Additionally, the notion of bad management seems pervasive within the technical community even though it's not always justified to blame management. Some projects are simply very hard to manage effectively. The more people you have on a project, the more distributed general and specialized knowledge becomes.
I guess what I'm trying to say is project management is hard and it gets harder the bigger the mess becomes. Blaming managers, as tempting as that may be, is not always the answer. More to the point, in any system, if you find yourself routinely blaming a particular part or type of part (eg a manager), it is likely the fault lies with the system and not the part.
Just sort of a general comment... I think the capability of office suites to do complicated things is directly proportional to the amount of pain felt by regular IT staff. Seriously, it's nice that people can do all sorts of neat stuff and track data outside of the system... because, often due to time constraints, it's not always possible for IT staff to facilitate all requests... but then they come ask us for an on-demand parameterized report that works off an ms sql server database, mysql, access, and excel.... and we get stuck doing it regardless of the relative value proposition and it takes a lot of time and ends up crashing when someone locks the excel file or fubar's the access database... and it's our fault.
Part of what makes it so painful is you get stuck spending your time trying to figure out how to do something the-right-way in excel when the same task would be trivial in a database. It's not just a matter of burning everything to the ground because, if you take that approach, you are forced into accepting responsibility for rewriting the thing. Some of the stuff I've seen people make is just so thoroughly messed up as to be conceptually, not just technically, beyond redemption.
Of course, the flip side is, if people can do more stuff on their own, that's one less thing they have to bug me about... but the things they do hit you with become all the more painful.
For the past week or so, I've been trying to think about ways little guys can survive earning an honest buck in today's patent environment. One way might be for independents and small businesses to form collective bargaining units. So instead of one company with a tiny one or two patent ip portfolio, you have 1,000 companies with thousands of patents. All of a sudden, a big company can't be so sure of what might happen if they try to squash the little guy.
In terms of the lone coder being extinct or not... I think the patent craze we hear about all the time on slashdot is probably a little like RIAA lawsuits. You hear about them everyday, but they only affect a statistically insignificant number of people. I expect that if you are not painting a big red X on yourself by going after big/entrenched players like Microsoft, you're probably not going to get patent-smushed.
Just sort of an add-on... there are ways to be the lone coder without being a one man software development company. For example, I'm a sys admin / developer in a small university department. I provide a lot of integration/misc development to handle the needs of our office, and I'm effectively a lone coder. Because I'm a pretty good worker, I also have a lot of freedom to pursue things that might help out the office. Essentially, they let me self direct within the boundaries of our organization's purpose. Of course that's not the same as being your own boss in your own development company, but some aspects are qualitatively comparable. I guess I'm saying if you can find a job as the-it-guy with a friendly organization with some development needs, you can gain many of the lifestyle benefits of being a lone coder.
If you're a programmer looking to expand on the artistic side, in particular a web programmer, I would suggest looking into print design. The artistic aspect is fairly simple and it translates directly into creating better, more visually pleasing, more usable web applications. The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams is an excellent start.
This is one topic where, for most programmers, following a few simple rules really can make a world of difference.
In the past I have looked towards open source oriented themes sites.... You'll find a variety of things like icon collections listed under bsd, lgpl, or gpl licenses although what exactly that means is beyond me.
Another source is the Stock Photo Exchange. They have a variety of independently listed photos most of which you have express permission to use however you want. Quality varies.
Real professional graphics designers will usually have massive paid-for multimedia collections to draw upon.
I',m glad you responded because I'm kind of interested in hearing criticism of the idea. Frankly, in addition to what you said, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of the 800lb patent gorilla I think the OSS community could become if it chose to.
For a start, it costs a lot of money to get patents. Who will pay for that?
Yes, that's a very big problem. From what I understand it costs at least around $2,000 to get a typical patent. I can think of a few potential sources of funding but they are all hair-brained ideas at this point.
