Exactly. Let the company burn, if he really is that irreplaceable. They should have been more aggressive in finding a replacement, and more importantly, they should have listened to his advice. He's obviously screaming to them that all this domain knowledge will be lost because of their shitty IT systems and idiotic automatic 90-day email deletion policy. Let management suffer with the effects of their own dumb policies. This guy sounds like he's done all he can to warn management and try to help smooth the transition for them, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can't force him to drink.
The problem with this, as I see it, is that I don't think you're necessarily as likely to get quality people, in fact you may very well get worse people because they're sycophants/fanboys. An organization should do better with employees with more diverse opinions, not a bunch of yes-men.
And considering the lack of quality we've seen in a lot of the products from Apple, Google, and MS over the years, I think my opinion has merit here. Google, for instance, used to be famous for great products, but in more recent years it seems like they've been flagging a lot. Apple too; their stuff used to "just work" but now all I hear from the iDevice owners is how many problems they're having. Just hiring a bunch of fanboys seems like it might have that effect.
Thing is, everything deteriorates. Bones, organs, skin.
The problem is, they don't have to. There's lots of organisms where they're completely able to rejuvenate themselves on a regular basis. A good example of this is lizards which regrow their tails: their tails are easily pulled off, as a defense mechanism, to let them escape predators. The tails grow back relatively quickly, with no scarring, cartilage, skin, and all. Young children heal skin wounds pretty quickly and easily in humans. Some (simpler) animals go beyond this: you can cut them in half, and the two halves grow into separate organisms. Nature has already evolved mechanisms of repairing injuries, sometimes to an extreme degree. There is a theory, I believe, that we more-complex organisms don't usually do this as well because there's a direct relationship between healing ability and susceptibility to cancer. Smaller animals with short lifespans can afford better healing power because they're not going to live long enough for cancer to be a big problem, but animals with 100-year lifespans have to have much more robust cancer-protection mechanisms.
So if we rework our systems to have better healing, we can deal with the side-effects in other ways, since we have medicine and hospitals these days.
Exactly. After all, it's pretty easy for us to grow a new body right now: just fertilize an ova and let it grow. Nature has no problem growing bodies relatively quickly, it just isn't as good at repairing existing ones for some reason. Eventually we're going to figure out how that growth stage really works and use it to our advantage.
Doubtful IMO. While there have been quite a few sci-fi stories and movies about clones being used for organ harvesting, I really think we're going to figure out before long how to grow replacement organs without a clone. There's already a lot of work being done on this, and I think they already are doing significant work like this with artificial skin. This is what all this stem-cell research is all about, after all: being able to grow things quickly and easily, whether it's a replacement eyeball or liver or heart, or some artificial meat so you don't need to kill animals to enjoy a burger.
And think about it: why would you want to wait 20 years for a clone to grow to maturity so you can harvest its organs for yourself so you can live longer, when you could just grow yourself a new heart (without a host body at all) using stem cells, in just a few weeks or so?
Not too long after that, we're going to figure out many more rejuvenation therapies, and aging will simply be another disease to be fought against and eventually eradicated. You won't need to do a head transplant, because you can just have some pharmaceuticals (possibly including some nanites) injected into you periodically and maintain your age at 25 indefinitely.
It doesn't matter how many platforms Go compiles for; what matters is how much demand there is for Go programmers. Outside of Google, the answer is approximately zero, so it's a bad choice if you're worried about your continuing employability. C++, on the other hand, is used all over the place, so it's a very safe bet.
Exactly, this doesn't make sense at all for recruiting, it's actually backwards: using your own programming language makes it far more difficult to recruit, because very few people from outside your organization will have any expertise in the language.
It's called "international waters". If there's international waters between two non-adjacent countries, then there's no border. The "border" is wherever the territorial waters end (I think it's usually 5 miles off the coast, I forget exactly).
But if there's no international waters between the two, such as between the USA and Canada in the Great Lakes, then there must be a border there somewhere.
