In my head I see a diagram made up of pipes leading from the CPU. The pipes are metaphors for the maximum data throughput.
A CPU, rated by how many FLOPs or how much raw data it can push per second, pumps water into the pipes and hits the front side bus, which is X megahertz and can push X gigs of data per second. The Cache (L1 and L2?) represents pipes through which data flow is restricted to Y gigs per second. Then the RAM is another link in the pipeline, restricting flow to Z gigs of data per second. Then the AGP bus for graphics, then the PCI bus functions, and their respective restrictions.
Now some pipes will be wider than others so they aren't creating restrictions. In fact their potential is being under-utilized. However as I see it the pipes are getting smaller as they branch out - the CPU being the origin and the fattest pipe, the cache being the next fattest, then the FSB, then the RAM, then the AGP bus.
An AC referred to wait states, and I was wondering... if you could find a single universal method of measuring how much throughput goes through every link in the chain of computer system (micro) components, couldn't you concoct a single formula that would calculate the computer's maximum possible performance, based on: A) The cpu speed B) The Front side bus C) The L1 & L2 cache speed and size (though I'm sure this would be a fuzzy number at best) D) The RAM speed and size
in something called a 'core performance' formula?
There could be attendant formulas for hard drive performance WRT the max core performance. You could then go on to calculate video pixel performance on a system, given you know how to plug in the universal quantifier number describing the video card's output and the AGP bus.
I would love to see this formula as it would greatly simplify analyses. You could take that max performance formula and break it back down for an instant analysis of the theoretical maximums and limits of every subsystem. With it you could instantly and accurately pinpoint the weak spots, and then, of course, compare it against benchmarks.
About benchmarks: benchmarks would then simply solve the question "how much of a bottleneck is the OS/drivers with regards to the system's maximum throughput?"
Why not make a DVD player that can play THX Sound? A DVD is basically a huge repository of 1's and 0's, encode THX into the digital media and stick it on the disk, the player will decode it, right?
Guys, please check your previous stories before you put up articles. The new article says TPM won't be released on DVD in 2000 "or in the foreseeable future". That isn't much of a change from what was said back on December 23rd.
The gamers are brutally disloyal. They always hunger for the fastest biggest and baddest. They'll switch to an Athlon in a minute if they know the chipset will give them a monstrous speed advantage without an overly outrageous price tag. Which is to say if the coppermine is superior to the athlon by a maximum of 5fps in laboratory conditions, but the system costs $1000 more (an excellent real world analogy for this would be the RDRAM vs DDR SDRAM comparison), they'll go for the Athlon!
The Athlon only needs to stay close, or a breath ahead, of Intel, while keeping its prices down, down, down. The gamers will lead the exodus, and as the.18 micron chips roll out, DDR SDRAM comes into play, and AGP4x support becomes standard, all the vendors will go to bat for AMD.
When the dual boards come out, Intel has instantly lost the whole Linux community over the Chip ID issue. Linux people will have an economic and performance motivation for dumping Intel, plus the anti big brother aspect will weigh in.
A suggestion to AMD: advertise your chips with "No Big Brother Inside" ads and hit Intel down below the belt. It'll cause controversy galore, but you're going to score a lopsided public relations victory in the process.
Kryotech is selling the Super G, a 1000mhz Athlon running at a temperature of -40C.
However, your problem is not the chip speed, but the surrounding bus speed and RAM speed. The chip runs at 1000mhz, but the Front Side Bus is only 200mhz and the RAM runs at 100mhz. YUCK! Talk about your kinks in the hose!
The things you'll want to address before you improve your cpu speed are: 1) RAM speed. You'll theoretically wanna blast open that blockage in the pipeline with 800mhz RDRAM, although it has been shown that this does not deliver anywhere near the astronomical improvement that it is meant to deliver. 2) Cache speed. It runs at half the speed of the cpu - or, almost half. This needs to be rectified ASAP. 3) AGP support. This is very important in games. I predict AGP4x will really unleash the speed demon in every computer.
Is it any wonder that with all these bandwidth limitations, the Super Bypass only yields a 2-5% increase in performance over a non Super Bypass board?
Athlon systems sell for less than Intel systems, feature for feature and mhz for mhz, in every place I've seen. $50 to $100 less for an identically equipped machine up to 600mhz. (After that point the 633's vs 650's skew the comparison considerably)
RDRAM performance only gives you a small improvement over systems with PC133 RAM, according to the latest Windows general and game specific benchmark tests at Tom's Hardware. In the windows general test, the point spread between the i820/PC133 RAM and the i840/RDRAM is something like 25 points, with the lowest scoring 321 on the BAPco SYSMark98, and the highest at 343. In the game test, the i840 scores 122 in Q3 Arena (640x480x16), while the i820 scores 111.6. Hardly a mind boggling improvement.
