Why don't we gather all the highest-moderated posts (excluding jokes, since this is serious), and submit them together as the representative opinions of the/. community? It might carry more weight to submit as an organization.
How about putting small explosive devices in the envelopes? Then they'll blow their hands off when they open them! That'll teach 'em! </sarcasm>
Sending empty or false replies to junk mail isn't going to discourage them. The people who make the decisions are too far away from the people who do the work.
Personally, I've always found the best way to achieve interplanar travel is to find a high level wizard who can cast the necessary spells. I like to visit the outer planes at least twice a year.
You say you have heard from others that you should get the CIS degree, because they say you can get the same job? The people who told you this probably have CIS degrees. I say this because someone with a CS degree wouldn't likely agree.
Although you can get the same jobs - I work with programmers who got business degrees - you will never be viewed the same way as those with a CS degree. You will have a harder time getting a particular job, especially if you compete with those who have an Engineering degree. The difference in degrees can certainly be made up through experience, but that basically places you a year or more behind where you would be if you had a CS degree.
Another major issue, something many of us value above money, is peer respect. You will have a much harder time earning the respect of your peers if you have the lesser degree. When I was in Engineering college, we refered to the business CIS people as "dropouts". In many cases, this was true - lots of them had been in Engineering at first. The CS degree is harder for a reason. Partly, because you learn more, but also, it tests your mettle, and your future coworkers will think more of you if you make it through the tougher program. Furthermore, it shows that you are truly interested in the knowledge, and that will definitely count among others who feel that way.
Unless you're actively using three profiles, and don't want to bother reassigning one, just have at least one without anything recorded for the main (as in no shift) set of buttons. When you want the lights off, just switch to that profile, and they'll all be off.
The ui is pretty clunky. The best thing to do is set up your profiles using the record-on-the-fly feature, and only use the profile editor for advanced stuff, like inserting pauses.
I think this was a design change (early on) that never got represented in the advertising. Both of mine, the beta I tested with and the production version I got at the end of the test, had orange lights, too.
Actually, it's very easy to set up buttons to do single keypresses. Most of the buttons are primarily just macros. So you just set up each button to count as a single keyboard button. The advantage, then, is that you never have to look down and/or move your hand to hit the different buttons.
I beta tested the SC, and it is pretty cool. Oddly, I found it more useful for games like Baldur's Gate (I won't play BG without it) than for rts games they designed it for. Basically, it's because rts games tend to have too many options to organize a useful set without leaving out a lot. Not that it isn't still really useful, it's just that you still need to use the keyboard a lot. With BG, on the other hand, the only time I touch the keyboard is to name a saved game.
I definitely recommend this to any serious gamer. Among the features I found most useful were that it is left-handed, so it works alongside a mouse (for most of us); and it can be programmed on the fly, so if you decide you don't like how your profile is set up, you can change it right then. It also makes it easy to set up your own profiles, which I recommend over using a profile someone else has set up. It just makes it a lot easier to use.
There's only one serious issue I ran into, and you can work around it. If you type fast while you are recording, it sometimes treats separate keystrokes as combos. (You'll understand this once you see its accompanying software.) This sometimes makes the keystrokes replay out of order, so your commands don't work right. To avoid this, type carefully while recording, so that you don't have two keys down at once, except of course when that is required.
One thing in particular bugged me about this article. He misuses the term "negative reinforcement." This is not the same as punishment, which is what he is talking about. Punishment is the act of causing an unpleasant result if the subject (e.g. an engineer or a student) does not produce the desired result. Negative reinforcement is the act of causing something unpleasant until the subject produces the desired result.
As an example, in teaching a rat to run a maze, lets say you implant a device which can cause the rat a small amount of pain. Then, if the rat runs the wrong way, you activate the device. This is punishment. Now lets say you keep the device active unless the rat is running in the right direction (even if it's standing still). This is negative reinforcement.
