Where else can you write software *and* learn to juggle chairs!? I bet they have a heckuva dodgeball team too... "If you can dodge a chair, you can dodge a ball!"
I'd have to agree here. Most customers have no idea what they want. You're talking to someone that's high enough up to be able to make the decisions and that usually means they're out of touch with what happens on the shop floor (where my company's software gets used).
I once had a customer tell me that they thought it was perfectly reasonable to assume that joe blow in the shop would read the information off of a container and type it into our software... In reality this meant that joe would be dragging a 50 gallon drum over to a workstation buried in the corner of the shop so that he could copy it. It took forever to convince them that that just wasn't going to happen - for a myriad of reasons. Even when you have a product that perfectly meets the customer's needs you still have to get past their unfounded complaints.
Yeah, I've never had to wait for anything. I've watched everything from brand new releases to obscure old movies and they've always shown up immediately.
Either way lazy people are going to cash in, but let's face it, it's becoming human nature to be lazy. It's always been human nature for people to be lazy. It's just that our parents used to slap us around and make us work hard. They taught us self-discipline and the value of hard work. Now no one has parents. The divorce rate is something like 50%. The parents that aren't divorced both work. Either way, kids are raised in day care centers and at school. Parents don't even see their kids enough to teach them anything. Kids learn to do just enough to get through school and stay under their parent's radar - a.k.a. how to be lazy without anyone hassling you.
I don't know about that. I sweated over nearly every project I turned in an I knew *exactly* how it worked. Sure, on the bigger assignments I may not be able to tell you every class I wrote but you better I believe I could tell you how it worked.
That was the nice thing about programming classes - as long as you did the assignments you almost never had to study for the tests. After spending hours going over the code you didn't need to waste time memorizing it. You'd learned it just by doing it.
I was thinking the same thing. Seriously, they couldn't pick up a free web cam from Fry's? I see those things free with M.I.R. all the time. I've got one myself. Haven't used it much... but who cares - it was free!
As someone who has stepped into an extremely large project with no diagrams - I can say that I really, really wished there had been some. Instead, what I got were really awesome hand-drawn scribblings on my whiteboard and notepads by senior developers. Better than nothing, but not nearly as useful as a comprehensive diagram of the whole system.
I now make it a habit to write documentation and use diagrams to help others in my group as well as anyone coming after me. I think we all know we won't be working at our job forever and I'd prefer not to be the kind of guy that leaves a mess for the poor sod taking my position.
no, I acknowledged that they were nVidia's drivers and that it was nVidia's fault. My point was that nVidia is single handedly ruining the user experience for everyone with their cards (which, considering the way they're slapping ATI around with performance, I'd say is quite a few people). It's in Microsoft's interest to give them whatever assistance they need to make their drivers work correctly with Vista. I didn't say, "Microsoft sucks because nVidia sucks." I said, "Microsoft needs to hold nVidia's hand because they obviously can't do it by themselves."
> What incentive would anyone have now to provide "mature" drivers for Vista?
Because they want thier products to get shipped by OEMs and bought by users; if they don't improve thier drivers performance they lose on benchmarks, if they don't improve driver quality OEMs get upset.
The stability issue is what's frustrating. I've got a pair of nVidia 8800 GTS's and Vista Ultimate and all of my crashes are video card driver related. We've all seen the numbers for the % of crashes that were nVidia's fault when Vista was first released. I don't know how much hand-holding MSFT does on that sort of thing, but I think they should have done more. I think they underestimated how much poor drivers could ruin the user experience.
Right... in other words - some exec pulled some BS number out of his backside and now Google is getting sued based on that number. Come on. I guess it was only a matter of time before we saw a lawsuit based on someone else's made up numbers rather than the plaintiff's.
Indeed. That's why I haven't installed it yet. FF2 may be a memory hog but it's reliable. Also, I'll wait a while for all my my favorite plug-ins to get updated.
Hmm. I'm posting to remove my mod. I modded it "overrated". I was hoping to go for the opposite... -5 funny. Instead it turned into -1 flamebait because of the other moderation it already had. So sad!
I love how much abuse FEMA gets. Everyone always leaves out the awesomely retarded governor of that state. The few things she did do... were interesting.
You forgot about the part where everyone's page has got black text over a black and white background so you can only read every other word... as if anything on there were worth reading anyway.:P
It could also be a huge disaster for police departments. Thousands upon thousands of individuals appealing for reexamination of fingerprint evidence could swamp crime labs. Yeah, that won't be much of a problem... they'll just ignore it. Just like they've done in the past when it's been made obvious that the state has accepted evidence presented by "experts" that actually know nothing. This article talks a bit about what a problem it is. I don't see the specific case in it that I was looking for though - I know there was a forensic "expert" at hair and fingerprint analysis that convicted hundreds and hundreds of people and the state refused to systematically reexamine or review any of his cases.
Same could be said of music, art, etc... doesn't make it any less interesting or important to people. Curiosity, tinkering, and "because I can" have lead to all sorts of amazing things. Just because you don't understand the motivation doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to someone in some way.
I think he was referring to drum machine type music. Stuff like FL Studio where you're tracking the song out and the entire thing is all perfectly timed using identical sounds. In other words - it's created by a person but essentially being played with machine-like precision.
In my opinion Gates' business savvy more than anything else is what's made Microsoft, Microsoft. Yeah... he's a visionary but we all know their track record regarding swiped technology from other companies. Their massive pile of cash has allowed them to branch out into new areas and survive where other companies would have simply failed. I'm not saying everything they made was a winner - just that when they spent half a billion dollars on a pile of junk (yes, that's an arbitrary number. no, I don't know how much it cost to develop the Zune) - they could weather that storm without collapsing.