You are not going to notice that difference in a game. But you are going to feel it quite long, hard and wide in your pocket book. A whole lotta spankin' for nothin'. You can get an Athlon 750 for less, and the performance in real time is either superior, or not far enough back behind the Coppermine to justify the cost of the Coppermine/RDRAM combo.
Likewise RDRAM + the Athlon won't mean anything, either. Athlon's support of AGP4x will mean a lot, however.
Since I sent them a handwritten letter I'll try to recreate some of my points here:
1) Telecommuting is a giant ergonomic plus in and of itself. The workers will automatically adjust their home environment to their liking for when they are working (and even when they're not).
2) This being true, the benefit gained by forcing employers to take on the same obligations towards telecommuting workers as they have for onsite employees, will be strongly offset by a cutback in telecommuting programs. This will have a small but negative impact on the environment, as former telecommuters go back to their full morning/nite automobile commute schedule.
3) Who is to say the telecommuter won't do something to the furniture (say, SELL it)? This opens the door for the necessity of increased monitoring and accounting of their behavior at home, which is already certain to rise to alarming levels just to keep track of their work habits. A company trying to manage a telecommuter's ergonomic safety in the home, looks to be like trying to gently set down a can of charcoal lighter fluid on burning coals. Not a good idea. (And the people who try it won't get to keep their souls. heh.)
4) For the sake of ergonomic improvements and the environment, I would suggest two revisions: A) Publish information about ergonomic issues at home, for telecommuters. Give employers a small financial incentive to disseminate this information. Let the telecommuters make their own well informed ergonomic decisions at home. B) Provide more incentives to companies to push more of their tasks that have telecommuting potential, into telecommuting programs. Companies that do this should be assessed tax credits that will be ledgered against environmental funds (in other words take the tax credit loss out on the eco budget because it is, after all, cutting down on pollution from automobile commutes).
I wrote this last night and threw it in the mailbox this morning. And lo and behold the situation is already resolved. Grrrrrrrrrr. Oh well!
That's all fine and well for spiritual enlightenment. But would you rather ride in an airplane piloted by someone who has flown 1 hour in the simulator a day for a year, or 4 hours a day for a year?
Would you rather be operated on by a surgeon who spent 1 hour a day learning medicine or someone who spent 8 hours a day or 16 (or quite often, 36:)?
Likewise I'd rather entrust my vital electronic infrastructure with geeks who spend all day, or 4 hours a day, learning code, vs 1 hour a day. They might not get high marks as Zen Buddhist monks, but the planes won't crash into each other, the L.E.O. satellites will keep beaming bandwidth to the masses without interruption, and the power will stay on. And maybe, just maybe - Windows 2001 will be less buggy:)
Frankly I like the AC's idea of social skills fitness training. Do you know how many millions of geek men would flock to such a thing?
BTW: the fat dude is witty. In his own way. Not the way most people appreciate it, though.
Wit isn't detrimental to coding. But the hours you spend learning karate will put the other guy way ahead of you if he's doing what doctors and researchers do in their fields: namely spending that same time mastering their trade.
And creativity manifests itself in ways that most people don't appreciate for a long time. Since when did Albert Einstein win any awards for stand up comedy?
Also, most of the hard core types I know aren't fat, they're the exact opposite - wiry. The fat guy who got the 'dashing programmer' fired was simply a more efficient programmer. So were the much thinner programmers around him who outshone the unfortunate 'other' guy. These shy quiet techno monks work with stuff like Real Time Java and Java/GL, while Mr. Dashing was great with Java, C and custom database coding, but man, he was stumped trying to keep up with that 'real time extension' stuff. Once he was done doing the database work, his prowess hit a wall and he couldn't go any further and he wasn't needed anymore. (Merry Christmas, yer contract won't be renewed.) These ubermonks, though, had what it takes. I don't have that level of skill. I couldn't talk shop with the likes of Greg Bollella. But on the other hand I have a steady girlfriend.:)
And aside from one fat guy, as I said, I don't know any geeks who are 'losing their health, hating fitness or indulging in rude behavior' (to quote you closely). Most shy geeks try their best to AVOID being rude and they try to avoid saying the wrong things. Many shy geeks are conditioned to believe everything they say is going to be taken as rude crude or witless, so they keep the number of words that they might get hung by, to a bare minimum. Hence, they don't communicate very well.
And I'm just talking about shy geeks here. I'm not talking about geeks in general.
