Anyway, what happens is many young workers try to keep hopping upwards quick since they have seen from what happens to the old guys that "loyalty" (and too often hardwork and competence) doesn't get rewarded. Whereas if you hop, you can usually get salary increases much faster. The company hiring you may actually pay you more than the existing staff even if you aren't better than the existing staff because they're short-handed and can't find other replacements - supply and demand and all that.
If bosses want a "show me the money", "no mercy" workplace culture, they shouldn't be surprised when they get it.
you've seen the downsizing in front of your own eyes. you can't deny that, can you? are *all* those guys really poor performers? do you believe that?
I often see companies announce a global X% trimming in headcount. And they don't appear to care who gets the chop. This happens in all sectors, and seems ridiculous to me.
For example: someone I know works in a multinational corp, when Global HQ said "cut X%" his department was affected, even though his department was profitable, and surpassed targets. And so it was either him or his colleague that was to go. In the end his colleague got the chop. But what's most ridiculous is there was still a lot of work for the profitable department! So he ended up overworked. I told him he should have volunteered to take the severance package (since he was single, his colleague was married with commitments, there was more than enough work, he needed a break, he was supposedly better at the job, so I figured maybe he would be asked to come back later;) ).
Analogy: to me this is like sacking one of two chefs in a very busy profitable restaurant, just because HQ isn't doing well. And the busy profitable restaurant suffers as a result, customers get poorer service. Isn't this a stupid thing to do? What motivation is there for people to do well then? You get sacked because HQ or someone else screws up. Not your team or even your branch.
I can understand sacking the chef if the chef sucks (he may not have been the best but he didn't suck), the restaurant is losing money (it wasn't), the business is going to nosedive (nobody there thought that was going to happen, and it didn't).
I can understand it if HQ says: trim X% of all the departments/branches that aren't profitable or didn't meet the targets or "service levels", those that are profitable can maintain headcount and those who are doing very well can increase headcount. This sort of beancounter logic I can understand. It motivates people to meet the requirements. Whereas if I were a manager in a "trim X%, no matter what" organization, I'd be tempted to hire cheap extras just to use as "cannonfodder" whenever cuts are required.
With people like that at the upper layers, good luck getting much innovation and progress out of NASA.
People shouldn't mourn too much if NASA goes away, it's already mostly gone if you compare it to the Apollo days. Too much of the stuff they're doing and planning are just re-runs with better technology. Too many of the high levels are merely Priests maintaining Traditions rather than Prophets bringing the Future.
Is that's why the "red delicious" apples taste mediocre? I've always wondered why they were called "red delicious". They are red, but they sure aren't delicious.
As for tomatoes, so far I find I'm more likely to get good tasting cherry tomatoes than normal sized tomatoes.
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
In my opinion, NASA shouldn't have this stupid fixation on pilots. They should go check out nuclear submariners, those bunch are used to spending _months_ (not just hours) in a confined tube, where they'd die if something goes wrong. I'm sure at least some of them would be physically fit enough. I'm sure you'd be more likely to find ones that are mentally very stable from those who have had many "tours of duty". NASA have been wasting money doing those "long term in space" simulations to see if people can cope mentally. Maybe fewer air force pilots can cope, but submariners = been there done that.
Secondly NASA seems to have another stupid fixation on going to Mars. They should first build a space station with radiation shielding, and artificial gravity - whether with tethers and counterweights or something else. Going to Mars without that is like a baby trying to jump before being able to stand or walk.
Lastly, if they still have problems stuff right, here's another way to improve things with space travel:
Start a reality TV show called "Vote Them Off The Planet". Then you have the candidates (George Bush, Obama, Sarah Palin, Random Celebrity, Random Politician ) etc.
Then you have the categories: One Way, Return.
Those that win the One Way, can choose to: a) Not go. b) Go one way (not come back) c) Pay for the return trip, and go.
Those that win the Return, can choose to: a) Not go. b) Go one way. c) Go "Return".
but I think the whole server thing is working out.