It seems to have become popular now to call Bush a moron. Mostly this seems to be done by Gore supporters with no real arguments. Frankly, I think you are all reading way too much Doonesbury. The fact is, GW's in charge of the second largest state in the union. Texas is bigger than many nations, and he's top dog. How many of you can claim an accomplishment like that? And don't give me any crap about nepotism; nepotism gets you a cushy middle-management job, it doesn't get you a governorship. Those are earned. Finally, as for him sounding dumb, I suggest you go ask Jimmy Carter (ex-president, genius, lamentably bad accent) what he thinks about outward appearances.
I can't really prove anything, but I do know that there are quite a few of these businesses around the Ohio State campus. Many of them work with teachers to sell required class materials, but lots of them just hire students to take notes and then sell copies of those notes. Unless these companies are all just fronts for money-laundering schemes, I'd say it must be a viable business model.
What I don't understand is whom this is hurting. It's not like the teachers are being cheated; if they want to sell their notes themselves, they'll pretty much always beat the competition. They just need to make buying their notes a class requirement (I had teachers who did that). And if they're worried about students relying on the notes and not taking classes, screw 'em! If you think you can get through college just by reading someone else's notes and skipping class, you deserve to fail. On the other hand, having notes available to read before you get to a topic in class, and to mark up with your own notes during class, can be really helpful to students. I guess I just don't see how this bill benefits anyone. (I tried to look at the page in favor of it, but it's/.ed. Go Figure.)
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: you can't stop people from copying information. We've all seen the evidence with mp3's: no matter what you do, at some point it becomes audible, so it can be recorded. (Not to mention any copy protection scheme can be hacked:) The same applies to video: at some point it is visible, so it can be recorded. That is simply a fundamental fact - the only way copying can be prevented is by keeping the original from being seen and/or heard. And that rather defeats the purpose.
About a year ago, one of my company's "strategic partners" sent us a link to a site they had seen. It turns out that this site had completely ripped off its entire layout from ours. They also stole many of our images and a great deal of our text. Naturally, we were quite pissed. Our graphic designer had worked very hard to create those images and the layout and our site builders had worked very hard to build the site. We immediately sent our lawyers after them (you only hate lawyers when they're on the other side, by the way), and fortunately the other company soon took down their site. I think there's no question that web sites should be protected under copyright law. Copying a site is equivalent to writing a book by copying somebody else's book. Clearly there's no excuse.
The best compromise I've seen for this situation is to have full access to monitor everything your employees do. Then just don't use it. You aren't really intruding into your employees' privacy, because you aren't watching what they do. But you have everything in place in case you do need to start checking up on them. The important thing is that you explain this to your employees, so they know that a)they shouldn't be doing anything that can get them in trouble, because you could be watching, and b)they shouldn't worry about their privacy because, as long as they behave themselves, you won't be watching.
When I first started looking at this, I thought, "Oh, come on! This is just greed!" I mean, I'm all for kicking M$'s ass, but this sounds like some opportunists just trying to make a buck. Well, I thought about it some more, and decided I right. But now I wonder if maybe it's right, too. After all, isn't the ultimate reason why we have antitrust law to prevent harm to the consumer? When buying a new computer, didn't the vast majority of us have to pay a buttload (aprox. 12 square cubits) of money for Windoze, whether we wanted it or not? And if you bought a new computer, you had to pay again! And you didn't really have any choice, because the vendors didn't have much choice about selling it. Almost anywhere you went the computers came with Windoze preinstalled. Sure, some of us can build our own systems from scratch, but blah blah blah, ramble ramble ramble, anti-M$ anti-M$, anti-M$, and in conclusion, Bill Gates should be drawn and quartered and fed to dingos. (There, that should be good for a few karma points:)
The flaw in this argument is that the antitrust case is not about Microsoft's operating system monopoly. The actual cause of this monopoly (which in my opinion is a vicious cycle of application availability forcing users to use Windows, which forces software firms to write programs for Windows - but that's not important right now) is irrelevant. Microsoft has monopoly power. Anyone who questions that needs an emergency rectalcraniectomy.
