Hm, tastes pretty nasty... But anything in the name of science!
Ya know, its not that bad after all! Its almost like... wow... wow... look at those colors! Blues, greens, reds... waving around, like reeds on a field of social consciousness... waving... grabbing... make it stop! The COLORS... THE COLORS ARE ATTACKING! EATING!! FLESH EATING COLORS!! ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
Hey hey hey!! Watch where you're throwing that troll, dude! CS at Harvard is quite strong, our AC posting notwithstanding... We're not all jerks, ya know...
Well, I teach at Harvard also... And I'm glad I haven't run into you! Seriously, such arrogance has no place in a teaching situation.
1. Extra bloat my eye! What you're saying here is that you're a lazy bum and can't read through extra class files. If you want to do something constructive then how about instructing on how to lay out a project intelligantly?
2. Too much documentation? Again you're just a lazy TA and have no place grading. Regardless of the merits of HTML as a documentation medium, documentation is usually much more useful in grading than the actual code: it shows the thought process behind the code. Sure, I'm interested in that the code works as advertised, but I'm also interested in how you got there. It makes my job much easier to keep my students from falling into common pitfalls.
3. I do agree here, but not as far as the basic premise that unit testing is bad. Bad tests are useless, while a good test can be rather helpful, especially in a regression situation. Teach your students how to write good test and their code will be better. Punish them for writing bad tests and they'll never test.
Obviously you're not too proud of your convictions, or you wouldn't be an AC. I feel sorry for any professors you work with. I know mine are happy to work with me...
The main reason I can see for not outsourcing (or even for having international development - it's been a problem even internally at some companies I've worked for) is that you disconnect the workers at some level from the management, and this allows for the management to become disconnected and have no clue what's going on, and it allows the workers to slack or do things that aren't required.
Generally, in companies I've worked for or with (as a consultant), where the companies are NOT engineering companies (i.e. banks, supermarkets, etc.), management is completely disconnected from technology workers. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In an engineering company, the management at some level must be focused on the technology. Tech is what drives the company, and if often the companies product. If you outsource the technology work, you're outsourcing your product, and becoming a vendor rather than a manufacturer. When you become a vendor, you invariably lose some control. That loss of control might come in the form of timelines, decision process, design process, or even over the product itself.
At non-tech companies, the management is focused on "solutions" and business process. Technology becomes the tools used to achieve those goals, but beyond that mangement would rather not see the inner workings/workers. As usual, the vendor or manufacturer that provides the best combo of solution, price, and availability will win the job.
PRICE then becomes the major impetous for technology companies to outsource. Control becomes the major counterbalance against it. Non technology companies don't have that counterbalance, which is why outsourcing is actractive. If any vendor can do the job, the one with the best offer will win.
The town of Arlington MA has been online for many years now in the form of a community mailing list and adjuct web sites. The mailing list, of which I have been a member since 1998, serves several purposes: community Q&A, a notice board, and a place to vent on general topics of relevance. The forum is pretty self-regulating in the old usenet tradition, but there is a moderator to handle housekeeping and extreme problems.
Laws that restrict the people from doing something that they want to do and that they perceive as being "victimless" can never hold. Prohibition was one such law. Alcohol was illegal, so only criminals had it. Today's drug laws are similar. Those that want it can get it and a law will never have an impact on that as long as the demand is present.
Digital anti-piracy laws are not much different except that they are designed to protect the monied businesses (artists themselves rarely) rather than protect people from themselves. (arguably) Todays computers are like having a wisky still in every house. The government makes corn illegal, people will use potatoes. The government makes the sale of stills illegal, people will make their own or convert bathtubs. Eventually things will hit some kind of balance. One additional wrinkle is money. (isn't it always?) Will the gov't break peoples doors in and smash their computer equiptment for ripping CD's? Let's hope we never get to that.
I know around these parts (Eastern MA), I just can't get rid of the stuff. It piles up in closets, clutters up counters, sits in heaps in the corners. Old monitors my eyes can no longer tolerate, strange boards with bus interfaces I can no longer use, old hardrives too small to bother with. Its illegal to put in the trash, and even the "hasardous waste" pickup wont take monitors anymore. As more and more "average" people upgrade old computers, the problem will only get worse. Already I see "dumping" of old eletronics at the goodwill drop sites in the middle of the nights. I don't know what they do with the stuff, since it probably can't easily be sold or scrapped. Electronic waste will be a serious problem in the near future, and not just for our poorer friends in China.
