I was drooling over the new 17" until I got to the non-removable battery part. On long trips I've always loved the ability to swap through multiple batteries. 8 hours (which surely means 6 real world hours) is very good, but it still falls short of two or three swaps. Probably not something most people care about, so perhaps a good business decision... but I'll be holding on to my old 17" until it croaks, I guess.
Renewable or not It's still a huge waste of resources to grow trees, cut them down, mill them, ship them, use them, and landfill them (or even recycle them) if you don't actually need to use them in the first place.
If you do need to use them, fine. But a hell of a lot of what we use today is waste.
Cheers.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 1
Of course I read your comment. You can be as logical about it as you like, but human emotion and extended consequences are very valid issues in the discussion of torture. Your question was, in my opinion, reductionism to the point of meaninglessness. Bringing in some context was intentional. The lack of such context was the point in the original article, in fact.
I doubt you support torture. Nobody does, not even Cheney himself. Of course we all support using effective techniques to get vital information. What's the difference? Human emotion, extended consequences, and context.
I am a bit sad that you turned my claim that "it's not clear if the list was complete or error free" into "highly accurate, actionable evidence". That's the exact kind of predisposed thinking that allows things like torture to continue. Also missing from your analysis is that the entire foundation of the information they sought was wrong, so even if wholly accurate, the resulting actions were still inaccurate. You may think that's a separate issue, but it seems that these kinds of high level mistakes often go hand in hand with human rights violations. They all seem to source from hyper-reductionist analysis, realpolitik, closed feedback loops, groups of yes-men, and an unwavering belief that you have to do what you have to do.
Just my $0.02.
Cheers.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course you doubt it, because you want so bad for there to be some way in which our power allows us to get what we want.
My grandfather and his brother were captured by the Polish secret police in 1949. They had helped Eastern European refugees escape to the west from the Nazis during the war, but when those refugees returned to eastern Europe, Stalin suspected they were western spies. To find out who they were, and get evidence against them, my grandfather and his brother were held and tortured over a period of five years until they gave them the names of the refugees they had helped.
Was the information true? The soviets eventually got as many names as they wanted. After all that time and under duress it's not clear if the list was complete or error free. More importantly, the premise that the refugees were dangerous spies was false so even to the degree that the information was actionable it was under false assumptions.
I was told growing up that reliance on kidnappings and torture was the proof of why Communism was evil and our Democracy was inherently better. Now I know that was a lie. People like yourself, under any religious or government system, will justify evil acts to themselves if they want.
I don't hate MS either, but I don't think the reason people hate MS is because they make money. It's because they've often been assholes about it. People generally love a good success story as long as the recipient of the success seems to have done it in a fair way. Witness Warren Buffet. Or Google... as long as they shy away from evil. Apple is loved for now, but they're evil enough to get themselves thoroughly hated down the road.
But the point is: making money is not evil, but if you make money while being evil, people will hate you. And that's as it should be, really. Nobody likes to see assholes get ahead.
I don't know if this is common or not, but an EMT seemed to use this once to tell if I was going to pass out. I had broken my upper arm and at some point I guess I was looking whiter than usual (according to my friends). After putting the arm in a sling the EMT looked at me very seriously and said something like "What's the problem? You're a big guy. What's the big deal?" I was confused for a moment, then I realized he was being sarcastic and I laughed. When I did, he smiled, patted me on the (other) shoulder and announced "Yeah, he's okay. He'll be fine."
I thought that was a pretty good way to tell how out of it I was. Of course some people don't get sarcasm at all, so it might not work all the time.
I think you're missing my point: there are plenty of great people out there already, and you can hire and keep them if you offer a decent salary and a great work environment. I've done this, so it's not speculation. Maybe you could also hire and keep them if you offer a ridiculously high salary and a shitty work environment, but I'm not so sure and in any case I have no interest in managing such a thing.
Also: my experience generally indicates that with programmers, the more they're "in it for the money" the worse they are.
Maybe some people pull that term out of thin air. I would start with the median salary.com number, then apply some judgement based on what I knew of the current situation and the hire's abilities, which always resulted in some amount of upward bump. So everyone I hired was paid above median salary for the area. My salary was also in the same "above median" range.
If you're getting paid less than that, then sure, you're being lowballed, and that's bad. But I maintain that going way above that isn't the best way to hire or keep employees. Paying extra does not make up for a lousy work environment. But one shouldn't use a good work environment to lowball on salary either.
