"Fighting for what's right" isn't something we do when we have the luxury, after we've paid the mortgage, funded the 401K, and taken the two week vacation to Europe. It's something we all have to do, day in and day out, because we don't have the luxury not to.
There's more to "supporting a family" than making sure little Johnny eats his veggies and has money in his college account. You're also supposed to teach him to care about the world around him, to empathize with others, to be unwilling to inflict injustice upon others, or to stand idly by and watch it inflicted. You're supposed to help him understand that his actions have consequences. Above all, you should be fighting like hell to make sure that the world he grows up in is better than the one you grew up in.
Instead, you're teaching him by your example: Do the right thing when it's convenient, don't worry about the world so long as you've carved out a comfortable niche for yourself. There's no need to make big sacrifices, because nothing in this world outside yourself is worth much.
The good in this world exists because people braver, nobler, and less compromising than yourself were brave, noble, and uncompromising. The evil in this world exists because the vast majority of people are unwilling to work to avert it.
You presented your opinion as fact when you first posted, so I assumed that the "this is my opinion" was simply implicit. The difference is, while I presented evidence to back up my position, I felt like you intentionally hid evidence to strengthen your position.
Spelling? No, I don't often misspell words.
Sorry to hear about your rough night, though. Hope things get better.
Quick memo to anyone considering dropping Microsoft products solely because of an insufficiently negative stance on gay rights: The damn Linux hippies are a bunch of Communists,! If they're not stopped they'll soon usher in One World Government, take your guns away, and turn your kids gay! Use the only ideologically pure operating system out there, which promotes the best of America, Capitalism, and Apple Pie.
"Buffy gets raped, and decides to love her rapist, who then becomes the real star of the show, (and later of Angel). Other characters turn suddenly homicidal without much build-up, and never suffer any consequences from their actions."
Sorry to go all fanboy on you, but that's a blatantly unfair summary that intentionally removes all context in order to shore up a very weak point.
I'm too lazy to summarize what really happened. Okay, maybe a short version: Buffy and Spike's reconcilliation took an entire season, never actually led to Buffy loving Spike, and required great sacrifices from him. He suffered greatly for his sins, got a severe alteration to his personality, and finally sacrificed his life (to save the world, of course). Meanwhile, Willow's transition was foreshadowed throughout season 6, and her powers were crippled by her own fear until the very end of season 7. Yes, there were dissatisfying elements to both plot arcs, but Whedon had a series to wrap up.
In closing, use bloody whitespace, and learn to spell "misogynistic". Thank you.
If I understand your complaint, you're just whining because not every scene in the series made use of the most advanced weaponry and gadgets available in the Firefly universe.
Sorry, but that's truly lame.
More than any series I've come across, Firefly has a truly believable setting. Fantastic weaponry exists, but it's too pricey for regular schmucks. Most people are rather poor, and just scraping by. It's not like Star Trek, where the main characters always have crisply pressed uniforms and the latest technology. That distinction is saved for the Alliance troops. The overall western flavor is never really explained, but it seems pretty obvious that they use chemically-propelled projectile weapons (aka 'guns') because they're cheaper and more reliable than energy weapons.
I've never seen Farscape or Babylon 5, so I don't have the necessary background to call it "the best scifi on television," but I think it beats every Star Trek series to date, hands down. Your complaints completely miss the point, because Firefly was about showcasing the characters, not the technology.
You're presenting a false dichotomy, and I don't know why. You have to be aware of the many gradiations between "suit" and "t-shirt and jeans". There are plenty of ways to present a good appearance at an interview that do not involve wearing a suit, so why even bring up "taco bell bits on your t-shirt". Nobody is talking about that, nobody is asking to talk about that, and nobody is asking you to give Taco Bell boy as much consideration as any other candidate. So why bring it up?
Geeks don't like wearing suits. It's not because they think they should be given some sort of special consideration, or that the rules "don't apply to them", or that they are irreplaceable. It's because they generally value substance over style, and know quite well that dressing a man up in a suit doesn't actually change his intelligence or competence. So when you try and sell them on the idea that the business world somehow magically works better because everyone is wearing suits, well, it's a tough sale.
I recognize, on some level, that suits matter to some people. I also recognize on some level that I might someday be in a position where I want something--a paycheck, perhaps--from such a person. But in the end, the whole "wear suits to work" thing is a shared delusion that I wish would die a quick but painful death. The idea that wearing a suit to an interview is somehow "going above and beyond" is part of that shared delusion.
Quick question: Given your premise that, given a large enough applicant pool, you'll find enough qualified people that suits may be a deciding factor, what happens if you have several interchangeable, suit-wearing candidates? Would you base your decision on the quality of the suit itself? Does a tailored suit give a candidate an advantage over an "off the rack"?
Me, I would have resorted to Ye Olde 20-sided D&D dice long before it came to that. Maybe that's why I'll never get into management.:P
Re:In other words, YOU are incompetent
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Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 1
I've already taken this guy to task on some points, and you do bring up some valid points. But in some ways you're beating up on positions he never actually took. It's very hard to find positions in where you can "just code", and don't have to interact with customers in any way. If you're in an academic setting, you're likely to have to present papers at conferences. In any case, you certainly have to communicate with people on your own team. If all you look for in candidates is technical expertise, you may end up with an unmanageable team of primadonnas who refuse to talk to each other, fire off flaming e-mails to customers, and possibly smell funky.
