I weep when I see this sort of people laying shadows on Earth. If your kids are smarter than a lazy monkey, they will figure out the false analogy pretty fast and you will lose a large chunk (if not all) of their respect towards you. My parents used the same dumb shit on me until I have outgrown it (I was about 9 at the time). Just use a bloody reward system to have them make their beds. But maybe you're too cheap to do so. Well, your kids, not mine.
There's just one problem that comes with that, and it's called management expectations. I've been doing that sort of hacks for a while. Management says "we need an automated reporting application that gathers data from 5 different sources and displays nicely formatted reports on a web page, 24/7, every 15 minutes, but we don't have a budget for that sort of thing". I got an old desktop, installed Apache, installed an Office suite, created some VBA code that did all that. The reports were displayed best in IE only; under FX, the colors were a bit garbled but oh well, it was a quick hack. Right? Wrong. Management wanted FX compatibility. I talked them out of it, but it took me longer than actually writing the damn code in the first place. Then they wanted historical data, so I expanded my script to do that. Then they wanted e-mails to be sent to them automatically because they were too fucking lazy to check the damn webpage. Then they wanted 2 more data sources included in the consolidated reports. Then they wanted reports customization. We have a saying here in my country which sounds like this: "You can't make a whip out of shit and expect to crack it". But management expected just that. There's a pretty thick line between aiming for more and being flat out ridiculous. And needless to say, I am not a programmer and never been one, my job was different but I took this project to see what could I accomplish. That's the problem right there: you do something with nothing and then they expect you to do just that and more of it indefinitely. So good luck in hiring a "just get shit done" guy. It's good to have one. But the temptation to abuse him is high and most management level dudes have no clue when they cross the line.
Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want. Where's the undo function? Find-and-replace? Full justification?
Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J. All from memory. Those were the days... why use the mouse when you could use the keyboard? At last Microsoft kept the shortcuts consistent across versions.
I think it's a good step towards the right direction. Evil or not, Microsoft at least tilts towards being... less evil with this move. Might be too early to state that, but any nudge should be regarded with hope.
I don't have anything against asking specific, directed questions about a well-documented issue. But the article submitter wants ALL the answers on a cloudy issue that hasn't been detailed. Analogy: "I have to buy a car for my wife, here's several questions about how the car should be: Headlights? Tires? Engine? Consumption? Color?" The questions and details are crap, so the answers would be crap too.
I have read the synopsis 4 (four) times and I didn't get shit. Of course, TFA sheds some light on the whole thing, but really... work on your short version, guys, because what's in here makes no sense.
""People who are outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and have a good sense of humor and a large social network are less likely to commit suicide, therefore more likely to live longer", study says. DOH.
I'd venture to differentiate between online news and offline news. A paper magazine, sure, I'd pay for it more than the paper it's written on if I consider it a collectible. But online... I'm more interested in the hard data itself rather than the way it's written, and with all the portals publishing user-generated content (and some of those are REALLY good), I am not afraid of lacking any news sources any time soon. So what if I won't get informed about Justin Bieber's latest deeds right now? Some blog would republish the news in some way or another, if it's important enough, and Google's your friend. And of course, there's always Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I'm regularly visiting just Slashdot, Wikipedia, Wimp, Failblog and a couple local news sites (which are both awesome). Everything else can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned, and if any of the above go to hell themselves, well, I'll look for the next best thing.
Um, you're implying that interest toward porn and interest toward gaming are genetic traits. This is so, SO far from the truth. Both are cognitive gains and unlikely to pass on unless the progeny entourage is the same or the parent teaches the child. In other news, I'm an avid gamer (although not a particularly skilled one) and I like porn. Still, I have a wife and a child and they're happy with me (I'm depressed though but that's another story). If you'd ask my wife about me, sure, she'll say I spend my free time gaming (we watch porn together, at least used to until the baby was born) but my free time accounts for a couple hours a day, usually split in 3-4 episodes. All the rest I'm spending doing family stuff, from taking out the garbage to shopping, washing dishes, preparing kid's food and so on and so forth. I can prioritize and never cut off family time. If I feel the need to play a game and I couldn't find time that day, I cut 30-45 minutes off my sleep time after I come from work (that's at 2:30 AM). My gaming habit is a proven method for brain relaxation before going to sleep. If I go to sleep right after coming from work, I have a restless night, full of work-related tangled dreams. Gaming a bit helps me shrug it off. As for porn... that's too vague. Saying "porn ruins this generation" is similar to "music is ruining this generation". There's all kinds of music as well as all kinds of porn. You just need to be smart enough to tell good from bad. One more thing. I live in a country where talks about sex are frowned upon and a large percentage of population only knows and applies missionary and fellatio. Porn opened my eyes and made my sex life better, but then again, one needs to be smart enough for porn to be beneficial.
