Linux distros could solve a lot of the dependency problems by simply allowing multiple versions of the same package to be installed side-by-side
Sort of like how debian can install libgtk1.2 and libgtk2? This has been around for quite a while.
There are two problems here: Developers use cutting edge libraries that are released before the distributions release new versions (like using libqt 4.6 when debian has 4.4), and that people don't want to bother with the package system (which would Just Work when you use libraries supported by the distribution).
Very few people suck at everything, and nobody here has made that claim.
You're insisting that nobody sucks at starting and running a company, and that if people just thought harder, they'd be able to invent the next must-have widget, start a company to produce, market and sell that widget, and furthermore: do all of this all by themselves.
Working hard until you're 80% gets you a rat oiler. If you walked up to the average person on the street and demanded that they invent something right this second, you'd get a blank stare.
Do you know how I did it? I worked for someone else for years, and during that time I was exposed to a particular piece of software that was utter crap yet had been one of the top contenders in the industry. I realized I could do better, did so, and my former employer became one of my first clients. Had I worked in some other industry, perhaps I'd never have found that necessity (the mother of invention) and continued to be "just an employee" or worse: thinking I could set out on my own and blowing my savings trying to sell rat oilers.
I'm talking about owning and operating your own business.
Very well, 3 billion presidents, or owners or whatever you wish to title yourself. Either way, even with all the productivity and efficiency improvements of the past millenia, a single person alone doesn't get very far. My own company consists of an office manager, a salesperson, me and an assistant coder. If I had to stop everything and make angry calls every time a client forgot to pay their bill or dress up in a suit and drive around town for daily product demos, nothing would get done. I provide my employees with value commensurate with the value they provide to me. 'Round these parts we call this Capitalism.
I don't laugh at my employees for failing to start their own business, having done it myself I'm solidly convinced it's not something that everyone is capable of doing, nor is it some kind of failure on their part for not doing so. Numbers back me up on this: 55% of small businesses close in 5 years. I doubt that those who failed didn't work "efficient" enough, no matter how efficiently one might produce rat oilers, if there's no market for your product you're going to fail.
The problem in Brave New World is that the work-place was evolved from employees to CEOs
In Brave New World, people were created "CEO"s: the Alphas. And people were created to be employees: the Deltas and Epsilons. Thus my admonition: a Delta or Epsilon are incapable of advancing beyond what they were created to be. Within the book, Alphas and Betas are taught to be grateful that the Deltas and Epsilons are there to do all the hard work, just as the Deltas and Epsilons are grateful that Alphas and Betas are there to make the hard decisions.
And that's how my companies have grown. With me becoming way more efficient.
Great, glad you've achieved that. All I ask is that you recognize that you're atypical. You were able to find something that you can sell to others, something that very few people ever achieve beyond the old standby of selling their time and labor. Not only that, you've apparently been blessed with sufficient talent to produce, market and sell it yourself without assistance.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. You should read it sometime.
Anyway, a world of 3 billion CEOs would collapse as surely as a world of 3 billion followers. Where would your companies be now if you had to do 100% of the work yourself?
Because there is no door. In all but one airport that I've been in in the US, the path between the "secure area" and the rest of the airport consisted of a very long hallway for everyone to line up in with a rope or short banister down the middle. People entering the "secure area" kept to one side, people leaving were on the other.
Even if there was a door with no handles on the outside, it would have to open in order to let people out, at which point someone could walk right in anyway.
Turnstiles are a nice thought, but the problem is most of them are too small to get luggage through the turnstile.
That one exception I mentioned was O'Hare. There, a large revolving glass door (wide enough for me, my luggage, my coat, and the carryon I was dragging) was put up for exiting from the secure area. A large wired-up floor mat on the "wrong" side of the door made it pretty clear that if I had tried to go "backwards" through the revolving door, it would stop and probably sound an alarm to let everyone know I'm trying to sneak into the security area.
The only thing I learned when we used PDF forms a few years ago was... don't do it. Just no. Really, don't.
PDF forms with javascript for web submission? I agree.