You don't want that.
Coders are generally less concerned with appearance than marketing, and that's as it should be. After all, marketing people can get by on style indefinitely, while the coders can be judged on objective criteria. Can't write code that compiles? Have no idea how to use STL? Write incomprehensible code with meaningless or misleading variable names and no comments? Sooner or later, you'll get found out. So a guy who dresses like a slob but does good work can be an invaluable asset. A marketeer who dresses like a slob? Appearance is his work.
Give the guy some credit. He knows he's hiring coders, not marketroids. There are still times and situations where it's useful for coders to be able to present a professional appearance to others. Usually a good manager can act as a firewall between the customer and the coders, but not always, and it's good for a manager's sense of inner zen to know that his people have the people skills to make that unnecessary.
Finally, I doubt he's judging candidates primarily by their dress. What he was trying to get at is that it's a consideration, and I think that given a large enough pool of applicants, for most every candidate, you can find another one who (approximately) has all the first applicant's qualifications, and none of his drawbacks. I don't think that such a position precludes hiring the most talented people, nor does it preclude treating your people with respect. Some of the other stuff he said might be interpreted that way, though.
We're not talking about showing up for an interview "with taco bell bits left on your shirt". Few will claim that you should be able to wear your old Def Leopard t-shirt, forget to shower for the week before the interview, show up with prominent dribbles of barbecue sauce on your cheek, and expect your appearance to not count against you. To that extent, you're changing the subject.
The issue here is suits, and your original implication that somehow, wearing a suit to an interview--as opposed to good looking business casual dress, not as opposed to sweatpants, or as opposed to a gorilla suit and pink tutu--somehow means that the person will be more professional, represent your business better, and be easier to get along with.
I don't think you'd be taking any flack if you just left it at "appearance is important in business, like it or not, fair or not". That's a simple statement of fact. It's your "Every man a cog" attitude that rankles people. It doesn't matter if you had three hundred applicants for your last position or three hundred thousand. It doesn't matter if you selected from twenty well-qualified people or twenty million. Each one of them *is* unique, and deserves to be treated with respect.
Your post gives every indication of having forgotten that, because you claim that a candidate can only be unique if there is something about them that is uniquely suited for the particular slot you're hiring for. If you're as good a manager as you think you are, you don't actually need a lecture on treating people like human beings. You already treat them that way, because it's the right thing to do, and your people respect you for it. I'm just pointing out that your post indicates otherwise, and that's probably why it generated thirteen (mostly negative) responses.
The grandparent seems to be confusing "unique" and "inexpendable". A person's qualifications, talents, and skillset may not be unique, but the person sure as hell is. I've worked at places where I was expected to disappear into my function, and it was unpleasant. Had I been treated that way in an environment where the job itself required creativity and problem-solving, it would have been intolerable.
It's attitudes like the GP's that spawn sarcastic thoughts like "You're not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams" and "There is no 'my kid has cancer' in TEAM".
I think you're expecting too much. I've tried posting write-ups of talks before, and even if you take notes furiously, it's going to sound like a disorganized mess.
I'm a UofU student, and had planned to go to this lecture. Something came up. So I'm thrilled that someone took the time to do this.
Not that I agree with the grandparent's prophecies of doom and destruction, but I think your analogy suffers from serious flaws.
Everquest isn't just a service like Internet access. If my neighbor is paying more for access, and getting better performance, it doesn't hurt me in any way. But say me and my neighbor enter into a competition against one another (say, three on three basketball). Say we've been competing in this tournament for years, and rather enjoy it.
Then one year, the people running the game make a new rule that says any team can drop $20 and start a game with a five point advantage, with each additional $20 providing an additional 5 point handicap. Given that my neighbor is a multimillionaire and places a high priority on winning, how much fun am I going to have in this year's competition? Why should I even show?
Now imagine that Slashdot started selling special mod points that I could use to mod myself up. In both cases, cash is used as a replacement for talent. But in the latter case, nobody can be sure how my posts keep getting undeservedly high ratings. Hence, it saps trust from the system.
Or imagine that money could buy you more protection under the law, or special legislation that protected your interests... Wait. Nevermind.
The point is, there are some places where you shouldn't be able to pay to tilt the playing field in your favor. I think an RPG like Everquest is probably among them. As a private service, they're entitled to run things that way, but I don't see that offering "various levels of service" would benefit the end users in any way.
Yeah, the Verizon CEO brought up an incredibly important point there. "Maintenance?" blubber the poor, incompetent fools in San Francisco. "Why didn't somebody tell us? And I thought once the thing was up, it would just run itself! Friggin' crap! Good thing we thought we could do it all with a cheap Linksys from BestBuy, or we might have wasted some serious taxpayer money!"
Unless you're the sort who deep down really believes that corporation == competent && government == !competent, then he's not saying anything insightful.
Now, I have two options: believing that Verizon's CEO has closely scrutinized the plans and found that the city hasn't planned their rollout in a sane manner, or believing that he's worried about losing customers to new competition. Hmm... difficult choice.
To answer your first slippery-sloped question: It's the difference between building roads and handing out free cars, or the difference between the running a sewer system and giving everyone free toilets. In both cases, one is a good role for government and the other is not.