One strategy would be to go for big cash ideological sponsors. These would be people, companies, organizations, or even nations with a vested interest in seeing some kind of meaningful patent reform. For example, if China were to decide they didn't like software patents, they could invest in this scheme to reform them. Of course, one problem with big sponsors is they usually want control. Companies like MySQL and Red Hat could also invest.
Another possibility is to derrive revenue from the patents themselves. The whole intellectual property for cash thing is generally frowned upon in OSS but it does happen (eg mysql). The question is whether or not there is a cost/license model that would be acceptable within the community. The other question is whether or not such a model would be profitable enough to bootstrap the patent filing process.
Secondly, how would you enforce an "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" policy? Companies could easily set up subsidiaries with few worthwhile patents to offer. These subsidiaries would then be able to get access to the free patent portfolio without giving up the parent companies'.
The gpl itself was also not easy to phrase. I'm not sure if there is a way to phrase a patent license in such a way that this issue can be avoided. Obviously, it would be a tricky problem. One possible avenue would be for the license to exist at-will. This means if a subsidiary were to mess with us, we could retalliate against the parent company. Also, there may be other ways to phrase an open source patent license to achieve the same effects (reform/protection) other than a reciprocal patent licensing arangement.
Another approach to this whole thing might be to form a small businessman's patent union. In other words, small businesses finance their own patents but then join together to use their patent portfolio as a protective collective bargaining tool. Anyways, I'm sure none of this would be easy.
Maybe here's how we can speed up the reform of the patent system while protecting the open source community and raising money for OSS. The FSF no doubt already has one of the largest intellectual property portfolios on earth. What would happen if the open source community, arguably the largest organized creative community in the world, started patenting everything they could and then licensing it in a manner designed to encourage openess and protect the community from external ip threats?
The patents could be licensed on an I'll show you mine if you show me yours basis. You get permanent free access to our patents if we get permanent free access to yours. I'm sure it would be hell to word the licesne appropriately and the cost of discovering potential ip and filing for all those patents would be enormous but....
We would presumably amass an enormous ip portfolio which could be used for several purposes. It could theoretically generate revenue for the FSF. It could be used as amunition against companies seeking to threaten the open source community with ip suits. Eventually, we may amass so many patents that it becomes impossible to develop anything without agreeing to our open-source-esque patent licenses.
The tyranny of the system would become evident and reform would follow. In between now and then, we'd get protection for OSS.
Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy
On slashdot, the little guy is often considered to be the open source developers. Maybe, in this case, the answer to this kind of problem is for the Free Software Foundation to actively pursue aquisition of a high profile patent portfolio. The FSF probably already has one of the largest intellectual property portfolios on earth. Why not extend it to patents?
The patents could be licensed "for free" on a I'll show you mine if you show me yours basis. In other words, you get immunity from our patents if we get immunity from yours. Such a license would probably be fairly complex and carefully worded. Another problem is that it costs a lot of money to file for patents.
The point of the post wasn't to evangelize specific topics so much as it was to consider a more rigorous semi-standardized statistical analysis of the cost/value proposition of projects that are all effectively designed to protect people.
That said, there are definitely things we could be doing and have been doing to help with the aids epedemic, in the us and abroad.
One example you miss is the potential for a mother to pass hiv to her unborn child. Perhaps there is a way to help prevent this transmission. How do we determine if we should fund research into this topic. Let's say we've got a semi-proven technique. We're 50% sure we can get it to work. If it works, it will prevent the spread of HIV to children in 60% of all cases. Let's pretend we are only concerned about US cases and it turns out there's 1000 infants a year that could be affected. Maybe the expected price tag for the research is $50 million.
Essentially, figure out how much money it will cost and how many people will be saved (and any other benefits). Well you could run those numbers up against whatever you get for the expected benefit/cost of something like a missile defense system, an automobile safety initiative, or anything else.
I wouldn't suggest that anyone use this kind of analysis as a sole metric in allocating funding. I just think it might be a good tool for evaluating the relative utility of projects. I get the feeling that all too often, money is handed out without a strong justification for why one thing deserves funding over another.