FYI, I live in Eastern Europe and my country is in top 10 as far as average connection speed goes. And I pay 10 bucks a month for a good, fast, reliable connection. Aaaaand... I have a free 3G USB stick with unlimited traffic included in my 10-bucks-a-month subscription.
True, I stopped working from home when my son was born, but that's because we rent a tiny apartment and he sleeps while I work and I am in meetings a lot. So it's not that it doesn't work for me; it doesn't work for him well.
Bullshit. I've been working from home for a while and it's very relaxing. You can dress very, VERY casually, for example. I attended many a meetings while sitting butt-naked in a cozy chair. You can have a beer or whatever (I don't drink alcohol, though), you can pet the cat (I do) and so on and so forth. Lack of noisy-nosy-annoying colleagues is a plus. And as far as work being with you all day long, in a world where a laptop is ubiquitous and you can take it home, not to mention company provided VPN and webmail or mobile device connectivity, well, work's there already. I honestly think that whoever worries more while working from home either doesn't understand what "working from home" means or has deeper problems (including but not limited to a pathological fear of being fired).
"The problem of needing a connection has also led to an increase in workers waking up through the night due to stress." Seriously? What in the world is this shit? How can someone even attempt to work from home without a solid Internet connection and with no secure method of connecting to the company network? And waking up in the middle of the night because you need a connection to the fucking internet? Man, what a mess we're living in. And I thought I was messed up. Just get a fucking solid Internet connection. Surely one could afford it, I mean come on...
Ha, something like "This investigation will last 10 seconds starting from when we filled the paperwork, meaning that it's over and you have to pay us 10K USD for overtime".
OK, let me rephrase. I'm talking here about prioritization. When you have bigger, more severe issues to deal with (as police), of course you don't go and hunt for a stolen phone. But what if there's nothing that day? Then you allocate resources to whatever's left to do. I'm not saying that's the case in the article, but generally speaking, that's what you need to do as police. Besides, don't forget about the moral impact of the theft. When someone steals from police chief's son and gets away with it, people's perception is that the police is ballless, and even more so they proved this since they couldn't even recover it.
Um, how much would you value a rape, then? Or a beating? Or domestic violence? Or even murder? It would be interesting to see a world where such calculations are being performed. Oh, so the guy punched you repeatedly in the face and stole 100 USD from you? Right. How much was the hospital charging you? 2000 USD? I see. So that's a total of 2100 USD. Well, we can have one officer spend 5 days investigating this, then tough luck buddy. Maybe next time you'll get lucky and he'll stab you in the liver, I heard those wounds are expensive to heal and we'd be able to investigate the incident for one whole month.
Yeah, would be interesting to live in such a world, indeed...
If my employer doesn't like me hanging on Slashdot during my breaks, he can tell me or fire me eventually. If the cops don't pay attention to a genuine report, please tell me how could I fire them. 'Cause I'd do it in no time.
I weigh 139 pounds. If anything, during the last couple years I lost some good 10 pounds. I've always been thin, now I'm thinner. As far as vitamin D goes, I might have deficiency because I see daylight maybe 2-3 hours a day.