I mean, if it works on the program, why not snip a few frames from the ads too? Maybe you could squeeze in a 15 sec slot in there somewhere? If you really want to get nasty, you can place continous ads in place of the network logos that have become so annoying. Just fade them in and out... (Ooops, shouldn't even joke about that!)
IMHO, XP will not show well in the average IT shop. A major shortfall that I've seen in XP is that it requires that 'all be equal' in skill and understanding. A constant refactoring of existing code requires that all participants be on the same foot and have access to all the same facts. XP tries to address this by doubling up and shoulder work. The simple fact is people are not created interchangably. Heck, even entire shops are not interchangeable.
I'll go out on a limb and say XP can only succeed under the following conditions:
1. Tightly Focused team, with no distractions from other priorities. (I typically work on 2-3 projects at a time, each at various states. My scheduling precludes any 'shared programming' time.)
2. High average team skill level. One of the touted advantages of XP is that its supposed to raise the average skill level of the team. I'll argue the other way: The lowest skilled team member will drag the team and the project down.
3. Well targeted goals. I think this should be a prereq for all projects, but then again I'd like space travel to start for civilians too...
XP is an interesting idea, but lets just focus on the core skills (not just programming, but project too), and not snowboard our way into the trees before we can stand upright.
Take this as the urban legend it probably is, but a FOAF (see http://www.snopes.com) once told me that weighting them down doesn't do much more than having the postal system discard them. I doubt that that brick you tied to the postage paid envelope will go any further than the local office trash. I'm not even sure that the postage is ties to weight on these things -- Don't they get some kind of bulk/pre-sort discount? In which case, you putting anything really heavy in it will make it "out of spec", and adding something not-so-heavy won't cost 'em more than an empty.
Is higher resolutions on monitors. I can anti-alias the text into a blur, but (for my eyes anyway) I'd rather see SHARPER text with better contrast. Most monitors are in the range.22 -.25 these days, and I can definatly see a difference between the two. If I undersand it right, anti-aliasing improves the apparent resolution (translation to "readability") of a text glyph. I'd like to see the actual resolution improved. Don't get me wrong, AA is nice and good (and I use it), but lets get those 10K x 10K monitors out the door!
I know there's been quite a stir about Mr. Greenspun's perception of workers hours, so I won't harp on it. Surfice it to say: Would you want to work for such a tyrant?? When confronted with an egotistcal slave driver who demands my LIFE in return for a paycheck, I vote with my feet. Oh, and I fit his description of "The Best" too, so either his "reality checks" are overdrawn at the bank, or too many years at MIT should be "Considered Harmful."
I've worked for a large non-profit health care organization. All of the IT staff are required to carry pagers, and a large precentage of them are "on-call". For this they get no extra compensation. It's considered "factored into your total package." Of course this is complete BS since the "total package" they present is typcially 10-15% lower than a similar private sector company would offer.
The attrition rate for senior staff is very high there, but not necessarily directly related to on-call. (More to do with lack of leadership and some serious cases on craniumrecontonites.) Consequently the availablility of experienced staff for the on-call rotations is low, with some senior people picking up a disproportionate share of the load. This created more stress, which creates a vicious cycle of dicontentment.
On top of all this is a help desk that is only staffed 9-5 (cost reduction) with those duties shifting to development staff off-hours. And on top of THAT add the fact the management consideres themselves exempt from on-call duty despite reserving the right for all decision making to themselves.
It's a wonder there isn't a stampede for the doors...
Chris
Re:This is nice - but what about other DRM systems
on
SDMI Cracked Too Soon
·
· Score: 1
Nobody has? I've seen some Real Audio recorders around. But the real issue is that the quality of those formats is low, so it's not usually worth saving anything! My opinon, of course.
The real solution? Increase pay rates and put your brightest technical people at the same decision making level as their managers. When top performing IT architects/designers/coders (not managers!) receive pay rates on the same scale as their management counterparts (because they *produce* results), you'll see the best/brightest flock to the field.
We do this, and it seems to work. Mostly. Where we have problems is that only a few of the manager types "believe" that the architect types are actually at their level and are "partners" and not cattle to be driven.
When you have clued in people, it works. When you don't, then you have nothing but strife as the technical people try to assert themselves over FUD.