The point wasn't really about specific safety technologies so much as it was about taking a more formal statistical approach to evaluating the relative cost/value propositions of projects designed to "defend" people.
When was the last time I got into an accident? When will my house burn down? When will I die before age 70? Insurance. It's all about insurance...
Hmm Insurance... Maybe defense spending should be allocated in a probablistic risk mitigation sort of way.
What is the probability of different kinds of nuclear attacks (obviously unknown)? What are estimated casualties? What is the cost and success rates of potential preventative measures?
Compare that to similar estimations for things like the cost to benefit return on mandating airbags, improving smoke alarms, or sponsoring aids research. Even if you don't know the value of something like the probability of a nuclear attack, you can try to calculate what it might need to be in order for specific nuclear defense research to be more valuable then an alternative protective investment.
And what makes it worse is they would knock on my door and then sit there and lie to my face.
Hi, I'm Susie from a non-partisan organization trying to get out the vote. Blah blah blah. Here's a checklist to help you determine who to vote for. Gee, thanks susie, all these issues are so complex and I'm too young and naive to figure out anything on my own. The checklist would make Bush appear to be the prince of darkness while Kerry was some angel dedicated to the social well being of america.
Next Susie would ask you who you were planning to vote for. If you said Kerry, she'd make sure you were registered. Let's just say I doubt many Republicans were registered by Susie.
So when Susie said she was part of a non partisan organization trying to get out the vote, she actually meant to say she was part of a democratic
slush fund trying to get out democratic votes.
What makes these guys think that young people like being lied to and condescended to by stupid celebrities? I hear people raise the draft issue all the time as if it's some sort of evil republican attempt to enslave the youth of america. It's like they think we are too stupid to figure out the lie. When I get a phone call from P-Diddy telling me to vote or die, I don't think it's cute, it doesn't make me want to vote. What it does make me want to do is call the police and file a formal complaint for harassment, voter intimidation, or whatever else you wanna call it.
As a young columbus resident, I heard all the appeals from P-Diddy, Chris Rock, John Kerry, and everyone else at least once each every day... on my phone... at my door... on my tv.
I think we had 7 messages on our answering machine the day before elections and those are just the times we didn't answer the phone. We would see a canvaser a day at our door every day of the week leading up to the election. Sometimes there would be several in one a day.
What was the effect of this? We developed a strong hatred for anyone invading the privacy of our home in order to tell us to go vote. We'd tell them everyday, yes, we're voting, we put up a frickin political sign in are yard... but still they would come back day after day after day. At the end of it all, my room mate was actually threatening not to vote if people didn't stop pestering us.
Raise your standards. Apply filters. Pursue information that you need, that looks exceptionally valuable, fits inside your longterm goals, or that comes highly recommended.
I believe in knowledge as a means to an end. It holds little inherent value other than what it allows me to achieve. If you are having trouble selecting what knowledge to pursue, it is possible that the real problem is a lack of goals. If you work towards a set of goals, you will seek out the knowledge you desire and the manner in which you assimilate it will be optimized to serve your goals.
As you might guess, I have serious issues with most organized education in which you are given a curriculum to follow and are asked to pursue information with a relatively low value proposition with respect to your goals.
If you want advice on a shotgun approach to knowledge aquisition, learn to retain a gist of information. You don't need to read everything or understand everything about a particular topic. Instead, it is perfectly acceptable to keep an enormous amount of stuff on back burners.
If you find something interesting that you know you don't have the time to pursue at length, examine it briefly. Then keep it in the back of your mind and wait for opportunities/goals to arise which allow you to examine it at greater length. If no such opportunity arises, well then, you saved a hell of a lot of time by not thoroughly investigating it.
