No position is good to hang out in for hours. You really should take a few little breaks, stretch and get some blood flowing.
I've always wanted to try some sort of circle desk that you can strap you/laptop into.. work flat on your back, sitting up, roll forward facing down.. always seemed it would feel a lot better than sitting around stationary or just standing up.
I usually don't pay too close of attention to ATI vs Nvidia war, but I had built out a slick HTPC machine to run xbmc on Linux, and videos had all sorts of problems on the ATI card.. especially with decent quality videos. Hitching, crashing, general instability despite trying different drivers and config combinations.
Threw in a fanless nvidia, VDPAU works fine, totally different experience.
So, I'll stick with Nvidia on Linux for anything more serious than web browsing; their closed source binary driver is a little obnoxious, but at least it works.
Not that I really recommend it, but I occasionally use one of these:
Product Name: HP EliteBook 8560p
It has a normal sized numberpad. However it has ridiculously undersized arrow keys.. like 1/8th the size of a normal key.. very difficult to even use them.
Another annoying thing is they have the audio jacks on the right side near the front of the laptop, so if you're using an external mouse, headphone jack/cord bleeds into the area the mouse would be used.
It does have a fullsized keyboard, nice screen, plenty of power and I've not had any real problems with - but it's essentially a desktop, I never lug it around (bit of a weighty beasty).
A few startups ago, the marketing teams entire plan was "lean on your personal social networks". They'd have been better off standing outside handing out flyers.
If you like the app and think it's useful then it doesn't hurt to promote it a little. If it's just some crap, then don't bother - you'll just desensitize your friends and contacts.
Just saying "I'm working on app X, it's going pretty well!" is subtle and non-annoying, curious people will check it out.
Anyway, a company asking employees to lean heavily on friends/family for promotion is a sure-fire sign of a failed marketing vision in my book, a problem in the business side of the house.
There's been a whole lot of good research done on the mechanisms of addiction, how brain chemistry is changed.. a lot of data suggests (common sense) that if you change your environment, it's easier to break patterns. Charle Rose had a really good series on the brain where this was discussed..
It'd be really interesting if they used some modern techniques to figure out what was going on.. like monitoring differences in brain activity in the different regions..
A strong dose of LSD removes any underpinnings with reality. There's no way to prepare for it. For some people it's a good, useful thing which helps them gain a different perspective and form new thought patterns or approach problems in a different way. For others its a hellish experience that causes permanent damage to their psyche. Psychoactive drugs can trigger latent personality disorders. I know this from personal experience.
Think of LSD as a focuser; if you're prone to anxiety, you're likely to have an extremely hard time, especially if you're in an sterile lab environment (your ambient environment makes a huge difference to your experience, along with the people you are around).
Anyhow, I have a hard time trusting that study for much. I can see psychoactive drugs having lots of benefits, but a lot of risks too. It's hard to picture someone suffering from alcoholism (which encourages denialism, depression etc) really getting much positive benefit.
They're plenty happy to maintain an army of lawyers and sue everyone/anything they can on their way into oblivion. A crazed, rabid dog, biting everything it can on its way to being put down.
Not a dissimilar strategy to patent trolling; abuse the American legal system to make money.. the trick is, they still have enough power to actually buy laws, so they are quite dangerous.
At least game companies are marginally more intelligent; they realize for the most part that outright suing their customers would just backfire bigtime.
I'm not in any way an Apple fan, but having worked in digital music when they were coming on, I gotta say it's been entertaining watching ipod/itunes bend the industry over. Though in some ways Apple is no better.
Ah good point. Load times drive me nuts too. Seems like there's no reason for all the disc-seeking, especially when games install data onto hard drive.
Maybe motion control is just a preference, but I much prefer it for certain games. Take the EA boxing franchise; my thumb just about falls off after an hour or so of frantic controller-ing. Compare that with the move game Fight Night: Lights out - you actually move your arms, jab.. direction / precision matters, as does velocity. Way more realistic.
The problems are it's so klunky and imprecise tracking-wise 20-30% of your efforts are just wasted which leads to extreme frustration.
I can see it coming down to preference though, certainly sometimes I prefer to just chill out and not do a bunch of work to get through a game. It doesn't translate to stuff like Skyrim at all either.
