> 18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen"
Hey, this accurately describes a lot of us! I've personally reflected on this fact when flash-defrosting my meals, wondering to myself just how long it would take a significant portion of our society to reach where I am...
Yes. Lately huge amounts of moderator points are being handed out. Just last week I got moderator access 3 times in a row. Normally I only get it once every 1-3 months. (I have a karma around 40.)
Someone's over-reacted to some perceived situation. I mean there is always the occasional story that ends up not getting enough moderation, and posts to older articles not getting their share of moderator eyeballs, but this is ridiculous. Since everything I think should be a 4 or a 5 is already at 5, then I end up hunting down something else to moderate up that normally wouldn't go so high...
And I imagine with all that extra moderator points, they're not so 'valuable' or 'rare' any more, and so there's less disincentive to moderate down.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 2
Holy shit, you're me, or I'm you, or something or other. What I mean is, I know EXACTLY where you're coming from.
Currently the team/group I'm with is about 50% relatively new people and I'm a technical lead. I am also largely responsible for a few of the major products, and so am the only person who can answer a lot of the technical questions from marketing and support. There's always a few of the new people doing tasks that require a lot of direction/help from me due to the lack of documentation from the past 3 years. It's gotten me to the exact same point where you are. The experiences have left me *totally* demotivated.
I've spend the last MONTH doing around 3 days of work, 10-15 days of dealing with all these other non-task related interruptions, and 12 days of doing absolutely nothing due to my motivational state (get in late, slashdot, mail, mope, browse favorite web pages/cartoons, lunch, mail, meeting, mope, etc etc).
It's gotten me to the point where I think it would be better for the company and for me to ask for a transfer to a different division, or for an indefinite leave of absence. Of course there's always the chance that they'll decide to fire me for slacking off and doing nothing, instead of trying to do something productive to get me back on track. Of course even I have no idea as to what to do about this. Guess I should read some management type books, figure out what's missing, and tell them. Of course now that I think about it, I can easily come up with a half dozen things. I just can't figure out how to tell them, nor what to suggest to do to deal with it...
( When's the last time you heard of anyone going to their manager and saying "by the way, I'm horribly unmotivated and I haven't done any work for a month, you should do something about that!" )
Another semi-related story: A while further back I was on a project where I was sysadmin/troubleshooter/etc of ten million in hardware and software. It was fun, it was interesting, and I got to interact with users and developers and new systems going up, everything. But then the project deadlines came in and the occasional emergency, so I was handed some real tasks to get done. Unfortunately my days as a sysadmin consisted of 30% rote tasks and 70% interruptions for important things. You can draw the conclusion already, just guess at how much I got done while being interrupted 5 times an hour for important-critical systems things? Now I didn't mind, but it got to the point where my boss basically stood over my shoulder for an entire day and micromanaged what I did. It was only at that point that he understood what the hell was going on and why, and gave me the authority/direction to de-prioritize these interruptions. That helped a ton.
> I can verify the validity of the material
> presented here because I saw people obtain
> this information on Friday.
>...where people were trashing two CBC vans. Across
> form the CBC van's was an unmarked cruiser and
> van discuised as a commercial vehicle. We didn't
> know this until some members of the crowd
> smashed the windows and began pulling out...
I'm a Canadian taxpayer, and I'm deeply wary of the half baked stuff the WTO and FTAA and all the other globalization efforts. I was shocked at how close we dodged the bullet with the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (read the apropriate chapter of Maude Barlow's "The fight of my life" for an eye opener), and I fully support the views of the Council of Canadians.
HOWEVER, I'm all for identifying the vandals and criminals who destroyed those three vehicles. I'd like to see them personally pay for the damage. It's acts like these that keep many of the common people from delving further into the subject and discovering what there is to oppose, because they can write it all off as the acts of some hippies and vandals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm clearly aware of the capabilities of law enforcement to go horribly awry, and I wish the authorities in this case had been much more specific in their warrant. It disappoints me to have to support the fight against turning over such a broad sweep of information. They should ask for specifically what they need, as opposed to grabbing everything. It reminds me of the situations where the police confiscate $5000 of your personal computer equipment and don't return it for 12-18 months, until they're "finished" determining that you didn't do anything wrong. Except since this is "just information", they feel like they can ask for the moon.