Keep me up to date on how this goes. My email is travoltus@hotmail.com - your idea is absolutely awesome!
PS: moderators made me eat crow, news@11.:)
Re:it's true - offtopic? hmmmmm maybe not
on
A Profile of Coders
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· Score: 1
I don't deny that the power geeks aren't so numerous. The kind of skill needed to code a behemoth NT (as the gamasutra article put it) comes at a great cost, even when there is a team involved. That kind of skill is very very rare.
And as I said, 'personality' is a load of relativist hogwash anyway. Shy people don't learn social skills because they're always busy learning how to dodge *your* hateful jabs. They spent their lives avoiding getting rat tailed in the locker room and getting brutally piled on by jocks for saying 'hi' to a chick in a cafeteria and never understanding why in the heck they got jumped for trying to introduce themselves to someone they thought wasn't with anyone.
In other words these guys are shy because they're only trying to protect themselves from an insensitive, hateful, judgemental, and intolerant world. Computers give them that refuge, and in exchange these ubergeeks give computers their undying fealty in the form of becoming dedicated hard core programmers, because in the end the computers are the only things they can trust, and the only things they can rely on. The computer industry is their shield from a world where inconsistency, lack of personal integrity, cruelty, undecipherable social code words and capriciousness is the stuff of 'great personalities'.
Oh did I mention ignorance? Everyone throws around this term 'personality' and the other one.. 'social skills'. Do you have any idea what that really means? I know. You probably think "well he's gotta bathe at least once a day, wear clean, color matched clothes, and he shouldn't mumble when he talks."
DUH!!!!! I don't know any shy, socially handicapped geek who doesn't shower at least once a day. I don't know any ubergeek who would dare to wear dirty clothes. Most geeks I know will speak up and not mumble. The only good point is some guys aren't color coordinated with their wardrobe. But this 'Personality' crap - that's just a code word for "a guy who spits out witty little jokes that the hivemind thinks is funny, and who can laugh at the most stupid and senseless humor (see: south park), and who can dress the way the hivemind approves."
Some of these geeks never got the chance to learn social skills like you or I did. They were too busy trying to avoid you so you wouldn't break their neck in gym class, haze them with broomsticks in the locker room or gang up on them after school for the fun of it. The Gamasutra site speaks rightly when they speak of 'dispassionate, cold' programmer types - I know these guys. They're dispassionate and cold because you beat the warmth out of them back in high school! Remember? The coldness is the result of the armor plating they've evolved around their hearts which you stabbed every time you stole their glasses or made fun of their clothes.
Now you guys start preaching about 'social skills', and even if you had an idea of what you really meant, you lack the ability to understand the solution to these shy ubergeek types.
The solution is not to go around dissing them because they have no social skills, that's easy. Anyone can do that. Try making an honest to God effort to draw these shy types into the fold, eh? I know it ain't easy for ye of such short attention spans (talk about social skills) and no patience (ah yes more of that great personality thing), but the truly insightful one among you will sit these shy guys down and talked to them. Talk to them about what you see in them, in a non judgemental and non hostile manner, and work out steps to draw them out of their cold protective shell. Think of the training wheels approach. But then again I know you lack the patience, compassion and insight to pull this one off.
I wonder if Commander Taco would be willing to tackle this issue with the intent to help those who are shy and socially handicapped. Why are they handicapped? What was their past history? How do we help them without being so damned crass and pretentious and stuck up about how much 'better than them' we are? Not all shy people want help, of course, but I guarantee you a lot will come if you offer the real deal instead of a bunch of code words and b.s.
Mark my words, people, the people who attack this 'social handicap' issue with compassion and not conceit, will solve the biggest problem in the 21st century. Mark my words. I guarantee you the programming community will benefit astronomically from this.
We have to devote our hearts and souls to the trade in order to learn how to write good code.
The logical, non judgemental nature of computers tends to be a friendlier environment for shy folks who cannot figure out the whimsical, inconsistent and often childish and pointless rules of 'social skills'. In a world where Tommy Lee can beat Pamela Lee to a pulp and still remain a popular star, maybe computers are the only darned things that make any real sense.
I find it rather hypocritical that anyone can stand around laughing at a geek programmer's "lack of social skills". He's not the one hiding in the trunk of a car trying to evade police after murdering his girlfriend. (That would be you, Rae Carruth.) The devastating consequences of the excesses of those socially skilled 'alpha male' types make headline news all the time.
The image of this dashing Don Juan who can code up a clean version of Netscape overnight while weightlifting his way to tomorrow's Mister Universe competition while knowing all the slick lines that make the chicks swoon, is a myth. You put someone like that into a real honest to god developer's job and he'll be flat out crushed by the kind of tasks that the four-eyed geeks drink up like orange juice.
