The more I think about so-called "objective" scales that pigeon-hole people, the more I think these are there to protect the elite, whatever the ostensible function. Johnny takes a test and now he is certifiably dumb/smart/average. The rest of Johnny's future income and influence could now be determined by a self-fulfilling prophesy.

When I was very small, a shrink told my mother I was a "genius" but (a) this was not a boon because people like me had difficult lives, and (b) I would not perform until work was sufficiently challenging to engage me. While there was some truth in both a and b, what a stupid label to place on the shoulders of a 3yo! My mother did not have the education or skills to challenge him for a better label, such as something less prejudicial. A plain "he's very intelligent" without the editorializing would have done. These days they'd say "gifted" but that still carries expectations like "genius" did. Absurd. Just encourage and help kids be who they are while avoiding stupid labels as far as possible.

The first thing I did on Win 8 to make it useable was install one of the 3rd party start menus (Classic Explorer) and then move the desktop card to the top left hand corner of the sodomizing (q.v. above) and irrelevant (for non-touchscreen devices) Metro. Then you get something like the Windows 7 desktop back on boot and will never have to look at Metro again, unless it's on a tablet.

What an idiotic business decision it was to try to fuse these two very different use cases, shove it down the consumer's throat with a rolled up newspaper, and then totally omit the option to have a traditional start menu. Seniors will not cope but who cares about them, eh? MS are banking on kids just taking to Metro and then never learning what a start menu is.

Also strange that MS are duplicating the mistakes of numerous smaller companies who have worked hard to build something rather like Metro and then dismally failed in the marketplace. Stop force-feeding consumers what you think they have to have! I am dumbfounded at the stupidity of that decision.

I think the desktop metaphor is as optimum as it gets for usability on traditional boxes/laptops. Apple know that; they have had the brains to keep the desktop on OS X. MS doesn't know it or chooses not to. There is simply nothing better around for a non-touchscreen device with a keyboard. If there is, where is it? 'Coz it ain't Metro. It's all just about trying to move to the iOS walled garden model and shut down our choices and freedom as usual.

I saw that movie. Fell asleep. Boring, cliched "action" (a fight on top of a speeding train? Seriously?). Endless sequences of people walking or standing in a room. No sexual tension. Stereotypes like Judy Denche's very boring 'M' rendition. Only a little dry humor, and tackling Bond's mid-aged crisis and ageism issues, is not enough to save this movie.

Isn't the "app revolution" producing profound changes in geek culture? A democratization of app building tools and platforms so it's pretty easy to learn to build an app and a lot of motivation to hit the big time with one? So we are getting a big influx of app builders who may not come from traditional programming soil at all, are fully self-taught, and know very little about the underlying system. Compare using one of the high level easy SDKs now with first learning C/C++/Perl/Assembler to be taken seriously for a job. These are different times.

Right. Debian to me sounds like a suboptimal choice for getting any insight into the black hat subculture. Since Debian prides itself on being the most stable and dependable distribution (that's its brand, and it's a good one), I would have thought the only fondness they'd have for black hats would be as penetration/hardness testers. It's almost as if that choice was made without understanding that there is no relationship whatsoever between the press's definition of 'hacker' and the vague industry use of that term as interchangeable with 'programmer'. Black hats are supposed to be called "crackers" but that's gone right out of usage thanks to the media changing the meaning of "hacker".

I'll bet there's a huge diversity of people involved in Debian, from stereotypical Aspie-afflicted geeks that require careful handling through to smooth corporate IT types. After all you don't need to know coding to maintain a .deb package, help write documentation or do any number of other vital tasks that are the bricks and mortar of a distribution.

It's important to take the so-called anthropological method - and all qualitative research methodology - with a large grain of salt. This is not to discount it out of hand. As far as I am concerned, these methods are very useful for getting perspectives on a complex subject (by gathering so-called "rich data") and for extracting themes and developing hypotheses out of that data which might be quantitatively testable. But it's not scientific method by itself at all, these should be regarded as techniques that attempt to provide a preamble to doing scientific method. Pissed off by their exclusion from "science" and especially its funding, humanities and social sciences have inappropriately elevated qualitative methods to something mysterious and magical as part of a postmodern backlash against hard science. And of course the media has no idea what the difference is between qualitative and quantitative methods and just write things like "The study showed that ....".

Stock retort but good: so you would have no objection then to the government placing surveillance cameras in your bedroom and bathroom? After all, didn't you say that the secrets of you and your family should not be hidden from the government? Private emails to a loved one, to name one example, are every bit as personal as toilet and sexual habits as far as I am concerned.

How true. So many coding "innovations" turn out to be no more than marketing coats of a different color and that's true in many other life endeavors as well. One example is all the hype that accompanied the introduction of OoP: it was supposed to solve everything, provide world peace, provide ponies etc. Surprise! Studies suggest it has not delivered but OoP is now so entrenched in common apis (eg Gtk+) and industry coding practices that it has become quite unavoidable, loathe it or love it.

Amazing how young people buy so deeply into trends. I know I did myself at their age. I viewed it as a form of social intelligence to be up with trends. I really think human youths are biologically hard-wired to follow trends and fashions as part of 'socialization' or 'maturation' (with the political effect of processing or acculturation of the young so they become good little citizen-worker-consumers). That is the reason you love music from your youth always. There's some sort of imprinting going on.

I'm not complaining about the repetition here though. It's an issue that clearly needs more exposure since nothing is done about it.

The coverall internal jargon would be something like: "we are a youthful company and they are a poor cultural fit". Or more of the fallacy that only young grads could possibly be "up with the latest" or "on top of trends".

Those two 50yo+ talents that you mention will probably move into consulting companies (I hope).

Funny, I seem to get *less* risk averse over the last 10 years. More confidence and I'm better at appraising complex situations I think.

That may explain some of their dumb crap. The Poulsbo GPA driver (losing that term loosely since it barely worked) comes to mind as one example.

Unfortunately that means the industry doesn't appreciate the value of experienced generalists who, unlike the pups, have very broad perspective and years of experience. Studies have shown that experience beats education alone: graduates are very green. For the industry not to get this is absurd, especially when the average age of the US workforce is probably increasing. More experienced oldies should actually be a *boost* to the industry. By all means, fill up the design and product development departments with cool kiddies but make sure an old fart is looking over the partition to ensure they don't wreck the company.

Cf some other engineering disciplines where experience generalists are actually respected. Management itself is a generalist (multidisciplinary) activity that pretends to be specialist. Field managers are often engineers who have moved sideways out of their original speciality. In a major company I worked for, senior site engineers would rotate over different disciplines with each new project. A civil engineer was expected to understand what the EEs were doing in broad strokes for example. That meant they all got tons of experience in tightly interconnected facets of the work and could step into each others shoes at short notice. Even specialists would get redeployed on occasion and put on site to take on a more general engineering management role - mainly tracking contractor work quality and negotiating solutions. When building a real product of some kind, you need generalists to manage the specialists.

Sorry I was confusing two different posts.

Then show me a strictly non-mathematical, testable model of any real system that provides novel insight into the workings of that system and that has predictive power. Doesn't exist.

That is not to confuse all of perceived reality with a single mathematical model. There is no single mathematical model of reality (a GUT) that does not fail at some point as yet. But we're not talking about reality, we're talking about modeling reality as closely as we can get, an enterprise which is called physics.

Yes that's all good mathematics but it may or may not have applications in physics. A mathematics built from an alternative logic system may not be of any use to a physicist since unless it works. But unusual mathematical structures have turned out to be useful in physics before.