As a note, I was always a programmer as much as a manager, so I wasn't judging these things in managerial ignorance. At least I don't think I was:)
Very good point -- I agree completely. And those things are probably the hardest to come by. Most companies would rather just throw more money at their employees while continuing to give them crappy project schedules and poor guidance.
The sad part is that most employees will be placated enough by the extra money to stick with it even though they hate it and think things are going the wrong direction. This is bad for the company and the employee. Yet it's depressingly common.
Please, we're not talking about living at the poverty line here. We're talking about people who had plenty of money to pay their bills without worry and buy cool of toys for themselves. That's how I lived, as a manager, too. If you're a good programmer and you're not getting at least that then yes, you are underpaid (or an idiot with basic money management).
I'm just saying that dumping another couple thousand per year on someone who already lives in complete comfort doesn't make as much of an impact as finding ways to make their job better. That extra couple thousand doesn't matter much when you spend 40+ hours a week with people you hate doing things you hate.
That's probably true, but let me be more specific: I never had anyone turn down a job offer at all. I hired 20 people over the course of six years, so it wasn't high volume. I only had two employees that chose to leave while I was there, and that was during a move to another state. I never lowballed: I paid market. I suppose some people might think the market is lowball, though. I came from humble beginnings so it didn't seem that way to me.
I hope I didn't overstate it in my original post: proper pay is important. There's just diminishing returns there, and once people are making enough to live well without worrying about money, you get more motivation out of improving their work environment instead of giving them another few thousand a year. I felt this way myself: my pay allowed me to live well without worry. Unless they were going to give me enough money to retire on, token increases just weren't that important to me. I preferred getting more respect and appreciation from my superiors.
I've never known this to be the case. When I managed developers, I paid market rates which I am sure you would say are low. I never had a single offer turned down for salary considerations. I had a range of programmers from good to excellent. Expectation of higher salaries was not correlated with skills or performance at all.
You are right: programming _is_ hard. But salary is only useful as a motivator up to a point. Beyond that, what good programmers want is respect, appreciation, and freedom to do great things. They want to work on stuff that they feel good about. They also want to work with other smart people who they can learn from and build great stuff with. Those are decent starting points anyway.
So your general idea is right: that complaining companies are full of it, but I don't think it's because of money. It's because they have lousy uninspiring development environments.
I can't believe I'm seeing this argument again either. Dogma vs. pragmatism arguments in computer science predate the web by a very long time. Pragmatism always wins.
I've heard all the theoretical discussions again and again. Yet I continue to come across certain layouts that require a tiny amount of intuitive tables vs. oodles of hacky CSS to get the same effect. I have close friends who hate me for my stance on this, and who will "correct" my bad design by delivering to me the most gawd awful yet "correct" HTML to replace a simple table layout: stuff that is impossible to comprehend.
Having a small amount of table code does not break the content/layout dichotomy either. Certainly no more so than a bunch of nested div tags.
Hey: remember when the three column layout with a header and footer was called the "holy grail" of CSS? I realize the holy grail has been found, but the fact that it was a quest when the same thing is a natural and totally obvious layout with tables gives an indication of how limited the CSS box model is for horizontal positioning.
I sincerely hope you're not charging anyone by the hour for HTML.
Table layout is still very useful. I've seen some ugly, brittle CSS layout hacks that could have been solved with a very simple table layout. Yes, tables can be abused. Yes, in Netscape 4 they rendered painfully slow. Yes, CSS removes much of the need for tables. But dismissing tables entirely as a layout tool is pretty foolish.
I've had the same MacBook Pro for two years. When I upgraded to 10.5 I started having lots of wireless connection issues... slow and lots of connection timeout errors. Now at 10.5, it's mostly fixed, but still spottier than under 10.4, which was basically flawless as far as wireless was concerned.
The reality is a bit more variable. While it may sometimes be better to page out program data for disk caching, this is certainly not always true. A large DB system I used to administer performed much better without doing so. Luckily Linux supports a "swappiness" variable in/proc, which we turned way down. That prevented some major memory problems we were running into.
This was probably related to the fact that the DB software was doing some of it's own higher level data caching, so the OS level disk caching was redundant, but in any case the system ran measurably better over time with low swappiness. I have heard that for most desktop systems it's the other way around, as you say.
It all depends on your idea of profound, I guess. I find it immensely profound that our mind, a system for modeling the world around each of us, gives rise to such vivid experiences when the world changes dramatically. It's like sensations in a severed limb. Thinking of loved ones in that way gives me a sense of love and longing that rings lonely and true. I find it terribly sad, but surely profound.
Yeah, that's because there aren't differences between real races. That's the point.
