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Programming

Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive 465

Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 853

Yes, I did exactly the same thing from the late 70s to early 90s when I did my A-levels in maths, and came to same conclusion. Now I have to hire technical people and, if I'm to use A levels to discriminate, I have to somehow find out what year they took their A-levels (even though in the UK this may be construed as illegally discriminatory because that might involve discovery of a candidate's age).
The simplest system would work the best - order everyone and award marks by percentile rank. This avoids grade inflation by design.

I think the real problem is that as a society we've become so politically correct we go to great lengths to avoid telling people they are below average - when in reality half of all people are precisely that (by any uniformly distributed, reasonable, metric).
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Journal Journal: First Post!!!

Always looking at Slashdot, never posting. I should really be a bit more active, log in with my user name, not be an A.C. etc. So here's my first attempt at doing just that (about three years after my first login!)

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