The reason Microsoft is being punished is because they misused their monopoly power, not to press their OS, but rather for other applications, such as IE vs. Netscape. You can argue all you want that Jackson's numbers are wrong; so what? He just needed to say, "Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems." Why waste a lot of time on something so obvious? Even M$ made at best only a half-hearted attempt to claim not to be a monopoly. The real case was what they did with their monopoly power.
The author also fails to understand the nature of antitrust law. An example: ...if Microsoft did what
monopolists are supposed to do: restrict
sales in order to raise the company's prices
and profits.
The classic example of an antitrust case is the Standard Oil case. Standard Oil had a practice of buying out competing gas stations. If they wouldn't sell, SO would build a station nearby and undercut prices (even accepting a loss) until their competitors were out of business. This is not about restricting sales or raising prices - it is about preventing others from entering the market. If the author understood antitrust law, he would see that this, not the "restricting
sales in order to raise the company's prices
and profits," is the "misuse of power" that requires antitrust cases.
This was a very good review. It's nice to see someone who can resist the temptation to let his own biases show through. Although I did see a little C++ bias, it's clear that he has a healthy respect of Java as well, and gave C# a fair shot. I wish I could say I would have been as fair were I to have written this. Well done!
No, seriously. The main problem of Programmer's Block is you can't get started because you're afraid of messing up. Try getting a little tipsy, or just flat out drunk, and those ideas will just fly. On the down side, the typing goes a little slower, 'cause you mistype a lot, but it's better than staring at the screen.
Back in college, I was in that situation a lot. I was also in the situation where I wanted to get drunk a lot. (I'm still in that one:) I found that I finished my assignments a lot faster when I was drinking because I had fun with it, and didn't try to figure out every tiny detail before starting.
Of course, I don't do that at my job now. At least not very often. We're a relaxed company, but not that relaxed. And since a lot of people wouldn't understand this, you might want to try doing it at home on some little side project. Try hooking your doorbell to the internet, or something. Or better yet, your mother-in-law's doorbell!:) Once you get back to the fun side of programming, you'll be able to get past the Programmer's Block.
I've always said, "Programming drunk is fine; it's debugging with a hangover that sucks."
This sounds reasonable to me. IAM is claiming that Razorfish failed to fulfill the terms of its contract with IAM. This is just like any other agreement - fail to deliver what was promised, and you are in breach of contract. Of course, I don't know whether Razorfish is actually guilty, but the suit itself is nothing out of the ordinary.
There is one thing in the suit that bothers me, though. I work for a company that develops web sites (note: we do not compete with Razorfish), and so I can attest to how difficult it can be to get a client to sign off on a deliverable. This can be really bad for deadlines, because often you must stop development until the client has responded. If your project has deadlines, as most do, you have to get the client to respond, or they start complaining that you're missing deadlines, even though it's their fault. I think Razorfish is perfectly within its rights to demand (as long as it's in the contract) that their client signs off within a certain time, and five days (assuming they mean business days, this is a week) is certainly time enough to review most deliverables before signing off (or rejecting). Not to mention that IAM knew this requirement was in the contract when they signed it. As for the argument that there can be latent bugs that do not show up in that time, face it, there is no amount of time that would guarantee you would find all the latent bugs. Besides, the sign off is necessary more for terms of UI/design than functionality. Obviously, Razorfish should still be responsible for fixing any (hidden) bugs that turn up after sign-off.
For everyone who complains about gas prices, here's some fuel (pun not intended) for thought:
Think about how much you pay for: 1 gallon of gas a 12 oz bottle of Coke/Pepsi/etc a pint of beer (mmmm, beer) a 12 oz bottle of WATER! (I've seen these things go for $4 at a sports event) and so on...
Now I don't like high gas prices any more than anyone else, but compared with the cost of the sixer of beer I intend to drink tonight, it doesn't seem quite so bad. I remember being really pissed off when the gas in my area passed $1/gallon, but then somebody pointed this out to me, and it really doesn't bother me that much anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we gather all the highest-moderated posts (excluding jokes, since this is serious), and submit them together as the representative opinions of the /. community? It might carry more weight to submit as an organization.