1) Allow all discs to play on ps4 - at least ps2+ps3. People don't want to spend a ton of money on a new console & invalidate all their past purchases which are still quite playable, or jack around with changing out consoles all the time. It's a hassle to unplug/replug for most people.
2) Quit removing features because of your paranoia - the OtherOS debacle should have gotten some people fired. Either leave it in there or never put it in there.
3) Fix your fuggin security for reals. From what I've heard from my friends who work at Sony, they've just patched up a few weak spots that were vulnerable but their overall model is totally lacking. It's prevented me from re-upping subscription to a few games (like Vanguard) just because I don't want to trust them with their CC info.
More of a general sony point but still.
4) Allow for more mods / customization. I briefly used ps3 as HTPC but it's so limited in the formats it supports, ways of mounting to media etc it's just more of a hassle than its worth. I ended up going with xbmc on a PC.
5) Motion control is the future. Get better at it. The ps3 move is questionable; crappy titles, camera is a hassle in non-optimal light situations etc. For instance, Fight Night: Lights Out is a really good game, but it's totally ruined by subpar headtracking even in optimal light situations.
A few minor points;
- USB controllers should charge from pretty much any USB power source. My ps3 controllers are super picky for some reason.
- Use standardized friggin power button. It's incredibly ridiculous that you have to push the PS button on a controller to power the unit on, or push the button in the front. Used to drive me crazy when I drove it with harmony remote
I almost worked for a company that did kiosks. XP kiosks, delivering media. After asking a few basic questions I discerned;
1) They were all part of one AD domain 2) The systems auto-logged in via a service user that was a domain admin 3) The application had those creds in plaintext config files 4) That AD domain.. the company only had one.. shared with their office users / backoffice. 5) No one really thought it was a big deal to ship a product like that with physical units in the field.
I did not take the job.:-)
The VM thing is a reasonable idea, but there's still going to be communication to a centralized server with authorization requirements etc. That'll be the weak point.. or at least one of them. One of the keys is to look for 'unexpected' downtime.
If you have an android device, or even an important email / google voice account, getting banned would be a nightmare. So now you're looking at multiple accounts, which loses the whole 'integrated' advantage.
Google needs to take a serious look at their banning policies and how they have ripple effects. Being banned from their social media shouldn't affect any of your other accounts. Email abuses (like spamming) are a completely different transgression than not meeting google's (apparently puritan, also seemingly arbitrary) social media standards / rules.
I tried out several software suites for my HTPC and ultimately ended up with XBMC.
There's enough free content that if you're a casual TV watcher you can get away without it. There's a "free cable" plugin that pulls in a bunch of channels, along with hulu free (of course, who knows how long that will exist).
I use amazon prime to get all the "free" prime movies/shows and that is another ton of content.
Unfortunately blockbuster isn't working but I believe Netflix does on windows ( don't have that ). It's silverlight.
There are tons of handy plugins. Anything from adult plugins (pr0n) to academic earth.
I drive it all from my harmony remote, audio passthrough through video hdmi out to receiver.
Once I get mythtv going to record football I'm going to (finally) cancel comcast. I hope that one day HBO / Showtime will smarten up and offer modular monthly subscriptions, instead of requiring you use a federated login based on your cable/dish provider. Lame.
XBMC is flexible/hackable enough to make me happy since I can make most anything work, but presents media simply enough my computer illiterate girlfriend can drive it all. Win.
Why should I pay for a bunch of channels and service I don't want?
If they offered modular, on demand service I wouldn't have to monkey around with xbmc, encoding etc.
Services like on-demand streaming of movies/tv where you pay exactly what you want are the future. The cable company can't let go of their monolithic 'screw you cuz we can & always have' thinking. Eventually they will go the way of the labels as far as monopoly via audio CD's - technology will evolve past them (already is/has) and they'll just be left waving their wizened fists angrily, struggling for relevance and trying to screw people over with control of cable internet.
2) sfdisk partition data, then use xfsdump/xfsrestore to recreate the partition data on disk
Both of those have the advantage of being easily scriptable, and a disadvantage of being fairly dificult to deal with variable disk sizes without doing quite a bit more work.
+1 to spideroak. It's the best in breed, with actual clueful engineers who care about what they're doing & keep up with industry practices / laws that would impact them.
