Comment Well... (Score 4, Funny) 837
is the color blaze orange with concentric circles on the back?
is the color blaze orange with concentric circles on the back?
A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....
Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.
ERP Systems fail (and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just what I have seen myself)
The common theme here is that ERP implementations lack humility and respect for the existing business and the people who actually run it. In pursuit of relatively nebulous "strategic" advantages, an inflexible, underdocumented, undersupported system is shoved down everyone's throat.
A few years down the road what happens? The planning guy (me) and the accounting guy had EACH separately reimplemented Access databases to provide the information we need to do our jobs, despite the fact that a module exists in the ERP system to do exactly what we need to do.
Except that, of course, it's been configured in such a way that it doesn't do any such thing, and we can't change it. Hell it took me 3 months (not full time) grovelling through help screens to even understand it. No, there's no budget for training. Or user support. And changing things? Get in line.
It also is not "cheap" in terms of energy expended for the defensive team, and has a certain level of risk -- if the offense breaks the press and gets across halfcourt, the odds are pretty good they'll be able to get a quick and easy basket. It's a worthwhile strategy when used when necessary or as a non-routine variation that forces the other team to adapt. Do it all the time and the other team will adapt tactics (and personnel) to counter.
But these works are not works-for-hire and plaintiffs are not natural persons, so the entities suing are not necessarily the originators of the appropriate copyrights. They should be the assignees (that's what royalties are all about) but that's not the same thing and is NOT an unfair question to ask them to prove that they have the appropriate assignments of copyright from the original creators.
To file a motion to bar objections on something that hasn't been the subject of exhaustive motion and discovery practice?
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAL) you file a motion like that when the other side has been relentlessly arguing a point beyond all sense and reason and you are just trying to get them to knock it off and acknowledge - a la a request for admissions, that reality is what it is. Or perhaps you are asking the judge to compel them to acknowledge that reality is real.
In any event, you don't file this cold on something that hasn't been a bone of contention. That's just painting a target on it, right?
Counsel for Ms Thomas: "Oh wait? you don't want me to ask about your copyright registrations? really? oh? Your Honor, I'd like to see proof that the parties are actual the valid holders of the copyrights at issue in this lawsuit."
Judge: "So ordered"
RIAA counsel: "How could a 7 foot Wookie live on Endor? That... does not make sense. I... do not make sense."
NY Country Lawyer: "Oh no, they're using the Chewbacca defense again!"
You're not wrong, but I think the author referenced in the original post and you are addressed different parts of the whole problem of financial markets. The willingness of financial services salespeople - mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc - to basically lie their asses off because there's so much money on the line is one problem.
"Quant" analysis of financial markets is, really, another, related problem. The same moral hazard of too much money to make cutting corners worth it exists, but the basic problem here is that many "quant" models are bullshit. Quantitive models for derivative securities can be realistically valued -- if and only if the risk of the underlying primary asset has been properly assessed (along with several other critical assumptions about the marketplace for the security -- but that's the JUDGMENTAL assumption fundamentally inherent in the models.)
Risk assessment is not actually that difficult -- insurance is built on the ability to do risk assessment. The real problem with the current financial problems were that NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE UNDERLYING PRIMARY ASSETS WERE and everyone operated on the belief that Nothing Could Ever Possibly Go Wrong (because no one could prove otherwise, because no one knew what the hell was actually going on).
This is and was every bit as monumentally stupid an assumption in the financial realm as it is engineering, computer programming, science, or any other real-world discipline.
I think what Wilmott is proposing is the development of models that are more reactive to real-world inputs, models that are much more Bayesian in nature in their ability to refine and revise their predictive nature based on actual events.
Admittedly without reading TFA, that sounds like his point - that what "quants" should be doing is developing good empirically good heuristic models rather than wanking over what are essentially hypothetical analytical ones based on complete SWAG parameters, where the parameters supplied by salesmen will invevitably be optimistic best case ones (and that's putting it charitably).
A piece of standard 25th century technology - the communicator - is sitting in your wallet, or, if you're geek enough, clipped to your belt. It doesn't have enough power to pump a signal to LEO...YET.... so the only golly-gee technology in that sucker is...the battery.
The politics gets dated, the style gets dated - what were passionate issues in the 60's don't translate so well to the opening years of the 21st century.
The reboot was necessary - if you want to tell tales about Kirk and Spock and keep telling new stories aobut the voyages of Enterprise and NOT have every character turn into Wesley Crusher - you're gonna have to allow some creative leeway to back up, refocus on the essential elements of what makes Star Trek worth watching, and begin again.
Wrath of Khan was the best of the movies by far because the emotions of the characters were so complexly developed.
by Ian Stewart
highly readable non-technical tour of things like congruences, axiomatics, abstract algebra, topology and other elements of "real" mathematics, although as he rightly points out, he doesn't do much with analysis, because you really can't do much with analysis that isn't technical in nature.
http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewart/dp/0486284247
The IT department at my company does a piss poor job at actual user support, in terms of user education, learning curve, office apps, etc.
You know, the things people actually USE on the computer.
So it falls to people like me to provide user support in my department to everyone - "Hey, I've got an Excel question..." is usually something I'm happy to help out with, since it only happens a couple times a week.
But if it happens several times a day, because no one knows what their spiffy new software does, I will go completely ape****. So, no, changing systems is not a good idea
Not sure what you can use to create a visualization, but the information you need is in the IMG.
I don't have a need to develop a visualization of the whole of our SAP implementation, just my little FI-CO corner of it, and that's a big enough pain
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.