I've seen it happen on my job too many times. The witty funny dashing fellow gets his head handed to him time after time by the fat guy down the hall who spends half a day cleaning up the first guy's code with bug fixes and speed enhancements and then finally getting him fired for being a (relatively) crappy programmer.
Heh, this should really piss the moderators off...lol.
According to eToys' stock history, they've dropped from almost $80/share to ~$25.50/share.
Does anyone have a really credible analysis on this? I found some ideas over at the Red Herring. Toys R Us is down to $14.13, $10 off its yearly high. The entire online toy purchasing industry is suffering from a lack of confidence, resulting (reportedly) from their inability to fill toy orders on time.
While customers of other toy makers (Toys R Us) and KBKids professed (at a rate exceeding 40%) they wouldn't shop there again, the rate of terminal dissatisfaction with eToys is 12%.
My prediction is that eToys' stock will rebound. The eToys death watch will be an excruciatingly slow event and will suffer quite an ugly setback as eToys (in my non-investor prediction) gets out of the hospital bed around early Spring, the time by which eToys will most likely have gotten their butts in gear with regards to meeting customer orders. They will either have more efficient fulfillment techniques, or customers will buy earlier, but in either case this major depressant upon their stock value will be lifted away by April.
So is there cause for despair? Yes and no. Surely we cannot avoid eating a few crow feathers here and there when eToys' stock rebounds. But the way to keep the whole crow from being stuffed down, i.e. the way to keep their stock from rebounding too far, and perhaps even drag it down to sub-$20 levels, is rather clear. 1) If you know of any online artist groups, inform them about the eToy vs eToys issue. The artist community does not suffer this crap very easily. 2) If you know of any non-online artist groups of any sort - stores, galleries, you name it - let them know, also.
There is the more drastic and difficult theory, also: 3) Gather donations and fund an ad in USA Today, documenting the tragedy of eToys' attack on etoy.com. Express it as an attack on artistic free expression by means fraudulent legal tactics (false patent claims, etc.), under an atmosphere of judicial ignorance favoring the biggest-mouthed, deepest-pocketed lawyers. Call for a boycott on eToys.com.
You have to find ways to create massive tides of bad press for eToys - this and this alone will create a major dampener on their stock value. This should start right now, while their stock is down, so as to depress the upcoming rebound as eToys prepares a mission plan to prevent their previous customer fulfillment failures from happening again.
Now I've checked USA Today for their information on the costs of a full page ad, and the rates are almost $11,000 for a 1/16 page ad, up to $81K for a full pager. It ain't cheap. Of course the bigger the ad the more people are going to notice it, but I think even at 1/16th page it is still going to cause major press, and grab the attention of a lot of people.
The Challenger got caught in a very big fireball (aka an EXPLOSION!!) which killed seven crew members. Technically the Challenger was enveloped in a "massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank." The blast was also called, in this report, an explosive burn.
The issue of whether or not this was an explosion, pretty much means nothing to all the crew who died:
Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Spacecraft Commander Michael J. Smith, Pilot Judith A. Resnik, specialist Ronald E. McNair, specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, a payload specialist Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space
I know this is about 'inaccuracies' but this is a very petty 'inaccuracy'. It does nothing to eclipse the magnitude and total avoidability of this tragedy, or its effects upon the kids glued to the TV set at school to see a teacher go into space, only to instead see a shuttle explode - or burn up - or however you wanna describe it.
In fact, America is known to orbit a black hole of our own invention, once every 365 days.
Here's how it was made. We packed 1 President, 100 US Senators and 418 Representatives, one welfare mom and one subsidy-begging corporate lobbyist dude, into Congress, and that's what caused the gravitational disturbance that we have all come to celebrate every April 15.:)
Right before it was Jesus Christ Superstar (in my area). I loved it (heresy of heresies) at the time but I'll be darned if I can remember what I saw. I have wanted for ages to track that show down for nostalgic reasons:)
Gamers' Linux, the Linux distribution devoted to games (specifically, RedHat Linux 6.1 with Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament installed), has filed a S-1 and will be offering shares at the end of Q1/2000.
The Distribution will be available any time now, and you can also get the source code for only $45 (sorry we have no FTP site yet).
We expect to open up at $.25/share and rocket up to about $.75/share before either K-Mart buys us up or Linus Torvalds sues the bejeezus out of us for GPL violations...
Slashdot Mirror
In my head I see a diagram made up of pipes leading from the CPU. The pipes are metaphors for the maximum data throughput.