Nope, it's a border. Lots of international borders are drawn in water: the US and Canada have such a border in a few of the Great Lakes. The border lies at a particular place in the water; the water itself is NOT neutral territory. Same goes for the border between Canada and France.
Oh please. Carly Fiorina was a female CEO too, and look at the great job she did at HP.... oh wait. Now it's run by Meg Whitman... hmm, another bad example.
Well, there's also GM, run by Mary Barra... maybe that's not such a great example, considering the ignition switch problem.
Seriously, though, there's a bunch of female CEOs these days, as seen in this list. I can't say, however, that any of these companies are all that great.
And how will they do that? Oh right, in the article, she says they are going to inform people, and then social opinion shall be so! Wow! She should run for president!
I think this is an excellent example of how utterly detached from reality these corporate executives all are.
Not only not frowned upon, it's actively beneficial to all parties. The "problem" is market based pricing and region lockouts.
Wrong, this "stealing" is detrimental to certain media companies who seek to profit from region lockouts and market based pricing. That's why they want to make it socially unacceptable to use a VPN to evade region lockouts.
You don't count (almost) all the other countries on the planet being metric as a huge push?
No, because they aren't American Citizens and have no voice here, for good reason. Our government is supposed to answer to its electorate, not to foreign interests.
This whole metrification idea is really quite silly. Lots of things in America are already metric, where it makes a lot of sense to do so. Go buy yourself some soda at the grocery store; what size is the container? 2 liters. (A lot of smaller bottles are 1L too.) Even for groceries measured in imperial sizes, look at them closely: every single one of them also states its volume in metric units. Just like a lot of nations are bilingual, with nearly everything having labels or signs in two languages, we're a "bi-measurement-system" nation: many things here are stated in two units. People pick the one they're more comfortable with.
Also, for things like engineering work and other industrial stuff, many things are metric-only, because of either the need to work with other nations (or being a multinational company), or just because metric units are usually easier to work with for scientists and engineers. Most companies that do engineering work in the US already use metric units for everything; they don't need any political push to do so. Military contractors may be an exception though. But car companies aren't: all the domestic automakers long ago switched to metric (they probably all completed the transition by 2000).
I say this here every single time this dumb topic comes up, as it does come up every few years: America has already switched to metric for places where it really matters. Consumers are not the same as scientists and engineers. The places where you still see imperial units are places where consumers use them. It's like the Eloi and the Morlocks: the dumb Morlocks can keep using their archaic measurement system while the Eloi use a better one. The Eloi are smart enough to convert when they need to communicate or sell stuff to the Morlocks. The amount of money and energy needed to get the Morlocks to convert simply isn't worth it, and there are really no benefits to doing so. It isn't going to help anyone to have the weather report in degrees C instead of F. And Morlocks don't do unit conversions anyway: Suzy Homemaker is not going to look at the current temperature and use that with Boyle's Law to calculate the pressure of air in her refrigerator.
If your municipality lets you, install a septic instead of connecting to city sewer. No sewer fee. (Just get it pumped every few years).
You first tell him to minimize maintenance, and then you tell him to opt for something which requires more maintenance and is problem-prone. This makes no sense at all. Of course, some of this depends on location, but in most places I've seen, there's no sewer fee, there's only a water fee. The sewer cost is built in, and handled by the same entity, so there's no advantage in not having sewer service. Sewer service is simple and reliable; most people never have any problems (except maybe clogs, but you'd have those with septic too). Getting a septic tank cleaned is a pain, and worst of all, having a septic system means having a septic field, which can have problems, especially if there's any flooding. Finally, most places probably don't want you to have septic because they want the water back, so it can be processed and put back into the system.
Pick some trees and maybe bushes you like and put them in. Trimming every 1-10 years is easier than cutting the lawn every 3 weeks.
Bushes usually require trimming far more often than that. But avoiding lawns is a good idea if you can do it. Look up "xeriscaping". If you're going to have any lawn, try to keep the grassy area small, and use a manual reel mower to cut it; you'll get better exercise that way and generate no pollution. Use a battery-powered or corded electric weedwacker for edging/trimming. Have more wooded area, and a compost pile for kitchen waste, if you have the acreage.