Would most people use the new network for porn and piracy? I think predicting otherwise would be betting against a rather unambiguous trend. But I believe there would also be wonderful success stories, improved access to information, better communication between the government and its citizens, and increased demand for software and web services that solve everyday problems. And if the city is also attracting new businesses and new opportunities, that's probably also a good thing.
I'm not arguing that public education and health insurance aren't important concerns. They desperately need improvement, and I would choose them over free Internet if a choice had to be made. But I'm looking at the importance of the Internet to society today, as opposed to 1995 when it first entered the public consciousness, and how the cost of bandwidth keeps plummeting, and wondering at the opportunity we're missing.
Well, I'm going to go home and do my part by making sure my wireless router is unsecured. As if my ISP didn't hate me enough already.:)
I don't much care for your comic.
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Promoting Webcomics?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As the old saying goes, "A good product sells itself".
I am not--in any way--a humor professional. So my not liking your comic may not carry any weight. But the comics mostly seem flat, with the occasional tasteless pterodactyl-snatching baby gag thrown in out of desperation. Visually, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.
My first instinct is to tell you to give up. But since you'll most likely ignore that advice, my second piece of advice is to ditch the 'variety show' format and go with a more character-driven approach. As you develop the characters, they give you new ideas and new directions, and they carry past humorous triumphs with them. When you have to spend hours and hours fumbling for the next idea, it's a great relief to know that you can just fall back to, say, drawing Dogbert in a silly hat.
Gary Larson succeeded with the variety show approach. But he had so many brilliant ideas to work with, every comic could stand on its own. Also, his art was distinctive, so the people in each comic felt pleasantly familiar, even when you'd never seen them.
You need to be putting out new product daily, if you want to become part of a person's daily routine. this "when I get around to it" scheduling. Weekly is only good if you have a lot of content to put out every week (ala The Onion).
Again looking at Gary Larson, you'll notice that his art, while seemingly clumsy in an earnest ninth-grader sort of way, greatly added to the comic. Your visual style is all over the map. It doesn't have to be good, but it does have to be catchy and consistent.
So introduce some actual characters, discipline your artwork and your production schedule, and if the end result is good enough, shameless self-promotional Slashdot submissions won't be needed. Get people laughing, and they'll want everyone else to laugh along.
This is the same sort of narrow thinking that brought us, "Homosexuality is bad and wrong because if everyone were homosexuals, nobody would reproduce and our species would die off," and "You should avoid Vitamin A because if you eat too much of it you'll die."
Supply-sider nonsense to the contrary, there is no strong evidence that moderate changes in the tax rate have a significant effect on the economy. What matters more is how the government chooses to spend it. Spending on infrastructure, health, and education? You probably live in an okay economy. Spending on "presidential palaces"? You probably live somewhere where nobody should want to live.
I think you should take a breather, because right now you're being a presumptive prick. You can do better than that.
Truth is, I live in a moderately impoverished section of Salt Lake, and I'm well aware that homeless people don't generally have laptops. I don't want municipal WiFi because I want to surf the 'Net while sitting in a Starbucks and sipping a double-tall latte. I don't want to don a black sweater and carry around a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov" that I don't actually read, but just display prominently next to my laptop so that I can score with literary chicks. I'll pass.
One of your assumptions is that by "poor", I mean "homeless". While I think there would be some trickle-down effects for them, the bulk of the benefits would be for poor working families. I mean, they scrimped and saved for a $399 beige box, imagining all the wonderful things they could do with it, then found out that most of those things are impossible or unbelievably frustrating without a $70/month contract with Comcast.
I know lots of people who refuse to move off dial-up because they can't afford better. They don't mind much, because by and large they've given up on their computers for anything but e-mail, very occasional web surfing, and printing simple documents. They're not using their computers as creative tools. They're not using them to find solutions for the problems in their lives. The slow trickle of bits across a 56k modem just makes them think that the whole 'computer thing' is overrated.
All this translates into untapped potential, which is wasted simply because the price of broadband is more than most working families can afford. One of the biggest pleasures I get from reading Slashdot is finding the occasional story about computers doing something that completely rocks. I think there is real power in these machines, I want that power in the hands of as many people as possible, and I don't want people cut off from that power just because a private company can't improve its bottom line by providing access.
Sorry for waxing rhapsodic. But I firmly believe that universal access would reap benefits for an entire city, and should be implemented ASAP.
Oh, because you mentioned it, I don't own a laptop. My computer at home is a 400Mhz behemoth with a whopping 64M of RAM. Which is fine because I mostly use it to access University computers. With X and a fat pipe to a better computer, life isn't bad. While I'm not poor, I'm faking it until I can get through my program.
Your tax idea is wonderful until you realize that half our tax revenue will go to "Nursing Sick Puppies Back to Health". You're asking the average person--the person who can't see that his own cigarette addiction is a higher threat to his health than asbestos--to decide how much we should be spending on which public initiatives? That plan is doomed. Utterly doomed.
229/229 Republicans vs 73/205 Democrats? I think there's still some moral high ground to be salvaged there.
