The "very vague emotional undercurrents" that you dismiss are precisely what make the greatest and most inexplicably moving works of art, in any medium.
I can't send you to a paper that specifically mirrors my description, but if you pick up just about any journal in the cognitive, behavioral, or social sciences and read half of it, you'll find that it's generally in keeping with our basic understanding of human interaction: part of what we find so impressive about face-to-face interaction or performances are the millions of subtle clues that aren't at all verbal but that nonetheless impart information.
For this information to be meaningful, however (and thus moving, or interesting), there must be a shared awareness of context and a reasonably compatible match between enculturation and/or conceptual frameworks for meaning-making.
The humanity is in the variability (think of them as "mistakes" in a flawless performance) not in the perfection. And a perfect imitation of a specific instance of humanity is still not human, because the mistakes are out of context. This is the same reason that random computer-generated mistakes, even perfectly random ones, still don't sound human.
When a human performs, the performance is subtly affected by the things that affect humans: the weather outside and whether it's gloomy or not; the fact that it's the holiday season; the fact that a leader has been assassinated or the performer's daughter has been ill; the musty mugginess of the air in the auditorium... these subtle types of phenomenological data affect human performances in ways that the audience and performer can share as a kind of unconscious communication, at least so long as they are from the same culture.
A computer that reproduces a previous performance, even if it does so perfectly, does so out of context. It is making all the wrong mistakes for the current situation, so it's playing just doesn't ring true. Until computers can feel gloomy because of gloomy weather, or can be thrilled because the millenium dawns at midnight, five minutes from now, they won't be able to produce performances that truly move us in the same way that human performances do, because that element of unconscious situational communication and solidarity in shared experience is missing.
I think the mistake is in reifying the "gay" vs. "straight" dichotomy.
People in our culture must decide: are you straight, or are you gay? Saying that someone is born as one or the other reinforces this black-and-white notion, rather than allowing for genetic and behavioral-environmental variability in sexuality and mating practice.
Western anthropologists have for many decades been aware of the fact that in many cultures of the world, gender and sexuality are divided into more than two simple categories, none of which necessarily coincide rigidly with the absence or presence of a Y chromosome.
The fact is that there are more "gay" people in America now than there used to be, simply because there is more opportunity for someone to construct their identity as "gay person" in response to the urges that they feel and the preferences that they have.
"Unhappy heterosexual" or "bored heterosexual" is now classified as "gay" in our society, but I think this division is equally problematic; I suspect that as time goes on it will become clear that there is just as great a percentage of "unhappy gay" people or "bored gay" people as there are of the heterosexual variety, something that is already evidenced by the oft-forgotten "bi" category that itself is inadequate, positing a position roughtly equidistant from the two polar opposites.
Based on my reading across anthropology, sociology, and medicine, I firmly believe that autism and sexuality share this property: they can be located anywhere along a spectrum of manifestations that are not well served by simply listing them as on (i.e. "autistic" or "gay") or off (i.e. "normal" or "straight") as the result of some simple genetic test.
Furthermore, the reason for the increase in gay persons and autistic persons is at least partially in response to environmental forces during development that construct the expected behaviors for these categories long before those individuals that later seem to manifest them are aware of the influence that the availability of such categories has. The biological state, to put it more succintly, is reinforced by, channeled by, and developmentally related to the categories into which people develop as they emerge as conscious individuals, as well as they ways in which they are treated and the expectations that are maintained for them as a result.
It should be obvious to nearly everyone that human development and behavior are much more complex, multifaceted, and internally inconsistent than that.
My point is that an inadequate or low-quality power supply with inadequate guage wires, poor current filtering, etc., will work only so long as it doesn't destroy your hardware.
To make matters worse, there are no standards per se. For example, most mainboards these days draw CPU power from the 12v rail, but some (most notably a few Tyan boards) draw power for as many as two CPUs from the 5v rail instead.
When a power supply is listed as "XYZ watts," most users just assume that either it's big enough or it isn't. But a 550 watt power supply that only supplies 25a on the 5v rail giving the rest to 12v is going to flame out or melt wires eventually if your mainboard runs two CPUs on its 5v line. Meanwhile, a 550 watt that supplies 50a on the 5v line but only 10 or 15 on the 12 will flame out if your mainboard runs a pair of CPUs on 12v.