The modern executive animal possesses extraordinary foresight; written into their contracts are both buyout and early termination clauses.
They'll still get their golden parachutes, just not quite as much as if the stock valuation had happened.
They will use their parachute to gently land in the next company, with similar contracts, and use the "My company got sold to Microsoft, we were a success!" angle to get paid boatloads more money.
I remember specifically in 2000 at an IBM Developerworks conference, they were all hot for Teh Bluetooths, talking about how when you walk by a BT enabled vending machine it'd send a coupon to your phone.
I'm sure someone has been talking about this scenario for many more years than that. It's an advertisers wet dream.
Didn't want it then, don't want it now.. and unfortunately it's much more realistic now.
More spam to buzz my phone == fail, especially when it buzzes just because I'm walking by the shopping district to get to work. I'm sure you'll be able to disable it, for now - but even additional management of my mobile devices because of marketing drivel would piss me off.
Smart people get tired of underachievers and it's pretty easy to recognise.
I think most people want to try to do the right thing, follow best practices / stay professional. Often organisations make it easy to get disgruntled, when there's a perception that the brass don't know/care about what you perceive to be the "real" problems.
That aside, the most miserable places to work are usually where people are just phoning it in. You might have a little less up-front stress, but I'd argue the lack of any sort of job satisfaction or doing anything to take pride in would ultimately lead you to be less happy in life.
We all coast sometimes, or make compromises - but if you solely operate that way in your career you won't be getting too far. Especially in smaller tech communities where there is a small degree of separation.
Slashdot Mirror
No position is good to hang out in for hours. You really should take a few little breaks, stretch and get some blood flowing.
I've always wanted to try some sort of circle desk that you can strap you/laptop into.. work flat on your back, sitting up, roll forward facing down.. always seemed it would feel a lot better than sitting around stationary or just standing up.
Probably not a terrible idea - don't they tend to have lower power consumption / run cooler? I got this thing for my xbmc box;
http://www.quietpc.com/products/vga-cards/msi-n210-md512h
Fanless, which is nice for noise.
I usually don't pay too close of attention to ATI vs Nvidia war, but I had built out a slick HTPC machine to run xbmc on Linux, and videos had all sorts of problems on the ATI card.. especially with decent quality videos. Hitching, crashing, general instability despite trying different drivers and config combinations.
Threw in a fanless nvidia, VDPAU works fine, totally different experience.
So, I'll stick with Nvidia on Linux for anything more serious than web browsing; their closed source binary driver is a little obnoxious, but at least it works.
Not that I really recommend it, but I occasionally use one of these:
Product Name: HP EliteBook 8560p
It has a normal sized numberpad. However it has ridiculously undersized arrow keys.. like 1/8th the size of a normal key.. very difficult to even use them.
Another annoying thing is they have the audio jacks on the right side near the front of the laptop, so if you're using an external mouse, headphone jack/cord bleeds into the area the mouse would be used.
It does have a fullsized keyboard, nice screen, plenty of power and I've not had any real problems with - but it's essentially a desktop, I never lug it around (bit of a weighty beasty).
I dump java all the time. Try kill -3 `pidof java`
A few startups ago, the marketing teams entire plan was "lean on your personal social networks". They'd have been better off standing outside handing out flyers.
If you like the app and think it's useful then it doesn't hurt to promote it a little. If it's just some crap, then don't bother - you'll just desensitize your friends and contacts.
Just saying "I'm working on app X, it's going pretty well!" is subtle and non-annoying, curious people will check it out.
Anyway, a company asking employees to lean heavily on friends/family for promotion is a sure-fire sign of a failed marketing vision in my book, a problem in the business side of the house.
Y U NO GO FASTAR THAN LIGHT?!?!?!
I think they're just lazy, personally.
Too bad we probably paid billions for such crappy infra.
That's a good point.
There's been a whole lot of good research done on the mechanisms of addiction, how brain chemistry is changed.. a lot of data suggests (common sense) that if you change your environment, it's easier to break patterns. Charle Rose had a really good series on the brain where this was discussed..
I _think_ this one is it: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10974 - the whole series is great though.
It'd be really interesting if they used some modern techniques to figure out what was going on.. like monitoring differences in brain activity in the different regions..
