Life is what happens

Life is what happens when you're distracted by lots of crap in your life and just start leaping.

The fundamentals of fast computing

I think a lot of people mistake processor speed for "what makes a computer fast". Sure, it helps to have a fast processor. In a lot of cases, it can help to have multiple fast processors! Particularly if you're running a lot of separate applications that need a decent amount of CPU time each. But I've discovered, particularly in academia, but I've also seen it in business, that people will spend lots of extra $$ on faster processors and then skimp entirely on the RAM.

Yesterday I saw a 8-core Mac Pro system with 2GB of RAM. Seriously! I realize this was a default option for buying a Mac Pro a while back, but if you're going to spend the money to get the Mac Pro, at least get it with 4GB of RAM. Today you can buy 4GB of RAM at datamem for the Mac Pro for just over $100!

Now this is pretty interesting, but not quite as bad as DELL pushing super upgraded desktop and laptop computers with 6-8GB of RAM and a 32-bit version of Windows. That's like having a corvette engine hooked up to a 2 speed transmission!

It got made up

When reading papers talking about the statistics of something or another. I find it difficult to understand how some people can use extremely complex statistics and yet miss over the fact that their standard deviations are way out of character for what the average is. If you have a test that is standardized to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 50 and you report a test with a mean of 180 and a standard deviation of 200 or more, then I think it's more than likely that you're missing value is defined as 999 and you forgot to tell your stats program that.

So in this case, is it worse that they reported way-off-base results? Or would it be worse if they had just made it up and made up closer-to-understandable numbers? And how on earth did reviewers not catch this?

7 dirtiest jobs in IT

7 Even More Dirty Jobs in IT

As a dedication to this, I'd like to start posting my more ridiculous stories of working in IT. I'll start with one from college. I was working the computer help desk (it paid well and had good hours) during a campus-wide blackout. No power on campus, but of course we had the old school phones that still worked. I got a call from a student in a computer lab saying that none of the computers were working in the computer lab in her dorm. When I asked her if the lights were on, she said that the power was off and so the lights didn't work. Further, she had a computer in her room that wouldn't work because there was no power in the building. But she didn't make the leap that the power being off in the building was the reason that none of the computers in the computer lab would turn on.

Trends in employment

Young Workers Hard to Anticipate/Control

Apparently school is to blame

Well, you know what they say - "skools bad".

So I'm not sure what they're getting at here. People who come out of school tend to not know the ropes of a business. At the same time, college grads are entering the workspace with many more skills up front than people traditionally had. I've worked for a lot of companies. I've had good bosses and really crappy bosses. I've worked for people who nurture new people and others who do nothing but yell at entire teams.

I think it's odd that companies complain that new workers are hard to retain and expect too much, when it's likely that companies are hiring people for more menial tasks than we would have been hired for 5 years ago. At the same time we're teaching people problem solving and then shoving them into a world where it's "do what you're told".

On the wrong side of every issue

I'm not sure how the Republicans in congress think they're going to look good by voting against a stimulus package. Here's the thing, Obama and the media made a big deal about going to capital hill and reaching out and holding talks. At this point they've voted against the bill (that passed anyway) and here's roughly the two ways that things can turn out:

1. It works. The stimulus jump starts the economy and the republicans look like sore losers, out of touch with Americans. They lose even bigger in the next election and several republicans are cast as the bad guys in the next Harry Potter movie.

2. It doesn't work. Obama and Democrats point out that they made major compromises with republicans. 1/3 of the total bill was tax cuts that the Republicans wanted -- even said they needed to vote for the bill. The republicans thus can be shown to have weakened the bill and again they look petty and out of touch with both Americans and economic theory. Several republicans are again cast as the bad guys in the next Harry Potter movie and the rest are forced to act in the sequel to "Confessions of a Shopaholic".

So the way it's all playing the media is that the republicans made changes to the bill and then refused to vote for it. They're voting almost entirely along party lines, except for 3 republicans who thought the bill had a chance of working. Now here's the thing, the Dems even got the conservative democrats and moderates... So it looks even more like the republicans are taking their ball(s) and going home; refusing to play with the other kids on the playground.

Blank Slates