It's also likely that some of the 73 Democrats were exchanging their vote for something else that was more important to them, because the Republicans wanted it to be seen as a "bipartisan" bill. It's also likely that some of the Republicans were voting against their conscience because of pressure from their fellow Republicans. Arm-twisting and vote swapping occur all the time, but the end vote speaks for itself: it's clear which party wants to protect which constituency.
First, when it comes to implementation, it's not hard to set up the payment structure in such a way that it doesn't overburden the poor. For example, set the sticker price higher, but allow users to apply for income-based rebates. Since taxes will probably subsidize the cost, it's helpful to consider that most forms of taxes are disproportionately paid by the wealthy. So I don't think it's reasonable to try and turn people off the idea of municipal wifi using hand-waving about higher taxes hurting the poor.
I'm also a bit underwhelmed by your antagonistic attitude towards taxes. It's true that ultimately only the state can use force to collect debts, they are more than happy to take money "at gunpoint" in order to enforce private contracts. I don't see that as wrong, but given that this power is frequently invoked by private parties with the state acting as their agent, I think the "only the state can use force" argument has less rational appeal than emotional.
I take a much more pragmatic view of government intervention. In my mind, they should be allowed to intervene wherever the benefits of such intervention clearly outweigh the costs. In my mind, having cheap, ubiquitous Internet access is a public good. Better access to information leads to a more efficient economy, a better informed and better educated populace, and a higher standard of living for everyone. While there are ethical issues surrounding state-run programs that compete directly with private companies, I think that the benefits of a fully wired municipality outweigh them, and those benefits are going to be the greatest for the poor, not "gen-X yuppies".
How many people actually watch public access TV, though? As easy as it is to get your show on the air, getting hooked up to viewers is a much more difficult prospect.
Let's say your show is on a subject that will be interesting to one person in a million. If you're broadcasting throughout NYC, there might be eight people who would enjoy your show if they saw it. And I guarantee you, unless it's a documentary on people who are addicted to public access TV, none of them will be watching when your show broadcasts.
But if your audience is global, there might be 6000 people who might be interested in your show. So the aggregate audience is much, much bigger. Not everyone lives in New York (though I hear that such people are oddballs, and really don't matter).
But still, finding that one person in a million should be just as hard. If you had to put up flyers on every corner in New York to get the attention of half of the eight Yorkies, then you should have to murder millions of trees in order to tract out every city in the world, right?
But the whole idea of creating Internet communities is that the oddballs who would actually suffer through your badly-produced show have a chance of finding each other. So you just find these little niches, tell them about your show, and (ideally) you have an instant audience of thousands.
The point is, there's more to connecting with an audience than "getting on the air". In order for this tool to work well, it can't just be a way to "publish" torrents, but to advertise them in such a way that people can quickly find relevant content. I think this project will live and die by its searching and indexing abilities.
I think this thing is more feasible than you believe.
First, they're not proposing using "streams", but publishing the video as files swapped over BitTorrent. So as the demand increases, so does the supply.
The comparison to cable seems specious, because there isn't any need to watch more than one show at a time. Cable needs monstrous bandwidth precisely because it's pushing all 500 channels into your living room simultaneously. With this system, you don't need to be able to download faster than you can watch.
Nor is laggy, glitchy video an issue. You request the file, but then it's ready when it's ready. If you want a higher-quality feed than you can download in realtime, you just have to wait. Since the client will be pulling in other requested videos while you sleep, I don't see such a delay as a huge problem.
Finally, having millions of vanity channels is a social problem, but not a bandwidth problem. If you're hosting a file on BitTorrent that nobody wants, you're not using any bandwidth because nobody is downloading it from you.
You do raise the important issue of aggregate bandwidth demand. But I don't think it will be a long-term issue, because bandwidth has been increasing exponentially, at a rate comparable to Moore's law. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper.
So I think it all comes down to one issue: given the existence of the sort of infrastructure described by this system, and an oblivious Congress, how likely is it that the creators on this system can make something compelling to viewers?
My personal guess is that it will take years to hit the mainstream, but people who build shows around serving niche markets (especially tech savvy ones) would find some measure of success. I'm sure an entire channel devoted to World of Warcraft would have a depressingly large number of viewers. It could also be an ideal vehicle for educators (publishing lectures on the Internet, etc).
Debian isn't a company. I don't think Ubuntu is either, but I'm not sure.
The problem is, "a lot of people" means "people who want a desktop distro for x86." Far from having a grudge against Ubuntu, I've been installing it on all my systems. It's a very nice distro. But Debian has a bit less flexibility because it's trying to guarantee that a.deb file will work properly across a dozen different architectures.
I don't want to see.deb packages that only run on Ubuntu or only run on Debian, the way you have to find separate RPMs for Mandrake and Fedora. That would suck.
The last two don't seem to be directly addressed. However, that's probably because they arise from your apparent belief that the elevator is a solid structure, instead of a really long rope. The rope gets suddenly longer? The anchor at the top moves outward a bit. As a percentage of the elevator's overall length, the change isn't significant.
Nor will the structure "bend" significantly, because again, the anchor will take up any slack in the cable.
It's never good to turn arguments like these into arguments from authority, but I'm still curious about your background. How is it you're raising these objections when many apparently-well-informed people seem to think they're not issues at all? Moreover, many of your objections seem just plain wrong. So I'm hesitant to give your objections much weight.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fighting for what's right" isn't something we do when we have the luxury, after we've paid the mortgage, funded the 401K, and taken the two week vacation to Europe. It's something we all have to do, day in and day out, because we don't have the luxury not to.