A CPU, rated by how many FLOPs or how much raw data it can push per second, pumps water into the pipes and hits the front side bus, which is X megahertz and can push X gigs of data per second. The Cache (L1 and L2?) represents pipes through which data flow is restricted to Y gigs per second. Then the RAM is another link in the pipeline, restricting flow to Z gigs of data per second. Then the AGP bus for graphics, then the PCI bus functions, and their respective restrictions.
Now some pipes will be wider than others so they aren't creating restrictions. In fact their potential is being under-utilized. However as I see it the pipes are getting smaller as they branch out - the CPU being the origin and the fattest pipe, the cache being the next fattest, then the FSB, then the RAM, then the AGP bus.
An AC referred to wait states, and I was wondering
A) The cpu speed
B) The Front side bus
C) The L1 & L2 cache speed and size (though I'm sure this would be a fuzzy number at best)
D) The RAM speed and size
in something called a 'core performance' formula?
There could be attendant formulas for hard drive performance WRT the max core performance. You could then go on to calculate video pixel performance on a system, given you know how to plug in the universal quantifier number describing the video card's output and the AGP bus.
I would love to see this formula as it would greatly simplify analyses. You could take that max performance formula and break it back down for an instant analysis of the theoretical maximums and limits of every subsystem. With it you could instantly and accurately pinpoint the weak spots, and then, of course, compare it against benchmarks.
About benchmarks: benchmarks would then simply solve the question "how much of a bottleneck is the OS/drivers with regards to the system's maximum throughput?"
Any thoughts?
for the schoolage without all the spankage
I wish all 'corrections' were dealt out with that kind of patience and class.
Why not make a DVD player that can play THX Sound? A DVD is basically a huge repository of 1's and 0's, encode THX into the digital media and stick it on the disk, the player will decode it, right?
Guys, please check your previous stories before you put up articles. The new article says TPM won't be released on DVD in 2000 "or in the foreseeable future". That isn't much of a change from what was said back on December 23rd.
The gamers are brutally disloyal. They always hunger for the fastest biggest and baddest. They'll switch to an Athlon in a minute if they know the chipset will give them a monstrous speed advantage without an overly outrageous price tag. Which is to say if the coppermine is superior to the athlon by a maximum of 5fps in laboratory conditions, but the system costs $1000 more (an excellent real world analogy for this would be the RDRAM vs DDR SDRAM comparison), they'll go for the Athlon!
The Athlon only needs to stay close, or a breath ahead, of Intel, while keeping its prices down, down, down. The gamers will lead the exodus, and as the
When the dual boards come out, Intel has instantly lost the whole Linux community over the Chip ID issue. Linux people will have an economic and performance motivation for dumping Intel, plus the anti big brother aspect will weigh in.
A suggestion to AMD: advertise your chips with "No Big Brother Inside" ads and hit Intel down below the belt. It'll cause controversy galore, but you're going to score a lopsided public relations victory in the process.
peace!
Kryotech is selling the Super G, a 1000mhz Athlon running at a temperature of -40C.
However, your problem is not the chip speed, but the surrounding bus speed and RAM speed. The chip runs at 1000mhz, but the Front Side Bus is only 200mhz and the RAM runs at 100mhz. YUCK! Talk about your kinks in the hose!
The things you'll want to address before you improve your cpu speed are:
1) RAM speed. You'll theoretically wanna blast open that blockage in the pipeline with 800mhz RDRAM, although it has been shown that this does not deliver anywhere near the astronomical improvement that it is meant to deliver.
2) Cache speed. It runs at half the speed of the cpu - or, almost half. This needs to be rectified ASAP.
3) AGP support. This is very important in games. I predict AGP4x will really unleash the speed demon in every computer.
Is it any wonder that with all these bandwidth limitations, the Super Bypass only yields a 2-5% increase in performance over a non Super Bypass board?
Athlon systems sell for less than Intel systems, feature for feature and mhz for mhz, in every place I've seen. $50 to $100 less for an identically equipped machine up to 600mhz. (After that point the 633's vs 650's skew the comparison considerably)
RDRAM performance only gives you a small improvement over systems with PC133 RAM, according to the latest Windows general and game specific benchmark tests at Tom's Hardware. In the windows general test, the point spread between the i820/PC133 RAM and the i840/RDRAM is something like 25 points, with the lowest scoring 321 on the BAPco SYSMark98, and the highest at 343. In the game test, the i840 scores 122 in Q3 Arena (640x480x16), while the i820 scores 111.6. Hardly a mind boggling improvement.
You are not going to notice that difference in a game. But you are going to feel it quite long, hard and wide in your pocket book. A whole lotta spankin' for nothin'. You can get an Athlon 750 for less, and the performance in real time is either superior, or not far enough back behind the Coppermine to justify the cost of the Coppermine/RDRAM combo.
