meh... prior to my current job i would have agreed with you 100%. But I've actually stumbled into working somewhere that actually does have a culture. Everyone here is willing to put in as much time as it takes to make our clients happy; including staying up until 4am for a load test one night and then waking at 3am for a meeting with an overseas client the next. We've had people hop on and help troubleshoot while at the hospital and vacation, and drive hardware to other states over their weekend. More importantly, there is never a boss forcing or even asking it to be done, we just do what we know is needed. Co workers are open to receiving and dishing out honest opinions - no matter how harsh - and build stronger relationships with other on the count of it.
It may sound gruesome, but that is where the company embracing culture and its employees comes in. While we are semi expected to be in the office between 10am and 6pm, there is no one watching or caring what time you leave or come in - so long as you're getting your job done. Hell, we don't even track time! Any given night there is at least a few of us out having drinks, and even working from the bar. And more importantly, we are all very accepting. Anyone busting their asses is welcome, with open arms. Our office has a full service coffee bar with a barrista (free), free soda, free snacks, ping pong tables, several arcade machines, a theater and buys lunch for everyone every friday. We have no internet filters or people watching our activity. it's not all that uncommon to see people on facebook or reddit or even playing a video game. It's not uncommon for nerf gun fights to break out, or coworkers facebook bombing each other. Again, all that matters is performance. We all recognize that some weeks are 80 hours of chasing fires, and others are spent dicking around. Working from home is accepted, so long as it isn't abused. And even then they deal with it on an individual basis rather the typical all-encompassing "new company rules" approach. There are no "designated smoke breaks" and no one bitching about the smokers (myself being one have been previously unaccustomed to not constantly hearing that crap). Internal meetings are full of cursing - with our CEO being the biggest potty mouth. In fact, we make it a point to drop as many 4 letter words as we can during interviews to make sure the candidate isn't uptight about that kind of thing.
This may sound like an impossible environment to work/be productive in... but our flagship product has over 30 million lines of code, we have a hosted environment with 5 datacenters globally + EC2 overflow + PCI walled gardens, and hundreds of premise clients as well - all of which we support 24/7 without discrimination or cost to the client. And since our product is the backbone of many solutions, we have to deal with nearly every type of language and tech out there. python, ruby, groovy, java, C, php, opa, ccxml, vxml, html, groovy, js/jquery, etc. Even better, the purpose of our product is to parse/render many of those languages, it requirs a fairly deep understanding of them, and constant learning... we have to work with ALL db's, OS's, web service types, packet analysis, working with various carriers and telco's and hardwares, etc. . All done with around 100 employees, total - which only about 60 are technical.
TL;DR - free/happy employees make the best employees. Just make sure you focus on hiring/keeping the aces.
just because he asked the questions doesn't mean he is technically inept. He may already have a good idea of what the answer is and simply wants to see if it is in line with what others think. And even if he doesn't, he may still be the most technical person on the board. Asking questions/assuming you don't know everything/getting a broad range of opinion is ALWAYS the smart way to go about things.
This. More specifically, this summary was a very long winded way of saying "people" (meaning the less technically inclined in this context) do not want to hear actual facts - better they will shun anyone who attempts provide them - rather they want to know what their peer groups' opinion is, despite any form of reasoning. Not sure why this is news, or even research worthy.
Would NASA have ever been able to do that? No. NASA would have sent the rocket into space with the problem because it had no such software.
Which stated that NASA wouldn't have caught this issue in time (or at all even). And while they probably didn't have a computer making all of these decisions, I can't see them lacking a pressure valve that when opened diverted pressure to something of an 'off' switch - which would have accomplished the same thing; nearly as fast as a computer. (speed of air over a few feet vs speed of calculation.. )
I don't disagree that the new rockets are safer - "new" is [nearly] always better when talking cutting edge science/engineering. Especially since computers have become so powerful. But that this doesn't mean that NASA was a failure - only that they didn't have the desire to upgrade, yet. You have to consider that this transition was rather forced - creating a less than natural progression of events. Even more, you have to consider that most of the Xspace engineers came from NASA...
you honestly think NASA used zero fault detection?? they had triple redundancy of nearly every system for god's sake! I for one see a pressure sensor/valve as nothing impressive. I can't imagine that such technology hasn't been employed in the space program since day one.
