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Aug 08Sticking to the Method
by in Feature Articles on 2008-09-30
Long before the √-button on calculators, and the now-antique slide rules and logarithm tables, people actually had to calculate square roots by hand. Like so many other pre-Computer Age tasks, square root calculation isn’t really complicated, it’s just tedious. The simplest – and, as it happens, the oldest – technique for this the Babylonian method: guess the square root of a number and then continually refine the result by taking the arithmetic mean of the result and the quotient of the number and the result, until you’re satisfied with the precision. In other words:
<script type="text/JavaScript">
var numbr = 5, guess = 2;
do { guess = 0.5 * (guess + numbr/guess); }
while (confirm('Refine Further? ' + guess));
</script>
If Ben E. was given three words to describe his job, he’d use bureaucracy, bureaucracy, and after filling out Form 811B-AW (Request to Use More Than Three Words Form), serious fricken bureaucracy. But alas, when one works for The State, things like serious fricken bureaucracy, 
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Phil was living the dream, working on a Hollywood feature film. The film's budget was in the $35M range, putting it toward the low end for feature films. This movie in particular would utilize a lot of green screen, and they planned to film entirely digital. The director had (correctly) decided that JPEG-style compression that was common to most tape formats was not acceptable, and that they'd need something that could handle raw, uncompressed high-definition video. They were making a movie, after all, not some podunk town's weather report!
After spending a few years working at a large, faceless corporation, John W. decided that it was time to move on to a smaller, friendlier company where he could actually make a difference. He eventually settled on "Primatech," a software services company with a dozen or so developers. What really sold him was how receptive they were to change. Each month, they had a "Greatest Improvement Idea Contest" in their dev meeting, where the developer with the best idea for improvement would win a $100 bill. Surely, John figured, a company like that would be rife with best practices.