Include low-voltage wiring for speakers as well as the alarm system.
This isn't 1995; why would you need wiring for speakers? That's what Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth are for. Direct wiring to speakers is mostly obsolete now (it still probably makes sense for a good stereo system, but I'm talking about situations where the speakers are remote, and not really meant for premium sound quality).
Judging by all the teenagers I've seen with their middle-aged parents at classic rock concerts in recent years, I think your supposition is probably incorrect.
There's an inverse relationship between the cost of software (including software included with hardware, like industrial devices), and the quality of that software.
"Enterprise" software is widely regarded as crap, but the software on expensive industrial machines is probably even worse.
Until then, it's not really any better than vaporware.
Just because something's too expensive for cheap-ass home computer users doesn't mean it's "vaporware". There's a lot of other sectors in the computing market that can afford more.
Well to be fair, according to TFS, this company has done nothing but talk since 2001, almost 15 years now. Now it's finally got something ready for production.
How long has HP been talking about memristors? I don't think it's been this long.
I wonder how this (now proven) technology stacks up against (not yet proven) memristors in terms of density and speed.
I admit I haven't actually read TFA, but were these "CS professors" who left for Uber, or were they "researchers" as the summary says? Yes, tenured professors do indeed get good pay and extremely good job security, but "researchers" at universities usually are not tenured professors, they're postdocs, or maybe untenured professors. Postdocs aren't paid shit, by most accounts, and it's extremely hard to get one of these coveted tenured CS professor jobs. So if these people were a bunch of PhD students, it doesn't sound like they necessarily made a bad choice.
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Exactly. Let the company burn, if he really is that irreplaceable. They should have been more aggressive in finding a replacement, and more importantly, they should have listened to his advice. He's obviously screaming to them that all this domain knowledge will be lost because of their shitty IT systems and idiotic automatic 90-day email deletion policy. Let management suffer with the effects of their own dumb policies. This guy sounds like he's done all he can to warn management and try to help smooth the transition for them, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can't force him to drink.
The problem with this, as I see it, is that I don't think you're necessarily as likely to get quality people, in fact you may very well get worse people because they're sycophants/fanboys. An organization should do better with employees with more diverse opinions, not a bunch of yes-men.
And considering the lack of quality we've seen in a lot of the products from Apple, Google, and MS over the years, I think my opinion has merit here. Google, for instance, used to be famous for great products, but in more recent years it seems like they've been flagging a lot. Apple too; their stuff used to "just work" but now all I hear from the iDevice owners is how many problems they're having. Just hiring a bunch of fanboys seems like it might have that effect.
Several species do not exhibit increasing mortality with age, meaning that they are effectively immortal but for disease and accident.
Which ones are these?
I think we're going to get to that stage before long, thanks to the availability of medical technology.
Thing is, everything deteriorates. Bones, organs, skin.
The problem is, they don't have to. There's lots of organisms where they're completely able to rejuvenate themselves on a regular basis. A good example of this is lizards which regrow their tails: their tails are easily pulled off, as a defense mechanism, to let them escape predators. The tails grow back relatively quickly, with no scarring, cartilage, skin, and all. Young children heal skin wounds pretty quickly and easily in humans. Some (simpler) animals go beyond this: you can cut them in half, and the two halves grow into separate organisms. Nature has already evolved mechanisms of repairing injuries, sometimes to an extreme degree. There is a theory, I believe, that we more-complex organisms don't usually do this as well because there's a direct relationship between healing ability and susceptibility to cancer. Smaller animals with short lifespans can afford better healing power because they're not going to live long enough for cancer to be a big problem, but animals with 100-year lifespans have to have much more robust cancer-protection mechanisms.
So if we rework our systems to have better healing, we can deal with the side-effects in other ways, since we have medicine and hospitals these days.