Likewise RDRAM + the Athlon won't mean anything, either. Athlon's support of AGP4x will mean a lot, however.
I disagree. The damages were sought because of the total lack of free Vaseline which was deemed necessary by OSHA to prevent -
er
are kids under 18 reading this site?
Dude, I see in my mind's eye, your name becoming a grunge rock band in the future
Since I sent them a handwritten letter I'll try to recreate some of my points here:
1) Telecommuting is a giant ergonomic plus in and of itself. The workers will automatically adjust their home environment to their liking for when they are working (and even when they're not).
2) This being true, the benefit gained by forcing employers to take on the same obligations towards telecommuting workers as they have for onsite employees, will be strongly offset by a cutback in telecommuting programs. This will have a small but negative impact on the environment, as former telecommuters go back to their full morning/nite automobile commute schedule.
3) Who is to say the telecommuter won't do something to the furniture (say, SELL it)? This opens the door for the necessity of increased monitoring and accounting of their behavior at home, which is already certain to rise to alarming levels just to keep track of their work habits. A company trying to manage a telecommuter's ergonomic safety in the home, looks to be like trying to gently set down a can of charcoal lighter fluid on burning coals. Not a good idea. (And the people who try it won't get to keep their souls. heh.)
4) For the sake of ergonomic improvements and the environment, I would suggest two revisions:
A) Publish information about ergonomic issues at home, for telecommuters. Give employers a small financial incentive to disseminate this information. Let the telecommuters make their own well informed ergonomic decisions at home.
B) Provide more incentives to companies to push more of their tasks that have telecommuting potential, into telecommuting programs. Companies that do this should be assessed tax credits that will be ledgered against environmental funds (in other words take the tax credit loss out on the eco budget because it is, after all, cutting down on pollution from automobile commutes).
I wrote this last night and threw it in the mailbox this morning. And lo and behold the situation is already resolved. Grrrrrrrrrr. Oh well!
That's all fine and well for spiritual enlightenment. But would you rather ride in an airplane piloted by someone who has flown 1 hour in the simulator a day for a year, or 4 hours a day for a year?
Would you rather be operated on by a surgeon who spent 1 hour a day learning medicine or someone who spent 8 hours a day or 16 (or quite often, 36
Likewise I'd rather entrust my vital electronic infrastructure with geeks who spend all day, or 4 hours a day, learning code, vs 1 hour a day. They might not get high marks as Zen Buddhist monks, but the planes won't crash into each other, the L.E.O. satellites will keep beaming bandwidth to the masses without interruption, and the power will stay on. And maybe, just maybe - Windows 2001 will be less buggy
Frankly I like the AC's idea of social skills fitness training. Do you know how many millions of geek men would flock to such a thing?
BTW: the fat dude is witty. In his own way. Not the way most people appreciate it, though.
peace!
Wit isn't detrimental to coding. But the hours you spend learning karate will put the other guy way ahead of you if he's doing what doctors and researchers do in their fields: namely spending that same time mastering their trade.
And creativity manifests itself in ways that most people don't appreciate for a long time. Since when did Albert Einstein win any awards for stand up comedy?
Also, most of the hard core types I know aren't fat, they're the exact opposite - wiry. The fat guy who got the 'dashing programmer' fired was simply a more efficient programmer. So were the much thinner programmers around him who outshone the unfortunate 'other' guy. These shy quiet techno monks work with stuff like Real Time Java and Java/GL, while Mr. Dashing was great with Java, C and custom database coding, but man, he was stumped trying to keep up with that 'real time extension' stuff. Once he was done doing the database work, his prowess hit a wall and he couldn't go any further and he wasn't needed anymore. (Merry Christmas, yer contract won't be renewed.) These ubermonks, though, had what it takes. I don't have that level of skill. I couldn't talk shop with the likes of Greg Bollella. But on the other hand I have a steady girlfriend.
And aside from one fat guy, as I said, I don't know any geeks who are 'losing their health, hating fitness or indulging in rude behavior' (to quote you closely). Most shy geeks try their best to AVOID being rude and they try to avoid saying the wrong things. Many shy geeks are conditioned to believe everything they say is going to be taken as rude crude or witless, so they keep the number of words that they might get hung by, to a bare minimum. Hence, they don't communicate very well.
And I'm just talking about shy geeks here. I'm not talking about geeks in general.
Keep me up to date on how this goes. My email is travoltus@hotmail.com - your idea is absolutely awesome!
PS: moderators made me eat crow, news@11.