How about putting small explosive devices in the envelopes? Then they'll blow their hands off when they open them! That'll teach 'em!
</sarcasm>
Sending empty or false replies to junk mail isn't going to discourage them. The people who make the decisions are too far away from the people who do the work.
Personally, I've always found the best way to achieve interplanar travel is to find a high level wizard who can cast the necessary spells. I like to visit the outer planes at least twice a year.
You say you have heard from others that you should get the CIS degree, because they say you can get the same job? The people who told you this probably have CIS degrees. I say this because someone with a CS degree wouldn't likely agree.
Although you can get the same jobs - I work with programmers who got business degrees - you will never be viewed the same way as those with a CS degree. You will have a harder time getting a particular job, especially if you compete with those who have an Engineering degree. The difference in degrees can certainly be made up through experience, but that basically places you a year or more behind where you would be if you had a CS degree.
Another major issue, something many of us value above money, is peer respect. You will have a much harder time earning the respect of your peers if you have the lesser degree. When I was in Engineering college, we refered to the business CIS people as "dropouts". In many cases, this was true - lots of them had been in Engineering at first. The CS degree is harder for a reason. Partly, because you learn more, but also, it tests your mettle, and your future coworkers will think more of you if you make it through the tougher program. Furthermore, it shows that you are truly interested in the knowledge, and that will definitely count among others who feel that way.
One was oriented more towards programmers; the other towards idiots.
;-)
Well, what else is there?
Unless you're actively using three profiles, and don't want to bother reassigning one, just have at least one without anything recorded for the main (as in no shift) set of buttons. When you want the lights off, just switch to that profile, and they'll all be off.
The ui is pretty clunky. The best thing to do is set up your profiles using the record-on-the-fly feature, and only use the profile editor for advanced stuff, like inserting pauses.
I think this was a design change (early on) that never got represented in the advertising. Both of mine, the beta I tested with and the production version I got at the end of the test, had orange lights, too.
Actually, it's very easy to set up buttons to do single keypresses. Most of the buttons are primarily just macros. So you just set up each button to count as a single keyboard button. The advantage, then, is that you never have to look down and/or move your hand to hit the different buttons.
I beta tested the SC, and it is pretty cool. Oddly, I found it more useful for games like Baldur's Gate (I won't play BG without it) than for rts games they designed it for. Basically, it's because rts games tend to have too many options to organize a useful set without leaving out a lot. Not that it isn't still really useful, it's just that you still need to use the keyboard a lot. With BG, on the other hand, the only time I touch the keyboard is to name a saved game.
I definitely recommend this to any serious gamer. Among the features I found most useful were that it is left-handed, so it works alongside a mouse (for most of us); and it can be programmed on the fly, so if you decide you don't like how your profile is set up, you can change it right then. It also makes it easy to set up your own profiles, which I recommend over using a profile someone else has set up. It just makes it a lot easier to use.
There's only one serious issue I ran into, and you can work around it. If you type fast while you are recording, it sometimes treats separate keystrokes as combos. (You'll understand this once you see its accompanying software.) This sometimes makes the keystrokes replay out of order, so your commands don't work right. To avoid this, type carefully while recording, so that you don't have two keys down at once, except of course when that is required.
One thing in particular bugged me about this article. He misuses the term "negative reinforcement." This is not the same as punishment, which is what he is talking about. Punishment is the act of causing an unpleasant result if the subject (e.g. an engineer or a student) does not produce the desired result. Negative reinforcement is the act of causing something unpleasant until the subject produces the desired result.
As an example, in teaching a rat to run a maze, lets say you implant a device which can cause the rat a small amount of pain. Then, if the rat runs the wrong way, you activate the device. This is punishment. Now lets say you keep the device active unless the rat is running in the right direction (even if it's standing still). This is negative reinforcement.