Agreed with caveat. Sometimes the best interests of the employees and the company are aligned. I've seen situations where the effect of an awful manager was mitigated or limited by hr after a series of complaints. It's not in the company's best interests for a manager to work his staff to death and subject them to his every whim. Also, I would venture that abuses of managerial power tend to increase in the absence of a strong hr department.
The only regions that use the electronic voting machines are the wealthy republican suburban areas.
We used electronic voting in Columbus (democratic - franklin county). The real travesty for us was that it took 2-3 hours of standing in line to vote, and there's no way to recount that.
All the while standing in line, I kept wondering if there was some way a person could just bring a prefilled out ballot and simply drop it off instead of spending two minutes in one of three booths with a line of 200 people behind you stuck in a cramped crowded hot hallway occupied by an additional 200 people whose precinct's voting location just happened to be in the same room. Then again, at least we could wait inside. I heard others were stuck outside in the rain while standing in line.
I'm sure some of these things may already exist....
Some newish application ideas....
* A Web Browser that can be used by the blind and by sighted developers. Something like JAWs for windows would be even better.
* An open source php ide that lets you debug things as easily with php/apache as you can with.net/iis.
* Access-esque database software. Eg, something that can serve as a nice front end for just about anything else.
Suggestions for improvements...
* A standard set of uniform, good, easy to use, fully featured, graphical configuration tools for popular software like apache, mysql, postfix, etc. Think redhat-config-blah but works on every distribution. And not just some graphical front end that exactly mirrors the file format (like rh's samba config), but actually something designed to help make configuring things easy. Not all wizards are evil.
* Continued improvements to the GIMP. The recent version is soooo much better, but sometimes it still makes me cry.
* phpmyadmin is functionally incredibly awesome, but desparately needs a graphics designer or ui engineer or both.
* If I had a dollar for every time I had a broken package that couldn't install itself... Why not have apt or whatever automatically log problems with package dependencies to a central location, perhaps even give you a link to a bugtracker issue or forum in which people could help each other out.
* Friendly distribution specific idiot proof installation packages for all those projects I want to try out but either can't seem to get to work or haven't had the time to bang my head against wall yet: mythtv, zoneminder, freevo, etc.
* Documentation. No wait. Not just documentation. Mentally scalable help starting from inside the application and spreading outward. In other words, it would be nice if, upon encountering something unknown, you could maybe hover over it and get some alt text. If you're still confused, maybe there would be an option to click on an inconspicuous help link that would bring you to more detailed information on the immediate topic, and then some place to go from there to get a broader view. Integrated scalable help.
If anyone ports Hearts, they need to make sure that, when the computer has a chance to unload a card, he continues to get rid of the Ace or King of spades before the Queen (the bad one). It just wouldn't be the same otherwise.
From the description, it seems like you might be looking for a little sympathy. You've got it.
Without knowing the constraints or anything about the project, it's hard to give specific pointers. My advice would be to first prioritize the information. Figure out what do you need to know first, when you need to know it, and where you are likely to find it. If there are particular constraints that will be impossible to meet, truthfully determine that this is the case and report your findings.
If you have a lot of time, you might want to consider setting up some kind of document management system as a sort of knowledge base. If you don't have a dms, you can probably find one on sourceforge. I checked and the first one that popped up was call Owl Intranet Engine.
If you don't have a lot of time, select a point in the problem that you think is both understandable and provides a great potential to shed light on other aspects of the problem and then dive in. Think of it like you're mapping an unknown territory. Look for a mountain you can climb and scramble to the top and then use your perch as a vantage point to see everything within range. (This is how I design software - don't tell).
Slashdot Mirror
only a very few wild animals with comparable endurance - the horse, the wolf, and the hyena.
I wonder if that has anything to do with dogs being man's best friend? I mean, to this day, some people use dogs when hunting.
Additionally, the notion of bad management seems pervasive within the technical community even though it's not always justified to blame management. Some projects are simply very hard to manage effectively. The more people you have on a project, the more distributed general and specialized knowledge becomes.
