Slashdot generally seems to consider tech something that requires cutting-edge skills but management as something anyone could do.
I don't know about that - I'd say it's more that Slashdot just considers management as something not requiring cutting-edge skills. The problem is, of course, that tech doesn't have that much of a career path. You go from junior tech, to tech, to senior tech... and then if you want to go further, you go into management. Technical positions don't scale. Even in engineering, you'll be doing more management than design if you're in charge of something big.
Personally, I'm aiming (eventually) for IT security. From what I've seen, security scales well. You can be in charge of just your web server, or you can be in charge of a multinational corporation's WAN infrastructure, and you're still using most of the same skillset.
Oh wait... If for the same price you could have saved 2 lives doing something more senisble I guess not...
What's even more insidious are things which maybe save a few lives, but inconvenience millions of other people. Speed limits are a prime example; even if the reasoning was sound (it's not - they jump from "X% of road deaths were speed related" to "thus we could save Y lives if we drop the state speed limit by 10km/h" without acknowledging that if the cops list a road death as "speed related" they weren't following the bloody speed limit anyway), the extra time, fuel and wear-and-tear that it costs everyone else to sit in traffic adds up to more than the savings.
That's true, but at the same time, nothing in this world is perfect. You have to distinguish between intent, culpability (where there was on intent but reasonable care was not taken, implying negligence), and accidental events, which occur through chance despite all reasonable care being taken. Sure, you could probably eliminate most accidents by increasing safety margins and being more careful, but an efficient system gravitates towards the point where the cost of increasing precautions begins to outweigh the savings from reduced accidents.
So, in a maximally efficient society, you will always get "shit happens", because the cost of stopping any more of that shit happening is greater than the cost of just letting it happen.
Then explain, pray tell, why the Mercedes E-Class looks pretty 'normal' and yet has a better Cd than the Prius or Insight?
Achievable Cd numbers are pretty close for a wide range of vehicles, so most of the difference in aerodynamic drag is due to the difference in frontal area. There's really no excuse to munt up a car's appearance just to eke out another 2% improvement in Cd when they can reduce actual drag by far more simply by making it a couple of inches narrower.
Ah, but in the "real world", as in games, the pragmatic approach is far more efficient and effective. Your first step should *always* be to research prior art. A good example is those 'ingenuity tests' in job interviews where they ask you how you'd figure out the weight of a Boeing 747 or something. They seem to expect you to come up with some clever way of estimating or measuring it so they can judge your creative/investigative thought processes. If you were actually at work and your boss asked you the weight of a 747, however, you'd better not start looking up the nearest Jumbo-sized weighbridge or calculating fuel burn rates when you could just look up Wikipedia and find out in 10 seconds that "the 747's maximum takeoff weight ranges from 735,000 pounds (333,400 kg) for the -100 to 970,000 lb (439,985 kg) for the -8."
I agree that there's a lot of enjoyment to be had in exploring a game world and learning it for yourself, but I don't think it's a bad thing to use research skills to achieve results, as long as the original creative and investigative skills don't atrophy as a result.
Chess is only a game of skill at novice and grandmaster levels.
I'm stealing that for my sig.:D Also, above grandmaster level, chess becomes a simple game of brute-force number crunching.:P
Also, everything you say about chess applies to, for instance, RTS games too. Complete newbies win or lose based on how fast they figure out the tech tree and learn the units' strengths and weaknesses. Grandmaster players win or lose based on how well they can predict and respond to the other player's strategy while simultaneously base building and harassing their opponent. In the middle ground it's all about memorising your build order and unit counters.
I hope that, like half-Japanese girls, half-Japanese hybrid cars look exotic and very sexy. I'm sick of the science-project or iMac-humped-a-toaster designs that most people seem to put novel drivetrains in.
I recall reading an interesting post, years ago, on the WoW forums, stating basically that it's not possible to be skilled. Ever. At anything. In a remarkably Daniel Dennet-like argument, 'skill', like 'consciousness', was deconstructed to the point where it becomes a collection of mechanical processes. If you lose, then obviously you fail and are unskilled. If you win, however, it was because of your gear. Or because your class is overpowered. Or because the other guy lagged. Or because you happened to press the right buttons at the right time. Or because you got lucky. There's a million reasons for winning or losing, but none of them in itself constitutes skill, and if you take a pile of not-skill, no matter how large, it doesn't become skill.