There's more to "supporting a family" than making sure little Johnny eats his veggies and has money in his college account. You're also supposed to teach him to care about the world around him, to empathize with others, to be unwilling to inflict injustice upon others, or to stand idly by and watch it inflicted. You're supposed to help him understand that his actions have consequences. Above all, you should be fighting like hell to make sure that the world he grows up in is better than the one you grew up in.
Instead, you're teaching him by your example: Do the right thing when it's convenient, don't worry about the world so long as you've carved out a comfortable niche for yourself. There's no need to make big sacrifices, because nothing in this world outside yourself is worth much.
The good in this world exists because people braver, nobler, and less compromising than yourself were brave, noble, and uncompromising. The evil in this world exists because the vast majority of people are unwilling to work to avert it.
Yes, that makes you the Enemy.
You presented your opinion as fact when you first posted, so I assumed that the "this is my opinion" was simply implicit. The difference is, while I presented evidence to back up my position, I felt like you intentionally hid evidence to strengthen your position.
Spelling? No, I don't often misspell words.
Sorry to hear about your rough night, though. Hope things get better.
Quick memo to anyone considering dropping Microsoft products solely because of an insufficiently negative stance on gay rights: The damn Linux hippies are a bunch of Communists,! If they're not stopped they'll soon usher in One World Government, take your guns away, and turn your kids gay! Use the only ideologically pure operating system out there, which promotes the best of America, Capitalism, and Apple Pie.
That's right, folks. Buy SCO Unix today!
He's ruined the whole movie for me.
I'm too lazy to summarize what really happened. Okay, maybe a short version: Buffy and Spike's reconcilliation took an entire season, never actually led to Buffy loving Spike, and required great sacrifices from him. He suffered greatly for his sins, got a severe alteration to his personality, and finally sacrificed his life (to save the world, of course). Meanwhile, Willow's transition was foreshadowed throughout season 6, and her powers were crippled by her own fear until the very end of season 7. Yes, there were dissatisfying elements to both plot arcs, but Whedon had a series to wrap up.
In closing, use bloody whitespace, and learn to spell "misogynistic". Thank you.
If I understand your complaint, you're just whining because not every scene in the series made use of the most advanced weaponry and gadgets available in the Firefly universe.
Sorry, but that's truly lame.
More than any series I've come across, Firefly has a truly believable setting. Fantastic weaponry exists, but it's too pricey for regular schmucks. Most people are rather poor, and just scraping by. It's not like Star Trek, where the main characters always have crisply pressed uniforms and the latest technology. That distinction is saved for the Alliance troops. The overall western flavor is never really explained, but it seems pretty obvious that they use chemically-propelled projectile weapons (aka 'guns') because they're cheaper and more reliable than energy weapons.
I've never seen Farscape or Babylon 5, so I don't have the necessary background to call it "the best scifi on television," but I think it beats every Star Trek series to date, hands down. Your complaints completely miss the point, because Firefly was about showcasing the characters, not the technology.
You're presenting a false dichotomy, and I don't know why. You have to be aware of the many gradiations between "suit" and "t-shirt and jeans". There are plenty of ways to present a good appearance at an interview that do not involve wearing a suit, so why even bring up "taco bell bits on your t-shirt". Nobody is talking about that, nobody is asking to talk about that, and nobody is asking you to give Taco Bell boy as much consideration as any other candidate. So why bring it up?
:P
Geeks don't like wearing suits. It's not because they think they should be given some sort of special consideration, or that the rules "don't apply to them", or that they are irreplaceable. It's because they generally value substance over style, and know quite well that dressing a man up in a suit doesn't actually change his intelligence or competence. So when you try and sell them on the idea that the business world somehow magically works better because everyone is wearing suits, well, it's a tough sale.
I recognize, on some level, that suits matter to some people. I also recognize on some level that I might someday be in a position where I want something--a paycheck, perhaps--from such a person. But in the end, the whole "wear suits to work" thing is a shared delusion that I wish would die a quick but painful death. The idea that wearing a suit to an interview is somehow "going above and beyond" is part of that shared delusion.
Quick question: Given your premise that, given a large enough applicant pool, you'll find enough qualified people that suits may be a deciding factor, what happens if you have several interchangeable, suit-wearing candidates? Would you base your decision on the quality of the suit itself? Does a tailored suit give a candidate an advantage over an "off the rack"?
Me, I would have resorted to Ye Olde 20-sided D&D dice long before it came to that. Maybe that's why I'll never get into management.
I've already taken this guy to task on some points, and you do bring up some valid points. But in some ways you're beating up on positions he never actually took. It's very hard to find positions in where you can "just code", and don't have to interact with customers in any way. If you're in an academic setting, you're likely to have to present papers at conferences. In any case, you certainly have to communicate with people on your own team. If all you look for in candidates is technical expertise, you may end up with an unmanageable team of primadonnas who refuse to talk to each other, fire off flaming e-mails to customers, and possibly smell funky.
You don't want that.
