Serious point though - teach a man to fish and all that.
I find I only answer the toughies (when I can) and leave picking off 50 easy answers to other people - so I guess that means I enjoy the challenge of answering tough questions.
Do you think answer people are the ones who ask the sensible questions when they do get stuck? If you filter out all the questions you can answer using Google in five minutes, those that remain are a different category; generated, I so stipulate, by a different class of question person.
But with blades, 1U pizza boxes, xSeries+VMWare, LPARs, 156 and 288gb spindles, etc and the consolidation tools that all the vendors are pushing, data centres can and should be smaller than they were five years ago.
My, yes. The human body! Good luck getting anywhere close to that. Oh, this old chestnut.
The human body is a poor solution for many of the tasks that it performs. Ask anyone with cruciate ligament injuries.
If you spent a billion engineer-years on designing something that could hunt, climb trees, AND swim, you'd come up with something very different to the current design.
Oh, yeah, we also get less crap from managers than the permanent employes (sad but true). Theorem:
{self-motivated} union {highly skilled}
{contractors}
and the corollary...
NOT [ {self-motivated} or {highly skilled} ] -> troublemaker
Loyalty is the usual defence against this argument, but in today's market it matters not a fig until you're near six figure package or you are in a start-up.
Well, it might be so for a manager running a team of people with much lower stakes in company IPR than he or she themself has. But even McWalBucks burgerflippers will be more productive if correctly motivated. Being bullied or micromanaged does drive some people; but for others this will only slow them down. Real management skill lies in knowing the difference and dealing with each member of staff (or 'person' as I like to call them) accordingly.
If you are running a team of experts your job is to keep crap the hell out of the way of your staff and let them get on with leveraging their genius for the greater good.
The manager described in TFA will fail in either scenario. Remember that 'experts' might include fund managers just as nuch as Java coders.
Interesting, but i think you missed the point. This is quantum tech, not just nanotech.
A byte's worth of qubits can be in all 256 states *at once*, so as well as the 2d density of info you describe, you have to factor in that the thing is in many universes as a multiplier for the bit density it has merely in this one...
He's guilty of 2 and 3, sadly lumbered as the referant of 4 ("Best future history since Ringworld" - how many times have we seen that?), criminally guilty of 6 - in fact I have accidentally bought the same short stories at least five times, and some of the Known Space books stray into the territory of 8.
9 - Man/Kzin wars, let's say no more.
Then again "Scatterbrain" specifically apologises for point 6 and gives you interesting insights into the whole collabaration and ideas versus writing thing.
And don't get me started on EE Smith "with" Stephen Goldin.
In fact, have ANY of the well-known authors avoided all 10 of these traps?
The main problem in MS World is the number of people that use Access to do spreadsheet tasks and Excel to do relational tasks...
For small databases (ie 100,000 rows) it doesn't actually matter that both have crappy data engines, because these days Xeons eat small datasets for breakfast.
As a technical writer, I am basically paid to be a Grammar Nazi.
No you're not - you're paid to explain technical matters to the layman as end-user. Your grammar must be at a good enough level to avoid distracting from the content, but it does not need to be technically perfect. This is what Taco is saying.
There are many cases where breaking accepted rules of grammar actually -helps- understanding, especially beginning sentences with conjuctions. Period followed by "But" is often clearer than hiding the "but" in a subclause only subtly indicated by a comma in the middle of a long paragraph.
I hope you spend your time re-reading documents for clarity, and correcting proofing errors you happen to notice - not the other way around, please!
BTW, "evince" is not a good choice for Slashdot, because many of our international readers will wonder what the hell it means...
...in which environment, perfect English is often percieved as arrogant and/or anal. If you use correct punctuation in chat rooms, people think you are some kind of weirdo.
(I -am- a weirdo, but at least they never figured out I am a Dachshund.)
Do you say England are a great nation?
There's not much English spoken in England. You might think everybody here speaks like those nice people you met in Cambridge* once, but we don't.
I think American English is clearer than the original, which is an unusual thing for an Englishman to think. I think IBM must have warped my fragile little mind.
* Cambridge on the river Cam, England, not Cambridge, Mass.
I wonder if it's the case that they're not very good readers. If reading is a chore for you no matter how good the writing is -- if, in the worst case, you're sounding each word out as you go -- you mite just knot no any bedder.
