You can tell the difference between a leader and a director with a simple comparison: If the person would eventually/theoretically get the project done even if everyone else left, they're leading, and if they wouldn't get anything done when everyone left, they're not leading.
This is a pretty flawed definition of leadership... While getting my sociology degree I took a few classes in small group theory and leadership theory and the definition I'd submit would go more like, "If people are following you, you're leading; if you have to pull them constantly, you're not leading.
Leaders aren't supposed to be heroes who can do everything themselves, they're people who can get everyone on the same page so that the group can get it done.
Personally, I'm not too worried about how our cognitive processes will react. If we no longer have REM time, but need the functions provided by it, all of us who can't cope will go crazy and the rest will be fine and successive generations will have less of a problem.
But we shouldn't overlook the physical consequences of not sleeping. I imagine extended periods without sleep would put tremendous additional wear and tear on our eyes, not to mention our hearts.
I agree the problem here is the music industry, not the music itself.
I blame a lot of it on music videos and MTV, too. When a band needed promoting in the past, it would go on tour and play a bunch of shows. This required the band to have a "sound" and a "stage presence."
Now when a band needs promoting, they put out videos or become the star of some reality tv show. This requires the band to have a "look" or a "personality."
When I think back on the bands I really like from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, I couldn't tell you the first damn thing about what they're like as people. I couldn't tell you anything about Geddy Lee's personal life except that he's a member of Ayn Rand's Objectivists, and I learned that from reading about the Objectivists, not Geddy Lee.
But Nelly! Oh, I know that Nelly wears that band-aid on his face because one of his buddies is in jail, or something. I know who's dating who in today's R&B scene and I just have to wonder, wtf does any of it have to do with their music? 50 Cent was shot 3 million times, so I know that he's tough and authentic. This, however, does not change the fact the he can't rap worth a damn.
The music industry's main problem is they have completely lost sight of the product that they are attempting to produce. I'm not going to buy a CD because the artist has an interesting personality. I'll buy his biography instead.
I've been using btjunkie regularly for about a year now. It is pretty good because it has so much, but it's slow as hell and you lose all seeders frequently because, as someone previously mentioned, public bittorrent sites kind of suck.
One of the more important elements of a good bittorrent site is a responsive community so that you can request things and actually expect them to be upped. Nothing like being able to get a VHS rip of Howard the Duck or War Games, older stuff that it's harder to find.
On a related note, I was under the impression that the Pirate Bay had been taken down and was now being closely monitored and downloading from them was essentially flagging yourself.
The approach I've taken in my office is purely problem-solving.
We just bought a bunch of new computers and the main office didn't want to spring for MS Office (and why not, it costs like $150 per these days). "Oh no!" they say, "we need Excel!"
"Aha," says I, and show them OpenOffice. Only one of the five people who have been substituted in order to save money is unhappy with it (she has never owned a computer of her own and it shows). Three of the remaining four say they actually prefer it to MS Office (which shows how little they know). To the ones that prefer it, I simply mention how OpenOffice, quite frankly, is a craptastic example of open source software, and most OSS alternatives are much better. Then I burn them a live CD.
I've got one guy who can't get enough OSS, he asks me all the time about it. When I described Amarok's features to him, he almost wet himself (and he's a Mac user normally).
Also, for the record, I am not the tech person in the office, nor did I have any hand in the decision to pass on paying for MS Office. These are my colleagues (and sometimes superiors), not my underlings, so they're under no pressure to like what I show them.
The reason for the gas price spiking in the US since the invasion of Iraq is not directly because of Supply or Demand, neither were significantly affected by that event.
Gas prices in the US went up markedly because we live in a (mostly) free market economy, and all the traders in New York "buying" oil were afraid that supply would be significantly affected and began paying out the nose for it. Prices are coming back down because the traders have settled down and are no longer so scared.
On the web portal I built for my university way back in 2000, we had RSS feeds from various sites (I believe we ommitted slashdot, feeling it was overhyped).
Javascript isn't a proper programming language either, and I think you know that.
I apologize for overreacting about the OS X thing, but I get sick to shit of Mac users touting mac capabilities that are borrowed or commonplace capabilities.
There are two ways to look at this, IMHO (well, okay, more than two, but I only want to talk about two in this post).
1) University is a place for learning about what has happened.
2) University is a place for exploring the boundaries of knowledge.
If (1) is more important than (2), than the useage of sites like wikipedia et al to write papers and such is problematic and damaging.
If (2) is more important than (1), then it's a great resource and such behaviour should be encouraged. There's no real academic need to prove many concepts from the ground up.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel unless there's something broken with the wheel you're using. Otherwise, you should just go ahead and use somebody else's wheel, and work on reinventing the engine.
Another thing to do is, when you receive spam mail, to run the domain name through a whois lookup and possibly get the name of an administrator for the server, and contact them about it to make sure they're aware of potential problems with their system.
It won't always work, but it might sometimes.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/ for those of you who don't have whois as a basic utility.
Two things:
1) gcc has nothing to do with OS X, that bit of goodness comes from the underlying BSD core, and you'd probably be better served using a proper *nix machine to compile with it... my (admittedly limited) experience with OS X's command interface is that it's extremely limited, if not crippled.
2) HTML isn't even a programming language, not even close to being one. If it can't do job control, it's not programming.
Perl's pretty universal seeing as all you have to do to use it is download it, for free. Plus perl bypasses a lot of the more frustrating elements of programming (the way it handles arrays and hashes is just so perty!).
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell the difference between a leader and a director with a simple comparison: If the person would eventually/theoretically get the project done even if everyone else left, they're leading, and if they wouldn't get anything done when everyone left, they're not leading.
