no, that would be "ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhh.... oh-ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.... ah-aaah-ah-ah-ah-u-u-u-aah-AAAAH-aah-aah...
aaah-aaah".
After careful reflection I would be inclined to agree with you. I still haven't figured out how to work in the percussion though (which is essential for the whole opening credits experience). Maybe I could insert a text block that sounded right when printed on a loud dot-matrix? Hmm....
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
What the fruck is this supposed to be?
It's the Star Trek theme from the OLD show! Don't you remember the Nomad episode?
what is happening right now is the probe is being used as spare parts by a highly advanced AI robot probe. The two will merge and become something more powerful than any of it's creators ever imagined...
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
5 year mission, eh? I engineering projects are always behind schedule in the future too!
That's kind of what I was getting at. When you get taught (as opposed to learn) Software Engineering they talk about design, testing, etc. These are all great and I really want to be able to do them as much as possible but most of the time people in the industry just seem to laugh (or cry) when you ask them about these practices. I guess the people doing it right don't have time to hang out on Slashdot?:)
Any decent distro *cough*Debian*cough* sets up sulogin to spawn from single user bootup, not just bash. So you're prompted for the root password or it starts up normally.
Just started using Debian last week after too much RedHat... Thanks for the info, might save my Axx some time!:)
In the review the book is compared to some other "failure" books. I think it really is cathartic to write about things that went wrong, it may even be the best way to understand what happened and (theoretically) how to prevent it.
I think this is what inspired "Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks (IMO this is required reading). His motivation was, in part, to describe how and why things fall apart from an organizational perspective. There was some commentary on interdepartmental politics, IIRC, but it was mostly about configuration management and why the massive project he had tried to manage was so over-budget and behind its schedule. I guess it is a "related reading" for this topic.
Some people have suggested that the work he has done is no longer as relevant and that his organizational princicples seem kind of dinosaurish to a company running on Internet time, while others say the things he discussed are so ingrained in Software Engineering that we see the book as a cliche (something like a Platonic discussion of the ideal project environtment). What do you think?
Hi! We
have partially implemented this on a site called Prosebush
(http://www.prosebush.com). Feel free to make an account (or not) and
try to get you post boosted up to the top story. We are presently
evaluating the system and would like to have some good data. We
haven't implemented the entire algorithm yet for various reasons (I
don't think the cheap server we are on would be a good place to do
real-time clustering and the C++ compiler is really old). But what we
have there is a start. Please try to break it (in the context of the
moderation algorithm!), I have no doubt we at Prosebush will learn a
lot from it.
Thanks for you interest!
And to quote Bart Simpson: "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda" (or in this case Bayes!):) LOL
Yeah, to have open source stuff for this is ideal... I think there is quite a lot of open source NLP and Neural Net stuff out there but it's probably very academic in nature... I think if you look around University web pages where people do this you might find some packages. I would personally like to see it built into Emacs though!:) M-x moderate-based-on-personal-preferences
Think about it-- you cannot create an automated system that isn't eventually susceptible to automated attack. It's that simple.
I'm going to disagree... It is possible to do algorithmic moderation based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an analysis of who read what. I have been yammering about this in several discussions on Kuro5hin but no-one seems to reply so I won't bother reiterating here... but basically you do similarity analysis between what the person has read in the past and the current articles, this lets you know if they will be likely to want to read the current stuff. Further the number of other people who read that article (and it's children) will weight the choice (so a disagreeable, but controversial or important argument, still gets modded up).
The advantages of such "no hands" moderation include not requiring users to work in order to mod up posts (they just browse), the ability to turn off the rating or weight it in favor of some metric (browse at -1, or just read the Sports news), and articles that show up in a discussion long after the human moderators would have stopped paying attention would still have a good chance of being modded up automatically (for those who come to the dicsussion late but still have good ideas).
Disadvantages include the fact that it requires a helluva chunk of computer power to do this. We have implemented a more simplistic version of this system over at Prosebush and use it to rank story contributions, stories, and genres. So far it seems to work. Please check it and let me know if you think the system is failing to work...
Basically, you read what others have written, and at the end of each contribution the story can be continued by anyone in any direction (as many branches as you like). If you don't like any of the choices you can add you own (or add something anyway just to make the story richer).