Exactly. After all, it's pretty easy for us to grow a new body right now: just fertilize an ova and let it grow. Nature has no problem growing bodies relatively quickly, it just isn't as good at repairing existing ones for some reason. Eventually we're going to figure out how that growth stage really works and use it to our advantage.
Doubtful IMO. While there have been quite a few sci-fi stories and movies about clones being used for organ harvesting, I really think we're going to figure out before long how to grow replacement organs without a clone. There's already a lot of work being done on this, and I think they already are doing significant work like this with artificial skin. This is what all this stem-cell research is all about, after all: being able to grow things quickly and easily, whether it's a replacement eyeball or liver or heart, or some artificial meat so you don't need to kill animals to enjoy a burger.
And think about it: why would you want to wait 20 years for a clone to grow to maturity so you can harvest its organs for yourself so you can live longer, when you could just grow yourself a new heart (without a host body at all) using stem cells, in just a few weeks or so?
Not too long after that, we're going to figure out many more rejuvenation therapies, and aging will simply be another disease to be fought against and eventually eradicated. You won't need to do a head transplant, because you can just have some pharmaceuticals (possibly including some nanites) injected into you periodically and maintain your age at 25 indefinitely.
It doesn't matter how many platforms Go compiles for; what matters is how much demand there is for Go programmers. Outside of Google, the answer is approximately zero, so it's a bad choice if you're worried about your continuing employability. C++, on the other hand, is used all over the place, so it's a very safe bet.
Exactly, this doesn't make sense at all for recruiting, it's actually backwards: using your own programming language makes it far more difficult to recruit, because very few people from outside your organization will have any expertise in the language.
It's called "international waters". If there's international waters between two non-adjacent countries, then there's no border. The "border" is wherever the territorial waters end (I think it's usually 5 miles off the coast, I forget exactly).
But if there's no international waters between the two, such as between the USA and Canada in the Great Lakes, then there must be a border there somewhere.
Nope, it's a border. Lots of international borders are drawn in water: the US and Canada have such a border in a few of the Great Lakes. The border lies at a particular place in the water; the water itself is NOT neutral territory. Same goes for the border between Canada and France.
Except that Reddit is actually highly successful, unlike this dying wasteland of a discussion forum.
Oh please. Carly Fiorina was a female CEO too, and look at the great job she did at HP.... oh wait. Now it's run by Meg Whitman... hmm, another bad example.
Well, there's also GM, run by Mary Barra... maybe that's not such a great example, considering the ignition switch problem.
Seriously, though, there's a bunch of female CEOs these days, as seen in this list. I can't say, however, that any of these companies are all that great.
Yes, but what exactly is the benefit here? Why does this needs to be mandated?
And how will they do that? Oh right, in the article, she says they are going to inform people, and then social opinion shall be so! Wow! She should run for president!
I think this is an excellent example of how utterly detached from reality these corporate executives all are.
Yeah, well, Canada is just as huge and is only bordered by ONE country.
Wrong. It's bordered by two countries: the USA and a small piece of France (St. Pierre & Miquelon).
Not only not frowned upon, it's actively beneficial to all parties. The "problem" is market based pricing and region lockouts.
Wrong, this "stealing" is detrimental to certain media companies who seek to profit from region lockouts and market based pricing. That's why they want to make it socially unacceptable to use a VPN to evade region lockouts.
You don't count (almost) all the other countries on the planet being metric as a huge push?
No, because they aren't American Citizens and have no voice here, for good reason. Our government is supposed to answer to its electorate, not to foreign interests.
This whole metrification idea is really quite silly. Lots of things in America are already metric, where it makes a lot of sense to do so. Go buy yourself some soda at the grocery store; what size is the container? 2 liters. (A lot of smaller bottles are 1L too.) Even for groceries measured in imperial sizes, look at them closely: every single one of them also states its volume in metric units. Just like a lot of nations are bilingual, with nearly everything having labels or signs in two languages, we're a "bi-measurement-system" nation: many things here are stated in two units. People pick the one they're more comfortable with.