I don't deny that the power geeks aren't so numerous. The kind of skill needed to code a behemoth NT (as the gamasutra article put it) comes at a great cost, even when there is a team involved. That kind of skill is very very rare.
And as I said, 'personality' is a load of relativist hogwash anyway. Shy people don't learn social skills because they're always busy learning how to dodge *your* hateful jabs. They spent their lives avoiding getting rat tailed in the locker room and getting brutally piled on by jocks for saying 'hi' to a chick in a cafeteria and never understanding why in the heck they got jumped for trying to introduce themselves to someone they thought wasn't with anyone.
In other words these guys are shy because they're only trying to protect themselves from an insensitive, hateful, judgemental, and intolerant world. Computers give them that refuge, and in exchange these ubergeeks give computers their undying fealty in the form of becoming dedicated hard core programmers, because in the end the computers are the only things they can trust, and the only things they can rely on. The computer industry is their shield from a world where inconsistency, lack of personal integrity, cruelty, undecipherable social code words and capriciousness is the stuff of 'great personalities'.
Oh did I mention ignorance? Everyone throws around this term 'personality' and the other one.. 'social skills'. Do you have any idea what that really means? I know. You probably think "well he's gotta bathe at least once a day, wear clean, color matched clothes, and he shouldn't mumble when he talks."
DUH!!!!! I don't know any shy, socially handicapped geek who doesn't shower at least once a day. I don't know any ubergeek who would dare to wear dirty clothes. Most geeks I know will speak up and not mumble. The only good point is some guys aren't color coordinated with their wardrobe. But this 'Personality' crap - that's just a code word for "a guy who spits out witty little jokes that the hivemind thinks is funny, and who can laugh at the most stupid and senseless humor (see: south park), and who can dress the way the hivemind approves."
Some of these geeks never got the chance to learn social skills like you or I did. They were too busy trying to avoid you so you wouldn't break their neck in gym class, haze them with broomsticks in the locker room or gang up on them after school for the fun of it. The Gamasutra site speaks rightly when they speak of 'dispassionate, cold' programmer types - I know these guys. They're dispassionate and cold because you beat the warmth out of them back in high school! Remember? The coldness is the result of the armor plating they've evolved around their hearts which you stabbed every time you stole their glasses or made fun of their clothes.
Now you guys start preaching about 'social skills', and even if you had an idea of what you really meant, you lack the ability to understand the solution to these shy ubergeek types.
The solution is not to go around dissing them because they have no social skills, that's easy. Anyone can do that. Try making an honest to God effort to draw these shy types into the fold, eh? I know it ain't easy for ye of such short attention spans (talk about social skills) and no patience (ah yes more of that great personality thing), but the truly insightful one among you will sit these shy guys down and talked to them. Talk to them about what you see in them, in a non judgemental and non hostile manner, and work out steps to draw them out of their cold protective shell. Think of the training wheels approach. But then again I know you lack the patience, compassion and insight to pull this one off.
I wonder if Commander Taco would be willing to tackle this issue with the intent to help those who are shy and socially handicapped. Why are they handicapped? What was their past history? How do we help them without being so damned crass and pretentious and stuck up about how much 'better than them' we are? Not all shy people want help, of course, but I guarantee you a lot will come if you offer the real deal instead of a bunch of code words and b.s.
Mark my words, people, the people who attack this 'social handicap' issue with compassion and not conceit, will solve the biggest problem in the 21st century. Mark my words. I guarantee you the programming community will benefit astronomically from this.
We have to devote our hearts and souls to the trade in order to learn how to write good code.
The logical, non judgemental nature of computers tends to be a friendlier environment for shy folks who cannot figure out the whimsical, inconsistent and often childish and pointless rules of 'social skills'. In a world where Tommy Lee can beat Pamela Lee to a pulp and still remain a popular star, maybe computers are the only darned things that make any real sense.
I find it rather hypocritical that anyone can stand around laughing at a geek programmer's "lack of social skills". He's not the one hiding in the trunk of a car trying to evade police after murdering his girlfriend. (That would be you, Rae Carruth.) The devastating consequences of the excesses of those socially skilled 'alpha male' types make headline news all the time.
The image of this dashing Don Juan who can code up a clean version of Netscape overnight while weightlifting his way to tomorrow's Mister Universe competition while knowing all the slick lines that make the chicks swoon, is a myth. You put someone like that into a real honest to god developer's job and he'll be flat out crushed by the kind of tasks that the four-eyed geeks drink up like orange juice.
I've seen it happen on my job too many times. The witty funny dashing fellow gets his head handed to him time after time by the fat guy down the hall who spends half a day cleaning up the first guy's code with bug fixes and speed enhancements and then finally getting him fired for being a (relatively) crappy programmer.