There really is that much variability, too--check the power supply listings on ebay for a single value like 450 watts and read the amperage ratings for each rail. That power is spread every which way depending on manufacturer whims.
To make matters more complex are all of the big hairy AGP card that people are running these days, which draw tons of current, too.
It's a big deal and probably will get bigger if we continue to use bigger and bigger CPUs and GPUs.
Don't be naive. Electronic digital components are still electronic; their digital property is the result of engineering, not the result of physics.
The average computer has 30-50 amps of DC power flowing around inside it along with a pile of VRMs. Inadequate or low quality conductors and connections can lead to excess heat, meltdowns, overvoltage/undervoltage, or degredation in components due to said heat, meltdowns, overvoltage/undervoltage, etc. This degredation can then in turn affect power consistency/availability or indeed the digital nature (threshold sensitivity) of components themselves.
They're only digital so long as you don't wear 'em out or melt 'em down by giving them bad power. And the result is exactly what many think to be standards of consumer computing: instability, crashes, overheating, component failures, etc.
Um, without Netscape's extensions, there would be no World Wide Web as we know it today.
Anyone who was around at the birth of the "web" knows that from the user interface perspective, it was basically not much better than gopher (yes, there used to be a "web-like" system called gopher), and contained much less content overall.
Capabilities like text centering, forms, and tables are what turned the web into something that non-geeks and businesses could embrace for Commerce and Content delivery (note capitol Cs).
For those of you who don't know HTML, basically this all means that on the early Web, something as simple as two columns of text (much less anything like a sidebar or inset photo) was impossible. EVERY page on the web was paragraph text, from top to bottom and left to right, with each line of text extending all the way from the left edge of the browser to the right edge.
I think he's often focussed on cinematography over plot and story, but then again, if he wasn't, he'd probably be a book critic instead of a movie critic.
Thank god somebody gets it:
It's a movie. The reason it is a movie and not a book is because the creator has decided to use sound and visuals in a time-limited form, rather than to write a complete, consistent, deep fictional world in pages.
By the time you see it on the screen, the choice for a given story has already been made: to sacrifice plot and character development in the interest of including visuals and sound.
If you then turn around and say "wow, this film has great cinematography but it sucks because the plot isn't as strong as it could have been," you're completely missing the point. Go buy a book.
Even films with no plot (see Godard's "Weekend") can be considered classics based on the arrangement of scenes and adeptness of the cultral communication in its setpieces.
On the other hand, for the ultimate illustration, compare two hours in a dark room with zero plot but great visuals and sound to two hours in a a dark room with zero visuals or sound and tell me which you'd rather live through.
Basically, to everyone who complains about films with great visuals and sound (especially those that complain that a film doesn't live up to an existing novel): turn on the light and read a book. You're trying to walk through the park by driving your car.
I'm running Fedora Core on my ThinkPad T22 (a relatively modern machine with SpeedStep, USB, etc.) and everything was detected and installed fine, including power management.
I always end up compiling my own kernel for extra features that I want to use, but I needn't have if I didn't want to.
Part of the problem at the time was that Linux was under very heavy development. I know, it's under very heavy development now, but major XFree86 and desktop and libc versions were in flux.
For example, IBM was, IIRC, shipping Caldera OpenLinux 1.3, a fine distribution, one that was one of the best at the time--until the transition within a few short months from libc5 to libc6, XFree86 3 to XFree86 4, KDE 1 to KDE 2, etc. And suddenly, nearly every piece of new, interesting Linux software was incompatible with OpenLinux 1.3 (and all other current distributions at the time), even when compiling from scratch (you'd basically have to reinstall 50% of your packages ad-hoc to get something to compile, many of them system packages) and every current Linux book that discussed config files or the desktop or whatever didn't seem to match what the users had on their systems.
Linux was changing too quickly at that point to be the desktop alternative that it is now. It's a shame that everyone jumped on it just a little too quickly. I think it makes evident the distaste that both consumer and OEM alike have for Windows and the degree to which they were searching, even five or six years ago, for an alternative.
Usually, if the engineer says something like that, the manager will just move the team along regardless. "We're going to release on XYZ. Whatever's there is what the team will be working on and will get released. If you want it fixed by release, just be sure it's fixed before then."
It all speaks to our fondest value in the us, evident in places as diverse as SPAM, excessive plastic surgery, and corporate welfare/rights: so long is someone can believably assert that they are "just trying to make a buck," our national consciousness and our lawmaking machinery are \\absolutley loath\\ to do anything to slow them down, whether the argument is ethnical, environmental, logistical, criminal...