Good idea... for an American, which I'm not. if I would have been, I probably wouldn't have gotten depressed, because I'm not really asking for or expecting anything else than a decent life. I don't own a house or a car, nor do I aim for them. renting is fine. Public transportation is good enough. All I was trying to accomplish was offering decent living standards to my family. Lately it's been particularly difficult to achieve that. Expenses? Rent, bills, food. The problem stems from parity adjustment between the local currency and EUR. Shortly put, 5 years ago my income (in EUR) was 43% higher than right now. It didn't change mathematically, as far as local currency is involved, but the parity towards EUR went down the drain, and pretty much every price in this fucking country respects EUR value, but are expressed in local currency. Say a loaf of bread was 0.5 RON 5 years ago. Now it's 0.8 or 0.9 RON. Rent was 300 EUR, it's still 300 EUR a month, but I'm not paid in EUR and when I exchange RON for EUR, I pay more RON for rent every month. During last year, it went up 18% because of that. The company I work for doesn't give a shit. I got 5.5% "raise" over 5 years while the RON/EUR parity dropped 43% over the same period. During this time, I was "promoted" twice and got a shitload of gamification badges (which I currently hate). I asked for some more projects, I work 5 PM to 2 AM local time and I also work every damn Sunday to boost my income just enough to stay afloat. But that's just becoming to not be enough anymore, again. Applying for jobs was depressing too, mainly because the hiring process around here is a fucking mess. here's an example of fucked up requirements for a pretty low-payment job:
Technical skills required for automation - JSP + Java SE / beginner - Php / beginner - MySQL / PhpMyAdmin - MsSQL / advanced - Linux shell scripting / beginner - C++ / beginner - Knowledge of Oracle, MS SQL and My SQL databases. Good understanding of database dynamics. Experience with Toad is a plus. - Knowledge of Visual Basic for Applications. Good knowledge of Microsoft Excel. - Familiarity with the following technologies: XML, Java Script, HTML, PHP. Understanding of AJAX is a plus. (Optional) technical skills: - Action Script & Flex - Eclipse AXDT - Java SE - Swing
(Optional) knowledge of: - Object Oriented Programming - AJAX - Template Matching - Windows Server
(Optional) experience with : - Citrix - Oracle VM - SAP Business Objects
Like, seriously? What happens is that recruiters just throw acronyms in there, they have no fucking clue what they're asking for, hiring managers don't really talk to recruiters and I've been to interviews where the hiring manager was mortified when I showed him a copy of the job ad from the web. But that's another subject, no need to go off-topic. Point is: job market around here is a fucking lottery. Also, a new hire filling a position I had 5 years ago (and was "promoted" from) will get paid at least 50% more than I do now, and yes, market requires them to pay that amount, otherwise people wouldn't apply; but what about more experienced employees? Well, fuck them, because you know, all companies do the same: they'd rather hire stupid kids right off college (and pay them well) because the government pays them incentives for doing so. It's called "encouraging workforce absorption" and shit. Good idea with bad side effects. once those few incentive years wane away, your value drops like a stone, and you better be ultra-specialized or wither away. Sadly, I'm only specialized in stuff my current employer needed, and very few others would need that exact skill set. So I'm, stuck where I am and my manager knows that. Depressing.
Slashdot Mirror
I weep when I see this sort of people laying shadows on Earth. If your kids are smarter than a lazy monkey, they will figure out the false analogy pretty fast and you will lose a large chunk (if not all) of their respect towards you. My parents used the same dumb shit on me until I have outgrown it (I was about 9 at the time).
Just use a bloody reward system to have them make their beds. But maybe you're too cheap to do so. Well, your kids, not mine.
There's just one problem that comes with that, and it's called management expectations. I've been doing that sort of hacks for a while. Management says "we need an automated reporting application that gathers data from 5 different sources and displays nicely formatted reports on a web page, 24/7, every 15 minutes, but we don't have a budget for that sort of thing". I got an old desktop, installed Apache, installed an Office suite, created some VBA code that did all that. The reports were displayed best in IE only; under FX, the colors were a bit garbled but oh well, it was a quick hack. Right?
Wrong. Management wanted FX compatibility. I talked them out of it, but it took me longer than actually writing the damn code in the first place. Then they wanted historical data, so I expanded my script to do that. Then they wanted e-mails to be sent to them automatically because they were too fucking lazy to check the damn webpage. Then they wanted 2 more data sources included in the consolidated reports. Then they wanted reports customization.
We have a saying here in my country which sounds like this: "You can't make a whip out of shit and expect to crack it". But management expected just that. There's a pretty thick line between aiming for more and being flat out ridiculous. And needless to say, I am not a programmer and never been one, my job was different but I took this project to see what could I accomplish.
That's the problem right there: you do something with nothing and then they expect you to do just that and more of it indefinitely. So good luck in hiring a "just get shit done" guy. It's good to have one. But the temptation to abuse him is high and most management level dudes have no clue when they cross the line.
Well, truth be told I am a little sad. I know, too much SF made me secretly hope the experiment results would be proven right. A man could dream... :)
Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want. Where's the undo function? Find-and-replace? Full justification?
Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J. All from memory.
Those were the days... why use the mouse when you could use the keyboard?
At last Microsoft kept the shortcuts consistent across versions.
I think it's a good step towards the right direction. Evil or not, Microsoft at least tilts towards being... less evil with this move. Might be too early to state that, but any nudge should be regarded with hope.
Mod parent redundant!
I don't have anything against asking specific, directed questions about a well-documented issue. But the article submitter wants ALL the answers on a cloudy issue that hasn't been detailed.
Analogy: "I have to buy a car for my wife, here's several questions about how the car should be: Headlights? Tires? Engine? Consumption? Color?"
The questions and details are crap, so the answers would be crap too.
If you're asking all those questions, you should not be in that committee.