Coders are generally less concerned with appearance than marketing, and that's as it should be. After all, marketing people can get by on style indefinitely, while the coders can be judged on objective criteria. Can't write code that compiles? Have no idea how to use STL? Write incomprehensible code with meaningless or misleading variable names and no comments? Sooner or later, you'll get found out. So a guy who dresses like a slob but does good work can be an invaluable asset. A marketeer who dresses like a slob? Appearance is his work.
Give the guy some credit. He knows he's hiring coders, not marketroids. There are still times and situations where it's useful for coders to be able to present a professional appearance to others. Usually a good manager can act as a firewall between the customer and the coders, but not always, and it's good for a manager's sense of inner zen to know that his people have the people skills to make that unnecessary.
Finally, I doubt he's judging candidates primarily by their dress. What he was trying to get at is that it's a consideration, and I think that given a large enough pool of applicants, for most every candidate, you can find another one who (approximately) has all the first applicant's qualifications, and none of his drawbacks. I don't think that such a position precludes hiring the most talented people, nor does it preclude treating your people with respect. Some of the other stuff he said might be interpreted that way, though.
We're not talking about showing up for an interview "with taco bell bits left on your shirt". Few will claim that you should be able to wear your old Def Leopard t-shirt, forget to shower for the week before the interview, show up with prominent dribbles of barbecue sauce on your cheek, and expect your appearance to not count against you. To that extent, you're changing the subject.
The issue here is suits, and your original implication that somehow, wearing a suit to an interview--as opposed to good looking business casual dress, not as opposed to sweatpants, or as opposed to a gorilla suit and pink tutu--somehow means that the person will be more professional, represent your business better, and be easier to get along with.
I don't think you'd be taking any flack if you just left it at "appearance is important in business, like it or not, fair or not". That's a simple statement of fact. It's your "Every man a cog" attitude that rankles people. It doesn't matter if you had three hundred applicants for your last position or three hundred thousand. It doesn't matter if you selected from twenty well-qualified people or twenty million. Each one of them *is* unique, and deserves to be treated with respect.
Your post gives every indication of having forgotten that, because you claim that a candidate can only be unique if there is something about them that is uniquely suited for the particular slot you're hiring for. If you're as good a manager as you think you are, you don't actually need a lecture on treating people like human beings. You already treat them that way, because it's the right thing to do, and your people respect you for it. I'm just pointing out that your post indicates otherwise, and that's probably why it generated thirteen (mostly negative) responses.
Thank you.
The grandparent seems to be confusing "unique" and "inexpendable". A person's qualifications, talents, and skillset may not be unique, but the person sure as hell is. I've worked at places where I was expected to disappear into my function, and it was unpleasant. Had I been treated that way in an environment where the job itself required creativity and problem-solving, it would have been intolerable.
It's attitudes like the GP's that spawn sarcastic thoughts like "You're not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams" and "There is no 'my kid has cancer' in TEAM".
I think you're expecting too much. I've tried posting write-ups of talks before, and even if you take notes furiously, it's going to sound like a disorganized mess.
I'm a UofU student, and had planned to go to this lecture. Something came up. So I'm thrilled that someone took the time to do this.
Not that I agree with the grandparent's prophecies of doom and destruction, but I think your analogy suffers from serious flaws.
Everquest isn't just a service like Internet access. If my neighbor is paying more for access, and getting better performance, it doesn't hurt me in any way. But say me and my neighbor enter into a competition against one another (say, three on three basketball). Say we've been competing in this tournament for years, and rather enjoy it.
Then one year, the people running the game make a new rule that says any team can drop $20 and start a game with a five point advantage, with each additional $20 providing an additional 5 point handicap. Given that my neighbor is a multimillionaire and places a high priority on winning, how much fun am I going to have in this year's competition? Why should I even show?
Now imagine that Slashdot started selling special mod points that I could use to mod myself up. In both cases, cash is used as a replacement for talent. But in the latter case, nobody can be sure how my posts keep getting undeservedly high ratings. Hence, it saps trust from the system.
Or imagine that money could buy you more protection under the law, or special legislation that protected your interests... Wait. Nevermind.
The point is, there are some places where you shouldn't be able to pay to tilt the playing field in your favor. I think an RPG like Everquest is probably among them. As a private service, they're entitled to run things that way, but I don't see that offering "various levels of service" would benefit the end users in any way.
Yeah, the Verizon CEO brought up an incredibly important point there. "Maintenance?" blubber the poor, incompetent fools in San Francisco. "Why didn't somebody tell us? And I thought once the thing was up, it would just run itself! Friggin' crap! Good thing we thought we could do it all with a cheap Linksys from BestBuy, or we might have wasted some serious taxpayer money!"
Unless you're the sort who deep down really believes that corporation == competent && government == !competent, then he's not saying anything insightful.
Now, I have two options: believing that Verizon's CEO has closely scrutinized the plans and found that the city hasn't planned their rollout in a sane manner, or believing that he's worried about losing customers to new competition. Hmm... difficult choice.
To answer your first slippery-sloped question: It's the difference between building roads and handing out free cars, or the difference between the running a sewer system and giving everyone free toilets. In both cases, one is a good role for government and the other is not.