So, what's my wish? I wish the DA would get a clue and re-do the request such that it doesn't result in slurping up information on what tens of thousands of law abiding people were doing, but rather just focuses in on identifying the witnesses who can identify the criminals they are (supposedly) looking for.
How much of that "100-500 times the size" is in pages that can not be reached as they are internal or in dynamic sites? Or are pages for which there are no hyperlinks elsewhere on the net leading to them? I'd like to know Google's coverage when those things are factored out.
CKW said "semi-normal". Your $5 Trabant belching smoke isn't normal. And if the total cost of ownership and usage of $5 Trabant's was so shit hot, wouldn't there be more people using them?
The use of a lot of non-committal generalities in the argument plus the "un-accounted" reference clearly indicates that it's a very coarse limited-usage theory, which you've nicely demonstrated.
Section 9.2 of the FAQ, the Counting Theorem, says that "no program can compress without loss *all* files of size N >= 0".
Mike Goldman's challenge explicitly involves "a specific known file" of size N, where both N and the data within are arbitrary and predetermined.
Mike's intent is obvious, but his logic is horrible. It's quite clear that Mike's challenge has HUGE gaping holes in it's mathematics, statistics, and logic as compared to the Counting Theorem. There's nothing "for sure" about Mike's challenge. Just reading it by itself made me sure he's going to lose, if not this time, then another time. He set himself up to lose.
Last night on Speedvision during a one hour show on the SR-71, I was supprised to hear a claim that there was a smaller un-piloted version of the SR-71 made, supposedly still under wraps.
Have they fixed the horrific bugs in the Win9x version yet? Last time I tried the game, it would crash on 90-95% of the runs. Totally unplayable because of that.
Yup. The coverage of some of the spacewalks for the space station have been pathetic. They go to all the trouble to deliver tons of live net video streams and NASA-TV, and then what do they do? They point the camera at an inanimate joint for 60 minutes while the astronauts do all sorts of interesting things nearby equipped with helmet cams. Goodbye.., thanks for nothing.
The video here was spectacular, except it's a proprietary RealMedia format which prevents me from saving it to disk. So if I want to watch it again, ever, I have to download it each time. Real smart. I mean, it's Nasa, what reason do they have for not letting me save it to disk? They want to use RealMedia because it's a great compression format, fine. But whey the hell is it streaming only?
On a related note, just why is it that the fidelity of the astronaut communications sound like total shit? My $10 telephone and $5 computer mic give better sound quality than what they've got. You'd think that clear communications would be some sort of safety priority or something. It's not like it requires a 10Mbit datastream!
Um, Nintendo isn't denying that Microsoft has a right to try to do this, they're questioning whether it's in the retailers' best interests to let them do it...
Yup, you're completely correct.
One thing I've noticed is that unless a person explicitly says that, the assumption is easy to make that they're attacking Microsoft. When I re-read Xenex's post it was only then that I noticed that even he might not have been 'attacking' Microsoft, but that even I had simply assumed it.
> But, here in Canada? We've got a population density of 3.3 people per frigging kilometre! How do you affordably link the 3.3 people in each of those square kilometres with fibre, especially given that many of them are separated by waterways?
Most of us are concentrated along the US border, and just like any other western industrial country the vast majority of us live in big metropolitan areas (which already has the cheapest 1Mbit DSL in the world, $40 CDN). Even in Saskatchewan, half of everyone is in the two main cities.
>I don't see how those in Canada's north will soon join the digital revolution.
Same way we got electricity and telephones to the farms.
Here's a question: I know that the DSL used in Canada has a range of 5km from the telco, that could cover a lot of farms right there. (Of course first you need a bit of bandwidth going to the small towns.) Has anyone heard anything about the actual technical or economic issues involved with trying DSL to farms? (Pretend there aren't any party lines still in use..)