I am fully aware that by percentage you can correlate certain traits with certain races. And thus when speaking in gross generalities you can say "blacks are this way, whites are that way, asians are another way", etc. But the fact is that it's almost always a useless exercise, serving no purpose other than to help simplify a complex world at the expense of understanding that people are _individuals_ and nobody is bound by their race.
Yeah, I know all the examples you can point to of races having tendencies. And I can find exceptions to every case. Ask yourself what your point is.
Probably because none of those techs are close to being cost effective competition for nuclear or fossil. That's not to say they won't ever be, but you have to have some practicality here: we can't bet our economy on unproven tech. We can R&D it and blend it in and maybe someday it'll be the backbone. But we need a viable backbone now, too: nuclear is almost surely the best option for the next several decades.
I like the post you linked to there, and for some reason it strikes a chord with me: you're replying to some newbie nitwit who is sure that everything he doesn't understand about programming is in fact something that others don't understand. I couldn't count how many times I've had to make a real-world-functional system that was criticized by newcomers as being deficient in theory when they simply didn't understand the real-world problem space.
I remember a GI Joe game for the C64 that involved an enormous amount of disk switching and loading. It attempted to mitigate this by not having a loading screen: instead, when loading the next section it would display an animation of armored vehicles heading out of the base at an excruciatingly slow pace. This was supposed to be a cut-scene of Joe or Cobra heading to the impending battle.
But here's the thing: it still broke the 4th wall because it was so obvious. It would have been annoying in any case to let it load, but this technique imported the annoyance into the game world: "why do their vehicles go so fucking slow on their way to a heated battle!". It may have been in fact better if they had not done this. Of course, that depends on how well you do the cut scene and how long or annoying the loading time is, but breaking the 4th wall, as the article describes, is a lot more complex than for a film.
I'm not totally sure about that. I saw it as "change from the Bush administration", not "change from anything that has come before". But you're right, a lot of people probably saw it as both, which is at least a little naive:)
Slashdot Mirror
I was drooling over the new 17" until I got to the non-removable battery part. On long trips I've always loved the ability to swap through multiple batteries. 8 hours (which surely means 6 real world hours) is very good, but it still falls short of two or three swaps. Probably not something most people care about, so perhaps a good business decision... but I'll be holding on to my old 17" until it croaks, I guess.
Renewable or not It's still a huge waste of resources to grow trees, cut them down, mill them, ship them, use them, and landfill them (or even recycle them) if you don't actually need to use them in the first place.
If you do need to use them, fine. But a hell of a lot of what we use today is waste.
Cheers.
Of course I read your comment. You can be as logical about it as you like, but human emotion and extended consequences are very valid issues in the discussion of torture. Your question was, in my opinion, reductionism to the point of meaninglessness. Bringing in some context was intentional. The lack of such context was the point in the original article, in fact.
I doubt you support torture. Nobody does, not even Cheney himself. Of course we all support using effective techniques to get vital information. What's the difference? Human emotion, extended consequences, and context.
I am a bit sad that you turned my claim that "it's not clear if the list was complete or error free" into "highly accurate, actionable evidence". That's the exact kind of predisposed thinking that allows things like torture to continue. Also missing from your analysis is that the entire foundation of the information they sought was wrong, so even if wholly accurate, the resulting actions were still inaccurate. You may think that's a separate issue, but it seems that these kinds of high level mistakes often go hand in hand with human rights violations. They all seem to source from hyper-reductionist analysis, realpolitik, closed feedback loops, groups of yes-men, and an unwavering belief that you have to do what you have to do.
Just my $0.02.
Cheers.
Of course you doubt it, because you want so bad for there to be some way in which our power allows us to get what we want.
My grandfather and his brother were captured by the Polish secret police in 1949. They had helped Eastern European refugees escape to the west from the Nazis during the war, but when those refugees returned to eastern Europe, Stalin suspected they were western spies. To find out who they were, and get evidence against them, my grandfather and his brother were held and tortured over a period of five years until they gave them the names of the refugees they had helped.
Was the information true? The soviets eventually got as many names as they wanted. After all that time and under duress it's not clear if the list was complete or error free. More importantly, the premise that the refugees were dangerous spies was false so even to the degree that the information was actionable it was under false assumptions.
I was told growing up that reliance on kidnappings and torture was the proof of why Communism was evil and our Democracy was inherently better. Now I know that was a lie. People like yourself, under any religious or government system, will justify evil acts to themselves if they want.
If you want to read more about it: they wrote a book.
Cheers.