As for WoW, they seem to be trying to do away with "rotations" because they basically involve spamming the same sequence of buttons over and over again. The way they've done this is just add random procs to all classes so that players who can weave in whatever special ability just became active will be more effective than players who can't. This is good because it does away with travesties like the hunter steadyshot macro in Burning Crusade, where the highest dps in the game was produced by the hunter selecting their target then spinning their mouse wheel. It's bad, though, in that it really was fun trying to pull off the perfect DPS rotation for some classes (I'm thinking arms warriors here, where timing your use of Slam was the key to good DPS). Now it's more like whack-a-mole with procs.
Following your logic, $1.92 million at $0.99 per song (ie. around iTunes price) she'd have to have uploaded 1.92 million songs. Assuming an average 3.5mb per song, that's 6.4 terabytes of data uploaded. On a 256kbps uplink, that's 6.7 years of continuous uploading.
(As an aside - holy shit is Google getting scary! To calculate that, I typed in "1.92 million * 3.5 megabytes" and it said "6.40869141 terabytes". Then I asked it "6.41 terabytes / 256kbps" and got 6.81574337 years. I'm starting to think we should be referring to Google as 'a logic called Joe'.:S )
The "you wouldn't steal a car" ad always annoyed the hell out of me. Bad analogy, and all that. It wasn't until just now that I realised that this Peugeot ad is what you're actually doing when you download media. You're using your own hardware to create a (usually lower fidelity) replica of the car.
If we're talking price per performance, get yourself an R32 Skyline or JZA80 Supra and spend $20k on the engine. All up cost: ~35k. All up performance: It wouldn't keep up with the Veyron but it'd probably make the 'newest fastest' merc sweat a little, and all for a price that compares very favourably with a mid-level new car.
Well the same holds true of lower end vehicles so I wouldn't be surprised. I remember an article (I think MOTOR or DRIVER magazine) between a Porsche GT2 and litre superbike, with the result of the $18k bike being very even with the $200k Porsche. Of course, your life expectancy on the bike is slightly lower... another similar article here.
Then again they have different target markets. The guy on the bike got to demonstrate his incredible ballsiness, whereas the guy in the Porsche put some tunes on the stereo, flipped on the aircon and went to pick up his girlfriend.:)
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
This, a thousand times this. BT (the electronic music artist) has one track where the guy doing vocals raps something about "graphics like pentium II, 3DFX". That was cool in 1998 but that track dated badly.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment.
And that's why I've heard of David Wong and Cory Doctrow, and would buy books by either of them in hardcopy if I spotted one in a book shop, but I still have no idea who you are.
OK, ideologically and ethically, it's maybe a bit on the iffy side... but businesswise? As Mal would say, "I'm a businessman. I'm here to do business."
This is a good death. There's no shame in this, in a man's death. A man who has done fine works. We're making a better world. All of them - better worlds.
I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
Interesting! So for military lasers (woah, that just took me back to my days of playing Elite!) with a high degree of coherence, the fact that it's laser light rather than just intense collimated light is actually relevant to the purpose of burninating things? I shall have to read up on this...:)
As I understand it, if it's not collimated then it's no worse than an LED. It's not like coherent light carries more energy, and most diode lasers have very short coherence lengths anyway - a laser is no more likely to blind you than an LED of the same power if you stick it a millimeter from your eye and turn it on. The difference is that with the laser, you can get the same effect from 100m away (or more depending on how well collimated it is). Put a laser through a lens that spreads it out into a divergent beam and it's not going to be any danger.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot generally seems to consider tech something that requires cutting-edge skills but management as something anyone could do.
I don't know about that - I'd say it's more that Slashdot just considers management as something not requiring cutting-edge skills. The problem is, of course, that tech doesn't have that much of a career path. You go from junior tech, to tech, to senior tech... and then if you want to go further, you go into management. Technical positions don't scale. Even in engineering, you'll be doing more management than design if you're in charge of something big.