Smart. Very smart. You should be proud of yourself, being part of an elite that has the inherent right of stomping less-gifted people. Gratz!
I have read the synopsis 4 (four) times and I didn't get shit.
Of course, TFA sheds some light on the whole thing, but really... work on your short version, guys, because what's in here makes no sense.
You could just rephrase the article:
""People who are outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and have a good sense of humor and a large social network are less likely to commit suicide, therefore more likely to live longer", study says.
DOH.
I'd venture to differentiate between online news and offline news. A paper magazine, sure, I'd pay for it more than the paper it's written on if I consider it a collectible. But online... I'm more interested in the hard data itself rather than the way it's written, and with all the portals publishing user-generated content (and some of those are REALLY good), I am not afraid of lacking any news sources any time soon.
So what if I won't get informed about Justin Bieber's latest deeds right now? Some blog would republish the news in some way or another, if it's important enough, and Google's your friend. And of course, there's always Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I'm regularly visiting just Slashdot, Wikipedia, Wimp, Failblog and a couple local news sites (which are both awesome). Everything else can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned, and if any of the above go to hell themselves, well, I'll look for the next best thing.
Um, you're implying that interest toward porn and interest toward gaming are genetic traits. This is so, SO far from the truth. Both are cognitive gains and unlikely to pass on unless the progeny entourage is the same or the parent teaches the child.
In other news, I'm an avid gamer (although not a particularly skilled one) and I like porn. Still, I have a wife and a child and they're happy with me (I'm depressed though but that's another story). If you'd ask my wife about me, sure, she'll say I spend my free time gaming (we watch porn together, at least used to until the baby was born) but my free time accounts for a couple hours a day, usually split in 3-4 episodes. All the rest I'm spending doing family stuff, from taking out the garbage to shopping, washing dishes, preparing kid's food and so on and so forth.
I can prioritize and never cut off family time. If I feel the need to play a game and I couldn't find time that day, I cut 30-45 minutes off my sleep time after I come from work (that's at 2:30 AM). My gaming habit is a proven method for brain relaxation before going to sleep. If I go to sleep right after coming from work, I have a restless night, full of work-related tangled dreams. Gaming a bit helps me shrug it off.
As for porn... that's too vague. Saying "porn ruins this generation" is similar to "music is ruining this generation". There's all kinds of music as well as all kinds of porn. You just need to be smart enough to tell good from bad.
One more thing. I live in a country where talks about sex are frowned upon and a large percentage of population only knows and applies missionary and fellatio. Porn opened my eyes and made my sex life better, but then again, one needs to be smart enough for porn to be beneficial.
FYI, I live in Eastern Europe and my country is in top 10 as far as average connection speed goes. And I pay 10 bucks a month for a good, fast, reliable connection. Aaaaand... I have a free 3G USB stick with unlimited traffic included in my 10-bucks-a-month subscription.
That's because you are less dissatisfied with your work environment and can focus for a longer time, because you're not interrupted that often.
True, I stopped working from home when my son was born, but that's because we rent a tiny apartment and he sleeps while I work and I am in meetings a lot. So it's not that it doesn't work for me; it doesn't work for him well.
I think that's going to happen pretty soon. Too bad they'll drag the whole fucking planet along with them.
Bullshit.
I've been working from home for a while and it's very relaxing. You can dress very, VERY casually, for example. I attended many a meetings while sitting butt-naked in a cozy chair. You can have a beer or whatever (I don't drink alcohol, though), you can pet the cat (I do) and so on and so forth. Lack of noisy-nosy-annoying colleagues is a plus. And as far as work being with you all day long, in a world where a laptop is ubiquitous and you can take it home, not to mention company provided VPN and webmail or mobile device connectivity, well, work's there already.
I honestly think that whoever worries more while working from home either doesn't understand what "working from home" means or has deeper problems (including but not limited to a pathological fear of being fired).
"The problem of needing a connection has also led to an increase in workers waking up through the night due to stress."
Seriously?
What in the world is this shit? How can someone even attempt to work from home without a solid Internet connection and with no secure method of connecting to the company network? And waking up in the middle of the night because you need a connection to the fucking internet? Man, what a mess we're living in. And I thought I was messed up.
Just get a fucking solid Internet connection. Surely one could afford it, I mean come on...
Ha, something like "This investigation will last 10 seconds starting from when we filled the paperwork, meaning that it's over and you have to pay us 10K USD for overtime".
OK, let me rephrase.
I'm talking here about prioritization. When you have bigger, more severe issues to deal with (as police), of course you don't go and hunt for a stolen phone. But what if there's nothing that day? Then you allocate resources to whatever's left to do.