It's time to return to my little library of books, which are light, were cheap, are deeper than DVDs or CDs, and don't accuse me every time I interact with them.
You're missing the point. Think about your experiences in corporate America thus far.
Imagine that you work in development for Vendor X producing Vendor X Linux. You have a marketing department and some managers over you, all hungry for targets and bonuses.
As a developer, you have spent the last three months bringing the product in line with LSB for the alpha test. Now, as you detail your changes in a meeting, both marketing and management jump on you:
"Wait, you mean our Vendor X Linux is now the same as Vendor Y Linux and Vendor Z Linux?"
"NO!" You answer, almost in a huff. "It just shares a fundamental compatibility with them. A common set of file locations, libraries, etc., so that customers know that what runs on Vendor X Linux will also run on Y Linux and Z Linux."
"So what you're saying," the manager responds, "Is that you're doing your best to lower barriers to out-migration among our existing customer base, while at the same time creating just the sort of backward-compatibility headache that is most likely to encourage it?"
"Plus," the marketing person adds, "you're diluting the brand! We have a strong brand and are proud of the value adds that our differences from other distributions represent. If we're LSB and Y is LSB and Z is LSB, we're really saying to the customer that we're the same as they are. We don't want to be the same. We want to be better. We have a strong brand and we shouldn't be afraid to use it! We want to be the standard; we want to make sure that Y and Z match us. We certainly don't want to go around saying that we're doing our best to match them."
Next thing you know, you're walking out of that meeting with instructions to roll back the changes you've just spent the last few months making, to ensure that the product is NOT LSB-ready.
4. Rebates get customers into the store, so that they have to make a purchase of some kind if they don't want to have wasted a trip.
How many times have you gone into AstoreUSA or Somestore Depot because they had a brand new 17" LCD monitor in their ad for $0.00 (FREEEEE!!!!): $599.99 - $299.99 manufacturer mail-in rebate - $200.00 store mail-in rebate - $100.00 club mail in rebate.
Only when you get there after a 45 minute drive, and they're ALL SOLD OUT, OH NO, even though you called ahead to make sure they had some! Of course, they have a big giant poster and a bunch of price signs next to an empty shelf to show you where these mystical items "WERE" but (the salesperson tells you) they were all gone by noon. HOWEVER......they can give you a great deal on another model for $399.99 that's from a better manufacturer with a better warranty. No, there's no rebate, it's really $399.99, but as long as you're here and you've made the trip, why not consider it?
It's bait-and-switch. I'd list that as reason #1, based on the number of times I've gone to AstoreUSA or Somestore Depot only to find that 90% of the "rebate" items in their circular are completely sold out by noon on the FIRST DAY of the "sale."
Um, I used to work in IT as a network administrator over a heterogeneous network of UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac 68k machines.
Here's a 101 course in reality for you: I'm now a professional writer and editor instead of a tech monkey, and if I want to have a job, I can't tell the production department--who uses Quark, not LaTeX--that I don't want to deliver important file XYZ in the company format (Word) or use the pre-built the company styles. They'll look at me funny. If I keep at it, I'll miss my targets, and I'll be out of a job.
Now that I'm on this end of things, I also can't install any non-IT-approved software on my work PC, so no Linux, no OpenOffice, and no LaTeX (not that I do typesetting anyway; we pay people for that, whether or not you think it can be done for free using LaTeX). Yes, I probably could move over to the IT department and then I could affect IT policy and install whatever I want on my PC, but the shift from editorial back to IT would mean a large pay cut, and plus... I don't want to do it.
So from someone who spent years formatting for band printers in uEmacs (because emacs was too big a memory footprint for our hardware) using nroff or groff (do you even know what those are?), and who can also format documents using LaTeX when necessary, why don't you \usepackage{common-sense} and realize that some of us work, we have to work within the environment of the team, and it's nice in that environment to be able to see TWO PAGES OF WHAT YOU'RE WORKING ON at once, not to see how it's laid out, but because sometimes when you're writing about DIFFICULT SUBJECTS it's nice to have context and nearby sentences so that you can see if your writing flows.
But I wouldn't expect an IT 101 student to know much about good writing.
Marketing is much, much worse than that in a technology driven company because the marketers do not understand even the current products and how they are used.