A strong dose of LSD removes any underpinnings with reality. There's no way to prepare for it. For some people it's a good, useful thing which helps them gain a different perspective and form new thought patterns or approach problems in a different way. For others its a hellish experience that causes permanent damage to their psyche. Psychoactive drugs can trigger latent personality disorders. I know this from personal experience.
Think of LSD as a focuser; if you're prone to anxiety, you're likely to have an extremely hard time, especially if you're in an sterile lab environment (your ambient environment makes a huge difference to your experience, along with the people you are around).
Anyhow, I have a hard time trusting that study for much. I can see psychoactive drugs having lots of benefits, but a lot of risks too. It's hard to picture someone suffering from alcoholism (which encourages denialism, depression etc) really getting much positive benefit.
Scenario A)
Total annihilation of all mankind, including most living organisms, with the world taking many centuries to slowly recover
Scenario B)
Facebooks r down
The (sweet) xbmc plugin Bluecop wrote suddenly quit working when they changed to use 'DRM' flash. See this thread for details;
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=108124&page=32
Pretty painful.
They're plenty happy to maintain an army of lawyers and sue everyone/anything they can on their way into oblivion. A crazed, rabid dog, biting everything it can on its way to being put down.
Not a dissimilar strategy to patent trolling; abuse the American legal system to make money.. the trick is, they still have enough power to actually buy laws, so they are quite dangerous.
At least game companies are marginally more intelligent; they realize for the most part that outright suing their customers would just backfire bigtime.
I'm not in any way an Apple fan, but having worked in digital music when they were coming on, I gotta say it's been entertaining watching ipod/itunes bend the industry over. Though in some ways Apple is no better.
Ah good point. Load times drive me nuts too. Seems like there's no reason for all the disc-seeking, especially when games install data onto hard drive.
Maybe motion control is just a preference, but I much prefer it for certain games. Take the EA boxing franchise; my thumb just about falls off after an hour or so of frantic controller-ing. Compare that with the move game Fight Night: Lights out - you actually move your arms, jab.. direction / precision matters, as does velocity. Way more realistic.
The problems are it's so klunky and imprecise tracking-wise 20-30% of your efforts are just wasted which leads to extreme frustration.
I can see it coming down to preference though, certainly sometimes I prefer to just chill out and not do a bunch of work to get through a game. It doesn't translate to stuff like Skyrim at all either.
1) Allow all discs to play on ps4 - at least ps2+ps3. People don't want to spend a ton of money on a new console & invalidate all their past purchases which are still quite playable, or jack around with changing out consoles all the time. It's a hassle to unplug/replug for most people.
2) Quit removing features because of your paranoia - the OtherOS debacle should have gotten some people fired. Either leave it in there or never put it in there.
3) Fix your fuggin security for reals. From what I've heard from my friends who work at Sony, they've just patched up a few weak spots that were vulnerable but their overall model is totally lacking. It's prevented me from re-upping subscription to a few games (like Vanguard) just because I don't want to trust them with their CC info.
More of a general sony point but still.
4) Allow for more mods / customization. I briefly used ps3 as HTPC but it's so limited in the formats it supports, ways of mounting to media etc it's just more of a hassle than its worth. I ended up going with xbmc on a PC.
5) Motion control is the future. Get better at it. The ps3 move is questionable; crappy titles, camera is a hassle in non-optimal light situations etc. For instance, Fight Night: Lights Out is a really good game, but it's totally ruined by subpar headtracking even in optimal light situations.
A few minor points;
- USB controllers should charge from pretty much any USB power source. My ps3 controllers are super picky for some reason.
- Use standardized friggin power button. It's incredibly ridiculous that you have to push the PS button on a controller to power the unit on, or push the button in the front. Used to drive me crazy when I drove it with harmony remote
I almost worked for a company that did kiosks. XP kiosks, delivering media. After asking a few basic questions I discerned;
1) They were all part of one AD domain
2) The systems auto-logged in via a service user that was a domain admin
3) The application had those creds in plaintext config files
4) That AD domain.. the company only had one.. shared with their office users / backoffice.
5) No one really thought it was a big deal to ship a product like that with physical units in the field.