Well, if you're having a heart attack I surely hope you're not going to try and drive!:)
And if I'm having a heart attack, you'd better be giving me CPR!!
Ok, ok, I'll talk serious now. Certainly if we put our heads together we could come up with a situation where not being able to speed would kill an innocent. But I'm sure I could come up with a situation where not having a grenade-launcher could result in innocents dying as well.
So what differentiates between them? Well, put bluntly, the odds of the likelyhood multiplied by the consequences. The simple fact of the matter is that Air Bags save 100 times as many lives as they kill. The thing that sucks or that is so hard to come to grips with is that these people that air-bags kill, wouldn't be killed if air-bags didn't exist. Completely different people are dying to save a lot more people.
So, how many people are going to be saved by speed limiters and car retina-print-breathalizers, versus how many people are going to be killed by not having speed when they need it or by walking home drunk?
I'm putting *all* my money on these two technologies, and our ability to *eventually* deal with all the complexities. Instead of trying to 'keep people from crashing', now all we have to do is 'keep people from putting kids in front of airbags and put in more technology to adjust for short people'... keep whittling away at all the nasties.
Eventually the human race must venture forth from the black and white shadows, into the world filled with a million shades of grey.
As commander in chief of the Armed Forces, I would immediately remove all American troops from foreign soil. Europe and Asia can pay for their own defense, and they can risk their own lives in their eternal squabbles. This would save billions of dollars a year in taxes, but -- more important -- it would make sure your sons and daughters never fight or die in someone else's war.
That's right brainiac, you'd be all safe and sound in your little isolated igloo. No Americans would ever die... well, at least until some foreign power conquered all of the Mideast and Asia, built a fleet, and then made it an American war.
Besides, all those things inhabiting the rest of the world don't deserve what we have. Let's just let them all rot in their own feces. It's what God would want.
I would order everyone in the executive branch to stop harassing... alternative medicine suppliers, religious groups (whether respected or labeled as "cults"), investment companies, health-care providers, businessmen, or anyone else who's conducting his affairs peaceably.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!! (giggle).. [wipes tear from eye]... Yeah, the USA would become an absolute paradise with someone like this in charge.
No wonder you can't make any headway into the mainstream educated (or even semi-educated) voters.
> What happens if my wife or whomever is about to give birth?
Well gollllly Jimmy-Bob, I think you should get in your car and drive 120 mph, because God knows childbirth is a dangerous life threatening situation that will always end badly if not done in a modern high-tech hospital.
Simple. We allow one 60 second burst of speed every 10 minutes. If you need to pass more than 6 people an hour, then something else in our world needs fixing...
Besides, soon enough all the driving will be done by computers, no 'stop-and-go' traffic, it will all be 'streamed'.
> > Seriously, if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, you will get Shakespear's sonnets.
>Sure - but how long until you get a copy of Windows2000?
Well, obviously enough it was a room full of monkeys that created Windows 98...
Why do I need a 20 KiloByte proprietary binary blob which I can't view or search with any other application on the planet just to hold 500 bytes of text!!?!?!
Personally speaking, this is true, oh so true. Every so often I have to make a concerted effort to go out and *browse* off the well worn paths. It's harder than it used to be, as so many of the lesser traveled paths lead to outhouses.
I remember the first night I discovered the web in 1993, I ended up at a dozen different interesting places all over the planet, including a visual tour of some English or Irish town. It was worth a whole two pages in my letter home that week. Same as Solaris inter-machine 'talk' (still in Solaris 8!), ftp, and my discovery of mudding (OverDrive) in 91 and 92.
<aside>
Too damn bad I didn't think just an itsy bitsy witsy ahead, and thought about the ever increasing computing and networking power and decreasing performance costs. I might have quit school and done something useful with my life, instead of spending 8 years on a degree (physics) I don't use . Damn, why couldn't I see it coming? Why didn't I see it coming? Hell, even if I had seen it coming, would I have really had the guts to jump? Sigh...
</aside>
I concur. Not only that, but there are people like me who don't download anything but 160+. As soon as the number of people who avoid 128 reaches critical mass, 160+ will snowball.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this accurately describes a lot of us! I've personally reflected on this fact when flash-defrosting my meals, wondering to myself just how long it would take a significant portion of our society to reach where I am...