What you're talking about is irrelevant and off-topic. Most linux servers do not have GUIs installed and even when they do, most linux server apps do NOT use the GUI stuff. So no problems with GNOME, KDE, X, or lack of backward compatibility with GUI libraries/APIs.
Sure, but it reduces the amount of selection by genetic fitness:).
Say you have a group of animals that put themselves in risky situations where they have no control vs a group of animals that put themselves in slightly riskier situations where they have control. After a number of generations, I suggest that the latter group is more likely to have fitter individuals, even if more of the individuals in the latter group died. And the latter group as a whole may have a higher chance of survival in new circumstances.
Maybe that's why many people are more scared in scenarios when they don't have control even though the danger is less than if they did. They generally only accept the "no control risk" if the risk is a lot lower. Because the animals that weren't as scared of such situations died out long ago...
It's often due to buggy plugins. The problem with Firefox's single process model is if a plugin or Firefox leaks, you often can't free up memory by closing windows or tabs. You have to close everything.
In contrast even though Google Chrome might actually leak more, you can usually just close the offending tab, and the memory is freed up. You can even reopen the tab without having to log in again. So if a page gradually leaks memory, you can close it once it gets to big and reopen it again. All without losing sessions in your other tabs/windows.
One might say "Don't use those plugins then". But without those plugins there might be no other reason to use Firefox instead of some other browser.
It may not be stale if you time it right;), and apparently some restaurant people are kind enough to pass the left-overs to you directly (and not via the dump).
There's also begging. But I think many beggars ruin things for those who are really down on their luck. Some are scammers - saying they need big bucks for a train or to take a taxi to a plane, etc.
Anyway back when I was a student I had a young "street lady/girl" ask me for money for food, I offered to buy her a kebab sandwich (which was what I was going to buy and eat near by), and she said she didn't like kebab sandwiches and wanted fried chicken. So I bought her fried chicken instead... So the saying beggars can't be choosers isn't true:).
I had no idea what you were searching for with that
I was searching for the specific article I remembered reading that contained all those keywords.
The article dealt with China, Japanese supermarkets, vegetables and photos of japanese farmers. The article contains all my keywords. Your query does not mention China, supermarkets. My query does.
I'm a nerd. I don't need a search engine or person to "second guess" what I really want. I give the keywords, give me non-link-spam/non-spam articles with all those keywords. If the results are not what I want, I can adjust it for myself. I don't want to try to read Google's "mind" that's trying to read my mind. I don't want to have to put double quotes around every frigging keyword.
With this sort of results, it's no surprise it's getting harder to search for work related stuff. When I search for something, there's often a chance that the answer does NOT exist on any webpage out there. When that happens, I'm fine if there are zero pages returned. Because I can stop searching and try to figure it out the answers myself. What is useless is 300000 pages that don't contain all my search terms. Then I have to figure out whether the answer isn't published or it's because the search engines all suck and I need to try different sorts of queries...
honestly i find it a bit weird that people here really have no idea about street punk culture.
1) Living "on the street" is not the same around the world. 2) Just because I'm curious about how Moxie did it specifically, doesn't mean I have no idea about the "general solutions".
There might be interesting specific cases. e.g. Steve Jobs when he was poorer got a weekly free meal courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Maybe Moxie might know of even better options?
Well I'd prefer to avoid crime. I know some people who had to literally eat garbage (rotting food) because they were so hungry, and they never ever want to have to do that again (AFAIK they didn't steal or commit crimes).
The trouble with tape and tape drives is 1) if the technology improves, you have to get another expensive tape drive to take advantage of it. With HDDs, the media comes with the drive attached;). 2) If you keep using the same tapes regularly they don't last that long (and often take the drive down with it, and the faulty drive may take another tape with it too, if you don't realize it). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability I believe the tape drive head actually touches the tape, so go figure.
If you're going to have dozens or more of tapes/drives, then tape is better. But for most individuals I think HDDs are better.
In North America we can't even track which country the meat comes from, let alone which animal.