We have set up a website to do this (Prosebush). And so far the response from people has been great! There are a few stories that are coming along really well, a few that are really silly, etc... All the guys involved in building the site were fans of old-school text adventure games and choose-your-owns... They really inspired the site in many ways...
Look, your experience sucks more. Obviously I agree.
My response concerned time pressure and the fact that occasionally there are demands for per-client custom orders beyond the IT industry. In your case it sounds like your boss is a moron who doesn't know how to evaluate a project or communicate. Otherwise how could the development team not know they were going live (ready or not) in 24 hours. Sucks to be you.
And, just for all the over-worked scumbag wage slaves out there who would give thier thumbs to know how to program (so they could escape thier dead-end job with no possibility of a raise let alone advancement) it isn't one steak that's stressful, it's the 80th, and it's after three weeks working in a hot smoky little hell-hole for a guy who is convinced the WWII Germans were RIGHT and keeps "accidentally" dropping your knife on the floor, etc. Everybody's job sucks sometimes. My point was if my job is going to suck I want to be paid well. IT pays well. I hope I never have to go through what you did...
OK, point taken, but I spent a fair bit of time in swanky hotels, in some many cases working in open kitchens where the guests can see you, and talk to you, and are paying $60 for an entre. They get what they want.
For a while I had to prepare entres for about 80 people a night without any bills in front of me. The sous-chef would call out the orders (in German, this was Switzerland, and I am Canadian) and you just have to remember what is ordered. It's hard. And you better hope you ordered and prepared enough food for the night or it's your ass...
But essentially you are bang on. I left cooking because of monotony (and low pay, and the grease, etc!) and was attracted to computers because of problems solving (despite my complaints I am not in it for the dough). *pun* yeesh!:)
Oh man, I have done time in both a pastry kitchen and as a breakfast cook (I've done many other positions these are just ones that required being up early) and you have a point there. Fresh bread (and a massive baking sheet covered in BACON!) can really start your morning off. Party all night, two hours of sleep, and a coffee and cig out back by the dumpster... Wait a minute! Maybe I SHOULD go back to cooking!:)
7) Take a break every now and then for maintenance, both for yourself (exercise,socialize, learn), you machine (backups, organize files), and your environment (clear off desk, take down sticky notes, clean mouse and monitor).
Now this is GREAT advice. Even if you are not stressed out by IT (everyone feels thier particular job/environment is stressful, I find) taking time to do this stuff can really help. If I am not in a tidy environment I find it hard to concentrate (I can but I feel distracted). I find the mindless act of tidying (or perhaps doing some cardio exercise or something) for twenty minutes or so can do wonders...
Have you ever had a flash of inspiration while doing this? It's the best....:)
I was a chef before attending a comp. sci. program. I don't have extensive industry experience yet (so what I am about to should be disregarded by everyone, right?) but from what I have seen it seems like there is stress in IT but we are relatively well paid for our trouble.
As a chef I often worked for weeks on end without a day off or overtime pay. 14 hour days were frequently the norm and the time pressures are immeadiate. There is always someone yelling at you (sometimes that is just "how it is done") and you frequently burn yourself, get cut, fall, etc.
Okay, it's way better than digging ditches (!). I got to eat well, I lived in a bunch of places and met some great people. I also am now a wicked cook. My point is I did all that for about $10 an hour (Canadian) as my peak wage. Now that's pretty crappy money considering the training and experience I had...
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around for an organization that will treat you better...
How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying information?
If I have a message I can certainly write the text to convey that message. Include a link? I can do that as well by merely typing in the link...
Attachments can handle images, HTML, etc. I think what should be done with outlook is have it send both "real" and TNEF versions of it's mail (actually forget the TNEF):) and just let people read the format the want (I think most mailers that send fancy mail also include a text attachment by default, thank Bob). The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common denominator as far as interpersonal communications. You need to ask yourself what is more important: the message or it's presentation? Most people would agree it is the message.
The only person who
can assure quality is a third party (Non developer), who does a full QA test on it.
I agree with this... I feel that a developer can, with discipline, build a comprehensive test plan that scours every requirement, etc. but you just can't beat a 3rd party for this. It's far too easy to gloss over areas you "think" are working, or to not find a bug because you just didn't think "anyone would ever DO that".
