On Fri, 08 Jun 2012 21:56:07 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> For the average person, it most certainly is possible.  There are tools
>> in the basic/cheap versions of Photoshop to do this sort of thing IIRC.
> 
> There is no magical "tool" which can correctly guess what is hidden
> behind a solid object.

No, but if you have a picture that shows what's behind a solid object, 
then you can in fact mask out the object.

Photoshop also now has a plugin that can do a reasonable fill that looks 
good to do things like remove a tree from the foreground and replace it 
with grass, that kind of thing.  That's much easier than, for example, 
removing people from a picture.

But if you take a series of photos with people walking in front of the 
subject, in general, you can paint people out and replace them with 
what's behind them using data from other shots in the series.

That's how it's done, generally.

> I'm aware that there *are* people who possess the skill to do utterly
> amazing things with photo editors. But that doesn't mean that everybody
> can do this. It's not a question of having a magic "tool"; it's about
> being sufficiently skilful to find ways to trick the eye. From what I've
> seen, few people have such skills.

Well, you are working from a very small sample.

>>> That's my point.
>>>
>>> If you do not have all of the information (the usual case), then
>>> whether your conclusions are correct or not is largely chance.
>>
>> I don't think this is the "usual case".
> 
> Usually what you know about a thing is utterly dwarfed by what you don't
> know. The question is whether you know the important facts - which is
> usually a matter of chance.

That's not been my experience.  It is possible to seek out the important 
facts before making a decision.

Business intelligence systems do exactly that, in fact.

>> Well, no, it's not my intention to say "Andy, you're an idiot" - I hope
>> you know that.  What you do tend to do, though, is start from a very
>> bad premise and then make wild assertions that are not accurate and
>> very easily verifiable.
> 
> Statements like this make me wonder where this vast endless source of
> "easy" counter-examples is... It's as if the entire world knows
> something that I don't.

How to properly use google? <scnr>

>>> I'll see if I can figure out what my password is. (If not, I guess I
>>> can look it up on some Russian forum...)
>>
>> LOL
>>
>> There is a forgotten password link you can use to reset it, of course.
> 
> Nah, it's probably the same password I use for everything else...
> 
> ...oh. ****. >_<

I smell a problem....

>>> Or because - as I already suggested - it's perhaps aimed at somebody
>>> other than me.
>>
>> That's certainly possible, but you are a "job seeker", and that's part
>> of the target audience.
> 
> As I say, I get the impression (I'm not sure precisely why) that it's
> mainly targeted at high-powered business executives in upper management.
> (These are the people who are usually obsessed with "networking", for
> example.) Since I am not one of those people, perhaps this isn't an
> appropriate tool for me, which is why it looks useless when I look at
> it.
> 
> (Alternatively, perhaps I'm just mistaken...)

Yep, you are.  I'm certainly not a 'high powered business executive in 
upper management", but I do happen to have worked with a lot of people in 
several different fields.

>> But jobs typically don't fall out of the sky into your lap (as you
>> know), you have to work to find them (which you also know) and it can
>> be difficult (which you also also know).
> 
> Sure. As I say, last time I looked, there didn't seem to be anything to
> "work at". Once you've filled in all the fields, that's about it. Unless
> they really have /radically/ altered the capabilities of the site...

Well, there's also the question of your unwillingness to go where the 
work is, or your unwillingness to believe that anyone on the planet who 
works a "normal" job makes enough to live on.

Even with plenty of real-life examples demonstrating the opposite.

Heck, I was laid off last May.  I didn't work again until October, and 
it's been contract work ever since.  A couple of really tight months 
financially, but we haven't lost the house and are still paying all the 
bills.

>>> OOC, do you have any factual basis for saying that "millions of people
>>> do use it with some success", beyond the fact that the site still
>>> exists and hasn't gone bankrupt yet? Or is /that/ merely an
>>> assumption? :-P
>>
>> Oooh, he's got teeth, this one does. ;)  That's a fair question.
> 
> Back atcha. ;-)

It always makes me smile when you take a stand on something.  Even when 
the stand isn't necessarily logical in my view.  You have changed in that 
regard, and it's a good change.  :)

>> Look at the number of people I'm connected to.  I follow a number of
>> companies and see people taking positions at new companies that had
>> jobs posted on the site.
> 
> So, there's indirect evidence that some of the people on the site lead
> quite successful careers. That's a correlation, but not necessarily a
> causal relationship.

Sure, it's not a causal relationship - but even if you consider the 
possibility that 0.01% of the people on LinkedIn have successfully used 
it to find work (and that's an extremely conservative estimate), that's 
still 500 people who have found jobs using it just in my network alone.

>> My network (out to three degrees) consists of nearly 5 million people.
> 
> So there's a lot of people /on/ the site.

And it stands to reason if it were a waste of time, people wouldn't spend 
time on the site, would they?  (The point of LinkedIn isn't to waste 
time, it's to build a professional network.  Facebook, OTOH, is 
essentially there for people to waste time on so they can be the 
'product' sold to advertisers - the two aren't really equivalent).

>> Every job search professional I have talked to (recruiters, placement
>> agencies, etc.) has said that networking is something that's generally
>> a good predictor of success in finding employment.
> 
> I don't get the whole "networking" thing. I mean, hypothetically I can
> see why it might work. But I have no idea how you'd go about this in the
> real world, nor do I directly know of any instances where this has been
> a successful approach for somebody. Maybe I haven't seen networking
> succeed because I don't do any networking and I don't know anybody else
> that does, IDK... It just seems a slightly strange concept.

Well, I've had it work for me in the past.  In fact, the contract work 
I'm doing right now is due to networking - I applied for a position with 
a local company, and while I wasn't hired by that company, someone 
external to the company involved in the selection process saw my CV and 
gave me a call for another project she was working on.

I've been working "for" her (as an independent contractor) ever since.

The job before the one I was laid off from (or rather, the company), I 
met a recruiter at a user group meeting who introduced me to the hiring 
manager at the company - and I was originally going to contract to them, 
but they bought the contract out and hired me directly.

So there's two examples.

>>> (Not that a seriously doubt you. But it sounds like exactly the sort
>>> of statement that's easy to casually make and almost impossible to
>>> objectively verify.)
>>
>> See above. :)
> 
> For example, how do you know that "millions" have found it useful? Not,
> say, "thousands"? The number of people on the site is not necessarily
> the number who have actually found it beneficial.

It stands to reason that if it weren't beneficial, people would stop 
using it.  After all, you didn't find it beneficial, and you stopped 
using it.  That's actually a perfectly natural reaction.

So are you assuming you're the only one who stopped using it because you 
didn't find it beneficial?

> In general, I imagine it's quite hard to scientifically quantify this.
> (What counts as "beneficial" or "not beneficial"? How do you put a
> number on that?)

Found something they were looking for using the service.

Jim

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