Personally, I'm aiming (eventually) for IT security. From what I've seen, security scales well. You can be in charge of just your web server, or you can be in charge of a multinational corporation's WAN infrastructure, and you're still using most of the same skillset.
Lisa, I want to buy your rock!
Oh wait... If for the same price you could have saved 2 lives doing something more senisble I guess not...
What's even more insidious are things which maybe save a few lives, but inconvenience millions of other people. Speed limits are a prime example; even if the reasoning was sound (it's not - they jump from "X% of road deaths were speed related" to "thus we could save Y lives if we drop the state speed limit by 10km/h" without acknowledging that if the cops list a road death as "speed related" they weren't following the bloody speed limit anyway), the extra time, fuel and wear-and-tear that it costs everyone else to sit in traffic adds up to more than the savings.
That's true, but at the same time, nothing in this world is perfect. You have to distinguish between intent, culpability (where there was on intent but reasonable care was not taken, implying negligence), and accidental events, which occur through chance despite all reasonable care being taken. Sure, you could probably eliminate most accidents by increasing safety margins and being more careful, but an efficient system gravitates towards the point where the cost of increasing precautions begins to outweigh the savings from reduced accidents.
So, in a maximally efficient society, you will always get "shit happens", because the cost of stopping any more of that shit happening is greater than the cost of just letting it happen.
Then explain, pray tell, why the Mercedes E-Class looks pretty 'normal' and yet has a better Cd than the Prius or Insight?
Achievable Cd numbers are pretty close for a wide range of vehicles, so most of the difference in aerodynamic drag is due to the difference in frontal area. There's really no excuse to munt up a car's appearance just to eke out another 2% improvement in Cd when they can reduce actual drag by far more simply by making it a couple of inches narrower.
Ah, but in the "real world", as in games, the pragmatic approach is far more efficient and effective. Your first step should *always* be to research prior art. A good example is those 'ingenuity tests' in job interviews where they ask you how you'd figure out the weight of a Boeing 747 or something. They seem to expect you to come up with some clever way of estimating or measuring it so they can judge your creative/investigative thought processes. If you were actually at work and your boss asked you the weight of a 747, however, you'd better not start looking up the nearest Jumbo-sized weighbridge or calculating fuel burn rates when you could just look up Wikipedia and find out in 10 seconds that "the 747's maximum takeoff weight ranges from 735,000 pounds (333,400 kg) for the -100 to 970,000 lb (439,985 kg) for the -8."
I agree that there's a lot of enjoyment to be had in exploring a game world and learning it for yourself, but I don't think it's a bad thing to use research skills to achieve results, as long as the original creative and investigative skills don't atrophy as a result.
http://www.xkcd.com/606/, sir. http://www.xkcd.com/606/.
Chess is only a game of skill at novice and grandmaster levels.
I'm stealing that for my sig. :D Also, above grandmaster level, chess becomes a simple game of brute-force number crunching. :P
Also, everything you say about chess applies to, for instance, RTS games too. Complete newbies win or lose based on how fast they figure out the tech tree and learn the units' strengths and weaknesses. Grandmaster players win or lose based on how well they can predict and respond to the other player's strategy while simultaneously base building and harassing their opponent. In the middle ground it's all about memorising your build order and unit counters.
I hope that, like half-Japanese girls, half-Japanese hybrid cars look exotic and very sexy. I'm sick of the science-project or iMac-humped-a-toaster designs that most people seem to put novel drivetrains in.
I recall reading an interesting post, years ago, on the WoW forums, stating basically that it's not possible to be skilled. Ever. At anything. In a remarkably Daniel Dennet-like argument, 'skill', like 'consciousness', was deconstructed to the point where it becomes a collection of mechanical processes. If you lose, then obviously you fail and are unskilled. If you win, however, it was because of your gear. Or because your class is overpowered. Or because the other guy lagged. Or because you happened to press the right buttons at the right time. Or because you got lucky. There's a million reasons for winning or losing, but none of them in itself constitutes skill, and if you take a pile of not-skill, no matter how large, it doesn't become skill.