I'm not saying that's the case in the article, but generally speaking, that's what you need to do as police. Besides, don't forget about the moral impact of the theft. When someone steals from police chief's son and gets away with it, people's perception is that the police is ballless, and even more so they proved this since they couldn't even recover it.
Um, how much would you value a rape, then? Or a beating? Or domestic violence? Or even murder?
It would be interesting to see a world where such calculations are being performed.
Oh, so the guy punched you repeatedly in the face and stole 100 USD from you? Right. How much was the hospital charging you? 2000 USD? I see. So that's a total of 2100 USD. Well, we can have one officer spend 5 days investigating this, then tough luck buddy. Maybe next time you'll get lucky and he'll stab you in the liver, I heard those wounds are expensive to heal and we'd be able to investigate the incident for one whole month.
Yeah, would be interesting to live in such a world, indeed...
If my employer doesn't like me hanging on Slashdot during my breaks, he can tell me or fire me eventually. If the cops don't pay attention to a genuine report, please tell me how could I fire them. 'Cause I'd do it in no time.
I weigh 139 pounds. If anything, during the last couple years I lost some good 10 pounds. I've always been thin, now I'm thinner.
As far as vitamin D goes, I might have deficiency because I see daylight maybe 2-3 hours a day.
Good idea... for an American, which I'm not. if I would have been, I probably wouldn't have gotten depressed, because I'm not really asking for or expecting anything else than a decent life. I don't own a house or a car, nor do I aim for them. renting is fine. Public transportation is good enough.
All I was trying to accomplish was offering decent living standards to my family. Lately it's been particularly difficult to achieve that. Expenses? Rent, bills, food. The problem stems from parity adjustment between the local currency and EUR. Shortly put, 5 years ago my income (in EUR) was 43% higher than right now. It didn't change mathematically, as far as local currency is involved, but the parity towards EUR went down the drain, and pretty much every price in this fucking country respects EUR value, but are expressed in local currency.
Say a loaf of bread was 0.5 RON 5 years ago. Now it's 0.8 or 0.9 RON. Rent was 300 EUR, it's still 300 EUR a month, but I'm not paid in EUR and when I exchange RON for EUR, I pay more RON for rent every month. During last year, it went up 18% because of that.
The company I work for doesn't give a shit. I got 5.5% "raise" over 5 years while the RON/EUR parity dropped 43% over the same period. During this time, I was "promoted" twice and got a shitload of gamification badges (which I currently hate). I asked for some more projects, I work 5 PM to 2 AM local time and I also work every damn Sunday to boost my income just enough to stay afloat. But that's just becoming to not be enough anymore, again.
Applying for jobs was depressing too, mainly because the hiring process around here is a fucking mess. here's an example of fucked up requirements for a pretty low-payment job:
Technical skills required for automation
- JSP + Java SE / beginner
- Php / beginner
- MySQL / PhpMyAdmin
- MsSQL / advanced
- Linux shell scripting / beginner
- C++ / beginner
- Knowledge of Oracle, MS SQL and My SQL databases. Good understanding of database dynamics. Experience with Toad is a plus.
- Knowledge of Visual Basic for Applications. Good knowledge of Microsoft Excel.
- Familiarity with the following technologies: XML, Java Script, HTML, PHP. Understanding of AJAX is a plus.
(Optional) technical skills:
- Action Script & Flex - Eclipse AXDT
- Java SE - Swing
(Optional) knowledge of:
- Object Oriented Programming
- AJAX
- Template Matching
- Windows Server
(Optional) experience with :
- Citrix
- Oracle VM
- SAP Business Objects
Like, seriously?
What happens is that recruiters just throw acronyms in there, they have no fucking clue what they're asking for, hiring managers don't really talk to recruiters and I've been to interviews where the hiring manager was mortified when I showed him a copy of the job ad from the web.
But that's another subject, no need to go off-topic. Point is: job market around here is a fucking lottery. Also, a new hire filling a position I had 5 years ago (and was "promoted" from) will get paid at least 50% more than I do now, and yes, market requires them to pay that amount, otherwise people wouldn't apply; but what about more experienced employees? Well, fuck them, because you know, all companies do the same: they'd rather hire stupid kids right off college (and pay them well) because the government pays them incentives for doing so. It's called "encouraging workforce absorption" and shit. Good idea with bad side effects. once those few incentive years wane away, your value drops like a stone, and you better be ultra-specialized or wither away. Sadly, I'm only specialized in stuff my current employer needed, and very few others would need that exact skill set.
So I'm, stuck where I am and my manager knows that. Depressing.