I did not take the job. :-)
The VM thing is a reasonable idea, but there's still going to be communication to a centralized server with authorization requirements etc. That'll be the weak point.. or at least one of them. One of the keys is to look for 'unexpected' downtime.
Physical access is pretty painful to shore up.
If you have an android device, or even an important email / google voice account, getting banned would be a nightmare. So now you're looking at multiple accounts, which loses the whole 'integrated' advantage.
Google needs to take a serious look at their banning policies and how they have ripple effects. Being banned from their social media shouldn't affect any of your other accounts. Email abuses (like spamming) are a completely different transgression than not meeting google's (apparently puritan, also seemingly arbitrary) social media standards / rules.
I tried out several software suites for my HTPC and ultimately ended up with XBMC.
There's enough free content that if you're a casual TV watcher you can get away without it. There's a "free cable" plugin that pulls in a bunch of channels, along with hulu free (of course, who knows how long that will exist).
I use amazon prime to get all the "free" prime movies/shows and that is another ton of content.
Unfortunately blockbuster isn't working but I believe Netflix does on windows ( don't have that ). It's silverlight.
There are tons of handy plugins. Anything from adult plugins (pr0n) to academic earth.
I drive it all from my harmony remote, audio passthrough through video hdmi out to receiver.
Once I get mythtv going to record football I'm going to (finally) cancel comcast. I hope that one day HBO / Showtime will smarten up and offer modular monthly subscriptions, instead of requiring you use a federated login based on your cable/dish provider. Lame.
XBMC is flexible/hackable enough to make me happy since I can make most anything work, but presents media simply enough my computer illiterate girlfriend can drive it all. Win.
Why should I pay for a bunch of channels and service I don't want?
If they offered modular, on demand service I wouldn't have to monkey around with xbmc, encoding etc.
Services like on-demand streaming of movies/tv where you pay exactly what you want are the future. The cable company can't let go of their monolithic 'screw you cuz we can & always have' thinking. Eventually they will go the way of the labels as far as monopoly via audio CD's - technology will evolve past them (already is/has) and they'll just be left waving their wizened fists angrily, struggling for relevance and trying to screw people over with control of cable internet.
1) dd mbr + data on disk
2) sfdisk partition data, then use xfsdump/xfsrestore to recreate the partition data on disk
Both of those have the advantage of being easily scriptable, and a disadvantage of being fairly dificult to deal with variable disk sizes without doing quite a bit more work.
You could also look at partimage which may be more what you had in mind - http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
+1 to spideroak. It's the best in breed, with actual clueful engineers who care about what they're doing & keep up with industry practices / laws that would impact them.
Oddly the version I'm running is called 'KVM'. It's got lots of features and is free.. thanks, vmware!
The modern executive animal possesses extraordinary foresight; written into their contracts are both buyout and early termination clauses.
They'll still get their golden parachutes, just not quite as much as if the stock valuation had happened.
They will use their parachute to gently land in the next company, with similar contracts, and use the "My company got sold to Microsoft, we were a success!" angle to get paid boatloads more money.
Poor executives. It's a hard knock life.
I remember specifically in 2000 at an IBM Developerworks conference, they were all hot for Teh Bluetooths, talking about how when you walk by a BT enabled vending machine it'd send a coupon to your phone.
I'm sure someone has been talking about this scenario for many more years than that. It's an advertisers wet dream.
Didn't want it then, don't want it now.. and unfortunately it's much more realistic now.
More spam to buzz my phone == fail, especially when it buzzes just because I'm walking by the shopping district to get to work. I'm sure you'll be able to disable it, for now - but even additional management of my mobile devices because of marketing drivel would piss me off.
Smart people get tired of underachievers and it's pretty easy to recognise.
I think most people want to try to do the right thing, follow best practices / stay professional. Often organisations make it easy to get disgruntled, when there's a perception that the brass don't know/care about what you perceive to be the "real" problems.
That aside, the most miserable places to work are usually where people are just phoning it in. You might have a little less up-front stress, but I'd argue the lack of any sort of job satisfaction or doing anything to take pride in would ultimately lead you to be less happy in life.
We all coast sometimes, or make compromises - but if you solely operate that way in your career you won't be getting too far. Especially in smaller tech communities where there is a small degree of separation.