I would argue that it is the fast readers who tend to stall if they spot a big mistake. I am a very quick reader by nature, and like you say, I just don't see words, I absorb sentences, or even two or three sentences at a time.
(Many people are taught speed-reading, but that's not quite the same - there, you are deliberately filtering content. I don't do that, but I still read at speed-reading speeds.)
I tend to stall on big mistakes, and as Taco said, the pipeline falls apart. (My reading seems to be more EPIC than POWER, so it REALLY stalls.:-) )
Like Taco, I agree that Slashdot does not need to follow NYT standards of grammar - that's not the idea. If you start concentrating on grammar, you stop concentrating on content. That is why the editor of a newspaper has a team of subs, and the editor learns to ignore spelling and grammar and let his team deal with them, whilst (s)he ensures the voice is consistent and the opinion of the paper is clear.
I agree that big and obvious mistakes are a pain in the neck because they interrupt the flow of understanding, but we really shouldn't sweat the small stuff, unless we want to start paying 50 cents for slashdot each morning, to cover the cost of those sub-eds.
Just as an aside... I also stall when I think the paragraph is going in one direction and it turns out to be going somewhere else, like in a shaggy dog tale, for instance. I consider it a feature, not a bug, because that stall means I will stop and think whenever the message of the text is new to me.
Actually, there are a lot of comapanies (Goole, MapQuest) that use the services of NavTech to get their data. Free map data is unlikely to include new roads and torn-down roads, etc.
In my experience, NavTech's satnav DVDs seldom include such information either.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
...discuss.
Serious point though - teach a man to fish and all that.
I find I only answer the toughies (when I can) and leave picking off 50 easy answers to other people - so I guess that means I enjoy the challenge of answering tough questions.
Do you think answer people are the ones who ask the sensible questions when they do get stuck? If you filter out all the questions you can answer using Google in five minutes, those that remain are a different category; generated, I so stipulate, by a different class of question person.
Is that question person also our answer person?
But with blades, 1U pizza boxes, xSeries+VMWare, LPARs, 156 and 288gb spindles, etc and the consolidation tools that all the vendors are pushing, data centres can and should be smaller than they were five years ago.
Hmmm - I need to make that a bit more snappy
The human body is a poor solution for many of the tasks that it performs. Ask anyone with cruciate ligament injuries.
If you spent a billion engineer-years on designing something that could hunt, climb trees, AND swim, you'd come up with something very different to the current design.
"It doesnt seem like much, but it does add up if you have a lot of files (pr0n, music, data, images, etc)."
Surely all of those types of file are way over 512 bytes anyway?
Unless you can fit a really really dirty story into 85 words or so of English?
{self-motivated} union {highly skilled}
{contractors}
and the corollary...
NOT [ {self-motivated} or {highly skilled} ]
->
troublemaker
Loyalty is the usual defence against this argument, but in today's market it matters not a fig until you're near six figure package or you are in a start-up.
Waitaminute... if you're an Australian living in London, surely you would say 'Stella, or Carling,sir?'
Well, it might be so for a manager running a team of people with much lower stakes in company IPR than he or she themself has. But even McWalBucks burgerflippers will be more productive if correctly motivated. Being bullied or micromanaged does drive some people; but for others this will only slow them down. Real management skill lies in knowing the difference and dealing with each member of staff (or 'person' as I like to call them) accordingly.
If you are running a team of experts your job is to keep crap the hell out of the way of your staff and let them get on with leveraging their genius for the greater good.
The manager described in TFA will fail in either scenario. Remember that 'experts' might include fund managers just as nuch as Java coders.
a strong desire to place on the front page any article with any mention at all of nanoparticles, or nanobots, or nanos in general.
Including "nanocontent" and "nanodupes"...
Interesting, but i think you missed the point. This is quantum tech, not just nanotech.
A byte's worth of qubits can be in all 256 states *at once*, so as well as the 2d density of info you describe, you have to factor in that the thing is in many universes as a multiplier for the bit density it has merely in this one...
*Feynman fans read 'history' for 'universe'
They built the first one and measured the speed exactly... but afterwards they could no longer find it...
Really? I reckon my feet accelerating several times faster than my head is going to hurt. Quite a lot.
Good news for chiropractors though eh?
Gronk?
When? When?