We're forgetting another major reason that SA is being turned off! And that is: Our own troops are using NON-MILITARY GPS recievers! Yup! Now, wouldn't that be really great when platoon A opens fire on the wrong hill 50' from where they should have... I don't know what official roles these have, but plenty of our own troops use non-military GPS units during training and other maneuvers.
Has there been a case yet where a law enforcement agency was unable to optain evedence or other material relating to an investigation but were thwarted by encrytion or other cyber (or cypher!) means? If you read alot (espeically/.) you hear a lot about this topic, but I'm unaware of any specific cases that make this a high priority for law enforcement. If I were a cyber-criminal, I'd probably just use the old-fashioned method: don't keep anything around that would incriminate you; don't use anything that could be tapped: email, phones, etc.
Over the last few years, 2D performance has hit a plateau where it's very hard for a graphics card manufacturer to justify increasing the perfomance any further. (how much faster than 1 refresh cycle to redraw the entire screen do we need?) If newer, much higher resoution display devices become more prevalant, there is going to be suddenly a need for rather high performance 2D cards, if only because of the sheer ammount of data that would now be required to be moved, in for example a bitblt operation. I don't know about others, but I typically run 24bpp at 1600x1200 now on a 24" monitor, and sometimes I can see the screen updated. (only sometimes...)
Why is it that poor Leonardo has to put up with so many products named after him? Every marketing department for a computer product has at one time or another hit upon this "great new" idea for a name. Exactly what does DaVinci have to do with a Linux hand-held? You can bet that it's graphics capabilities aren't going to up to the old masters...
Actually this WOULD be funny if it wasn't quite so close to the truth. (I didn't read the article, so slap me if I'm making obvious statements here...) What is it that makes geekdom and other aspects of "normal" life incompatible? I only suffer partly from the geek syndrome, but I can speculate that several things cause the divide: 1) Knowledge gap. Lets face it, most technical and academic fields have this problem. The "playing field" is NOT level, and many people in these fields do not mix with other groups. 2) Gender gap. Again, in the computer field, it's predominatly a male game. I'm happy that lately I've had the pleasure to work with many female professionals in the field, but that hasn't been always the case. I think this is changing for the better lately. 3) Lifestyle. Lets face it, not all geeks are the best companions. Long hours, demanding problems, lack of attention to "real world" type stuff. I'll also argue here that geeks aren't any better or worse than any other "traditional" geek-types: Professors, Lawyers, etc. 4) "star appeal" - Most of the "easy" woman go for the jocks because of pure physical attraction. Geeks usually aren't the athletic type, and when they are, it's usually not traditional sports. But when A geek gets a girl, I'll argue that it's better than a good lay, becuase the attraction is usually on deeper levels than just physical.
Slashdot Mirror
Licking it? Hmmm, lemme try that...
Hm, tastes pretty nasty... But anything in the name of science!
Ya know, its not that bad after all! Its almost like... wow... wow... look at those colors! Blues, greens, reds... waving around, like reeds on a field of social consciousness... waving... grabbing... make it stop! The COLORS... THE COLORS ARE ATTACKING! EATING!! FLESH EATING COLORS!! ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
Hey hey hey!! Watch where you're throwing that troll, dude! CS at Harvard is quite strong, our AC posting notwithstanding... We're not all jerks, ya know...
RM
Well, I teach at Harvard also... And I'm glad I haven't run into you! Seriously, such arrogance has no place in a teaching situation.
1. Extra bloat my eye! What you're saying here is that you're a lazy bum and can't read through extra class files. If you want to do something constructive then how about instructing on how to lay out a project intelligantly?
2. Too much documentation? Again you're just a lazy TA and have no place grading. Regardless of the merits of HTML as a documentation medium, documentation is usually much more useful in grading than the actual code: it shows the thought process behind the code. Sure, I'm interested in that the code works as advertised, but I'm also interested in how you got there. It makes my job much easier to keep my students from falling into common pitfalls.
3. I do agree here, but not as far as the basic premise that unit testing is bad. Bad tests are useless, while a good test can be rather helpful, especially in a regression situation. Teach your students how to write good test and their code will be better. Punish them for writing bad tests and they'll never test.
Obviously you're not too proud of your convictions, or you wouldn't be an AC. I feel sorry for any professors you work with. I know mine are happy to work with me...
RM
Yeah, well, atleast you didn't have to run Windows Me.
No, we "ran" MS BOB!! So there!