As for TFA - the media makes me bitter. Something that was intended for the good of the public has become vastly more of a harm. While I am of the opinion that the transition from public to private space programs should have been accomplished more organically, privatizing it overall is a good thing. And smear campaigns by the media is only helping to setback our nation - as funding and public opinion are often closely related.
The original enercalc, which performed various indeterminate/FEM calculations, like frame analysis, was written in excel (well, an early version of lotus) (ref: http://www.enercalc.com/sel58_help/index.html?company__software_history.htm ) I myself have written entire engineering calculation templates and even was able to perform automated solution on an iterative problem (ICR for an arbitrary bolt grouping - Crawford and Kulak) which mathmatica was unable to do (it simply replied "no algebraic solution") using excel. So while it isn't formally a "language" it is still a very powerful (and fast) solution to many mathematical/logic endeavors.
That index does not include numPy and sciPy, which is specifically what TFA is talking about. numPy performs calculations at "near C" speeds (at least *much* faster than normal python or other non-compiled languages can). And yes, a good amount of research/non-programming scientific types use it. I would imagine the time difference between learning to code well in C versus learning to use numPy at a basic level would pretty much cover the time one might save in performance. Plus C is a lot more writing.
when did I say any of that? We currently live in a decently educated society. So, NO... I didn't say that I don't want to live in the USA of today. And that is because more people are able to afford higher education. and NO I don't believe that high school is not enough - even private schools. If you are looking for further examples, look to any first world nation. If you are looking for a contrast comparison, look to any third world nation. Notice any distinct patterns? Figure there may be a correlation? I know that you would love to save an extra few dollars on your taxes (and we really are talking a small amount), but the consequences are simply not worth those savings, IMHO. Lastly, if you really need a professional opinion, rather than common sense, I would direct here http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf . I would go as far to say that the decrease in average education levels, created by increased costs in higher education from our taxes NOT going toward it, would result in crime levels that offset the savings in increased police budgets. That is, in the end you wouldn't be saving any money.
Because we would prefer that the general populous be educated. The more the better. It is to our detriment even. Under educated societies are dangerous in a number of ways - even for the people who are "better/above" than the general populous. It's not a place I would want to live, at least. So what your tax dollars are paying for is a better society. Thinking that it is merely paying for some individuals chance at success is vastly short-sighted.
all undergraduate study, at every state college, is covered 5/8's by taxes. tuition is only the other 3/8. That is the portions in FL at least - not sure about other states. That is why "out of state" and graduate students pay more. and that is why a state college costs less than a private one.
Simple curiosity.... when was a two-faced? I said we don't know what impact we are having, and we don't know if trying to control it will have a desirable outcome. For all we know CO2 has helped in terms of long term planet health... which is exactly my point: we don't know. So how can we know what is "the right thing" ?
This. Further, most of the "consensus" has been that we are, in fact, warming up. (duh) But there are still the matters of 1.) is this a natural phenomenon that (apperently has) happens regardless of our input and 2.) should we go dicking with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over... *those* are the points they need to address. Not simply "yes, it's getting warmer"... As far as I'm concerned, until our weather man can accurately predict at least 5 days out - for some small section of the planet - we have no business assuming we know wtf we are doing when messing with what appears a natural cycle of our global climate. We simply don't/can't know the consequences of such actions. (i.e. the planet becoming uninhabitable rather than merely less-inhabitable)
eh... to be fair the patent isn't *completely* a troll. they were fairly specific about packet encoding and what sides of the communication are responsible for what logic. But IMO without and engine/framework having been made by them and commercially available, it is akin to patenting logic.
hmm, not sure that I get what would stop people from sniffin the traffic and using etc/host to your own server to make the game *think* it is in contact with them. with that said, what's the issue again?
yeah, i was aware that it may entice some more... but i figured better people were warned, rather than blindly clicking like i did. good to know it is fake. still disgusting.
my guess is they were talking required streaming rates...? I doubt the author actually thinks a 1Tbps would transfer 500 blue rays in 1 second... (though, you never know..)