This is the key in almost every technology firm I've worked in for the last fifteen years.
Marketers:
- Think they're smarter or higher-functioning than the engineers because they're usually well-dressed and personable, while the engineers are often just a little, well, engineery.
- So they tend to make their own decisions on what's useful and what's not, even though they don't really understand why any of their customers buy any of their products...
-...because they don't understand what any of their customers do or what any of their products are used for, so meetings are often wasted just trying to tell marketing what a product is, enough that they might be able to cook up some ad copy or a plan that's remotely related...
-...but they inevitably want to schematize based on what they already know, rather than on what the engineer is trying to say: "Oh, I get it! So a forty percent reduction in memory footprint by using a recursive process is kind of like hiring a more responsible maid to clean your kitchen, if the one you already had was stealing from you, right? So the launch campaign will focus on positive results and trust, maybe we'll even use the maid idea, I sort of like it. No, I don't think we should use words like 'reduced memory footprint' in our ad copy, nobody knows what that means. I certainly don't. I mean, you have to realize that you guys know what it means, but not everybody is an engineer."
- Marketing folk are essentially trained to see a generalized, broad, open kind of "market" that is both darwinistic and capitalistic. They are not at all prepared for the vertical, integrated, and often very narrow, specialized, or jargon- and needs-laden marketplaces of science and technology.
Marketing has transitioned from the process of making informed customers aware of what you're selling to selling irrelevant "overhead" products between businesses to clueless corporate buyers who, more likely than not, are also marketers. It's a kind of incestuous cesspit that currently controls a huge portion of the capital that's at play, and that stifles both innovation and simple functionality in the workplace.
And the problem is that it given current organization charts, these days marketing's input generally drives the R&D budget, rather than the people who work in R&D. The budget is set based on what marketing is planning to do over the next few quarters or the next several years. Not just the amount, but also the use of the R&D budget is directed accordingly.
I hear this a lot... "American PhDs are real PhDs, the overseas ones just went to high schools that try to issue PhDs" or some such.
If you've ever been to any of our top schools, in any field, whether it's MIT for science and technology or Chicago for sociology... OUR TOP PROGRAMS ARE FULL OF FOREIGN STUDENTS.
The foreign PhDs that we are outsourcing to are in many cases the top of class students from our best schools, while the American PhDs that must be paid four times as much are the B and C students from the same programs.
Sure, there are some idiot foreign PhDs. Do you have any idea how many bland, idiotic American PhDs are out there in the work force? Let me assure you, there are enough that we never, ever need to worry about running out of them.
When you get into your career after college, you'll discover that the people that are good at what they do get jobs in the commercial sector. This is because they can pay them well for their ability.
The people in the private sector are completely incompetent; but since none of them have any idea what competence actually looks like, they go around patting each other on the back and assuming that they're all doing great jobs.
The brightest people around work in:
- Academics - Policy analysis - Large, international nonprofits
I am an academic who has worked in all of the above areas, and the private sector, and done contract work for the government.
The private sector and the government are both bone stupid, they're just stupid in different ways.
Counter-point: If a system doesn't have enough preferences to configure the things that I want to configure, I won't use it, even if it's "better for me" and "better for software the whole world wide!"
People don't even understand the issues enough to talk about them, much less be upset by them.
I shock people every day by using an unlocked cell phone. It has one carrier's logo on the outside and another on the screen. I unlocked it myself. More often than not, people are very interested in "how I did that" but don't have time to actually listen to the ten-sentence explanation: they're busy trying to keep their job and earn enough money to make rent. They already have too many things on their plate.
Those that do listen are shocked and I've had several people talk to me in utter disbelief that "they" would impose artificial walls of dysfunctionality on devices that we pay for, in order to ensure/increase "their" profits.
Other issues I've had similar experiences trying to explain to people include:
DVD region encoding
Inkjet/laser printer ink/toner compatibility
Automobile performance tuning (i.e. "the computer" in the car)
Just about everything else
When people don't even understand the technology... when DVDs, printers, phones, VCRs, cars, and everything else are just bewildering "magic" to very intelligent people (lawyers, accountants, etc..), it's no wonder that they don't understand (and thus can't act on) any of the issues that surround technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The "very vague emotional undercurrents" that you dismiss are precisely what make the greatest and most inexplicably moving works of art, in any medium.