I guess what I'm trying to say is project management is hard and it gets harder the bigger the mess becomes. Blaming managers, as tempting as that may be, is not always the answer. More to the point, in any system, if you find yourself routinely blaming a particular part or type of part (eg a manager), it is likely the fault lies with the system and not the part.
I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.
Just sort of a general comment ... I think the capability of office suites to do complicated things is directly proportional to the amount of pain felt by regular IT staff. Seriously, it's nice that people can do all sorts of neat stuff and track data outside of the system... because, often due to time constraints, it's not always possible for IT staff to facilitate all requests... but then they come ask us for an on-demand parameterized report that works off an ms sql server database, mysql, access, and excel.... and we get stuck doing it regardless of the relative value proposition and it takes a lot of time and ends up crashing when someone locks the excel file or fubar's the access database... and it's our fault.
Part of what makes it so painful is you get stuck spending your time trying to figure out how to do something the-right-way in excel when the same task would be trivial in a database. It's not just a matter of burning everything to the ground because, if you take that approach, you are forced into accepting responsibility for rewriting the thing. Some of the stuff I've seen people make is just so thoroughly messed up as to be conceptually, not just technically, beyond redemption.
Of course, the flip side is, if people can do more stuff on their own, that's one less thing they have to bug me about... but the things they do hit you with become all the more painful.
deep hurting...
sandstorm....
For the past week or so, I've been trying to think about ways little guys can survive earning an honest buck in today's patent environment. One way might be for independents and small businesses to form collective bargaining units. So instead of one company with a tiny one or two patent ip portfolio, you have 1,000 companies with thousands of patents. All of a sudden, a big company can't be so sure of what might happen if they try to squash the little guy.
In terms of the lone coder being extinct or not... I think the patent craze we hear about all the time on slashdot is probably a little like RIAA lawsuits. You hear about them everyday, but they only affect a statistically insignificant number of people. I expect that if you are not painting a big red X on yourself by going after big/entrenched players like Microsoft, you're probably not going to get patent-smushed.
Just sort of an add-on... there are ways to be the lone coder without being a one man software development company. For example, I'm a sys admin / developer in a small university department. I provide a lot of integration/misc development to handle the needs of our office, and I'm effectively a lone coder. Because I'm a pretty good worker, I also have a lot of freedom to pursue things that might help out the office. Essentially, they let me self direct within the boundaries of our organization's purpose. Of course that's not the same as being your own boss in your own development company, but some aspects are qualitatively comparable. I guess I'm saying if you can find a job as the-it-guy with a friendly organization with some development needs, you can gain many of the lifestyle benefits of being a lone coder.
If you're a programmer looking to expand on the artistic side, in particular a web programmer, I would suggest looking into print design. The artistic aspect is fairly simple and it translates directly into creating better, more visually pleasing, more usable web applications. The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams is an excellent start.
This is one topic where, for most programmers, following a few simple rules really can make a world of difference.
In the past I have looked towards open source oriented themes sites.... You'll find a variety of things like icon collections listed under bsd, lgpl, or gpl licenses although what exactly that means is beyond me.
Another source is the Stock Photo Exchange. They have a variety of independently listed photos most of which you have express permission to use however you want. Quality varies.
Real professional graphics designers will usually have massive paid-for multimedia collections to draw upon.
I',m glad you responded because I'm kind of interested in hearing criticism of the idea. Frankly, in addition to what you said, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of the 800lb patent gorilla I think the OSS community could become if it chose to.
For a start, it costs a lot of money to get patents. Who will pay for that?
Yes, that's a very big problem. From what I understand it costs at least around $2,000 to get a typical patent. I can think of a few potential sources of funding but they are all hair-brained ideas at this point.
One strategy would be to go for big cash ideological sponsors. These would be people, companies, organizations, or even nations with a vested interest in seeing some kind of meaningful patent reform. For example, if China were to decide they didn't like software patents, they could invest in this scheme to reform them. Of course, one problem with big sponsors is they usually want control. Companies like MySQL and Red Hat could also invest.