Yes. Lately huge amounts of moderator points are being handed out. Just last week I got moderator access 3 times in a row. Normally I only get it once every 1-3 months. (I have a karma around 40.)
Someone's over-reacted to some perceived situation. I mean there is always the occasional story that ends up not getting enough moderation, and posts to older articles not getting their share of moderator eyeballs, but this is ridiculous. Since everything I think should be a 4 or a 5 is already at 5, then I end up hunting down something else to moderate up that normally wouldn't go so high...
And I imagine with all that extra moderator points, they're not so 'valuable' or 'rare' any more, and so there's less disincentive to moderate down.
Holy shit, you're me, or I'm you, or something or other. What I mean is, I know EXACTLY where you're coming from.
Currently the team/group I'm with is about 50% relatively new people and I'm a technical lead. I am also largely responsible for a few of the major products, and so am the only person who can answer a lot of the technical questions from marketing and support. There's always a few of the new people doing tasks that require a lot of direction/help from me due to the lack of documentation from the past 3 years. It's gotten me to the exact same point where you are. The experiences have left me *totally* demotivated. I've spend the last MONTH doing around 3 days of work, 10-15 days of dealing with all these other non-task related interruptions, and 12 days of doing absolutely nothing due to my motivational state (get in late, slashdot, mail, mope, browse favorite web pages/cartoons, lunch, mail, meeting, mope, etc etc).
It's gotten me to the point where I think it would be better for the company and for me to ask for a transfer to a different division, or for an indefinite leave of absence. Of course there's always the chance that they'll decide to fire me for slacking off and doing nothing, instead of trying to do something productive to get me back on track. Of course even I have no idea as to what to do about this. Guess I should read some management type books, figure out what's missing, and tell them. Of course now that I think about it, I can easily come up with a half dozen things. I just can't figure out how to tell them, nor what to suggest to do to deal with it...
( When's the last time you heard of anyone going to their manager and saying "by the way, I'm horribly unmotivated and I haven't done any work for a month, you should do something about that!" )
Another semi-related story: A while further back I was on a project where I was sysadmin/troubleshooter/etc of ten million in hardware and software. It was fun, it was interesting, and I got to interact with users and developers and new systems going up, everything. But then the project deadlines came in and the occasional emergency, so I was handed some real tasks to get done. Unfortunately my days as a sysadmin consisted of 30% rote tasks and 70% interruptions for important things. You can draw the conclusion already, just guess at how much I got done while being interrupted 5 times an hour for important-critical systems things? Now I didn't mind, but it got to the point where my boss basically stood over my shoulder for an entire day and micromanaged what I did. It was only at that point that he understood what the hell was going on and why, and gave me the authority/direction to de-prioritize these interruptions. That helped a ton.
> I can verify the validity of the material
> presented here because I saw people obtain
> this information on Friday.
> ...where people were trashing two CBC vans. Across
> form the CBC van's was an unmarked cruiser and
> van discuised as a commercial vehicle. We didn't
> know this until some members of the crowd
> smashed the windows and began pulling out...
I'm a Canadian taxpayer, and I'm deeply wary of the half baked stuff the WTO and FTAA and all the other globalization efforts. I was shocked at how close we dodged the bullet with the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (read the apropriate chapter of Maude Barlow's "The fight of my life" for an eye opener), and I fully support the views of the Council of Canadians.
HOWEVER, I'm all for identifying the vandals and criminals who destroyed those three vehicles. I'd like to see them personally pay for the damage. It's acts like these that keep many of the common people from delving further into the subject and discovering what there is to oppose, because they can write it all off as the acts of some hippies and vandals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm clearly aware of the capabilities of law enforcement to go horribly awry, and I wish the authorities in this case had been much more specific in their warrant. It disappoints me to have to support the fight against turning over such a broad sweep of information. They should ask for specifically what they need, as opposed to grabbing everything. It reminds me of the situations where the police confiscate $5000 of your personal computer equipment and don't return it for 12-18 months, until they're "finished" determining that you didn't do anything wrong. Except since this is "just information", they feel like they can ask for the moon.