I can't send you to a paper that specifically mirrors my description, but if you pick up just about any journal in the cognitive, behavioral, or social sciences and read half of it, you'll find that it's generally in keeping with our basic understanding of human interaction: part of what we find so impressive about face-to-face interaction or performances are the millions of subtle clues that aren't at all verbal but that nonetheless impart information.
For this information to be meaningful, however (and thus moving, or interesting), there must be a shared awareness of context and a reasonably compatible match between enculturation and/or conceptual frameworks for meaning-making.
The humanity is in the variability (think of them as "mistakes" in a flawless performance) not in the perfection. And a perfect imitation of a specific instance of humanity is still not human, because the mistakes are out of context. This is the same reason that random computer-generated mistakes, even perfectly random ones, still don't sound human.
When a human performs, the performance is subtly affected by the things that affect humans: the weather outside and whether it's gloomy or not; the fact that it's the holiday season; the fact that a leader has been assassinated or the performer's daughter has been ill; the musty mugginess of the air in the auditorium... these subtle types of phenomenological data affect human performances in ways that the audience and performer can share as a kind of unconscious communication, at least so long as they are from the same culture.
A computer that reproduces a previous performance, even if it does so perfectly, does so out of context. It is making all the wrong mistakes for the current situation, so it's playing just doesn't ring true. Until computers can feel gloomy because of gloomy weather, or can be thrilled because the millenium dawns at midnight, five minutes from now, they won't be able to produce performances that truly move us in the same way that human performances do, because that element of unconscious situational communication and solidarity in shared experience is missing.
I think the mistake is in reifying the "gay" vs. "straight" dichotomy.
People in our culture must decide: are you straight, or are you gay? Saying that someone is born as one or the other reinforces this black-and-white notion, rather than allowing for genetic and behavioral-environmental variability in sexuality and mating practice.
Western anthropologists have for many decades been aware of the fact that in many cultures of the world, gender and sexuality are divided into more than two simple categories, none of which necessarily coincide rigidly with the absence or presence of a Y chromosome.
The fact is that there are more "gay" people in America now than there used to be, simply because there is more opportunity for someone to construct their identity as "gay person" in response to the urges that they feel and the preferences that they have.
"Unhappy heterosexual" or "bored heterosexual" is now classified as "gay" in our society, but I think this division is equally problematic; I suspect that as time goes on it will become clear that there is just as great a percentage of "unhappy gay" people or "bored gay" people as there are of the heterosexual variety, something that is already evidenced by the oft-forgotten "bi" category that itself is inadequate, positing a position roughtly equidistant from the two polar opposites.
Based on my reading across anthropology, sociology, and medicine, I firmly believe that autism and sexuality share this property: they can be located anywhere along a spectrum of manifestations that are not well served by simply listing them as on (i.e. "autistic" or "gay") or off (i.e. "normal" or "straight") as the result of some simple genetic test.
Furthermore, the reason for the increase in gay persons and autistic persons is at least partially in response to environmental forces during development that construct the expected behaviors for these categories long before those individuals that later seem to manifest them are aware of the influence that the availability of such categories has. The biological state, to put it more succintly, is reinforced by, channeled by, and developmentally related to the categories into which people develop as they emerge as conscious individuals, as well as they ways in which they are treated and the expectations that are maintained for them as a result.
It should be obvious to nearly everyone that human development and behavior are much more complex, multifaceted, and internally inconsistent than that.
My point is that an inadequate or low-quality power supply with inadequate guage wires, poor current filtering, etc., will work only so long as it doesn't destroy your hardware.
To make matters worse, there are no standards per se. For example, most mainboards these days draw CPU power from the 12v rail, but some (most notably a few Tyan boards) draw power for as many as two CPUs from the 5v rail instead.
When a power supply is listed as "XYZ watts," most users just assume that either it's big enough or it isn't. But a 550 watt power supply that only supplies 25a on the 5v rail giving the rest to 12v is going to flame out or melt wires eventually if your mainboard runs two CPUs on its 5v line. Meanwhile, a 550 watt that supplies 50a on the 5v line but only 10 or 15 on the 12 will flame out if your mainboard runs a pair of CPUs on 12v.
There really is that much variability, too--check the power supply listings on ebay for a single value like 450 watts and read the amperage ratings for each rail. That power is spread every which way depending on manufacturer whims.