Further, 3rd partys (or any non-developer) can really help point out interface issues. I know what a boolean operator is, and how to build a query string using them, but I wouldn't dream of asking a search engine user to enter a query in disjunctive normal form, etc, yet if I recently found myself using a bunch of "tree" terminology when trying to write prompts and messages for an application I was working on that organizes user contributions in a tree structure. It took a non-CS person to try out our interface and laughingly ask what it meant for a form field to be "non-empty", etc... And so on...
One thing I would add (and I won't address what I would remove from the above terms) is an "Agreement" that the code will compile as long as the instructions included with it are followed. This would include the precondition that certain libraries are installed. This is one thing that bothers me... when developers use non-standard (i.e. stuff that isn't included with major distributions---or any distributions) libraries and don't make it clear in the documentation.
As a programmer, etc., I can usually figure out what I need but many people can't do this. I can understand how a developer could forget to mention this kind of thing, they work with the package every day and the extra libs are things they always have installed etc, but not everyone is aware of what the developer is using on their personal development machine...
Anyway, a standard practice of trying to build your package on a machine that is not normally used for development (or getting a few friends to do so) can go a long way to making installation instructions clearer (and more useable) which, in the long run, will get your package used and tested by a larger group of users. Seems to be a good thing for everyone.
I am part of a three person team running a collaborative fiction site (Prosebush). We have spent a lot of time discussing these issues and take them seriously. One thing we have decided is not to censor anyone unless it is an obvious case of hate literature. If that does crop up (it hasn't yet---probably will now!) we intend to mail the user and ask if what they wrote is legitimately being used as a literary device. If they can't, or won't, justify it, we will remove it. Hopefully this will never happen.... we just don't want something we (and our contributors) worked hard on becoming a vehicle for racism, etc... We will tolerate almost anyhting but there is that line (yes, it is different for everyone.... where do YOU draw it?)
One thing I am wondering about is how will this policy affect people who choose to post anonymously. If they do this they are forfeiting ownership of thier work right? (RIGHT?!?) What do you guys think about that. If someone doesn't explicitly release thier work is it free for others to use?
Slashdot Mirror
no, that would be "ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhh.... oh-ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.... ah-aaah-ah-ah-ah-u-u-u-aah-AAAAH-aah-aah... aaah-aaah".
After careful reflection I would be inclined to agree with you. I still haven't figured out how to work in the percussion though (which is essential for the whole opening credits experience). Maybe I could insert a text block that sounded right when printed on a loud dot-matrix? Hmm....
--8<--
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
What the fruck is this supposed to be?
It's the Star Trek theme from the OLD show! Don't you remember the Nomad episode?
--8<--
what is happening right now is the probe is being used as spare parts by a highly advanced AI robot probe. The two will merge and become something more powerful than any of it's creators ever imagined...
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
5 year mission, eh? I engineering projects are always behind schedule in the future too!
--8<--
That's kind of what I was getting at. When you get taught (as opposed to learn) Software Engineering they talk about design, testing, etc. These are all great and I really want to be able to do them as much as possible but most of the time people in the industry just seem to laugh (or cry) when you ask them about these practices. I guess the people doing it right don't have time to hang out on Slashdot? :)
--8<--
Just started using Debian last week after too much RedHat... Thanks for the info, might save my Axx some time! :)
--8<--
Thanks, this is a really concise review.
In the review the book is compared to some other "failure" books. I think it really is cathartic to write about things that went wrong, it may even be the best way to understand what happened and (theoretically) how to prevent it.
I think this is what inspired "Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks (IMO this is required reading). His motivation was, in part, to describe how and why things fall apart from an organizational perspective. There was some commentary on interdepartmental politics, IIRC, but it was mostly about configuration management and why the massive project he had tried to manage was so over-budget and behind its schedule. I guess it is a "related reading" for this topic.
Some people have suggested that the work he has done is no longer as relevant and that his organizational princicples seem kind of dinosaurish to a company running on Internet time, while others say the things he discussed are so ingrained in Software Engineering that we see the book as a cliche (something like a Platonic discussion of the ideal project environtment). What do you think?