It seems to have become popular now to call Bush a moron. Mostly this seems to be done by Gore supporters with no real arguments. Frankly, I think you are all reading way too much Doonesbury. The fact is, GW's in charge of the second largest state in the union. Texas is bigger than many nations, and he's top dog. How many of you can claim an accomplishment like that? And don't give me any crap about nepotism; nepotism gets you a cushy middle-management job, it doesn't get you a governorship. Those are earned. Finally, as for him sounding dumb, I suggest you go ask Jimmy Carter (ex-president, genius, lamentably bad accent) what he thinks about outward appearances.
I can't really prove anything, but I do know that there are quite a few of these businesses around the Ohio State campus. Many of them work with teachers to sell required class materials, but lots of them just hire students to take notes and then sell copies of those notes. Unless these companies are all just fronts for money-laundering schemes, I'd say it must be a viable business model.
/.ed. Go Figure.)
What I don't understand is whom this is hurting. It's not like the teachers are being cheated; if they want to sell their notes themselves, they'll pretty much always beat the competition. They just need to make buying their notes a class requirement (I had teachers who did that). And if they're worried about students relying on the notes and not taking classes, screw 'em! If you think you can get through college just by reading someone else's notes and skipping class, you deserve to fail. On the other hand, having notes available to read before you get to a topic in class, and to mark up with your own notes during class, can be really helpful to students. I guess I just don't see how this bill benefits anyone. (I tried to look at the page in favor of it, but it's
Excuse me, Ms. Rosen? I seem to have lost my soapbox, could I share yours? It seems to be broken in nicely.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: you can't stop people from copying information. We've all seen the evidence with mp3's: no matter what you do, at some point it becomes audible, so it can be recorded. (Not to mention any copy protection scheme can be hacked :) The same applies to video: at some point it is visible, so it can be recorded. That is simply a fundamental fact - the only way copying can be prevented is by keeping the original from being seen and/or heard. And that rather defeats the purpose.
About a year ago, one of my company's "strategic partners" sent us a link to a site they had seen. It turns out that this site had completely ripped off its entire layout from ours. They also stole many of our images and a great deal of our text. Naturally, we were quite pissed. Our graphic designer had worked very hard to create those images and the layout and our site builders had worked very hard to build the site. We immediately sent our lawyers after them (you only hate lawyers when they're on the other side, by the way), and fortunately the other company soon took down their site. I think there's no question that web sites should be protected under copyright law. Copying a site is equivalent to writing a book by copying somebody else's book. Clearly there's no excuse.
How much do You trust your Boss?
/. from work. You do the math.
I'm posting on
The best compromise I've seen for this situation is to have full access to monitor everything your employees do. Then just don't use it. You aren't really intruding into your employees' privacy, because you aren't watching what they do. But you have everything in place in case you do need to start checking up on them. The important thing is that you explain this to your employees, so they know that a)they shouldn't be doing anything that can get them in trouble, because you could be watching, and b)they shouldn't worry about their privacy because, as long as they behave themselves, you won't be watching.
When I first started looking at this, I thought, "Oh, come on! This is just greed!" I mean, I'm all for kicking M$'s ass, but this sounds like some opportunists just trying to make a buck. Well, I thought about it some more, and decided I right. But now I wonder if maybe it's right, too. After all, isn't the ultimate reason why we have antitrust law to prevent harm to the consumer? When buying a new computer, didn't the vast majority of us have to pay a buttload (aprox. 12 square cubits) of money for Windoze, whether we wanted it or not? And if you bought a new computer, you had to pay again! And you didn't really have any choice, because the vendors didn't have much choice about selling it. Almost anywhere you went the computers came with Windoze preinstalled. Sure, some of us can build our own systems from scratch, but blah blah blah, ramble ramble ramble, anti-M$ anti-M$, anti-M$, and in conclusion, Bill Gates should be drawn and quartered and fed to dingos. (There, that should be good for a few karma points :)
The flaw in this argument is that the antitrust case is not about Microsoft's operating system monopoly. The actual cause of this monopoly (which in my opinion is a vicious cycle of application availability forcing users to use Windows, which forces software firms to write programs for Windows - but that's not important right now) is irrelevant. Microsoft has monopoly power. Anyone who questions that needs an emergency rectalcraniectomy.