I heard in Japan it's not uncommon for a farmer's produce to be labelled/displayed with his photo in a supermarket (e.g. vegetables, and stuff like ginger). Read it somewhere[1] and recently asked a friend who is working there.
Anyone in/from Japan would like to confirm/deny or provide more details?
I might have to switch to trying Bing first, if Google continues being so crap. Yes I know you're supposed to put double quotes around every mandatory keyword in Google nowadays. Fuck that.
Drives aren't that expensive (even after the flood). If your data is that important to you, buy more drives.
Whatever the manufacturer, the drive return rates are about 2-5%. It makes no sense to bet that the drive model you happens to be the 2% return rate, and even so that's a 1 in 50 chance you're taking. Unless a particular model/batch is so crap, it doesn't seem worth it to take extra effort just to search around to see which is more reliable.
Whereas if you have independent copies of your data on two different drives, the odds of both drives failing would be 5% * 5% = 0.25%. Unless of course you keep both drives in the exact same place and they get destroyed by the same disaster:). If you're paranoid pick different manufacturers for each drive, and try to keep them in different places...
I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work
So my question to Moxie is "How do/did you get food and shelter when you don't/didn't have money?".
Slashdot Mirror
Works well till the Y10K problem ;).
It'll be interesting if you get called out of retirement to fix that...
Anyway, what happens is many young workers try to keep hopping upwards quick since they have seen from what happens to the old guys that "loyalty" (and too often hardwork and competence) doesn't get rewarded. Whereas if you hop, you can usually get salary increases much faster. The company hiring you may actually pay you more than the existing staff even if you aren't better than the existing staff because they're short-handed and can't find other replacements - supply and demand and all that.
If bosses want a "show me the money", "no mercy" workplace culture, they shouldn't be surprised when they get it.
you've seen the downsizing in front of your own eyes. you can't deny that, can you? are *all* those guys really poor performers? do you believe that?
I often see companies announce a global X% trimming in headcount. And they don't appear to care who gets the chop. This happens in all sectors, and seems ridiculous to me.
For example: someone I know works in a multinational corp, when Global HQ said "cut X%" his department was affected, even though his department was profitable, and surpassed targets. And so it was either him or his colleague that was to go. In the end his colleague got the chop. But what's most ridiculous is there was still a lot of work for the profitable department! So he ended up overworked. I told him he should have volunteered to take the severance package (since he was single, his colleague was married with commitments, there was more than enough work, he needed a break, he was supposedly better at the job, so I figured maybe he would be asked to come back later ;) ).
Analogy: to me this is like sacking one of two chefs in a very busy profitable restaurant, just because HQ isn't doing well. And the busy profitable restaurant suffers as a result, customers get poorer service. Isn't this a stupid thing to do? What motivation is there for people to do well then? You get sacked because HQ or someone else screws up. Not your team or even your branch.
I can understand sacking the chef if the chef sucks (he may not have been the best but he didn't suck), the restaurant is losing money (it wasn't), the business is going to nosedive (nobody there thought that was going to happen, and it didn't).
I can understand it if HQ says: trim X% of all the departments/branches that aren't profitable or didn't meet the targets or "service levels", those that are profitable can maintain headcount and those who are doing very well can increase headcount. This sort of beancounter logic I can understand. It motivates people to meet the requirements. Whereas if I were a manager in a "trim X%, no matter what" organization, I'd be tempted to hire cheap extras just to use as "cannonfodder" whenever cuts are required.
With people like that at the upper layers, good luck getting much innovation and progress out of NASA.
People shouldn't mourn too much if NASA goes away, it's already mostly gone if you compare it to the Apollo days. Too much of the stuff they're doing and planning are just re-runs with better technology. Too many of the high levels are merely Priests maintaining Traditions rather than Prophets bringing the Future.
Here's one writer's take on it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080402194_pf.html
Is that's why the "red delicious" apples taste mediocre? I've always wondered why they were called "red delicious". They are red, but they sure aren't delicious.
As for tomatoes, so far I find I'm more likely to get good tasting cherry tomatoes than normal sized tomatoes.