In an engineering company, the management at some level must be focused on the technology. Tech is what drives the company, and if often the companies product. If you outsource the technology work, you're outsourcing your product, and becoming a vendor rather than a manufacturer. When you become a vendor, you invariably lose some control. That loss of control might come in the form of timelines, decision process, design process, or even over the product itself.
At non-tech companies, the management is focused on "solutions" and business process. Technology becomes the tools used to achieve those goals, but beyond that mangement would rather not see the inner workings/workers. As usual, the vendor or manufacturer that provides the best combo of solution, price, and availability will win the job.
PRICE then becomes the major impetous for technology companies to outsource. Control becomes the major counterbalance against it. Non technology companies don't have that counterbalance, which is why outsourcing is actractive. If any vendor can do the job, the one with the best offer will win.
RM
Is there a place on the web to get old (197?-198?) BYTE or DECProfessional? I loved those old mags, and still read the ones I have.
The town of Arlington MA has been online for many years now in the form of a community mailing list and adjuct web sites. The mailing list, of which I have been a member since 1998, serves several purposes: community Q&A, a notice board, and a place to vent on general topics of relevance. The forum is pretty self-regulating in the old usenet tradition, but there is a moderator to handle housekeeping and extreme problems.
Laws that restrict the people from doing something that they want to do and that they perceive as being "victimless" can never hold. Prohibition was one such law. Alcohol was illegal, so only criminals had it. Today's drug laws are similar. Those that want it can get it and a law will never have an impact on that as long as the demand is present.
Digital anti-piracy laws are not much different except that they are designed to protect the monied businesses (artists themselves rarely) rather than protect people from themselves. (arguably) Todays computers are like having a wisky still in every house. The government makes corn illegal, people will use potatoes. The government makes the sale of stills illegal, people will make their own or convert bathtubs. Eventually things will hit some kind of balance. One additional wrinkle is money. (isn't it always?) Will the gov't break peoples doors in and smash their computer equiptment for ripping CD's? Let's hope we never get to that.
RM
I know around these parts (Eastern MA), I just can't get rid of the stuff. It piles up in closets, clutters up counters, sits in heaps in the corners. Old monitors my eyes can no longer tolerate, strange boards with bus interfaces I can no longer use, old hardrives too small to bother with. Its illegal to put in the trash, and even the "hasardous waste" pickup wont take monitors anymore. As more and more "average" people upgrade old computers, the problem will only get worse. Already I see "dumping" of old eletronics at the goodwill drop sites in the middle of the nights. I don't know what they do with the stuff, since it probably can't easily be sold or scrapped. Electronic waste will be a serious problem in the near future, and not just for our poorer friends in China.
I mean, if it works on the program, why not snip a few frames from the ads too? Maybe you could squeeze in a 15 sec slot in there somewhere? If you really want to get nasty, you can place continous ads in place of the network logos that have become so annoying. Just fade them in and out... (Ooops, shouldn't even joke about that!)
I'll go out on a limb and say XP can only succeed under the following conditions:
1. Tightly Focused team, with no distractions from other priorities. (I typically work on 2-3 projects at a time, each at various states. My scheduling precludes any 'shared programming' time.)
2. High average team skill level. One of the touted advantages of XP is that its supposed to raise the average skill level of the team. I'll argue the other way: The lowest skilled team member will drag the team and the project down.
3. Well targeted goals. I think this should be a prereq for all projects, but then again I'd like space travel to start for civilians too...
XP is an interesting idea, but lets just focus on the core skills (not just programming, but project too), and not snowboard our way into the trees before we can stand upright.
Take this as the urban legend it probably is, but a FOAF (see http://www.snopes.com) once told me that weighting them down doesn't do much more than having the postal system discard them. I doubt that that brick you tied to the postage paid envelope will go any further than the local office trash. I'm not even sure that the postage is ties to weight on these things -- Don't they get some kind of bulk/pre-sort discount? In which case, you putting anything really heavy in it will make it "out of spec", and adding something not-so-heavy won't cost 'em more than an empty.
Is higher resolutions on monitors. I can anti-alias the text into a blur, but (for my eyes anyway) I'd rather see SHARPER text with better contrast. Most monitors are in the range .22 - .25 these days, and I can definatly see a difference between the two. If I undersand it right, anti-aliasing improves the apparent resolution (translation to "readability") of a text glyph. I'd like to see the actual resolution improved. Don't get me wrong, AA is nice and good (and I use it), but lets get those 10K x 10K monitors out the door!