...if Microsoft did what
monopolists are supposed to do: restrict
sales in order to raise the company's prices
and profits.
The reason Microsoft is being punished is because they misused their monopoly power, not to press their OS, but rather for other applications, such as IE vs. Netscape. You can argue all you want that Jackson's numbers are wrong; so what? He just needed to say, "Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems." Why waste a lot of time on something so obvious? Even M$ made at best only a half-hearted attempt to claim not to be a monopoly. The real case was what they did with their monopoly power.
The author also fails to understand the nature of antitrust law. An example:
The classic example of an antitrust case is the Standard Oil case. Standard Oil had a practice of buying out competing gas stations. If they wouldn't sell, SO would build a station nearby and undercut prices (even accepting a loss) until their competitors were out of business. This is not about restricting sales or raising prices - it is about preventing others from entering the market. If the author understood antitrust law, he would see that this, not the "restricting sales in order to raise the company's prices and profits," is the "misuse of power" that requires antitrust cases.
I get all my news from /. and from The Onion.
This was a very good review. It's nice to see someone who can resist the temptation to let his own biases show through. Although I did see a little C++ bias, it's clear that he has a healthy respect of Java as well, and gave C# a fair shot. I wish I could say I would have been as fair were I to have written this. Well done!
No, seriously. The main problem of Programmer's Block is you can't get started because you're afraid of messing up. Try getting a little tipsy, or just flat out drunk, and those ideas will just fly. On the down side, the typing goes a little slower, 'cause you mistype a lot, but it's better than staring at the screen.
:) I found that I finished my assignments a lot faster when I was drinking because I had fun with it, and didn't try to figure out every tiny detail before starting.
:) Once you get back to the fun side of programming, you'll be able to get past the Programmer's Block.
Back in college, I was in that situation a lot. I was also in the situation where I wanted to get drunk a lot. (I'm still in that one
Of course, I don't do that at my job now. At least not very often. We're a relaxed company, but not that relaxed. And since a lot of people wouldn't understand this, you might want to try doing it at home on some little side project. Try hooking your doorbell to the internet, or something. Or better yet, your mother-in-law's doorbell!
I've always said, "Programming drunk is fine; it's debugging with a hangover that sucks."
This sounds reasonable to me. IAM is claiming that Razorfish failed to fulfill the terms of its contract with IAM. This is just like any other agreement - fail to deliver what was promised, and you are in breach of contract. Of course, I don't know whether Razorfish is actually guilty, but the suit itself is nothing out of the ordinary.
There is one thing in the suit that bothers me, though. I work for a company that develops web sites (note: we do not compete with Razorfish), and so I can attest to how difficult it can be to get a client to sign off on a deliverable. This can be really bad for deadlines, because often you must stop development until the client has responded. If your project has deadlines, as most do, you have to get the client to respond, or they start complaining that you're missing deadlines, even though it's their fault. I think Razorfish is perfectly within its rights to demand (as long as it's in the contract) that their client signs off within a certain time, and five days (assuming they mean business days, this is a week) is certainly time enough to review most deliverables before signing off (or rejecting). Not to mention that IAM knew this requirement was in the contract when they signed it. As for the argument that there can be latent bugs that do not show up in that time, face it, there is no amount of time that would guarantee you would find all the latent bugs. Besides, the sign off is necessary more for terms of UI/design than functionality. Obviously, Razorfish should still be responsible for fixing any (hidden) bugs that turn up after sign-off.
For everyone who complains about gas prices, here's some fuel (pun not intended) for thought:
Think about how much you pay for:
1 gallon of gas
a 12 oz bottle of Coke/Pepsi/etc
a pint of beer (mmmm, beer)
a 12 oz bottle of WATER! (I've seen these things go for $4 at a sports event)
and so on...
Now I don't like high gas prices any more than anyone else, but compared with the cost of the sixer of beer I intend to drink tonight, it doesn't seem quite so bad. I remember being really pissed off when the gas in my area passed $1/gallon, but then somebody pointed this out to me, and it really doesn't bother me that much anymore.