Well yeah, but the test is a predictor of IQ not an IQ test (i.e. it's not supposed to directly measure IQ). They found a strong correlation between certain results (total reaction time, difference between large and small image reaction time etc) and IQ. It won't work in all cases but appears to be a good predictor. Hence the term predictor.

THIS. Gun laws in the US aren't going to solve anything. It's the culture around guns in the US that is the real issue. Guns are viewed as a solution to problems (defending your property, controlling physical violence etc), and while guns may be a solution they are rarely the correct solution.

When I lived in the US we had an elderly neighbour (single lady, probably 70s) who kept a loaded revolver in her home as "protection". She found it absurd we didn't have a gun "to protect ourselves". "But what would you do if someone broke in?" Ahh.. let them have whatever they want? Call the police?

I know plenty of people in Canada with guns. They use them for hunting. They don't have them in their homes to "protect themselves". And due to storing them properly they would be extremely difficult to access in a break in type situation. The cultural view on guns is entirely different. I strongly believe any difference in non-crime related gun violence (between countries) is based in gun culture. Access to guns is secondary. Good luck changing culture around guns once it's established though. That's something that takes many generations to change, and with the short term thinking of politics in general, no one is going to be brave enough to try and start that movement.

No. Marketing's job is to make tools for the sales people. They handle advertising and the presentation of the product to the masses. They don't design the product.

Should they have input? Sure, but generally it should be of the form, "We need feature X so that we have a bullet point that matches this competitor's bullet point." If you let them start dictating, "This button should be here and look like this.." you'll end up spending more time changing silly little things over and over than getting anything actually done. In my experience no one can focus on the superficial quite like marketing. UI/UX people are able to focus on the details in the right places and get high level usability right. Marketing (in my experience) have no ability and don't actually care about usability since they won't generally won't use the end product. Let them design the box if you have physical copies of the software.

And what does that speak to other than your company's ability to hire? Obviously your superstar wasn't a superstar (hence the quotes you added).

I haven't been involved in hiring EEs (last company we only needed a few, and the ones we had were doing fine and had a few decades left in them before retirement), but have been involved in hiring engineering (computer, mech) and compsci grads. My anecdotal experience shows a "top school" doesn't mean much. A student has to be motivated and take what they want from school. A top school may have more to offer, but an unmotivated student at a top school (who gets good grades by jumping through the hoops of tests and papers) is not half the employee someone from a less prestige school who actually took real interest in the subject. I had a co-op student (compsci/math double major) who could code circles around developers with 20+ years experience. He understood software and had a drive to improve himself and his knowledge of the subject. Exceedingly smart as well, but smart on its own is nearly useless. As a company you want smart people that get stuff done. Grunts (get stuff done) are ok for particular roles (with plenty of supervision) but smart people who can't get stuff done are truly useless. This all comes down to motivation, which can't be taught.

I'd argue that there are a lack of self motivated people in the upcoming generation. My grandfather's generation was people that worked hard for what little they had, my father's generation worked hard and were often loyal to their place of employment (but had quite a lot for how hard they worked). My generation jumps jobs more frequently (searching their "right" fit) and has high expectations as far as "work life balance". The upcoming generation has even higher monetary expectations (want everything now) and is even more fickle with their loyalty. To me the issue isn't education but rather attitude towards work. This is seen across the board, from educated to retail clerks. Walk into a store and see how many employees are browsing social media on their phones. We have trained each generation to be better and better consumers of entertainment with little to no attention span.

What's the solution? I don't think there is one other than time. Basically Darwinism in an intellectual age. The smart self motivated people will start their own companies with their cohorts and be successful, the lazy leaches will eventually end up being the technology era equivalents of janitors and garbage men. In the mean time we have some people that should be picking up garbage in a higher role than they deserve (due to labor market conditions). It'll all even out in time. In the meantime, expect to hire some useless people into roles they can barely fulfill.

If you think you are good and no one recommends you it's time for some self reflection.

Exactly. Thanks Dice for bringing slashdot down another notch. This is garbage.

Exactly. If he's concerned about image quality, then why not offer downloads that are up to his standards at a price that's so good it's easier to pay it and get a guaranteed good DL.

Heck, run their own private (pay for) torrent site and they can avoid some bandwidth costs. Or free official torrents with an advert or two at the begining (which they should get some revenue off or).

There are ways to monetize free viewers. I stream a few shows from the comedy network (Workaholics mainly, since they have the latest episodes) an I don't mind the ad interruptions.

Not lazy. It's simple economics. If I need something that works and I need it now, then "free" and partially working is not a solution.

I paid money for a game engine when there are free solutions out there. Why? Not laziness, it was for efficiency. The pay-for solution gets me onto multiple platforms quickly and that's what pays the bills. The free solutions create unpaid work.

In my spare time I might hack away at a project I find interesting to see where it gets me, but when it comes to business I need solutions that work now. Sometimes they are open source, sometimes they are proprietary. Obviously this isn't aimed at the hobbyist. And that's ok.

Forgetting the fact that one of your two actual examples is not free (for commercial use). Yes, I would pay. Why? Time == money.

If the solution gets me a model in a usable form quickly (no futzing, converting etc), then it's worth money. $1000 buys maybe a half week of someone's time. So if I can save 3 days work it has paid for itself.

Maybe that doesn't apply to you, but you can't assume that's the same for others. Not all of us have time to mess around with open source solutions that only get us 90% of the way. Just like how some will buy a 3d printer and others will make one (for significantly less). If your time is worth nothing, or it's just a hobby, then sure spend the time and save a few bucks. If you actually need to use it in a business (e.g. rapid prototyping) then building one yourself is a false economy.