I don't hate MS either, but I don't think the reason people hate MS is because they make money. It's because they've often been assholes about it. People generally love a good success story as long as the recipient of the success seems to have done it in a fair way. Witness Warren Buffet. Or Google... as long as they shy away from evil. Apple is loved for now, but they're evil enough to get themselves thoroughly hated down the road.
But the point is: making money is not evil, but if you make money while being evil, people will hate you. And that's as it should be, really. Nobody likes to see assholes get ahead.
Cheers.
I don't know if this is common or not, but an EMT seemed to use this once to tell if I was going to pass out. I had broken my upper arm and at some point I guess I was looking whiter than usual (according to my friends). After putting the arm in a sling the EMT looked at me very seriously and said something like "What's the problem? You're a big guy. What's the big deal?" I was confused for a moment, then I realized he was being sarcastic and I laughed. When I did, he smiled, patted me on the (other) shoulder and announced "Yeah, he's okay. He'll be fine."
I thought that was a pretty good way to tell how out of it I was. Of course some people don't get sarcasm at all, so it might not work all the time.
Really? So you want a manager who runs the company into the ground at your expense?
I guess the golden rule only works if you're not a short-sighted fool.
Cheers.
I think you're missing my point: there are plenty of great people out there already, and you can hire and keep them if you offer a decent salary and a great work environment. I've done this, so it's not speculation. Maybe you could also hire and keep them if you offer a ridiculously high salary and a shitty work environment, but I'm not so sure and in any case I have no interest in managing such a thing.
Also: my experience generally indicates that with programmers, the more they're "in it for the money" the worse they are.
Cheers.
Maybe some people pull that term out of thin air. I would start with the median salary.com number, then apply some judgement based on what I knew of the current situation and the hire's abilities, which always resulted in some amount of upward bump. So everyone I hired was paid above median salary for the area. My salary was also in the same "above median" range.
If you're getting paid less than that, then sure, you're being lowballed, and that's bad. But I maintain that going way above that isn't the best way to hire or keep employees. Paying extra does not make up for a lousy work environment. But one shouldn't use a good work environment to lowball on salary either.
As a note, I was always a programmer as much as a manager, so I wasn't judging these things in managerial ignorance. At least I don't think I was :)
Cheers
Very good point -- I agree completely. And those things are probably the hardest to come by. Most companies would rather just throw more money at their employees while continuing to give them crappy project schedules and poor guidance.
The sad part is that most employees will be placated enough by the extra money to stick with it even though they hate it and think things are going the wrong direction. This is bad for the company and the employee. Yet it's depressingly common.
Cheers.
Please, we're not talking about living at the poverty line here. We're talking about people who had plenty of money to pay their bills without worry and buy cool of toys for themselves. That's how I lived, as a manager, too. If you're a good programmer and you're not getting at least that then yes, you are underpaid (or an idiot with basic money management).
I'm just saying that dumping another couple thousand per year on someone who already lives in complete comfort doesn't make as much of an impact as finding ways to make their job better. That extra couple thousand doesn't matter much when you spend 40+ hours a week with people you hate doing things you hate.
Cheers.
That's probably true, but let me be more specific: I never had anyone turn down a job offer at all. I hired 20 people over the course of six years, so it wasn't high volume. I only had two employees that chose to leave while I was there, and that was during a move to another state. I never lowballed: I paid market. I suppose some people might think the market is lowball, though. I came from humble beginnings so it didn't seem that way to me.
I hope I didn't overstate it in my original post: proper pay is important. There's just diminishing returns there, and once people are making enough to live well without worrying about money, you get more motivation out of improving their work environment instead of giving them another few thousand a year. I felt this way myself: my pay allowed me to live well without worry. Unless they were going to give me enough money to retire on, token increases just weren't that important to me. I preferred getting more respect and appreciation from my superiors.
Cheers.
I've never known this to be the case. When I managed developers, I paid market rates which I am sure you would say are low. I never had a single offer turned down for salary considerations. I had a range of programmers from good to excellent. Expectation of higher salaries was not correlated with skills or performance at all.
You are right: programming _is_ hard. But salary is only useful as a motivator up to a point. Beyond that, what good programmers want is respect, appreciation, and freedom to do great things. They want to work on stuff that they feel good about. They also want to work with other smart people who they can learn from and build great stuff with. Those are decent starting points anyway.
So your general idea is right: that complaining companies are full of it, but I don't think it's because of money. It's because they have lousy uninspiring development environments.
Cheers.
I can't believe I'm seeing this argument again either. Dogma vs. pragmatism arguments in computer science predate the web by a very long time. Pragmatism always wins.