--8<--
lilo: linux single
# passwd
--8<--
Hi! We have partially implemented this on a site called Prosebush (http://www.prosebush.com). Feel free to make an account (or not) and try to get you post boosted up to the top story. We are presently evaluating the system and would like to have some good data. We haven't implemented the entire algorithm yet for various reasons (I don't think the cheap server we are on would be a good place to do real-time clustering and the C++ compiler is really old). But what we have there is a start. Please try to break it (in the context of the moderation algorithm!), I have no doubt we at Prosebush will learn a lot from it. Thanks for you interest!
--8<--
Thanks for the links. I'll check it out!
And to quote Bart Simpson: "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda" (or in this case Bayes!) :) LOL
Yeah, to have open source stuff for this is ideal... I think there is quite a lot of open source NLP and Neural Net stuff out there but it's probably very academic in nature... I think if you look around University web pages where people do this you might find some packages. I would personally like to see it built into Emacs though! :) M-x moderate-based-on-personal-preferences
THAT would be sweet! :)
Thanks again.
--8<--
I'm going to disagree... It is possible to do algorithmic moderation based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an analysis of who read what. I have been yammering about this in several discussions on Kuro5hin but no-one seems to reply so I won't bother reiterating here... but basically you do similarity analysis between what the person has read in the past and the current articles, this lets you know if they will be likely to want to read the current stuff. Further the number of other people who read that article (and it's children) will weight the choice (so a disagreeable, but controversial or important argument, still gets modded up).
The advantages of such "no hands" moderation include not requiring users to work in order to mod up posts (they just browse), the ability to turn off the rating or weight it in favor of some metric (browse at -1, or just read the Sports news), and articles that show up in a discussion long after the human moderators would have stopped paying attention would still have a good chance of being modded up automatically (for those who come to the dicsussion late but still have good ideas).
Disadvantages include the fact that it requires a helluva chunk of computer power to do this. We have implemented a more simplistic version of this system over at Prosebush and use it to rank story contributions, stories, and genres. So far it seems to work. Please check it and let me know if you think the system is failing to work...
--8<--
Hey, if you like IF you might also enjoy writing or reading collaborative fiction.
Basically, you read what others have written, and at the end of each contribution the story can be continued by anyone in any direction (as many branches as you like). If you don't like any of the choices you can add you own (or add something anyway just to make the story richer).
We have set up a website to do this (Prosebush). And so far the response from people has been great! There are a few stories that are coming along really well, a few that are really silly, etc... All the guys involved in building the site were fans of old-school text adventure games and choose-your-owns... They really inspired the site in many ways...
--8<--
Look, your experience sucks more. Obviously I agree.
My response concerned time pressure and the fact that occasionally there are demands for per-client custom orders beyond the IT industry. In your case it sounds like your boss is a moron who doesn't know how to evaluate a project or communicate. Otherwise how could the development team not know they were going live (ready or not) in 24 hours. Sucks to be you.
And, just for all the over-worked scumbag wage slaves out there who would give thier thumbs to know how to program (so they could escape thier dead-end job with no possibility of a raise let alone advancement) it isn't one steak that's stressful, it's the 80th, and it's after three weeks working in a hot smoky little hell-hole for a guy who is convinced the WWII Germans were RIGHT and keeps "accidentally" dropping your knife on the floor, etc. Everybody's job sucks sometimes. My point was if my job is going to suck I want to be paid well. IT pays well. I hope I never have to go through what you did...
Thanks
--8<--
OK, point taken, but I spent a fair bit of time in swanky hotels, in some many cases working in open kitchens where the guests can see you, and talk to you, and are paying $60 for an entre. They get what they want.
For a while I had to prepare entres for about 80 people a night without any bills in front of me. The sous-chef would call out the orders (in German, this was Switzerland, and I am Canadian) and you just have to remember what is ordered. It's hard. And you better hope you ordered and prepared enough food for the night or it's your ass...
But essentially you are bang on. I left cooking because of monotony (and low pay, and the grease, etc!) and was attracted to computers because of problems solving (despite my complaints I am not in it for the dough). *pun* yeesh! :)
--8<--
Oh man, I have done time in both a pastry kitchen and as a breakfast cook (I've done many other positions these are just ones that required being up early) and you have a point there. Fresh bread (and a massive baking sheet covered in BACON!) can really start your morning off. Party all night, two hours of sleep, and a coffee and cig out back by the dumpster... Wait a minute! Maybe I SHOULD go back to cooking! :)
Thanks for the reminder. It wasn't all bad...