Because you are paying for a platform not a Kinect camera. It's software and hardware that are guaranteed to work together (which is a lot easier to support than software alone).

Sure they could sell the software alone, but I'm assuming that's the majority of the cost anyhow. I'd expect to pay over a grand for that software (and it would pay for itself quickly). With the amount of kickstarter backers it's obvious there are more than a few people that think they can get value out of it for the price.

Yeah, I was going somewhere else with it (but I did get your point and I do agree). Go hard at first then slightly loosen the reigns shows the seriousness of the situation (i.e. Yahoo is in serious trouble).

I really hope it's a matter of starting from square one. To me this reeks of something that looked good on paper to execs. They needed to drop a bunch of employees quick without it looking bad (or rather as good as it could possibly look). The idea was tighten down by getting rid of the "slackers", which is great in theory, however working from home doesn't necessarily correlate with "slacking off" (as has been pointed out here repeatedly). In reality they just selected an attribute they are allowed to discriminate on (as opposed to sex, religion or skin color) and fired those people. Performance had nothing to do with it, but that was the excuse. Now they are trying to frantically back up the "reasoning" behind this with false metrics. In the end they would have been better off just randomly firing people. That way you don't get the dead sea effect of the weakest people clinging to the company (the people that can't easily get a job elsewhere).

This is not a far cry from firing all the men because, "Men aren't as good at multitasking, and we need good multitaskers to keep Yahoo alive." That's the stereotype and that's exactly what Yahoo is doing. They are stereotyping a group and using that as the reason they are getting rid of them. People would be less upset by a lottery, or, I don't know.. real metrics, where they fire the actual slackers. Of course, as that has been pointed out, it takes actual effort to go through reviews and real metrics to decide who is worth keeping and who should leave.

Yes, false consensus effect. "If I were working at home I'd be slacking off, therefor everyone working from home must be slacking off."

It's also a matter of perspective. The last place I worked at I had measurable better performance the days I worked at home. More code was written, more bugs fixed etc. I'm willing to bet sales and some of service would have been glad if I was forced to work from the office all days. Why? Aside from them assuming I was slacking (one of the directors was caught running an airplay server chock-o-block full of anal porn at work .. so we know what he assumed I was doing at home), they couldn't get a hold of me any time they wanted by popping into my "office" (my office with a door had since been replaced with an "open concept" region) and interrupting me any time of the day. Generally it was to ask questions they could answer themselves, but would take significantly more effort than the energy it took to walk to my desk. If you subscribe to the school of thought that an interruption kills 15-20 minutes productivity, then it would be fair to assume I would have essentially 0 productivity on the days I was in the office. Of course to the sales and service staff I wasn't being productive if I wasn't answering their questions (despite that not being my job). Their expectation was I should be able to answer "simple questions" and still pound out code (as well as slip in their pet features).

Using time tracking software we found I had about an 85-15 split in office. 15% was writing and working on software I was responsible for, the 85% was "other stuff" (interruptions, meetings, emergency bug fixes on other people's code...). Working from home that split changed to 10-90 (90% software and 10% communication). To balance things out I'd work from home some days and from the office others. It was understood my office days would generally be unproductive.

My experience may not be directly comparable, but my point was perspective matters as well. To the software team I was best working from home, to sales and service I was most "productive" in office (well.. up until the deadline on the feature/fix their customer "needs" started slipping). To some quick efficient communication is key and that's what is labelled "productive". In software, yes we need to communicate with the team, but once things are sorted (api, architecture etc) then programming is generally a very private task that requires little or no input from others. I find gtalk or similar sufficient for most communication while knee deep in code (and team members could always get hold of me quickly, despite the rest of the organization being cut off).

I have to agree with you there. I am a little biased towards a degree (if experience is lacking), but I've seen people midstream university that can code circles around guys with "20+ years experience". Some people get software, others don't. I don't think school really has anything to do with that. Depending on what is being worked on the math background can help, but it's not like you need a CS degree to know the difference between a O(n^2) and O(nlogn) solution. Plus having a degree doesn't guarantee any kind of competence.

I think the biggest plus for someone without a degree is it shows they put effort into learning something themselves. I know too many people that graduated with CSc degrees that never learned to code (as in really code, they could slap something together to get a decent grade on an assignment.. but it's not proper software). Some of those students got straight 'A's. Heck, I didn't have any passion for coding until my last year when stuff really clicked. I could see the design errors in my own solutions and seek out ways to fix those deficiencies.

It's like how there are people who slap a DB together with no thought for logical design vs physical, those who will insist on 3NF then those who can on the fly write a physical db layer that is denormalized where it should be and can rationalize and clearly describe what they did where and why (i.e. they had a thought process and one beyond, "this is what the book told me to do"). I want to work with critical thinkers, not people who can jump through hoops.

Not to mention many now rev match on downshifting. I recently had a rental with a 6 speed classic auto (i.e. non dual clutch) and it did not feel anything like the auto transmission with "manual mode" from 5 years ago. Quick sharp shifts that happened when I signaled (rather than waiting and deciding if that's what it wants to do) and perfect rev matching on downshifts. Yes it did nanny on downshifts (won't let you over-rev) but it was happy to let me hit the (too low) rev limiter on a late upshift. What happened to cars that let you dip into the redline? If the redline on the tach is 7k rpm I expect to be able to rev to at least 7250rpm before hitting a limiter (this particular vehicle had no yellow or orange region before the red on the tach).

That's why I wear a fanny pack.