To make matters more complex are all of the big hairy AGP card that people are running these days, which draw tons of current, too.
It's a big deal and probably will get bigger if we continue to use bigger and bigger CPUs and GPUs.
Don't be naive. Electronic digital components are still electronic; their digital property is the result of engineering, not the result of physics.
The average computer has 30-50 amps of DC power flowing around inside it along with a pile of VRMs. Inadequate or low quality conductors and connections can lead to excess heat, meltdowns, overvoltage/undervoltage, or degredation in components due to said heat, meltdowns, overvoltage/undervoltage, etc. This degredation can then in turn affect power consistency/availability or indeed the digital nature (threshold sensitivity) of components themselves.
They're only digital so long as you don't wear 'em out or melt 'em down by giving them bad power. And the result is exactly what many think to be standards of consumer computing: instability, crashes, overheating, component failures, etc.
Um, without Netscape's extensions, there would be no World Wide Web as we know it today.
Anyone who was around at the birth of the "web" knows that from the user interface perspective, it was basically not much better than gopher (yes, there used to be a "web-like" system called gopher), and contained much less content overall.
Capabilities like text centering, forms, and tables are what turned the web into something that non-geeks and businesses could embrace for Commerce and Content delivery (note capitol Cs).
For those of you who don't know HTML, basically this all means that on the early Web, something as simple as two columns of text (much less anything like a sidebar or inset photo) was impossible. EVERY page on the web was paragraph text, from top to bottom and left to right, with each line of text extending all the way from the left edge of the browser to the right edge.
I think he's often focussed on cinematography over plot and story, but then again, if he wasn't, he'd probably be a book critic instead of a movie critic.
Thank god somebody gets it:
It's a movie. The reason it is a movie and not a book is because the creator has decided to use sound and visuals in a time-limited form, rather than to write a complete, consistent, deep fictional world in pages.
By the time you see it on the screen, the choice for a given story has already been made: to sacrifice plot and character development in the interest of including visuals and sound.
If you then turn around and say "wow, this film has great cinematography but it sucks because the plot isn't as strong as it could have been," you're completely missing the point. Go buy a book.
Even films with no plot (see Godard's "Weekend") can be considered classics based on the arrangement of scenes and adeptness of the cultral communication in its setpieces.
On the other hand, for the ultimate illustration, compare two hours in a dark room with zero plot but great visuals and sound to two hours in a a dark room with zero visuals or sound and tell me which you'd rather live through.
Basically, to everyone who complains about films with great visuals and sound (especially those that complain that a film doesn't live up to an existing novel): turn on the light and read a book. You're trying to walk through the park by driving your car.
Best looking computer equipment ever. Straight out of sci-fi. Combined with the name, the sexiest hardware ever.
I'm running Fedora Core on my ThinkPad T22 (a relatively modern machine with SpeedStep, USB, etc.) and everything was detected and installed fine, including power management.
I always end up compiling my own kernel for extra features that I want to use, but I needn't have if I didn't want to.
Part of the problem at the time was that Linux was under very heavy development. I know, it's under very heavy development now, but major XFree86 and desktop and libc versions were in flux.
For example, IBM was, IIRC, shipping Caldera OpenLinux 1.3, a fine distribution, one that was one of the best at the time--until the transition within a few short months from libc5 to libc6, XFree86 3 to XFree86 4, KDE 1 to KDE 2, etc. And suddenly, nearly every piece of new, interesting Linux software was incompatible with OpenLinux 1.3 (and all other current distributions at the time), even when compiling from scratch (you'd basically have to reinstall 50% of your packages ad-hoc to get something to compile, many of them system packages) and every current Linux book that discussed config files or the desktop or whatever didn't seem to match what the users had on their systems.
Linux was changing too quickly at that point to be the desktop alternative that it is now. It's a shame that everyone jumped on it just a little too quickly. I think it makes evident the distaste that both consumer and OEM alike have for Windows and the degree to which they were searching, even five or six years ago, for an alternative.
Usually, if the engineer says something like that, the manager will just move the team along regardless. "We're going to release on XYZ. Whatever's there is what the team will be working on and will get released. If you want it fixed by release, just be sure it's fixed before then."
It all speaks to our fondest value in the us, evident in places as diverse as SPAM, excessive plastic surgery, and corporate welfare/rights: so long is someone can believably assert that they are "just trying to make a buck," our national consciousness and our lawmaking machinery are \\absolutley loath\\ to do anything to slow them down, whether the argument is ethnical, environmental, logistical, criminal...