:)
Would most people use the new network for porn and piracy? I think predicting otherwise would be betting against a rather unambiguous trend. But I believe there would also be wonderful success stories, improved access to information, better communication between the government and its citizens, and increased demand for software and web services that solve everyday problems. And if the city is also attracting new businesses and new opportunities, that's probably also a good thing.
I'm not arguing that public education and health insurance aren't important concerns. They desperately need improvement, and I would choose them over free Internet if a choice had to be made. But I'm looking at the importance of the Internet to society today, as opposed to 1995 when it first entered the public consciousness, and how the cost of bandwidth keeps plummeting, and wondering at the opportunity we're missing.
Well, I'm going to go home and do my part by making sure my wireless router is unsecured. As if my ISP didn't hate me enough already.
As the old saying goes, "A good product sells itself".
I am not--in any way--a humor professional. So my not liking your comic may not carry any weight. But the comics mostly seem flat, with the occasional tasteless pterodactyl-snatching baby gag thrown in out of desperation. Visually, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.
My first instinct is to tell you to give up. But since you'll most likely ignore that advice, my second piece of advice is to ditch the 'variety show' format and go with a more character-driven approach. As you develop the characters, they give you new ideas and new directions, and they carry past humorous triumphs with them. When you have to spend hours and hours fumbling for the next idea, it's a great relief to know that you can just fall back to, say, drawing Dogbert in a silly hat.
Gary Larson succeeded with the variety show approach. But he had so many brilliant ideas to work with, every comic could stand on its own. Also, his art was distinctive, so the people in each comic felt pleasantly familiar, even when you'd never seen them.
You need to be putting out new product daily, if you want to become part of a person's daily routine. this "when I get around to it" scheduling. Weekly is only good if you have a lot of content to put out every week (ala The Onion).
Again looking at Gary Larson, you'll notice that his art, while seemingly clumsy in an earnest ninth-grader sort of way, greatly added to the comic. Your visual style is all over the map. It doesn't have to be good, but it does have to be catchy and consistent.
So introduce some actual characters, discipline your artwork and your production schedule, and if the end result is good enough, shameless self-promotional Slashdot submissions won't be needed. Get people laughing, and they'll want everyone else to laugh along.
This is the same sort of narrow thinking that brought us, "Homosexuality is bad and wrong because if everyone were homosexuals, nobody would reproduce and our species would die off," and "You should avoid Vitamin A because if you eat too much of it you'll die."
Supply-sider nonsense to the contrary, there is no strong evidence that moderate changes in the tax rate have a significant effect on the economy. What matters more is how the government chooses to spend it. Spending on infrastructure, health, and education? You probably live in an okay economy. Spending on "presidential palaces"? You probably live somewhere where nobody should want to live.
I think you should take a breather, because right now you're being a presumptive prick. You can do better than that.
Truth is, I live in a moderately impoverished section of Salt Lake, and I'm well aware that homeless people don't generally have laptops. I don't want municipal WiFi because I want to surf the 'Net while sitting in a Starbucks and sipping a double-tall latte. I don't want to don a black sweater and carry around a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov" that I don't actually read, but just display prominently next to my laptop so that I can score with literary chicks. I'll pass.
One of your assumptions is that by "poor", I mean "homeless". While I think there would be some trickle-down effects for them, the bulk of the benefits would be for poor working families. I mean, they scrimped and saved for a $399 beige box, imagining all the wonderful things they could do with it, then found out that most of those things are impossible or unbelievably frustrating without a $70/month contract with Comcast.
I know lots of people who refuse to move off dial-up because they can't afford better. They don't mind much, because by and large they've given up on their computers for anything but e-mail, very occasional web surfing, and printing simple documents. They're not using their computers as creative tools. They're not using them to find solutions for the problems in their lives. The slow trickle of bits across a 56k modem just makes them think that the whole 'computer thing' is overrated.
All this translates into untapped potential, which is wasted simply because the price of broadband is more than most working families can afford. One of the biggest pleasures I get from reading Slashdot is finding the occasional story about computers doing something that completely rocks. I think there is real power in these machines, I want that power in the hands of as many people as possible, and I don't want people cut off from that power just because a private company can't improve its bottom line by providing access.
Sorry for waxing rhapsodic. But I firmly believe that universal access would reap benefits for an entire city, and should be implemented ASAP.
Oh, because you mentioned it, I don't own a laptop. My computer at home is a 400Mhz behemoth with a whopping 64M of RAM. Which is fine because I mostly use it to access University computers. With X and a fat pipe to a better computer, life isn't bad. While I'm not poor, I'm faking it until I can get through my program.
Your tax idea is wonderful until you realize that half our tax revenue will go to "Nursing Sick Puppies Back to Health". You're asking the average person--the person who can't see that his own cigarette addiction is a higher threat to his health than asbestos--to decide how much we should be spending on which public initiatives? That plan is doomed. Utterly doomed.
Replace "sushi" with "food", and you've got something I'd vote for.
You're confusing luxury with necessity. If you want to argue that Internet access is a mere luxury, hey, 1995 called and it wants its argument back.
229/229 Republicans vs 73/205 Democrats? I think there's still some moral high ground to be salvaged there.