A) are you a military pilot with thousands of hours in high-performance jets? If not, forget anything resembling a "pilot" seat.
In my opinion, NASA shouldn't have this stupid fixation on pilots. They should go check out nuclear submariners, those bunch are used to spending _months_ (not just hours) in a confined tube, where they'd die if something goes wrong. I'm sure at least some of them would be physically fit enough. I'm sure you'd be more likely to find ones that are mentally very stable from those who have had many "tours of duty". NASA have been wasting money doing those "long term in space" simulations to see if people can cope mentally. Maybe fewer air force pilots can cope, but submariners = been there done that.
Secondly NASA seems to have another stupid fixation on going to Mars. They should first build a space station with radiation shielding, and artificial gravity - whether with tethers and counterweights or something else. Going to Mars without that is like a baby trying to jump before being able to stand or walk.
Lastly, if they still have problems stuff right, here's another way to improve things with space travel:
Start a reality TV show called "Vote Them Off The Planet". Then you have the candidates (George Bush, Obama, Sarah Palin, Random Celebrity, Random Politician ) etc.
Then you have the categories: One Way, Return.
Those that win the One Way, can choose to:
a) Not go.
b) Go one way (not come back)
c) Pay for the return trip, and go.
Those that win the Return, can choose to:
a) Not go.
b) Go one way.
c) Go "Return".
So is that the chibi form of the Higgs boson?
Uh PWM must have been used for controlling effective magnitude of "whatever" for decades.
Can we mention the white elephants in the room?
but I think the whole server thing is working out.
What you're talking about is irrelevant and off-topic. Most linux servers do not have GUIs installed and even when they do, most linux server apps do NOT use the GUI stuff. So no problems with GNOME, KDE, X, or lack of backward compatibility with GUI libraries/APIs.
Search is not a monopoly yet at least on desktop computers- go ask altavista, infoseek, hotbot.
I've actually been using Bing for some searches because I'm too lazy to put double quotes around everything, or:
Click More search tools on the left side of the search results page.
Click Verbatim.
Nobody is stopping you from making a better search engine and/or interface than Google.
Start small, try it on Amazon EC2, if it's successful try to get big discounts/incentives/$$$$ from Microsoft to migrate it to Windows Azure ;).
Sure, but it reduces the amount of selection by genetic fitness :).
Say you have a group of animals that put themselves in risky situations where they have no control vs a group of animals that put themselves in slightly riskier situations where they have control. After a number of generations, I suggest that the latter group is more likely to have fitter individuals, even if more of the individuals in the latter group died. And the latter group as a whole may have a higher chance of survival in new circumstances.
Maybe that's why many people are more scared in scenarios when they don't have control even though the danger is less than if they did. They generally only accept the "no control risk" if the risk is a lot lower. Because the animals that weren't as scared of such situations died out long ago...
In Soviet Russia, citizens spy on police!
It's often due to buggy plugins. The problem with Firefox's single process model is if a plugin or Firefox leaks, you often can't free up memory by closing windows or tabs. You have to close everything.
In contrast even though Google Chrome might actually leak more, you can usually just close the offending tab, and the memory is freed up. You can even reopen the tab without having to log in again. So if a page gradually leaks memory, you can close it once it gets to big and reopen it again. All without losing sessions in your other tabs/windows.
One might say "Don't use those plugins then". But without those plugins there might be no other reason to use Firefox instead of some other browser.
It may not be stale if you time it right ;), and apparently some restaurant people are kind enough to pass the left-overs to you directly (and not via the dump).
:).
There's also begging. But I think many beggars ruin things for those who are really down on their luck. Some are scammers - saying they need big bucks for a train or to take a taxi to a plane, etc.
Anyway back when I was a student I had a young "street lady/girl" ask me for money for food, I offered to buy her a kebab sandwich (which was what I was going to buy and eat near by), and she said she didn't like kebab sandwiches and wanted fried chicken. So I bought her fried chicken instead... So the saying beggars can't be choosers isn't true
Don't see that option. Do I have to sign in?