This is a pretty flawed definition of leadership... While getting my sociology degree I took a few classes in small group theory and leadership theory and the definition I'd submit would go more like, "If people are following you, you're leading; if you have to pull them constantly, you're not leading.
Leaders aren't supposed to be heroes who can do everything themselves, they're people who can get everyone on the same page so that the group can get it done.
Personally, I'm not too worried about how our cognitive processes will react. If we no longer have REM time, but need the functions provided by it, all of us who can't cope will go crazy and the rest will be fine and successive generations will have less of a problem.
But we shouldn't overlook the physical consequences of not sleeping. I imagine extended periods without sleep would put tremendous additional wear and tear on our eyes, not to mention our hearts.
It's a lot about a growing feeling of insecurity and anger at a company that just doesn't seem to care a damn.
Let me know when they find one that does!
I agree the problem here is the music industry, not the music itself.
I blame a lot of it on music videos and MTV, too. When a band needed promoting in the past, it would go on tour and play a bunch of shows. This required the band to have a "sound" and a "stage presence."
Now when a band needs promoting, they put out videos or become the star of some reality tv show. This requires the band to have a "look" or a "personality."
When I think back on the bands I really like from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, I couldn't tell you the first damn thing about what they're like as people. I couldn't tell you anything about Geddy Lee's personal life except that he's a member of Ayn Rand's Objectivists, and I learned that from reading about the Objectivists, not Geddy Lee.
But Nelly! Oh, I know that Nelly wears that band-aid on his face because one of his buddies is in jail, or something. I know who's dating who in today's R&B scene and I just have to wonder, wtf does any of it have to do with their music? 50 Cent was shot 3 million times, so I know that he's tough and authentic. This, however, does not change the fact the he can't rap worth a damn.
The music industry's main problem is they have completely lost sight of the product that they are attempting to produce. I'm not going to buy a CD because the artist has an interesting personality. I'll buy his biography instead.
I've been using btjunkie regularly for about a year now. It is pretty good because it has so much, but it's slow as hell and you lose all seeders frequently because, as someone previously mentioned, public bittorrent sites kind of suck.
One of the more important elements of a good bittorrent site is a responsive community so that you can request things and actually expect them to be upped. Nothing like being able to get a VHS rip of Howard the Duck or War Games, older stuff that it's harder to find.
On a related note, I was under the impression that the Pirate Bay had been taken down and was now being closely monitored and downloading from them was essentially flagging yourself.
The approach I've taken in my office is purely problem-solving.
We just bought a bunch of new computers and the main office didn't want to spring for MS Office (and why not, it costs like $150 per these days). "Oh no!" they say, "we need Excel!"
"Aha," says I, and show them OpenOffice. Only one of the five people who have been substituted in order to save money is unhappy with it (she has never owned a computer of her own and it shows). Three of the remaining four say they actually prefer it to MS Office (which shows how little they know). To the ones that prefer it, I simply mention how OpenOffice, quite frankly, is a craptastic example of open source software, and most OSS alternatives are much better. Then I burn them a live CD.
I've got one guy who can't get enough OSS, he asks me all the time about it. When I described Amarok's features to him, he almost wet himself (and he's a Mac user normally).
Also, for the record, I am not the tech person in the office, nor did I have any hand in the decision to pass on paying for MS Office. These are my colleagues (and sometimes superiors), not my underlings, so they're under no pressure to like what I show them.
Because Microsoft is famous for seamless third-party interaction with their proprietary code...
Clearly then, Windows is not an OS. It must be true if the post says it.
The reason for the gas price spiking in the US since the invasion of Iraq is not directly because of Supply or Demand, neither were significantly affected by that event.
Gas prices in the US went up markedly because we live in a (mostly) free market economy, and all the traders in New York "buying" oil were afraid that supply would be significantly affected and began paying out the nose for it. Prices are coming back down because the traders have settled down and are no longer so scared.
On the web portal I built for my university way back in 2000, we had RSS feeds from various sites (I believe we ommitted slashdot, feeling it was overhyped).
Javascript isn't a proper programming language either, and I think you know that.
I apologize for overreacting about the OS X thing, but I get sick to shit of Mac users touting mac capabilities that are borrowed or commonplace capabilities.
There are two ways to look at this, IMHO (well, okay, more than two, but I only want to talk about two in this post).
1) University is a place for learning about what has happened.
2) University is a place for exploring the boundaries of knowledge.
If (1) is more important than (2), than the useage of sites like wikipedia et al to write papers and such is problematic and damaging.
If (2) is more important than (1), then it's a great resource and such behaviour should be encouraged. There's no real academic need to prove many concepts from the ground up.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel unless there's something broken with the wheel you're using. Otherwise, you should just go ahead and use somebody else's wheel, and work on reinventing the engine.
Another thing to do is, when you receive spam mail, to run the domain name through a whois lookup and possibly get the name of an administrator for the server, and contact them about it to make sure they're aware of potential problems with their system. It won't always work, but it might sometimes. http://www.dnsstuff.com/ for those of you who don't have whois as a basic utility.
Two things: 1) gcc has nothing to do with OS X, that bit of goodness comes from the underlying BSD core, and you'd probably be better served using a proper *nix machine to compile with it... my (admittedly limited) experience with OS X's command interface is that it's extremely limited, if not crippled. 2) HTML isn't even a programming language, not even close to being one. If it can't do job control, it's not programming. Perl's pretty universal seeing as all you have to do to use it is download it, for free. Plus perl bypasses a lot of the more frustrating elements of programming (the way it handles arrays and hashes is just so perty!).