It's also likely that some of the 73 Democrats were exchanging their vote for something else that was more important to them, because the Republicans wanted it to be seen as a "bipartisan" bill. It's also likely that some of the Republicans were voting against their conscience because of pressure from their fellow Republicans. Arm-twisting and vote swapping occur all the time, but the end vote speaks for itself: it's clear which party wants to protect which constituency.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
First, when it comes to implementation, it's not hard to set up the payment structure in such a way that it doesn't overburden the poor. For example, set the sticker price higher, but allow users to apply for income-based rebates. Since taxes will probably subsidize the cost, it's helpful to consider that most forms of taxes are disproportionately paid by the wealthy. So I don't think it's reasonable to try and turn people off the idea of municipal wifi using hand-waving about higher taxes hurting the poor.
I'm also a bit underwhelmed by your antagonistic attitude towards taxes. It's true that ultimately only the state can use force to collect debts, they are more than happy to take money "at gunpoint" in order to enforce private contracts. I don't see that as wrong, but given that this power is frequently invoked by private parties with the state acting as their agent, I think the "only the state can use force" argument has less rational appeal than emotional.
I take a much more pragmatic view of government intervention. In my mind, they should be allowed to intervene wherever the benefits of such intervention clearly outweigh the costs. In my mind, having cheap, ubiquitous Internet access is a public good. Better access to information leads to a more efficient economy, a better informed and better educated populace, and a higher standard of living for everyone. While there are ethical issues surrounding state-run programs that compete directly with private companies, I think that the benefits of a fully wired municipality outweigh them, and those benefits are going to be the greatest for the poor, not "gen-X yuppies".
How many people actually watch public access TV, though? As easy as it is to get your show on the air, getting hooked up to viewers is a much more difficult prospect.
Let's say your show is on a subject that will be interesting to one person in a million. If you're broadcasting throughout NYC, there might be eight people who would enjoy your show if they saw it. And I guarantee you, unless it's a documentary on people who are addicted to public access TV, none of them will be watching when your show broadcasts.
But if your audience is global, there might be 6000 people who might be interested in your show. So the aggregate audience is much, much bigger. Not everyone lives in New York (though I hear that such people are oddballs, and really don't matter).
But still, finding that one person in a million should be just as hard. If you had to put up flyers on every corner in New York to get the attention of half of the eight Yorkies, then you should have to murder millions of trees in order to tract out every city in the world, right?
But the whole idea of creating Internet communities is that the oddballs who would actually suffer through your badly-produced show have a chance of finding each other. So you just find these little niches, tell them about your show, and (ideally) you have an instant audience of thousands.
More from Wikipedia
The point is, there's more to connecting with an audience than "getting on the air". In order for this tool to work well, it can't just be a way to "publish" torrents, but to advertise them in such a way that people can quickly find relevant content. I think this project will live and die by its searching and indexing abilities.
I think this thing is more feasible than you believe.
First, they're not proposing using "streams", but publishing the video as files swapped over BitTorrent. So as the demand increases, so does the supply.
The comparison to cable seems specious, because there isn't any need to watch more than one show at a time. Cable needs monstrous bandwidth precisely because it's pushing all 500 channels into your living room simultaneously. With this system, you don't need to be able to download faster than you can watch.
Nor is laggy, glitchy video an issue. You request the file, but then it's ready when it's ready. If you want a higher-quality feed than you can download in realtime, you just have to wait. Since the client will be pulling in other requested videos while you sleep, I don't see such a delay as a huge problem.
Finally, having millions of vanity channels is a social problem, but not a bandwidth problem. If you're hosting a file on BitTorrent that nobody wants, you're not using any bandwidth because nobody is downloading it from you.
You do raise the important issue of aggregate bandwidth demand. But I don't think it will be a long-term issue, because bandwidth has been increasing exponentially, at a rate comparable to Moore's law. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper.
So I think it all comes down to one issue: given the existence of the sort of infrastructure described by this system, and an oblivious Congress, how likely is it that the creators on this system can make something compelling to viewers?
My personal guess is that it will take years to hit the mainstream, but people who build shows around serving niche markets (especially tech savvy ones) would find some measure of success. I'm sure an entire channel devoted to World of Warcraft would have a depressingly large number of viewers. It could also be an ideal vehicle for educators (publishing lectures on the Internet, etc).
Debian isn't a company. I don't think Ubuntu is either, but I'm not sure.
.deb file will work properly across a dozen different architectures.
.deb packages that only run on Ubuntu or only run on Debian, the way you have to find separate RPMs for Mandrake and Fedora. That would suck.
The problem is, "a lot of people" means "people who want a desktop distro for x86." Far from having a grudge against Ubuntu, I've been installing it on all my systems. It's a very nice distro. But Debian has a bit less flexibility because it's trying to guarantee that a
I don't want to see
Rebuttal to your first point
Rebuttal to your second point
The last two don't seem to be directly addressed. However, that's probably because they arise from your apparent belief that the elevator is a solid structure, instead of a really long rope. The rope gets suddenly longer? The anchor at the top moves outward a bit. As a percentage of the elevator's overall length, the change isn't significant.
Nor will the structure "bend" significantly, because again, the anchor will take up any slack in the cable.
It's never good to turn arguments like these into arguments from authority, but I'm still curious about your background. How is it you're raising these objections when many apparently-well-informed people seem to think they're not issues at all? Moreover, many of your objections seem just plain wrong. So I'm hesitant to give your objections much weight.