As for WoW, they seem to be trying to do away with "rotations" because they basically involve spamming the same sequence of buttons over and over again. The way they've done this is just add random procs to all classes so that players who can weave in whatever special ability just became active will be more effective than players who can't. This is good because it does away with travesties like the hunter steadyshot macro in Burning Crusade, where the highest dps in the game was produced by the hunter selecting their target then spinning their mouse wheel. It's bad, though, in that it really was fun trying to pull off the perfect DPS rotation for some classes (I'm thinking arms warriors here, where timing your use of Slam was the key to good DPS). Now it's more like whack-a-mole with procs.
Following your logic, $1.92 million at $0.99 per song (ie. around iTunes price) she'd have to have uploaded 1.92 million songs. Assuming an average 3.5mb per song, that's 6.4 terabytes of data uploaded. On a 256kbps uplink, that's
:S )
6.7 years of continuous uploading.
(As an aside - holy shit is Google getting scary! To calculate that, I typed in "1.92 million * 3.5 megabytes" and it said "6.40869141 terabytes". Then I asked it "6.41 terabytes / 256kbps" and got 6.81574337 years. I'm starting to think we should be referring to Google as 'a logic called Joe'.
"A force that tends to oppose or retard motion."
I think that very well describes the motion in question; it opposes a retarded motion. ;)
In evolutionary biology, floppy PREVENTS coppy.
The "you wouldn't steal a car" ad always annoyed the hell out of me. Bad analogy, and all that. It wasn't until just now that I realised that this Peugeot ad is what you're actually doing when you download media. You're using your own hardware to create a (usually lower fidelity) replica of the car.
If we're talking price per performance, get yourself an R32 Skyline or JZA80 Supra and spend $20k on the engine. All up cost: ~35k. All up performance: It wouldn't keep up with the Veyron but it'd probably make the 'newest fastest' merc sweat a little, and all for a price that compares very favourably with a mid-level new car.
If it's bandwidth you're after, an E63 AMG wagon probably has more. The Veyron will have substantially better ping times, though. ;)
Well the same holds true of lower end vehicles so I wouldn't be surprised. I remember an article (I think MOTOR or DRIVER magazine) between a Porsche GT2 and litre superbike, with the result of the $18k bike being very even with the $200k Porsche. Of course, your life expectancy on the bike is slightly lower... another similar article here.
:)
Then again they have different target markets. The guy on the bike got to demonstrate his incredible ballsiness, whereas the guy in the Porsche put some tunes on the stereo, flipped on the aircon and went to pick up his girlfriend.
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
This, a thousand times this. BT (the electronic music artist) has one track where the guy doing vocals raps something about "graphics like pentium II, 3DFX". That was cool in 1998 but that track dated badly.
Woah. Your internets is in the mail. O.o
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment.
And that's why I've heard of David Wong and Cory Doctrow, and would buy books by either of them in hardcopy if I spotted one in a book shop, but I still have no idea who you are.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
OK, ideologically and ethically, it's maybe a bit on the iffy side... but businesswise? As Mal would say, "I'm a businessman. I'm here to do business."
This is a good death. There's no shame in this, in a man's death. A man who has done fine works. We're making a better world. All of them - better worlds.
I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
Was I the first person to think "London Stock Exchange was running on Windows? HOLY SHIT!" :P )
(Of course I know I wasn't... but cmon!
Interesting! So for military lasers (woah, that just took me back to my days of playing Elite!) with a high degree of coherence, the fact that it's laser light rather than just intense collimated light is actually relevant to the purpose of burninating things? I shall have to read up on this... :)
As I understand it, if it's not collimated then it's no worse than an LED. It's not like coherent light carries more energy, and most diode lasers have very short coherence lengths anyway - a laser is no more likely to blind you than an LED of the same power if you stick it a millimeter from your eye and turn it on. The difference is that with the laser, you can get the same effect from 100m away (or more depending on how well collimated it is). Put a laser through a lens that spreads it out into a divergent beam and it's not going to be any danger.