I think the true "green solution" is to get to a point where we do most of space-based manufacturing and placement of such items from outer space itself. At least the moon. then the only times we would need to lift off from our planet would be to put people there.
"He also is surprised the music industry has not addressed the artists' rights violations taking place on YouTube"
or the part directly from TFA
"You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube."
regardless of whether it is in the context of sound quality or not is still proof of my point -- yet another person who fails to understand and strive to embrace, rather wants to fight it instead.
you sire, are just plain wrong. In piracy most "theft" is of stuff that the "thief" wouldn't have paid for regardless. Like the entire anthology of pearl jam - VERY FEW would ever buy all of that. They would maybe buy a couple of singles, or maybe a disc. So the loss is no where near as great as the guys calculating it understand. However, the consequence is that the name of what they "stole" becomes better known. Other people hear them listening to this music and *some* of them will want to buy. It is free marketing - and very good marketing too.
Autocad has always been my proof-of-concept in this argument. Prior to 2004 Autocad had plenty of well positioned competitors. There was really no specific reason for them to become the industry leaders; except for piracy. People wanted to learn cad, or just play with "some new software." Nearly NONE of those people would have gone out and chunked $5,000 at those endeavors. But, because Autocad was the easiest to pirate, it become the CAD software that everyone had some experience with. So companies were smart to buy autocad, since all of their potential hires had already trained themselves for free. And it become the name that people associated with the word "drafting" at-large; enabling Autodesk to becomes the graphics powerhouse they are today.
The pure point of the matter is that these industries need to learn how to harness the way things work rather than wasting all of *our* time and money trying to fight it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can appreciate this. But my aim was advice I felt in-line with the ops inquiry.
meh... prior to my current job i would have agreed with you 100%. But I've actually stumbled into working somewhere that actually does have a culture. Everyone here is willing to put in as much time as it takes to make our clients happy; including staying up until 4am for a load test one night and then waking at 3am for a meeting with an overseas client the next. We've had people hop on and help troubleshoot while at the hospital and vacation, and drive hardware to other states over their weekend. More importantly, there is never a boss forcing or even asking it to be done, we just do what we know is needed. Co workers are open to receiving and dishing out honest opinions - no matter how harsh - and build stronger relationships with other on the count of it.
It may sound gruesome, but that is where the company embracing culture and its employees comes in. While we are semi expected to be in the office between 10am and 6pm, there is no one watching or caring what time you leave or come in - so long as you're getting your job done. Hell, we don't even track time! Any given night there is at least a few of us out having drinks, and even working from the bar. And more importantly, we are all very accepting. Anyone busting their asses is welcome, with open arms. Our office has a full service coffee bar with a barrista (free), free soda, free snacks, ping pong tables, several arcade machines, a theater and buys lunch for everyone every friday. We have no internet filters or people watching our activity. it's not all that uncommon to see people on facebook or reddit or even playing a video game. It's not uncommon for nerf gun fights to break out, or coworkers facebook bombing each other. Again, all that matters is performance. We all recognize that some weeks are 80 hours of chasing fires, and others are spent dicking around. Working from home is accepted, so long as it isn't abused. And even then they deal with it on an individual basis rather the typical all-encompassing "new company rules" approach. There are no "designated smoke breaks" and no one bitching about the smokers (myself being one have been previously unaccustomed to not constantly hearing that crap). Internal meetings are full of cursing - with our CEO being the biggest potty mouth. In fact, we make it a point to drop as many 4 letter words as we can during interviews to make sure the candidate isn't uptight about that kind of thing.