Heh, this should really piss the moderators off...lol.
All this is saying is that burning coals eventually turn white.
That's when the real BBQ happens
According to eToys' stock history, they've dropped from almost $80/share to ~$25.50/share.
Does anyone have a really credible analysis on this? I found some ideas over at the Red Herring. Toys R Us is down to $14.13, $10 off its yearly high. The entire online toy purchasing industry is suffering from a lack of confidence, resulting (reportedly) from their inability to fill toy orders on time.
While customers of other toy makers (Toys R Us) and KBKids professed (at a rate exceeding 40%) they wouldn't shop there again, the rate of terminal dissatisfaction with eToys is 12%.
My prediction is that eToys' stock will rebound. The eToys death watch will be an excruciatingly slow event and will suffer quite an ugly setback as eToys (in my non-investor prediction) gets out of the hospital bed around early Spring, the time by which eToys will most likely have gotten their butts in gear with regards to meeting customer orders. They will either have more efficient fulfillment techniques, or customers will buy earlier, but in either case this major depressant upon their stock value will be lifted away by April.
So is there cause for despair? Yes and no. Surely we cannot avoid eating a few crow feathers here and there when eToys' stock rebounds. But the way to keep the whole crow from being stuffed down, i.e. the way to keep their stock from rebounding too far, and perhaps even drag it down to sub-$20 levels, is rather clear.
1) If you know of any online artist groups, inform them about the eToy vs eToys issue. The artist community does not suffer this crap very easily.
2) If you know of any non-online artist groups of any sort - stores, galleries, you name it - let them know, also.
There is the more drastic and difficult theory, also:
3) Gather donations and fund an ad in USA Today, documenting the tragedy of eToys' attack on etoy.com. Express it as an attack on artistic free expression by means fraudulent legal tactics (false patent claims, etc.), under an atmosphere of judicial ignorance favoring the biggest-mouthed, deepest-pocketed lawyers. Call for a boycott on eToys.com.
You have to find ways to create massive tides of bad press for eToys - this and this alone will create a major dampener on their stock value. This should start right now, while their stock is down, so as to depress the upcoming rebound as eToys prepares a mission plan to prevent their previous customer fulfillment failures from happening again.
Now I've checked USA Today for their information on the costs of a full page ad, and the rates are almost $11,000 for a 1/16 page ad, up to $81K for a full pager. It ain't cheap. Of course the bigger the ad the more people are going to notice it, but I think even at 1/16th page it is still going to cause major press, and grab the attention of a lot of people.
What do y'all think?
The Challenger got caught in a very big fireball (aka an EXPLOSION!!) which killed seven crew members. Technically the Challenger was enveloped in a "massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank." The blast was also called, in this report, an explosive burn.
The issue of whether or not this was an explosion, pretty much means nothing to all the crew who died:
Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Spacecraft Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Judith A. Resnik, specialist
Ronald E. McNair, specialist
Ellison S. Onizuka, specialist
Gregory B. Jarvis, a payload specialist
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space
I know this is about 'inaccuracies' but this is a very petty 'inaccuracy'. It does nothing to eclipse the magnitude and total avoidability of this tragedy, or its effects upon the kids glued to the TV set at school to see a teacher go into space, only to instead see a shuttle explode - or burn up - or however you wanna describe it.
It still sucked.
I'm sure that eToy can sue these guys under California's Anti-SLAPP ordinance.
SLAPP == Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or a shut-you-up-with-big-money lawsuit.
We already know how to create a black hole.
It's really simple, actually.
In fact, America is known to orbit a black hole of our own invention, once every 365 days.
Here's how it was made. We packed 1 President, 100 US Senators and 418 Representatives, one welfare mom and one subsidy-begging corporate lobbyist dude, into Congress, and that's what caused the gravitational disturbance that we have all come to celebrate every April 15.
Right before it was Jesus Christ Superstar (in my area). I loved it (heresy of heresies) at the time but I'll be darned if I can remember what I saw. I have wanted for ages to track that show down for nostalgic reasons
Gamers' Linux, the Linux distribution devoted to games (specifically, RedHat Linux 6.1 with Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament installed), has filed a S-1 and will be offering shares at the end of Q1/2000.
The Distribution will be available any time now, and you can also get the source code for only $45 (sorry we have no FTP site yet).
We expect to open up at $.25/share and rocket up to about $.75/share before either K-Mart buys us up or Linus Torvalds sues the bejeezus out of us for GPL violations...
And it'll be the Jar Jar-free version!
Place your orders!!
Need I justify him as Man of the Year?