So, what's my wish? I wish the DA would get a clue and re-do the request such that it doesn't result in slurping up information on what tens of thousands of law abiding people were doing, but rather just focuses in on identifying the witnesses who can identify the criminals they are (supposedly) looking for.
How much of that "100-500 times the size" is in pages that can not be reached as they are internal or in dynamic sites? Or are pages for which there are no hyperlinks elsewhere on the net leading to them? I'd like to know Google's coverage when those things are factored out.
The use of a lot of non-committal generalities in the argument plus the "un-accounted" reference clearly indicates that it's a very coarse limited-usage theory, which you've nicely demonstrated.
Section 9.2 of the FAQ, the Counting Theorem, says that "no program can compress without loss *all* files of size N >= 0".
Mike Goldman's challenge explicitly involves "a specific known file" of size N, where both N and the data within are arbitrary and predetermined.
Mike's intent is obvious, but his logic is horrible. It's quite clear that Mike's challenge has HUGE gaping holes in it's mathematics, statistics, and logic as compared to the Counting Theorem. There's nothing "for sure" about Mike's challenge. Just reading it by itself made me sure he's going to lose, if not this time, then another time. He set himself up to lose.
Last night on Speedvision during a one hour show on the SR-71, I was supprised to hear a claim that there was a smaller un-piloted version of the SR-71 made, supposedly still under wraps.
Has anyone else heard anything about it?
> So... A whopping 0.25% is now devoted to game AI? Step back.
Now remember, that's the equivalent of 100+ Commodore 64's chugging away madly.
Have they fixed the horrific bugs in the Win9x version yet? Last time I tried the game, it would crash on 90-95% of the runs. Totally unplayable because of that.
Just as long as they kill the right people, then I'm ok with it.
Yup. The coverage of some of the spacewalks for the space station have been pathetic. They go to all the trouble to deliver tons of live net video streams and NASA-TV, and then what do they do? They point the camera at an inanimate joint for 60 minutes while the astronauts do all sorts of interesting things nearby equipped with helmet cams. Goodbye.., thanks for nothing.
The video here was spectacular, except it's a proprietary RealMedia format which prevents me from saving it to disk. So if I want to watch it again, ever, I have to download it each time. Real smart. I mean, it's Nasa, what reason do they have for not letting me save it to disk? They want to use RealMedia because it's a great compression format, fine. But whey the hell is it streaming only?
On a related note, just why is it that the fidelity of the astronaut communications sound like total shit? My $10 telephone and $5 computer mic give better sound quality than what they've got. You'd think that clear communications would be some sort of safety priority or something. It's not like it requires a 10Mbit datastream!
Um, Nintendo isn't denying that Microsoft has a right to try to do this, they're questioning whether it's in the retailers' best interests to let them do it...
Yup, you're completely correct.
One thing I've noticed is that unless a person explicitly says that, the assumption is easy to make that they're attacking Microsoft. When I re-read Xenex's post it was only then that I noticed that even he might not have been 'attacking' Microsoft, but that even I had simply assumed it.
> But, here in Canada? We've got a population density of 3.3 people per frigging kilometre! How do you affordably link the 3.3 people in each of those square kilometres with fibre, especially given that many of them are separated by waterways?
Most of us are concentrated along the US border, and just like any other western industrial country the vast majority of us live in big metropolitan areas (which already has the cheapest 1Mbit DSL in the world, $40 CDN). Even in Saskatchewan, half of everyone is in the two main cities.
>I don't see how those in Canada's north will soon join the digital revolution.
Same way we got electricity and telephones to the farms.
Here's a question: I know that the DSL used in Canada has a range of 5km from the telco, that could cover a lot of farms right there. (Of course first you need a bit of bandwidth going to the small towns.) Has anyone heard anything about the actual technical or economic issues involved with trying DSL to farms? (Pretend there aren't any party lines still in use..)
Oh nice, because what this guy considers "serious literature" or "serious art" is so much more worthwhile in the world as compared to serious fun?