This may sound like an impossible environment to work/be productive in... but our flagship product has over 30 million lines of code, we have a hosted environment with 5 datacenters globally + EC2 overflow + PCI walled gardens, and hundreds of premise clients as well - all of which we support 24/7 without discrimination or cost to the client. And since our product is the backbone of many solutions, we have to deal with nearly every type of language and tech out there. python, ruby, groovy, java, C, php, opa, ccxml, vxml, html, groovy, js/jquery, etc. Even better, the purpose of our product is to parse/render many of those languages, it requirs a fairly deep understanding of them, and constant learning... we have to work with ALL db's, OS's, web service types, packet analysis, working with various carriers and telco's and hardwares, etc. . All done with around 100 employees, total - which only about 60 are technical.
TL;DR - free/happy employees make the best employees. Just make sure you focus on hiring/keeping the aces.
just because he asked the questions doesn't mean he is technically inept. He may already have a good idea of what the answer is and simply wants to see if it is in line with what others think. And even if he doesn't, he may still be the most technical person on the board. Asking questions/assuming you don't know everything/getting a broad range of opinion is ALWAYS the smart way to go about things.
This. More specifically, this summary was a very long winded way of saying "people" (meaning the less technically inclined in this context) do not want to hear actual facts - better they will shun anyone who attempts provide them - rather they want to know what their peer groups' opinion is, despite any form of reasoning. Not sure why this is news, or even research worthy.
Would NASA have ever been able to do that? No. NASA would have sent the rocket into space with the problem because it had no such software.
Which stated that NASA wouldn't have caught this issue in time (or at all even). And while they probably didn't have a computer making all of these decisions, I can't see them lacking a pressure valve that when opened diverted pressure to something of an 'off' switch - which would have accomplished the same thing; nearly as fast as a computer. (speed of air over a few feet vs speed of calculation.. )
I don't disagree that the new rockets are safer - "new" is [nearly] always better when talking cutting edge science/engineering. Especially since computers have become so powerful. But that this doesn't mean that NASA was a failure - only that they didn't have the desire to upgrade, yet. You have to consider that this transition was rather forced - creating a less than natural progression of events. Even more, you have to consider that most of the Xspace engineers came from NASA...
you honestly think NASA used zero fault detection?? they had triple redundancy of nearly every system for god's sake! I for one see a pressure sensor/valve as nothing impressive. I can't imagine that such technology hasn't been employed in the space program since day one.
As for TFA - the media makes me bitter. Something that was intended for the good of the public has become vastly more of a harm. While I am of the opinion that the transition from public to private space programs should have been accomplished more organically, privatizing it overall is a good thing. And smear campaigns by the media is only helping to setback our nation - as funding and public opinion are often closely related.
The original enercalc, which performed various indeterminate/FEM calculations, like frame analysis, was written in excel (well, an early version of lotus) (ref: http://www.enercalc.com/sel58_help/index.html?company__software_history.htm )
I myself have written entire engineering calculation templates and even was able to perform automated solution on an iterative problem (ICR for an arbitrary bolt grouping - Crawford and Kulak) which mathmatica was unable to do (it simply replied "no algebraic solution") using excel. So while it isn't formally a "language" it is still a very powerful (and fast) solution to many mathematical/logic endeavors.
That index does not include numPy and sciPy, which is specifically what TFA is talking about. numPy performs calculations at "near C" speeds (at least *much* faster than normal python or other non-compiled languages can). And yes, a good amount of research/non-programming scientific types use it. I would imagine the time difference between learning to code well in C versus learning to use numPy at a basic level would pretty much cover the time one might save in performance. Plus C is a lot more writing.
when did I say any of that? We currently live in a decently educated society. So, NO... I didn't say that I don't want to live in the USA of today. And that is because more people are able to afford higher education. and NO I don't believe that high school is not enough - even private schools.
If you are looking for further examples, look to any first world nation. If you are looking for a contrast comparison, look to any third world nation. Notice any distinct patterns? Figure there may be a correlation? I know that you would love to save an extra few dollars on your taxes (and we really are talking a small amount), but the consequences are simply not worth those savings, IMHO. Lastly, if you really need a professional opinion, rather than common sense, I would direct here http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf .
I would go as far to say that the decrease in average education levels, created by increased costs in higher education from our taxes NOT going toward it, would result in crime levels that offset the savings in increased police budgets. That is, in the end you wouldn't be saving any money.