I wouldn't buy it.
It's time to return to my little library of books, which are light, were cheap, are deeper than DVDs or CDs, and don't accuse me every time I interact with them.
You're missing the point. Think about your experiences in corporate America thus far.
Imagine that you work in development for Vendor X producing Vendor X Linux. You have a marketing department and some managers over you, all hungry for targets and bonuses.
As a developer, you have spent the last three months bringing the product in line with LSB for the alpha test. Now, as you detail your changes in a meeting, both marketing and management jump on you:
"Wait, you mean our Vendor X Linux is now the same as Vendor Y Linux and Vendor Z Linux?"
"NO!" You answer, almost in a huff. "It just shares a fundamental compatibility with them. A common set of file locations, libraries, etc., so that customers know that what runs on Vendor X Linux will also run on Y Linux and Z Linux."
"So what you're saying," the manager responds, "Is that you're doing your best to lower barriers to out-migration among our existing customer base, while at the same time creating just the sort of backward-compatibility headache that is most likely to encourage it?"
"Plus," the marketing person adds, "you're diluting the brand! We have a strong brand and are proud of the value adds that our differences from other distributions represent. If we're LSB and Y is LSB and Z is LSB, we're really saying to the customer that we're the same as they are. We don't want to be the same. We want to be better. We have a strong brand and we shouldn't be afraid to use it! We want to be the standard; we want to make sure that Y and Z match us. We certainly don't want to go around saying that we're doing our best to match them."
Next thing you know, you're walking out of that meeting with instructions to roll back the changes you've just spent the last few months making, to ensure that the product is NOT LSB-ready.
4. Rebates get customers into the store, so that they have to make a purchase of some kind if they don't want to have wasted a trip.
...they can give you a great deal on another model for $399.99 that's from a better manufacturer with a better warranty. No, there's no rebate, it's really $399.99, but as long as you're here and you've made the trip, why not consider it?
How many times have you gone into AstoreUSA or Somestore Depot because they had a brand new 17" LCD monitor in their ad for $0.00 (FREEEEE!!!!): $599.99 - $299.99 manufacturer mail-in rebate - $200.00 store mail-in rebate - $100.00 club mail in rebate.
Only when you get there after a 45 minute drive, and they're ALL SOLD OUT, OH NO, even though you called ahead to make sure they had some! Of course, they have a big giant poster and a bunch of price signs next to an empty shelf to show you where these mystical items "WERE" but (the salesperson tells you) they were all gone by noon. HOWEVER...
It's bait-and-switch. I'd list that as reason #1, based on the number of times I've gone to AstoreUSA or Somestore Depot only to find that 90% of the "rebate" items in their circular are completely sold out by noon on the FIRST DAY of the "sale."
Um, I used to work in IT as a network administrator over a heterogeneous network of UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac 68k machines.
Here's a 101 course in reality for you: I'm now a professional writer and editor instead of a tech monkey, and if I want to have a job, I can't tell the production department--who uses Quark, not LaTeX--that I don't want to deliver important file XYZ in the company format (Word) or use the pre-built the company styles. They'll look at me funny. If I keep at it, I'll miss my targets, and I'll be out of a job.
Now that I'm on this end of things, I also can't install any non-IT-approved software on my work PC, so no Linux, no OpenOffice, and no LaTeX (not that I do typesetting anyway; we pay people for that, whether or not you think it can be done for free using LaTeX). Yes, I probably could move over to the IT department and then I could affect IT policy and install whatever I want on my PC, but the shift from editorial back to IT would mean a large pay cut, and plus... I don't want to do it.
So from someone who spent years formatting for band printers in uEmacs (because emacs was too big a memory footprint for our hardware) using nroff or groff (do you even know what those are?), and who can also format documents using LaTeX when necessary, why don't you \usepackage{common-sense} and realize that some of us work, we have to work within the environment of the team, and it's nice in that environment to be able to see TWO PAGES OF WHAT YOU'RE WORKING ON at once, not to see how it's laid out, but because sometimes when you're writing about DIFFICULT SUBJECTS it's nice to have context and nearby sentences so that you can see if your writing flows.
But I wouldn't expect an IT 101 student to know much about good writing.
I second this! This was originally a WordPerfect feature and now Word does it. When will OpenOffice do it? I can't imagine writing without it!