Another possibility is to derrive revenue from the patents themselves. The whole intellectual property for cash thing is generally frowned upon in OSS but it does happen (eg mysql). The question is whether or not there is a cost/license model that would be acceptable within the community. The other question is whether or not such a model would be profitable enough to bootstrap the patent filing process.
Secondly, how would you enforce an "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" policy? Companies could easily set up subsidiaries with few worthwhile patents to offer. These subsidiaries would then be able to get access to the free patent portfolio without giving up the parent companies'.
The gpl itself was also not easy to phrase. I'm not sure if there is a way to phrase a patent license in such a way that this issue can be avoided. Obviously, it would be a tricky problem. One possible avenue would be for the license to exist at-will. This means if a subsidiary were to mess with us, we could retalliate against the parent company. Also, there may be other ways to phrase an open source patent license to achieve the same effects (reform/protection) other than a reciprocal patent licensing arangement.
Another approach to this whole thing might be to form a small businessman's patent union. In other words, small businesses finance their own patents but then join together to use their patent portfolio as a protective collective bargaining tool. Anyways, I'm sure none of this would be easy.
I've been pondering this idea for a few days....
Maybe here's how we can speed up the reform of the patent system while protecting the open source community and raising money for OSS. The FSF no doubt already has one of the largest intellectual property portfolios on earth. What would happen if the open source community, arguably the largest organized creative community in the world, started patenting everything they could and then licensing it in a manner designed to encourage openess and protect the community from external ip threats?
The patents could be licensed on an I'll show you mine if you show me yours basis. You get permanent free access to our patents if we get permanent free access to yours. I'm sure it would be hell to word the licesne appropriately and the cost of discovering potential ip and filing for all those patents would be enormous but....
We would presumably amass an enormous ip portfolio which could be used for several purposes. It could theoretically generate revenue for the FSF. It could be used as amunition against companies seeking to threaten the open source community with ip suits. Eventually, we may amass so many patents that it becomes impossible to develop anything without agreeing to our open-source-esque patent licenses.
The tyranny of the system would become evident and reform would follow. In between now and then, we'd get protection for OSS.
Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy
On slashdot, the little guy is often considered to be the open source developers. Maybe, in this case, the answer to this kind of problem is for the Free Software Foundation to actively pursue aquisition of a high profile patent portfolio. The FSF probably already has one of the largest intellectual property portfolios on earth. Why not extend it to patents?
The patents could be licensed "for free" on a I'll show you mine if you show me yours basis. In other words, you get immunity from our patents if we get immunity from yours. Such a license would probably be fairly complex and carefully worded. Another problem is that it costs a lot of money to file for patents.
I wish I could pull in between $30,000 and $750,000 per month while keeping my spending below $50,000 (per month).
I think I can help you out. Send me $50,000 every month and I will send you $30,000 back.
The point of the post wasn't to evangelize specific topics so much as it was to consider a more rigorous semi-standardized statistical analysis of the cost/value proposition of projects that are all effectively designed to protect people.
That said, there are definitely things we could be doing and have been doing to help with the aids epedemic, in the us and abroad.
One example you miss is the potential for a mother to pass hiv to her unborn child. Perhaps there is a way to help prevent this transmission. How do we determine if we should fund research into this topic. Let's say we've got a semi-proven technique. We're 50% sure we can get it to work. If it works, it will prevent the spread of HIV to children in 60% of all cases. Let's pretend we are only concerned about US cases and it turns out there's 1000 infants a year that could be affected. Maybe the expected price tag for the research is $50 million.
Essentially, figure out how much money it will cost and how many people will be saved (and any other benefits). Well you could run those numbers up against whatever you get for the expected benefit/cost of something like a missile defense system, an automobile safety initiative, or anything else.