Also, for things like engineering work and other industrial stuff, many things are metric-only, because of either the need to work with other nations (or being a multinational company), or just because metric units are usually easier to work with for scientists and engineers. Most companies that do engineering work in the US already use metric units for everything; they don't need any political push to do so. Military contractors may be an exception though. But car companies aren't: all the domestic automakers long ago switched to metric (they probably all completed the transition by 2000).
I say this here every single time this dumb topic comes up, as it does come up every few years: America has already switched to metric for places where it really matters. Consumers are not the same as scientists and engineers. The places where you still see imperial units are places where consumers use them. It's like the Eloi and the Morlocks: the dumb Morlocks can keep using their archaic measurement system while the Eloi use a better one. The Eloi are smart enough to convert when they need to communicate or sell stuff to the Morlocks. The amount of money and energy needed to get the Morlocks to convert simply isn't worth it, and there are really no benefits to doing so. It isn't going to help anyone to have the weather report in degrees C instead of F. And Morlocks don't do unit conversions anyway: Suzy Homemaker is not going to look at the current temperature and use that with Boyle's Law to calculate the pressure of air in her refrigerator.
The shooting-range hallway is a special, underground hallway that's only used as an emergency escape.
I have to disagree with some of your advice.
If your municipality lets you, install a septic instead of connecting to city sewer. No sewer fee. (Just get it pumped every few years).
You first tell him to minimize maintenance, and then you tell him to opt for something which requires more maintenance and is problem-prone. This makes no sense at all. Of course, some of this depends on location, but in most places I've seen, there's no sewer fee, there's only a water fee. The sewer cost is built in, and handled by the same entity, so there's no advantage in not having sewer service. Sewer service is simple and reliable; most people never have any problems (except maybe clogs, but you'd have those with septic too). Getting a septic tank cleaned is a pain, and worst of all, having a septic system means having a septic field, which can have problems, especially if there's any flooding. Finally, most places probably don't want you to have septic because they want the water back, so it can be processed and put back into the system.
Pick some trees and maybe bushes you like and put them in. Trimming every 1-10 years is easier than cutting the lawn every 3 weeks.
Bushes usually require trimming far more often than that. But avoiding lawns is a good idea if you can do it. Look up "xeriscaping". If you're going to have any lawn, try to keep the grassy area small, and use a manual reel mower to cut it; you'll get better exercise that way and generate no pollution. Use a battery-powered or corded electric weedwacker for edging/trimming. Have more wooded area, and a compost pile for kitchen waste, if you have the acreage.
Include low-voltage wiring for speakers as well as the alarm system.
This isn't 1995; why would you need wiring for speakers? That's what Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth are for. Direct wiring to speakers is mostly obsolete now (it still probably makes sense for a good stereo system, but I'm talking about situations where the speakers are remote, and not really meant for premium sound quality).
Judging by all the teenagers I've seen with their middle-aged parents at classic rock concerts in recent years, I think your supposition is probably incorrect.
There's an inverse relationship between the cost of software (including software included with hardware, like industrial devices), and the quality of that software.
"Enterprise" software is widely regarded as crap, but the software on expensive industrial machines is probably even worse.
Until then, it's not really any better than vaporware.
Just because something's too expensive for cheap-ass home computer users doesn't mean it's "vaporware". There's a lot of other sectors in the computing market that can afford more.
Well to be fair, according to TFS, this company has done nothing but talk since 2001, almost 15 years now. Now it's finally got something ready for production.
How long has HP been talking about memristors? I don't think it's been this long.
I wonder how this (now proven) technology stacks up against (not yet proven) memristors in terms of density and speed.
I admit I haven't actually read TFA, but were these "CS professors" who left for Uber, or were they "researchers" as the summary says? Yes, tenured professors do indeed get good pay and extremely good job security, but "researchers" at universities usually are not tenured professors, they're postdocs, or maybe untenured professors. Postdocs aren't paid shit, by most accounts, and it's extremely hard to get one of these coveted tenured CS professor jobs. So if these people were a bunch of PhD students, it doesn't sound like they necessarily made a bad choice.
It's simple:
He's married.