(Maybe if I put the "OT" in parentheses rather than brackets it
will survive better. It appears that GG's posting interface
strips off tags in brackets. Anyone know why that might have
seemed like a good idea??)
On Jul 29, 9:16 pm, (e-mail address removed) (Richard Harter) wrote:
On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:27:45 -0700 (PDT),spinoza1111
[ snip ]
I'm not a stalker. Seebach unleashed a cybernetic mob on Herb Schildt
a number of years ago in order to advance himself in a career for
which Seebach is just not qualified, and I examined Seebach's attack
to find it to be garbage. My article about this matter was accepted
for publication in the competently moderated and prestigious group
comp.risks. The moderator was then spammed by the sort of cybernetic
mob Seebach had marshaled against Schildt and printed an apology for
accepting my article,
Why? If he was right to accept your article, why not print(?)
a defense instead? It seems to me that you're contradicting
yourself here -- the moderation is competent, and yet the moderator
succumbed to pressure?
Not a contradiction, an indication of the pressures Peter is under. I
dropped the matter after exchanging email in private with Peter
because I respect him and his time commitment. He has always treated
me with a decency and respect I don't see many people showing here.
His experience with you may be different from that of those who
post here, and that may be a factor.
He is more intelligent, more qualified, and above all a better person
than nearly anyone here, and if we may consider that there is a
collective persona in comp.risks, he is, as Hamlet said, "Hyperion to
a Satyr" with respect to that monster.
Was there any suggestion, in the e-mail exchanged with PGN, that
you explicitly mention this experience in your post? I think it
might have helped me assess your remarks more accurately, and indeed
reading through the post one more time, I think maybe I *was* unduly
harsh.
I don't believe you're here to judge other people. You lack standing
and qualifications.
Peter was a source for my book, "Build Your Own .Net Language and
Compiler" (Apress 2004), and he read the review copy, it appears from
his email thank you note.
This book described my experience in mainframe platforms.
The one point where I'm still confused, though, is why you claim
NP completeness for an operation that it seems to me is no worse
Actually, I never made that claim. However, matching two sets using
linear pairwise search is indeed NP complete.
But that's not what minimally competent programmer would do when using
DASD in the old days while processing a payroll as a "batch", which as
I said would be necessary given accounting, not data processing,
constraints. He would use "employee ID" as a key to randomly access
the "employee master record". But this, as I said, would cause read
head motion for each record in the batch, and this is much slower than
sequentially proceeding, with minimal head motion, through two sorted
files. Paradoxically, when using batch-oriented payroll accounting,
you needed to use DASD as if it were sequential.
than order-N-squared, with N being the number of employees. (NP
completeness might be involved if one needed to consider all subsets
of the set of employees, but I'm not thinking of why that would be
necessary if the goal is to process many "change this employee's
salary" requests, even if only sequential reading of the data is
possible.)
The formula would have nothing to do with this. For a random DASD
access for each payroll "ticket", your time formula is N*A where N is
the size of the incoming ticket or hours worked record and A is the
average seek time.
If what you suspect about the background of the responders is true,
why were *their* posts accepted? I've looked over those responses
again, by the way, and everyone making a point about the underlying
technology seems to me to have relevant experience.
Because unlike me, Peter Neumann believes that managers know their
jobs.
Where to draw the line between informed speculation (which is,
and IMO should be, welcome in comp.risks) and wild guesses (which
IMO should not be) is probably to some extent a matter of opinion.
In this case it appears that I may have initially drawn it in
the wrong place, which I regret.
You've painted yourself using corporatese and unexamined phrases into
a logical corner.
Read George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language". "Never
use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used
to seeing in print." "A matter of opinion" is a received, hackneyed
figure of speech used by people who haven't disambiguated opinion from
status. It's a chunk of words that stops thought.
You see, you've unintentionally said that "where to draw the line
between informed speculation and wild guesses [opinion] is a matter of
opinion". This is an infinite regress.
It's simply untrue that corporations can any way through
administrative procedures identify "mere opinion". You can safely
predict that "scientists" at BP will now say that the oil is "gone"
from the Gulf of Mexico despite the fact that this "informed,
objective viewpoint" is a physical impossibility in physical law
(conservation of matter) and a shocking offense to Gulf fishermen who
have lost their livelihoods. I worked at Amoco, now part of BP, in OS
development and realized that Job One was lying to the oil boys (who
were vicious, drunken thugs) about status.
Absent a kind of maturity which is a termination offense in many
corporations, it is impossible to distinguish people and the quality
of their opinions: there are no individuals, just in duh viduals as we
see here.
It's not my opinion that data processing managers did command
programmers to use the key to look up each employee master when
processing large sequential files. This is what they did in my lived
experience because, shortly after the "structured programming"
innovation of the early 1970s, they insisted on dominating, usually
boorishly, structured walkthroughs despite the fact that this was
discouraged in the literature, and nearly all of them were instances
of the famous Peter Principle: they'd been made manager because they
were incompetent programmmers.
To them, the (rather simple) subtleties and gotchas of a properly
coded and walkable-throughable sequential match were "too complicated"
and ergo "inefficient" because they did not understand it. They would
force programmers to do a random seek.
Nor am I generalizing from insufficient data points. I'm a consultant
whose worked worldwide. This is what happened in reality. It's not
"opinion" at all.
