Elias Sinderson <elias@cse.ucsc.edu> writes:
> Sorry, Karl, your confusing things.
No, it's just a silly discussion, but that's what picky semantic
discussions turn into :)
> Thos is saying that selective
> breeding should be counted as genetic engineering, whereas you are
> extending his definition to include the attration that your parents felt...
Yes, I'm saying that if he extends "genetic engineering" to include
selecting animals to breed, he must extend it to include selecting
people to breed with.
> Unless your parents were selectively bred like livestock to produce you,
> I don't think you can make that case...  :-)
I'm saying that my parents selected each other, and that they did so
because (among other reasons) each wanted the other's genes to be
mixed with their own in the offspring that they were planning.
What does it matter that they were selecting to produce their own
offspring, rather than the offspring of two unrelated animals?
--
Karl Anderson      kra@monkey.org           http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

URL: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020917.html
Date: Not supplied
Jakob Nielsen on Offshore Usability[1]: "To save costs, some companies are
outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these
countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited
access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users."
Offshore usability is a specific case of the general "offshore design" problem.
Put simply, software teams are not successful when
design or management are done in a different physical location than
programming. Once I actually had a job where I was in New York, my direct
manager was in Singapore, _his_ manager was in Hyderabad, and if I needed
any management input I had literally no choice but to go to the CEO because at
least he was awake during the same hours as I was. You can't get things done
like this. A good project team relies on hundreds of small interactions a day.
Here in the Fog Creek offices, we have 10 small conversations about FogBUGZ 3.0
development every day.
What I don't understand is people who think it's OK to move the developers ten
time zones away from their managers and expect good results. Those same people
would scream bloody murder if you told them that you were going to
send the whole _management_ team to Bangalore or Beijing.
[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020916.html