I liked Niven until I read your post... damn.
He's guilty of 2 and 3, sadly lumbered as the referant of 4 ("Best future history since Ringworld" - how many times have we seen that?), criminally guilty of 6 - in fact I have accidentally bought the same short stories at least five times, and some of the Known Space books stray into the territory of 8.
9 - Man/Kzin wars, let's say no more.
Then again "Scatterbrain" specifically apologises for point 6 and gives you interesting insights into the whole collabaration and ideas versus writing thing.
And don't get me started on EE Smith "with" Stephen Goldin.
In fact, have ANY of the well-known authors avoided all 10 of these traps?
Nothing wrong with what you say, but you dropped some zeroes. FTSE100/Fortune500 companies run sites with that many hits PER HOUR, not month.
Maybe MySQL is good for big applications, for some values of big...but not 200-blade Linux farm big.
The main problem in MS World is the number of people that use Access to do spreadsheet tasks and Excel to do relational tasks...
For small databases (ie 100,000 rows) it doesn't actually matter that both have crappy data engines, because these days Xeons eat small datasets for breakfast.
grammer nazi's
"grammar Nazis"
You correct his "grammer" but you leave "stayed inter-office" (intra- not inter-) alone? Bah! You should have your jackboots revoked!
In Germany, to publish that whole exchange would be ILLEGAL, never mind ungrammatical...
As a technical writer, I am basically paid to be a Grammar Nazi.
No you're not - you're paid to explain technical matters to the layman as end-user. Your grammar must be at a good enough level to avoid distracting from the content, but it does not need to be technically perfect. This is what Taco is saying.
There are many cases where breaking accepted rules of grammar actually -helps- understanding, especially beginning sentences with conjuctions. Period followed by "But" is often clearer than hiding the "but" in a subclause only subtly indicated by a comma in the middle of a long paragraph.
I hope you spend your time re-reading documents for clarity, and correcting proofing errors you happen to notice - not the other way around, please!
BTW, "evince" is not a good choice for Slashdot, because many of our international readers will wonder what the hell it means...
...in which environment, perfect English is often percieved as arrogant and/or anal. If you use correct punctuation in chat rooms, people think you are some kind of weirdo. (I -am- a weirdo, but at least they never figured out I am a Dachshund.)
Do you say England are a great nation? There's not much English spoken in England. You might think everybody here speaks like those nice people you met in Cambridge* once, but we don't. I think American English is clearer than the original, which is an unusual thing for an Englishman to think. I think IBM must have warped my fragile little mind. * Cambridge on the river Cam, England, not Cambridge, Mass.
This is exactly the kind of poor English up with which I will not put!
I wonder if it's the case that they're not very good readers. If reading is a chore for you no matter how good the writing is -- if, in the worst case, you're sounding each word out as you go -- you mite just knot no any bedder.
:-) )
I would argue that it is the fast readers who tend to stall if they spot a big mistake. I am a very quick reader by nature, and like you say, I just don't see words, I absorb sentences, or even two or three sentences at a time.
(Many people are taught speed-reading, but that's not quite the same - there, you are deliberately filtering content. I don't do that, but I still read at speed-reading speeds.)
I tend to stall on big mistakes, and as Taco said, the pipeline falls apart. (My reading seems to be more EPIC than POWER, so it REALLY stalls.
Like Taco, I agree that Slashdot does not need to follow NYT standards of grammar - that's not the idea. If you start concentrating on grammar, you stop concentrating on content. That is why the editor of a newspaper has a team of subs, and the editor learns to ignore spelling and grammar and let his team deal with them, whilst (s)he ensures the voice is consistent and the opinion of the paper is clear.
I agree that big and obvious mistakes are a pain in the neck because they interrupt the flow of understanding, but we really shouldn't sweat the small stuff, unless we want to start paying 50 cents for slashdot each morning, to cover the cost of those sub-eds.
Just as an aside... I also stall when I think the paragraph is going in one direction and it turns out to be going somewhere else, like in a shaggy dog tale, for instance. I consider it a feature, not a bug, because that stall means I will stop and think whenever the message of the text is new to me.
In my experience, NavTech's satnav DVDs seldom include such information either. ;-)
There are probably only three people in the world who get Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. (I am trying to think who the third person is.)
(I'm also wondering if Einstein's estate will now sue...)