I've heard all the theoretical discussions again and again. Yet I continue to come across certain layouts that require a tiny amount of intuitive tables vs. oodles of hacky CSS to get the same effect. I have close friends who hate me for my stance on this, and who will "correct" my bad design by delivering to me the most gawd awful yet "correct" HTML to replace a simple table layout: stuff that is impossible to comprehend.
Having a small amount of table code does not break the content/layout dichotomy either. Certainly no more so than a bunch of nested div tags.
Hey: remember when the three column layout with a header and footer was called the "holy grail" of CSS? I realize the holy grail has been found, but the fact that it was a quest when the same thing is a natural and totally obvious layout with tables gives an indication of how limited the CSS box model is for horizontal positioning.
I sincerely hope you're not charging anyone by the hour for HTML.
Cheers.
Table layout is still very useful. I've seen some ugly, brittle CSS layout hacks that could have been solved with a very simple table layout. Yes, tables can be abused. Yes, in Netscape 4 they rendered painfully slow. Yes, CSS removes much of the need for tables. But dismissing tables entirely as a layout tool is pretty foolish.
Just my $0.02.
er, "at 10.5.5 it's mostly fixed". There we go.
I've had the same MacBook Pro for two years. When I upgraded to 10.5 I started having lots of wireless connection issues... slow and lots of connection timeout errors. Now at 10.5, it's mostly fixed, but still spottier than under 10.4, which was basically flawless as far as wireless was concerned.
Just adding to your sample data ;)
The reality is a bit more variable. While it may sometimes be better to page out program data for disk caching, this is certainly not always true. A large DB system I used to administer performed much better without doing so. Luckily Linux supports a "swappiness" variable in /proc, which we turned way down. That prevented some major memory problems we were running into.
This was probably related to the fact that the DB software was doing some of it's own higher level data caching, so the OS level disk caching was redundant, but in any case the system ran measurably better over time with low swappiness. I have heard that for most desktop systems it's the other way around, as you say.
Cheers.
It all depends on your idea of profound, I guess. I find it immensely profound that our mind, a system for modeling the world around each of us, gives rise to such vivid experiences when the world changes dramatically. It's like sensations in a severed limb. Thinking of loved ones in that way gives me a sense of love and longing that rings lonely and true. I find it terribly sad, but surely profound.
Cheers.
The current tendency to call everything terrorism is very dangerous...
One might even go so far as to call it terrorism!
Yeah, that's because there aren't differences between real races. That's the point.
I am fully aware that by percentage you can correlate certain traits with certain races. And thus when speaking in gross generalities you can say "blacks are this way, whites are that way, asians are another way", etc. But the fact is that it's almost always a useless exercise, serving no purpose other than to help simplify a complex world at the expense of understanding that people are _individuals_ and nobody is bound by their race.
Yeah, I know all the examples you can point to of races having tendencies. And I can find exceptions to every case. Ask yourself what your point is.
Cheers.
Probably because none of those techs are close to being cost effective competition for nuclear or fossil. That's not to say they won't ever be, but you have to have some practicality here: we can't bet our economy on unproven tech. We can R&D it and blend it in and maybe someday it'll be the backbone. But we need a viable backbone now, too: nuclear is almost surely the best option for the next several decades.
Cheers.
I like the post you linked to there, and for some reason it strikes a chord with me: you're replying to some newbie nitwit who is sure that everything he doesn't understand about programming is in fact something that others don't understand. I couldn't count how many times I've had to make a real-world-functional system that was criticized by newcomers as being deficient in theory when they simply didn't understand the real-world problem space.
Cheers.
I remember a GI Joe game for the C64 that involved an enormous amount of disk switching and loading. It attempted to mitigate this by not having a loading screen: instead, when loading the next section it would display an animation of armored vehicles heading out of the base at an excruciatingly slow pace. This was supposed to be a cut-scene of Joe or Cobra heading to the impending battle.
But here's the thing: it still broke the 4th wall because it was so obvious. It would have been annoying in any case to let it load, but this technique imported the annoyance into the game world: "why do their vehicles go so fucking slow on their way to a heated battle!". It may have been in fact better if they had not done this. Of course, that depends on how well you do the cut scene and how long or annoying the loading time is, but breaking the 4th wall, as the article describes, is a lot more complex than for a film.
I still played the GI Joe game a lot, though :)
I'm not totally sure about that. I saw it as "change from the Bush administration", not "change from anything that has come before". But you're right, a lot of people probably saw it as both, which is at least a little naive :)