I know there's been quite a stir about Mr. Greenspun's perception of workers hours, so I won't harp on it. Surfice it to say: Would you want to work for such a tyrant?? When confronted with an egotistcal slave driver who demands my LIFE in return for a paycheck, I vote with my feet. Oh, and I fit his description of "The Best" too, so either his "reality checks" are overdrawn at the bank, or too many years at MIT should be "Considered Harmful."
The attrition rate for senior staff is very high there, but not necessarily directly related to on-call. (More to do with lack of leadership and some serious cases on craniumrecontonites.) Consequently the availablility of experienced staff for the on-call rotations is low, with some senior people picking up a disproportionate share of the load. This created more stress, which creates a vicious cycle of dicontentment.
On top of all this is a help desk that is only staffed 9-5 (cost reduction) with those duties shifting to development staff off-hours. And on top of THAT add the fact the management consideres themselves exempt from on-call duty despite reserving the right for all decision making to themselves.
It's a wonder there isn't a stampede for the doors...
Chris
Chris
When you have clued in people, it works. When you don't, then you have nothing but strife as the technical people try to assert themselves over FUD.
Of course they'd kill it on my birthday. Something poetic and unfair about that.
I can't think of anything particular I'd actually use a VAX for these days, but I feel strangely compelled to keep it alive.
I've seen some emulators out there, mostly non-functional. Are there any that can actually boot VMS?
We're forgetting another major reason that SA is being turned off! And that is: Our own troops are using NON-MILITARY GPS recievers! Yup! Now, wouldn't that be really great when platoon A opens fire on the wrong hill 50' from where they should have... I don't know what official roles these have, but plenty of our own troops use non-military GPS units during training and other maneuvers.
Looks like it got Slashdotted -- I get a 'no permission' error on the page now... Sites never expect the Slashdot Effect!!
Has there been a case yet where a law enforcement agency was unable to optain evedence or other material relating to an investigation but were thwarted by encrytion or other cyber (or cypher!) means? If you read alot (espeically /.) you hear a lot about this topic, but I'm unaware of any specific cases that make this a high priority for law enforcement.
If I were a cyber-criminal, I'd probably just use the old-fashioned method: don't keep anything around that would incriminate you; don't use anything that could be tapped: email, phones, etc.
Ya know, the old Soviet methods!
Chris
Over the last few years, 2D performance has hit a plateau where it's very hard for a graphics card manufacturer to justify increasing the perfomance any further. (how much faster than 1 refresh cycle to redraw the entire screen do we need?) If newer, much higher resoution display devices become more prevalant, there is going to be suddenly a need for rather high performance 2D cards, if only because of the sheer ammount of data that would now be required to be moved, in for example a bitblt operation. I don't know about others, but I typically run 24bpp at 1600x1200 now on a 24" monitor, and sometimes I can see the screen updated. (only sometimes...)
Why is it that poor Leonardo has to put up with so many products named after him? Every marketing department for a computer product has at one time or another hit upon this "great new" idea for a name. Exactly what does DaVinci have to do with a Linux hand-held? You can bet that it's graphics capabilities aren't going to up to the old masters...
Actually this WOULD be funny if it wasn't quite so close to the truth. (I didn't read the article, so slap me if I'm making obvious statements here...) What is it that makes geekdom and other aspects of "normal" life incompatible? I only suffer partly from the geek syndrome, but I can speculate that several things cause the divide: 1) Knowledge gap. Lets face it, most technical and academic fields have this problem. The "playing field" is NOT level, and many people in these fields do not mix with other groups. 2) Gender gap. Again, in the computer field, it's predominatly a male game. I'm happy that lately I've had the pleasure to work with many female professionals in the field, but that hasn't been always the case. I think this is changing for the better lately. 3) Lifestyle. Lets face it, not all geeks are the best companions. Long hours, demanding problems, lack of attention to "real world" type stuff. I'll also argue here that geeks aren't any better or worse than any other "traditional" geek-types: Professors, Lawyers, etc. 4) "star appeal" - Most of the "easy" woman go for the jocks because of pure physical attraction. Geeks usually aren't the athletic type, and when they are, it's usually not traditional sports. But when A geek gets a girl, I'll argue that it's better than a good lay, becuase the attraction is usually on deeper levels than just physical.