Have you ever actually played the Windows version of TuxRacer? It crashes on 4/5 runs down the slope. Completely unplayable.
I read this story and immediate thought: "AHA! Now I can actually _play_ tux-racer!!".
Well, if you're having a heart attack I surely hope you're not going to try and drive!
And if I'm having a heart attack, you'd better be giving me CPR!!
Ok, ok, I'll talk serious now. Certainly if we put our heads together we could come up with a situation where not being able to speed would kill an innocent. But I'm sure I could come up with a situation where not having a grenade-launcher could result in innocents dying as well.
So what differentiates between them? Well, put bluntly, the odds of the likelyhood multiplied by the consequences. The simple fact of the matter is that Air Bags save 100 times as many lives as they kill. The thing that sucks or that is so hard to come to grips with is that these people that air-bags kill, wouldn't be killed if air-bags didn't exist. Completely different people are dying to save a lot more people.
So, how many people are going to be saved by speed limiters and car retina-print-breathalizers, versus how many people are going to be killed by not having speed when they need it or by walking home drunk?
I'm putting *all* my money on these two technologies, and our ability to *eventually* deal with all the complexities. Instead of trying to 'keep people from crashing', now all we have to do is 'keep people from putting kids in front of airbags and put in more technology to adjust for short people'... keep whittling away at all the nasties.
Eventually the human race must venture forth from the black and white shadows, into the world filled with a million shades of grey.
That's right brainiac, you'd be all safe and sound in your little isolated igloo. No Americans would ever die... well, at least until some foreign power conquered all of the Mideast and Asia, built a fleet, and then made it an American war.
Besides, all those things inhabiting the rest of the world don't deserve what we have. Let's just let them all rot in their own feces. It's what God would want.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!! (giggle).. [wipes tear from eye]... Yeah, the USA would become an absolute paradise with someone like this in charge.
No wonder you can't make any headway into the mainstream educated (or even semi-educated) voters.
> What happens if my wife or whomever is about to give birth?
Well gollllly Jimmy-Bob, I think you should get in your car and drive 120 mph, because God knows childbirth is a dangerous life threatening situation that will always end badly if not done in a modern high-tech hospital.
(How the f*ck did that make it to 5-Insightful?)
Simple. We allow one 60 second burst of speed every 10 minutes. If you need to pass more than 6 people an hour, then something else in our world needs fixing...
Besides, soon enough all the driving will be done by computers, no 'stop-and-go' traffic, it will all be 'streamed'.
> > Seriously, if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, you will get Shakespear's sonnets.
>Sure - but how long until you get a copy of Windows2000?
Well, obviously enough it was a room full of monkeys that created Windows 98...
"God shmod! I want my monkey-man!"
-Bart
My cousin is *really* attractive. I'd clone her in a second. I know a few other guys who would too.
The "exchange mailbox format" is good??
Why do I need a 20 KiloByte proprietary binary blob which I can't view or search with any other application on the planet just to hold 500 bytes of text!!?!?!
Personally speaking, this is true, oh so true. Every so often I have to make a concerted effort to go out and *browse* off the well worn paths. It's harder than it used to be, as so many of the lesser traveled paths lead to outhouses.
I remember the first night I discovered the web in 1993, I ended up at a dozen different interesting places all over the planet, including a visual tour of some English or Irish town. It was worth a whole two pages in my letter home that week. Same as Solaris inter-machine 'talk' (still in Solaris 8!), ftp, and my discovery of mudding (OverDrive) in 91 and 92.
<aside>
Too damn bad I didn't think just an itsy bitsy witsy ahead, and thought about the ever increasing computing and networking power and decreasing performance costs. I might have quit school and done something useful with my life, instead of spending 8 years on a degree (physics) I don't use . Damn, why couldn't I see it coming? Why didn't I see it coming? Hell, even if I had seen it coming, would I have really had the guts to jump? Sigh... </aside>
I concur. Not only that, but there are people like me who don't download anything but 160+. As soon as the number of people who avoid 128 reaches critical mass, 160+ will snowball.