--8<--
That $10 bucks an hour was for cooking, not IT stuff. Most IT people make that when they sneeze these days :)
--8<--
Now this is GREAT advice. Even if you are not stressed out by IT (everyone feels thier particular job/environment is stressful, I find) taking time to do this stuff can really help. If I am not in a tidy environment I find it hard to concentrate (I can but I feel distracted). I find the mindless act of tidying (or perhaps doing some cardio exercise or something) for twenty minutes or so can do wonders...
Have you ever had a flash of inspiration while doing this? It's the best.... :)
--8<--
I was a chef before attending a comp. sci. program. I don't have extensive industry experience yet (so what I am about to should be disregarded by everyone, right?) but from what I have seen it seems like there is stress in IT but we are relatively well paid for our trouble.
As a chef I often worked for weeks on end without a day off or overtime pay. 14 hour days were frequently the norm and the time pressures are immeadiate. There is always someone yelling at you (sometimes that is just "how it is done") and you frequently burn yourself, get cut, fall, etc.
Okay, it's way better than digging ditches (!). I got to eat well, I lived in a bunch of places and met some great people. I also am now a wicked cook. My point is I did all that for about $10 an hour (Canadian) as my peak wage. Now that's pretty crappy money considering the training and experience I had...
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around for an organization that will treat you better...
Okay, flame away! :)
--8<--
touchè! :)
--8<--
I can only assume that you are a fellow Canuck poking fun at the notion of a Canadian doing anything cool...
--8<--
What was that Macallum quote,"The medium is the message."?
Close! It was Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian, who said that. He was a proponent of the Global Village, etc. Had some neat ideas...
--8<--
I think it's available here:
http://world.std.com/~damned/software.ht ml
I have never actually used this though...
--8<--
How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying information?
:) and just let people read the format the want (I think most mailers that send fancy mail also include a text attachment by default, thank Bob). The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common denominator as far as interpersonal communications. You need to ask yourself what is more important: the message or it's presentation? Most people would agree it is the message.
If I have a message I can certainly write the text to convey that message. Include a link? I can do that as well by merely typing in the link...
Attachments can handle images, HTML, etc. I think what should be done with outlook is have it send both "real" and TNEF versions of it's mail (actually forget the TNEF)
--8<--
I agree with this... I feel that a developer can, with discipline, build a comprehensive test plan that scours every requirement, etc. but you just can't beat a 3rd party for this. It's far too easy to gloss over areas you "think" are working, or to not find a bug because you just didn't think "anyone would ever DO that".
Further, 3rd partys (or any non-developer) can really help point out interface issues. I know what a boolean operator is, and how to build a query string using them, but I wouldn't dream of asking a search engine user to enter a query in disjunctive normal form, etc, yet if I recently found myself using a bunch of "tree" terminology when trying to write prompts and messages for an application I was working on that organizes user contributions in a tree structure. It took a non-CS person to try out our interface and laughingly ask what it meant for a form field to be "non-empty", etc... And so on...
--8<--
One thing I would add (and I won't address what I would remove from the above terms) is an "Agreement" that the code will compile as long as the instructions included with it are followed. This would include the precondition that certain libraries are installed. This is one thing that bothers me... when developers use non-standard (i.e. stuff that isn't included with major distributions---or any distributions) libraries and don't make it clear in the documentation.
As a programmer, etc., I can usually figure out what I need but many people can't do this. I can understand how a developer could forget to mention this kind of thing, they work with the package every day and the extra libs are things they always have installed etc, but not everyone is aware of what the developer is using on their personal development machine...
Anyway, a standard practice of trying to build your package on a machine that is not normally used for development (or getting a few friends to do so) can go a long way to making installation instructions clearer (and more useable) which, in the long run, will get your package used and tested by a larger group of users. Seems to be a good thing for everyone.
--8<--
One thing I am wondering about is how will this policy affect people who choose to post anonymously. If they do this they are forfeiting ownership of thier work right? (RIGHT?!?) What do you guys think about that. If someone doesn't explicitly release thier work is it free for others to use?
--8<--