Because we would prefer that the general populous be educated. The more the better. It is to our detriment even. Under educated societies are dangerous in a number of ways - even for the people who are "better/above" than the general populous. It's not a place I would want to live, at least. So what your tax dollars are paying for is a better society. Thinking that it is merely paying for some individuals chance at success is vastly short-sighted.
all undergraduate study, at every state college, is covered 5/8's by taxes. tuition is only the other 3/8. That is the portions in FL at least - not sure about other states. That is why "out of state" and graduate students pay more. and that is why a state college costs less than a private one.
Simple curiosity .... when was a two-faced? I said we don't know what impact we are having, and we don't know if trying to control it will have a desirable outcome. For all we know CO2 has helped in terms of long term planet health... which is exactly my point: we don't know. So how can we know what is "the right thing" ?
This. Further, most of the "consensus" has been that we are, in fact, warming up. (duh) .. ...
But there are still the matters of
1.) is this a natural phenomenon that (apperently has) happens regardless of our input and
2.) should we go dicking with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over.
*those* are the points they need to address. Not simply "yes, it's getting warmer"
As far as I'm concerned, until our weather man can accurately predict at least 5 days out - for some small section of the planet - we have no business assuming we know wtf we are doing when messing with what appears a natural cycle of our global climate. We simply don't/can't know the consequences of such actions. (i.e. the planet becoming uninhabitable rather than merely less-inhabitable)
eh... to be fair the patent isn't *completely* a troll. they were fairly specific about packet encoding and what sides of the communication are responsible for what logic. But IMO without and engine/framework having been made by them and commercially available, it is akin to patenting logic.
hmm, not sure that I get what would stop people from sniffin the traffic and using etc/host to your own server to make the game *think* it is in contact with them. with that said, what's the issue again?
yeah, i was aware that it may entice some more... but i figured better people were warned, rather than blindly clicking like i did. good to know it is fake. still disgusting.
do NOT click that link.. some things you can't un-see. ... :( you've been warned.
my guess is they were talking required streaming rates...? I doubt the author actually thinks a 1Tbps would transfer 500 blue rays in 1 second... (though, you never know..)
if only i had mod points for you sir
I think the true "green solution" is to get to a point where we do most of space-based manufacturing and placement of such items from outer space itself. At least the moon. then the only times we would need to lift off from our planet would be to put people there.
"He also is surprised the music industry has not addressed the artists' rights violations taking place on YouTube"
or the part directly from TFA
"You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube."
regardless of whether it is in the context of sound quality or not is still proof of my point -- yet another person who fails to understand and strive to embrace, rather wants to fight it instead.
an old guy who doesn't understand the internet rips on the internet. go figure.
of all things, why would choose "engineer" as your ticket to inflating your salary???
eh. find replace "\t" with " " ? just a thought.
you sire, are just plain wrong. In piracy most "theft" is of stuff that the "thief" wouldn't have paid for regardless. Like the entire anthology of pearl jam - VERY FEW would ever buy all of that. They would maybe buy a couple of singles, or maybe a disc. So the loss is no where near as great as the guys calculating it understand. However, the consequence is that the name of what they "stole" becomes better known. Other people hear them listening to this music and *some* of them will want to buy. It is free marketing - and very good marketing too.
Autocad has always been my proof-of-concept in this argument. Prior to 2004 Autocad had plenty of well positioned competitors. There was really no specific reason for them to become the industry leaders; except for piracy. People wanted to learn cad, or just play with "some new software." Nearly NONE of those people would have gone out and chunked $5,000 at those endeavors. But, because Autocad was the easiest to pirate, it become the CAD software that everyone had some experience with. So companies were smart to buy autocad, since all of their potential hires had already trained themselves for free. And it become the name that people associated with the word "drafting" at-large; enabling Autodesk to becomes the graphics powerhouse they are today.
The pure point of the matter is that these industries need to learn how to harness the way things work rather than wasting all of *our* time and money trying to fight it.