I wouldn't suggest that anyone use this kind of analysis as a sole metric in allocating funding. I just think it might be a good tool for evaluating the relative utility of projects. I get the feeling that all too often, money is handed out without a strong justification for why one thing deserves funding over another.
The point wasn't really about specific safety technologies so much as it was about taking a more formal statistical approach to evaluating the relative cost/value propositions of projects designed to "defend" people.
When was the last time I got into an accident? When will my house burn down? When will I die before age 70? Insurance. It's all about insurance...
Hmm Insurance... Maybe defense spending should be allocated in a probablistic risk mitigation sort of way.
What is the probability of different kinds of nuclear attacks (obviously unknown)? What are estimated casualties? What is the cost and success rates of potential preventative measures?
Compare that to similar estimations for things like the cost to benefit return on mandating airbags, improving smoke alarms, or sponsoring aids research. Even if you don't know the value of something like the probability of a nuclear attack, you can try to calculate what it might need to be in order for specific nuclear defense research to be more valuable then an alternative protective investment.
And what makes it worse is they would knock on my door and then sit there and lie to my face.
Hi, I'm Susie from a non-partisan organization trying to get out the vote. Blah blah blah. Here's a checklist to help you determine who to vote for. Gee, thanks susie, all these issues are so complex and I'm too young and naive to figure out anything on my own. The checklist would make Bush appear to be the prince of darkness while Kerry was some angel dedicated to the social well being of america.
Next Susie would ask you who you were planning to vote for. If you said Kerry, she'd make sure you were registered. Let's just say I doubt many Republicans were registered by Susie.
So when Susie said she was part of a non partisan organization trying to get out the vote, she actually meant to say she was part of a democratic slush fund trying to get out democratic votes.
What makes these guys think that young people like being lied to and condescended to by stupid celebrities? I hear people raise the draft issue all the time as if it's some sort of evil republican attempt to enslave the youth of america. It's like they think we are too stupid to figure out the lie. When I get a phone call from P-Diddy telling me to vote or die, I don't think it's cute, it doesn't make me want to vote. What it does make me want to do is call the police and file a formal complaint for harassment, voter intimidation, or whatever else you wanna call it.
As a young columbus resident, I heard all the appeals from P-Diddy, Chris Rock, John Kerry, and everyone else at least once each every day ... on my phone ... at my door ... on my tv.
I think we had 7 messages on our answering machine the day before elections and those are just the times we didn't answer the phone. We would see a canvaser a day at our door every day of the week leading up to the election. Sometimes there would be several in one a day.
What was the effect of this? We developed a strong hatred for anyone invading the privacy of our home in order to tell us to go vote. We'd tell them everyday, yes, we're voting, we put up a frickin political sign in are yard... but still they would come back day after day after day. At the end of it all, my room mate was actually threatening not to vote if people didn't stop pestering us.
It was harassment.
Raise your standards. Apply filters. Pursue information that you need, that looks exceptionally valuable, fits inside your longterm goals, or that comes highly recommended.
I believe in knowledge as a means to an end. It holds little inherent value other than what it allows me to achieve. If you are having trouble selecting what knowledge to pursue, it is possible that the real problem is a lack of goals. If you work towards a set of goals, you will seek out the knowledge you desire and the manner in which you assimilate it will be optimized to serve your goals.
As you might guess, I have serious issues with most organized education in which you are given a curriculum to follow and are asked to pursue information with a relatively low value proposition with respect to your goals.
If you want advice on a shotgun approach to knowledge aquisition, learn to retain a gist of information. You don't need to read everything or understand everything about a particular topic. Instead, it is perfectly acceptable to keep an enormous amount of stuff on back burners.
If you find something interesting that you know you don't have the time to pursue at length, examine it briefly. Then keep it in the back of your mind and wait for opportunities/goals to arise which allow you to examine it at greater length. If no such opportunity arises, well then, you saved a hell of a lot of time by not thoroughly investigating it.