I had no idea what you were searching for with that
I was searching for the specific article I remembered reading that contained all those keywords.
The article dealt with China, Japanese supermarkets, vegetables and photos of japanese farmers. The article contains all my keywords. Your query does not mention China, supermarkets. My query does.
I'm a nerd. I don't need a search engine or person to "second guess" what I really want. I give the keywords, give me non-link-spam/non-spam articles with all those keywords. If the results are not what I want, I can adjust it for myself. I don't want to try to read Google's "mind" that's trying to read my mind. I don't want to have to put double quotes around every frigging keyword.
With this sort of results, it's no surprise it's getting harder to search for work related stuff. When I search for something, there's often a chance that the answer does NOT exist on any webpage out there. When that happens, I'm fine if there are zero pages returned. Because I can stop searching and try to figure it out the answers myself. What is useless is 300000 pages that don't contain all my search terms. Then I have to figure out whether the answer isn't published or it's because the search engines all suck and I need to try different sorts of queries...
honestly i find it a bit weird that people here really have no idea about street punk culture.
1) Living "on the street" is not the same around the world.
2) Just because I'm curious about how Moxie did it specifically, doesn't mean I have no idea about the "general solutions".
There might be interesting specific cases. e.g. Steve Jobs when he was poorer got a weekly free meal courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Maybe Moxie might know of even better options?
I'm personally not even sure that we can say an amoeba or white blood cell isn't sentient, or is that stupid.
They might just lack the ability/opportunity to show how smart they are. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001269/
Unlike neutrophils, macrophages live quite long, so perhaps someone could test and compare their learning abilities :).
Well I'd prefer to avoid crime. I know some people who had to literally eat garbage (rotting food) because they were so hungry, and they never ever want to have to do that again (AFAIK they didn't steal or commit crimes).
I don't want to have to do that even once.
The trouble with tape and tape drives is ;).
1) if the technology improves, you have to get another expensive tape drive to take advantage of it. With HDDs, the media comes with the drive attached
2) If you keep using the same tapes regularly they don't last that long (and often take the drive down with it, and the faulty drive may take another tape with it too, if you don't realize it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability
I believe the tape drive head actually touches the tape, so go figure.
If you're going to have dozens or more of tapes/drives, then tape is better. But for most individuals I think HDDs are better.
In North America we can't even track which country the meat comes from, let alone which animal.
I heard in Japan it's not uncommon for a farmer's produce to be labelled/displayed with his photo in a supermarket (e.g. vegetables, and stuff like ginger). Read it somewhere[1] and recently asked a friend who is working there.
Anyone in/from Japan would like to confirm/deny or provide more details?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/worldbusiness/11safety.html
By the way, I had to find this using Bing. Google produced tons of unrelated crap for: japanese farmers photos vegetables china "quality control" supermarket.
I might have to switch to trying Bing first, if Google continues being so crap. Yes I know you're supposed to put double quotes around every mandatory keyword in Google nowadays. Fuck that.
Poverty provides an education of its own?
OK, so what did you do to get food and shelter?
I'm curious about what Moxie did too - since he said:
I've also spent a considerable amount of time being broke and living without money.
After all, why waste time making the same mistakes if you can learn from others? Then you can spend more time making new different mistakes :).
I know some places give out free food etc, but just curious on what he (and you) actually did.
Drives aren't that expensive (even after the flood). If your data is that important to you, buy more drives.
:). If you're paranoid pick different manufacturers for each drive, and try to keep them in different places...
Whatever the manufacturer, the drive return rates are about 2-5%. It makes no sense to bet that the drive model you happens to be the 2% return rate, and even so that's a 1 in 50 chance you're taking. Unless a particular model/batch is so crap, it doesn't seem worth it to take extra effort just to search around to see which is more reliable.
Whereas if you have independent copies of your data on two different drives, the odds of both drives failing would be 5% * 5% = 0.25%. Unless of course you keep both drives in the exact same place and they get destroyed by the same disaster
I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work
So my question to Moxie is "How do/did you get food and shelter when you don't/didn't have money?".