical laws all operate in direct relationship to space. If everything follows the same rules and exists in a dimensionless void, what determines the apparent distortion in the way these particles interact? There is *something* different in the way the Earth interacts with the moon versus an asteroid in some other galaxy. Space has proven a useful concept in understanding the universe for some reason, and must be explained by some qualitatively similar property or force in a spaceless framework. For example, if I were to write a program that simulated the gravitational interactions of several bodies, the data would indeed exist in an irrelevant physical space, but I would need to store the values for each object's position and velocity. Does the universe have some type of data register for each particle? How do I conceptualize this?
I'm working with a Lattice-Boltzmann model, which, being a cellular automata, would benefit greatly from as many cores as possible. I'm currently using a dual-core Opteron, but I've seen the large speedup that GPUs can bring to such tasks, and have been looking into rewriting the code as Cg. Unfortunately, using shaders is proving to be a huge, hacky pain in the ass. With 8 cores, I think that a multithreaded C++ implementation would be faster than a shader, along with keeping the code sensible.
I often find that I encounter seemingly trivial setbacks that somehow end up taking forever to solve, such as an errant database connection or a z-index problem on a website or browser issues, etc. The documentation either doesn't address the issue or things simply don't work like they're supposed to. The snag isn't central to the actual project, but it ends up taking me forever to address, wasting hours of my time. Increasingly, I've begun to identify and define exactly what the issue is ("div over a windowed object"), and instead of continuing to work on it within the context of my project, I move on to something else. Later, at home, I create the simplest version of the snag possible, and solve it as an isolated puzzle.
That's one of my typical productivity issues. The other is what I would call "overthinking" an issue. Too often, I find myself trying to think of the best possible abstraction for a system and end up avoiding the task because of the difficulty involved in trying to do so. The nebulousness of the problem doesn't allow me to solve it in a one or two hour session, so I put it off if it's almost lunchtime or if there's a meeting soon or if it's near quittting time, etc. In avoiding it, it only becomes more unworkable. I eventually am forced to make progress on it, and for some reason I then am able to break it down into smaller problems instead of being cowed by the abstract whole. The time pressure focuses me, as I no longer have a large amount of time to create the best solution, so I'm satisfied to produce a workable solution. This may just be unique to me. I don't know the idiosyncracies of other coders.
Both of these boil down to the ability to break down your problem into workable pieces so that you can make progress regardless of limited time or perhaps just a bad day mentally. If you can budget your time into productive blocks (2+ hours at a minimum) and keep your brain sharp (get your sleep, eat right, exercise, regularly take any meds you may require) as well, you really can't do much else individually to improve things.
You know, I wrote a lengthy response in defense of the vapidity of celebrities, but eventually saw that it was a value judgement. In condemning the visible mouthpieces of political pablum I was ignoring the other million people who put them there and choose to listen to them. Regardless of how I feel, a value judgement cannot truly be argued, so I concede the point.
Of course, in the spirit of your own argument, my opinions have equal merit to anyone elses. Not being a celebrity, I voice them on Slashdot.
Ehh. Just because something is theoretically possible (or non-negatable) doesn't mean it's any more likely than the trillion other such potentialities. Sure, the Universe could be a simulation run by "higher" species, but that seems a limited, humanist way of viewing reality. The laws of nature are indeed, for all practical purposes, simulations. Stephen Wolfram subscribes to this idea that the universe acts much like a big computer automata, in essence computing the myriad interactions of whatever fundamental rules it is employing. Thinking of this too literally, though, is misleading, I believe. It assumes the primacy of some sort of "being," which is a very specific formulation. It seems too consciousness-centered, which is not surprisingly at the core of our own concepts of self. It seems too much like an artifact of our animal brains, much like aliens are often envisioned as being bipedal humanoids, or god as being a man. In this regard it smacks of religion, pushing off the ontological difficulty of explaining existance by invoking an artifical, intelligent endpoint. It seems most likely that existance just is, with no fathomable reason. Perhaps we're in a simulation, as are our simulators, etc. At some point, however, there is no further understanding, but a proverbial black hole. It exists and we experience it, but we'll never know what makes it tick.
A lot of existential arguments get tangled up in the supremacy of consciousness, but I don't see the reasoning (there often is none). Consciousness is simply a byproduct of a naturally occuring, critical system, like the vortices spinning off of a jet. They look complex, but they're just following the path of least resistance. So too is life, a fleeting phenomena which occurs under the right conditions, no more important than the supernova or the freezing of water.
People, by their very nature, cannot truly produce randomness. Everything we output is laden with the associations and processes inherent in the brain. Jackson Pollack apparently painted with a certain fractal regularity that he wasn't conscious of. I imagine that Van Gough didn't intend to depict turbulence per se, he just painted that way, and others percieve the mechanics.
Why is he suddenly getting so philosophical? Has he just gotten too old to make any advances in physics and decided to move on to metaphysics? First his urgent call for space colonies, now this. It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway. It also reminds me of the late career wanderings of other greats like Linus Pauling or Cary Mullis or Issac Newton. idk, I guess he's entitled to muse about whatever he wants, but it's weird to hear him waxing about humanity like a college girl.