Agreed with caveat. Sometimes the best interests of the employees and the company are aligned. I've seen situations where the effect of an awful manager was mitigated or limited by hr after a series of complaints. It's not in the company's best interests for a manager to work his staff to death and subject them to his every whim. Also, I would venture that abuses of managerial power tend to increase in the absence of a strong hr department.
Thanks for the info. I would not have thought of that one.
The only regions that use the electronic voting machines are the wealthy republican suburban areas.
We used electronic voting in Columbus (democratic - franklin county). The real travesty for us was that it took 2-3 hours of standing in line to vote, and there's no way to recount that.
All the while standing in line, I kept wondering if there was some way a person could just bring a prefilled out ballot and simply drop it off instead of spending two minutes in one of three booths with a line of 200 people behind you stuck in a cramped crowded hot hallway occupied by an additional 200 people whose precinct's voting location just happened to be in the same room. Then again, at least we could wait inside. I heard others were stuck outside in the rain while standing in line.
Sounds like someone's got a bad case of the NIH syndrome to me ...
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The Knights who say Nih demand a sacrifice!
We want
tabbed browsing
and a shrubbery!!!
the Xbox Next PC is not excepted to show up before autumn 2006. Darn, I wasn't excepting to have to wait that long.
I looked at dotproject for a while. Never used it in a real world setting, but others have.
I'm sure some of these things may already exist....
.net/iis.
Some newish application ideas....
* A Web Browser that can be used by the blind and by sighted developers. Something like JAWs for windows would be even better.
* An open source php ide that lets you debug things as easily with php/apache as you can with
* Access-esque database software. Eg, something that can serve as a nice front end for just about anything else.
Suggestions for improvements...
* A standard set of uniform, good, easy to use, fully featured, graphical configuration tools for popular software like apache, mysql, postfix, etc. Think redhat-config-blah but works on every distribution. And not just some graphical front end that exactly mirrors the file format (like rh's samba config), but actually something designed to help make configuring things easy. Not all wizards are evil.
* Continued improvements to the GIMP. The recent version is soooo much better, but sometimes it still makes me cry.
* phpmyadmin is functionally incredibly awesome, but desparately needs a graphics designer or ui engineer or both.
* If I had a dollar for every time I had a broken package that couldn't install itself... Why not have apt or whatever automatically log problems with package dependencies to a central location, perhaps even give you a link to a bugtracker issue or forum in which people could help each other out.
* Friendly distribution specific idiot proof installation packages for all those projects I want to try out but either can't seem to get to work or haven't had the time to bang my head against wall yet: mythtv, zoneminder, freevo, etc.
* Documentation. No wait. Not just documentation. Mentally scalable help starting from inside the application and spreading outward. In other words, it would be nice if, upon encountering something unknown, you could maybe hover over it and get some alt text. If you're still confused, maybe there would be an option to click on an inconspicuous help link that would bring you to more detailed information on the immediate topic, and then some place to go from there to get a broader view. Integrated scalable help.
If anyone ports Hearts, they need to make sure that, when the computer has a chance to unload a card, he continues to get rid of the Ace or King of spades before the Queen (the bad one). It just wouldn't be the same otherwise.
From the description, it seems like you might be looking for a little sympathy. You've got it.
Without knowing the constraints or anything about the project, it's hard to give specific pointers. My advice would be to first prioritize the information. Figure out what do you need to know first, when you need to know it, and where you are likely to find it. If there are particular constraints that will be impossible to meet, truthfully determine that this is the case and report your findings.
If you have a lot of time, you might want to consider setting up some kind of document management system as a sort of knowledge base. If you don't have a dms, you can probably find one on sourceforge. I checked and the first one that popped up was call Owl Intranet Engine.
If you don't have a lot of time, select a point in the problem that you think is both understandable and provides a great potential to shed light on other aspects of the problem and then dive in. Think of it like you're mapping an unknown territory. Look for a mountain you can climb and scramble to the top and then use your perch as a vantage point to see everything within range. (This is how I design software - don't tell).