Marketing is much, much worse than that in a technology driven company because the marketers do not understand even the current products and how they are used.
...because they don't understand what any of their customers do or what any of their products are used for, so meetings are often wasted just trying to tell marketing what a product is, enough that they might be able to cook up some ad copy or a plan that's remotely related...
...but they inevitably want to schematize based on what they already know, rather than on what the engineer is trying to say: "Oh, I get it! So a forty percent reduction in memory footprint by using a recursive process is kind of like hiring a more responsible maid to clean your kitchen, if the one you already had was stealing from you, right? So the launch campaign will focus on positive results and trust, maybe we'll even use the maid idea, I sort of like it. No, I don't think we should use words like 'reduced memory footprint' in our ad copy, nobody knows what that means. I certainly don't. I mean, you have to realize that you guys know what it means, but not everybody is an engineer."
This is the key in almost every technology firm I've worked in for the last fifteen years.
Marketers:
- Think they're smarter or higher-functioning than the engineers because they're usually well-dressed and personable, while the engineers are often just a little, well, engineery.
- So they tend to make their own decisions on what's useful and what's not, even though they don't really understand why any of their customers buy any of their products...
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- Marketing folk are essentially trained to see a generalized, broad, open kind of "market" that is both darwinistic and capitalistic. They are not at all prepared for the vertical, integrated, and often very narrow, specialized, or jargon- and needs-laden marketplaces of science and technology.
Marketing has transitioned from the process of making informed customers aware of what you're selling to selling irrelevant "overhead" products between businesses to clueless corporate buyers who, more likely than not, are also marketers. It's a kind of incestuous cesspit that currently controls a huge portion of the capital that's at play, and that stifles both innovation and simple functionality in the workplace.
And the problem is that it given current organization charts, these days marketing's input generally drives the R&D budget, rather than the people who work in R&D. The budget is set based on what marketing is planning to do over the next few quarters or the next several years. Not just the amount, but also the use of the R&D budget is directed accordingly.
Sorry, but this just isn't true.
I hear this a lot... "American PhDs are real PhDs, the overseas ones just went to high schools that try to issue PhDs" or some such.
If you've ever been to any of our top schools, in any field, whether it's MIT for science and technology or Chicago for sociology... OUR TOP PROGRAMS ARE FULL OF FOREIGN STUDENTS.
The foreign PhDs that we are outsourcing to are in many cases the top of class students from our best schools, while the American PhDs that must be paid four times as much are the B and C students from the same programs.
Sure, there are some idiot foreign PhDs. Do you have any idea how many bland, idiotic American PhDs are out there in the work force? Let me assure you, there are enough that we never, ever need to worry about running out of them.
When you get into your career after college, you'll discover that the people that are good at what they do get jobs in the commercial sector. This is because they can pay them well for their ability.
The people in the private sector are completely incompetent; but since none of them have any idea what competence actually looks like, they go around patting each other on the back and assuming that they're all doing great jobs.
The brightest people around work in:
- Academics
- Policy analysis
- Large, international nonprofits
I am an academic who has worked in all of the above areas, and the private sector, and done contract work for the government.
The private sector and the government are both bone stupid, they're just stupid in different ways.
Counter-point: If a system doesn't have enough preferences to configure the things that I want to configure, I won't use it, even if it's "better for me" and "better for software the whole world wide!"
People don't even understand the issues enough to talk about them, much less be upset by them.
I shock people every day by using an unlocked cell phone. It has one carrier's logo on the outside and another on the screen. I unlocked it myself. More often than not, people are very interested in "how I did that" but don't have time to actually listen to the ten-sentence explanation: they're busy trying to keep their job and earn enough money to make rent. They already have too many things on their plate.
Those that do listen are shocked and I've had several people talk to me in utter disbelief that "they" would impose artificial walls of dysfunctionality on devices that we pay for, in order to ensure/increase "their" profits.
Other issues I've had similar experiences trying to explain to people include:
When people don't even understand the technology... when DVDs, printers, phones, VCRs, cars, and everything else are just bewildering "magic" to very intelligent people (lawyers, accountants, etc..), it's no wonder that they don't understand (and thus can't act on) any of the issues that surround technology.
I knew how to rule the world in 1991 but unfortunately it changed. For the better.
Yeah, Linux happened and Stallman's free software vision took off.