Slashdot Mirror
Where else can you write software *and* learn to juggle chairs!? I bet they have a heckuva dodgeball team too... "If you can dodge a chair, you can dodge a ball!"
I'd have to agree here. Most customers have no idea what they want. You're talking to someone that's high enough up to be able to make the decisions and that usually means they're out of touch with what happens on the shop floor (where my company's software gets used).
I once had a customer tell me that they thought it was perfectly reasonable to assume that joe blow in the shop would read the information off of a container and type it into our software... In reality this meant that joe would be dragging a 50 gallon drum over to a workstation buried in the corner of the shop so that he could copy it. It took forever to convince them that that just wasn't going to happen - for a myriad of reasons. Even when you have a product that perfectly meets the customer's needs you still have to get past their unfounded complaints.
Yeah, I've never had to wait for anything. I've watched everything from brand new releases to obscure old movies and they've always shown up immediately.
I don't know about that. I sweated over nearly every project I turned in an I knew *exactly* how it worked. Sure, on the bigger assignments I may not be able to tell you every class I wrote but you better I believe I could tell you how it worked.
That was the nice thing about programming classes - as long as you did the assignments you almost never had to study for the tests. After spending hours going over the code you didn't need to waste time memorizing it. You'd learned it just by doing it.
Please, no! Even worse than an "I've got my MBA" manager would be an "I've got my CS degree (but I don't really know *anything* about CS)" manager.
I was thinking the same thing. Seriously, they couldn't pick up a free web cam from Fry's? I see those things free with M.I.R. all the time. I've got one myself. Haven't used it much... but who cares - it was free!
As someone who has stepped into an extremely large project with no diagrams - I can say that I really, really wished there had been some. Instead, what I got were really awesome hand-drawn scribblings on my whiteboard and notepads by senior developers. Better than nothing, but not nearly as useful as a comprehensive diagram of the whole system.
I now make it a habit to write documentation and use diagrams to help others in my group as well as anyone coming after me. I think we all know we won't be working at our job forever and I'd prefer not to be the kind of guy that leaves a mess for the poor sod taking my position.
Only thing consuming my life is slashdot. I gotta get outta here... *drops keyboard*.
Personally, I just refer to this diagram. It's the 42 of diagrams. You don't need any others.
no, I acknowledged that they were nVidia's drivers and that it was nVidia's fault. My point was that nVidia is single handedly ruining the user experience for everyone with their cards (which, considering the way they're slapping ATI around with performance, I'd say is quite a few people). It's in Microsoft's interest to give them whatever assistance they need to make their drivers work correctly with Vista. I didn't say, "Microsoft sucks because nVidia sucks." I said, "Microsoft needs to hold nVidia's hand because they obviously can't do it by themselves."
> What incentive would anyone have now to provide "mature" drivers for Vista?
Because they want thier products to get shipped by OEMs and bought by users; if they don't improve thier drivers performance they lose on benchmarks, if they don't improve driver quality OEMs get upset.
The stability issue is what's frustrating. I've got a pair of nVidia 8800 GTS's and Vista Ultimate and all of my crashes are video card driver related. We've all seen the numbers for the % of crashes that were nVidia's fault when Vista was first released. I don't know how much hand-holding MSFT does on that sort of thing, but I think they should have done more. I think they underestimated how much poor drivers could ruin the user experience.Yes! Awesome Nazi action - go! Can't decide whether the best part of your admonition is the "omg" or the "!!!!!!!".
See signature before getting all offended.
I've always wanted to say this - "Fo'Shizzle".
Hey! You watch out! In Soviet Russia, Roll Ricks you! err... crap.
Right... in other words - some exec pulled some BS number out of his backside and now Google is getting sued based on that number. Come on. I guess it was only a matter of time before we saw a lawsuit based on someone else's made up numbers rather than the plaintiff's.
Indeed. That's why I haven't installed it yet. FF2 may be a memory hog but it's reliable. Also, I'll wait a while for all my my favorite plug-ins to get updated.
So does everyone else.
Hmm. I'm posting to remove my mod. I modded it "overrated". I was hoping to go for the opposite... -5 funny. Instead it turned into -1 flamebait because of the other moderation it already had. So sad!
I love how much abuse FEMA gets. Everyone always leaves out the awesomely retarded governor of that state. The few things she did do... were interesting.
You forgot about the part where everyone's page has got black text over a black and white background so you can only read every other word... as if anything on there were worth reading anyway. :P
This article talks a bit about what a problem it is. I don't see the specific case in it that I was looking for though - I know there was a forensic "expert" at hair and fingerprint analysis that convicted hundreds and hundreds of people and the state refused to systematically reexamine or review any of his cases.
Same could be said of music, art, etc... doesn't make it any less interesting or important to people. Curiosity, tinkering, and "because I can" have lead to all sorts of amazing things. Just because you don't understand the motivation doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to someone in some way.
I think he was referring to drum machine type music. Stuff like FL Studio where you're tracking the song out and the entire thing is all perfectly timed using identical sounds. In other words - it's created by a person but essentially being played with machine-like precision.
In my opinion Gates' business savvy more than anything else is what's made Microsoft, Microsoft. Yeah... he's a visionary but we all know their track record regarding swiped technology from other companies. Their massive pile of cash has allowed them to branch out into new areas and survive where other companies would have simply failed. I'm not saying everything they made was a winner - just that when they spent half a billion dollars on a pile of junk (yes, that's an arbitrary number. no, I don't know how much it cost to develop the Zune) - they could weather that storm without collapsing.