In reality though, a lot of crap (especially government crap) still has to be done on paper, and until HTML+CSS gets to the point where I can reliably reproduce a form on paper, PDF is the best option, ahead of Word documents with 50,000 underscores that wordwrap when someone tries to write in them.
Given that just the other day they had to completely lock down Newark and rescan everyone because someone walked right around security, I think it's an apt comparison.
It'll be a great idea right up until some joker starts sending signals telling all the other cars to stop so that he can just drive straight through. Just like the systems in use now to allow emergency vehicles to override stoplights.
The problem is that when the shape is covered with snow, the snow glows whatever the light behind it is in whichever shape the snow happens to be in, that's why the one driver went straight through a left turn signal: they saw a green circle.
and the light on top (vertical hang) or to the left (horizontal hang) is *red*.
The problem is what comes after that? There's no standard for "left turn yield" versus "protected left turn" signals. Near my own house there's one intersection with 4 bulbs (red, yellow, green, green arrow) and a different intersection with one red bulb on top and a square of four lights below it (yellow arrow and green arrow on the left, yellow and green on the right). I've seen other places where red+green in a left turn lane means yield. From the wreck in the summary, it sounds like a thin layer of snow had covered a left turn arrow and diffused the light enough to make it look round.
Can you find anyone who was recommending against these bulbs before they were installed, or as they say, is hindsight 20/20? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody actually knew that the lightbulbs were why snow didn't stick to the streetlights, since that's the way they've always been (maybe there had been tests run with florescent bulbs previous to the LED bulbs?).
Most of the driving rules, in terms of real safety, are overly cautious. "Best Practice" guidelines at best
The driving rules are designed to protect drivers who obey the rules from other drivers who are obeying the rules, thus we're commanded on what side of the road to drive on, who goes first at a stop sign, what lanes you're allowed to turn from, when we're allowed to pass slow drivers, and so on.
The problem is that nothing but attentiveness and reaction time will protect people from drivers who are not obeying the rules.
I think the problem is that nobody has seen truly free movement of labor for centuries.
With free movement of labor, most of those Americans who are whining about losing their jobs could take what they've got and move to a cheaper country where they could find new jobs (perhaps even the job they lost) and as an added bonus they could live like kings for a while off of their saved wealth (or if they were smart, continue to save it so that they could retire like kings).
where said algorithm is a trade secret and is described in an addendum to the contract
I have never been in a situation where this has happened. The NDA always comes first. Once I've signed the NDA, I can see what I'm working on and then can say yes or no and sign the contract or move on with my life.
If someone gives me a contract with no NDA and I decline to sign it, they have no contractual authority to tell me what to do with the contract. If the contract is so offensive that I decide that not only should I not sign it, but I think I should tell others that I think the company has an offensive contract, then they shouldn't have any recourse other than to fire their lawyers for not thinking about this possibility.
Before it will work well they will have to implement nico nico features like chaining and looping (especially looping so people don't have to create 5 minute long video of just waiting for the person to push a button). Preferably without the scrolling comments.
It's a "bug" in slashdot's HTML or something. There's a <div style="display: block;" id="slug-Bottom" class="slug"></div> tag with no content that is located in the HTML just after the QOTD but the stylesheet places it just above the QOTD on the right side of the screen. I haven't installed adblock and both fsdn and slashdot's domains are allowed in NoScript so it doesn't seem to be a blocked ad, and otherwise has no content at all. It sticks up far enough that it covers the bottom right corner of the reply box when you're replying to a story itself or replying to the last comment of the story. According to DOM Inspector, its rules come from http://a.fsdn.com/sd/idlecore-tidied.css?T_2_5_0_283 and has a width of 336px and a height of 250px and is absolutely positioned at the right, with "bottom: 100%" which places the bottom 100% from the bottom of the footer div (in other words, it ends at the top of the footer div).
Slashdot Mirror
Linux distros could solve a lot of the dependency problems by simply allowing multiple versions of the same package to be installed side-by-side
Sort of like how debian can install libgtk1.2 and libgtk2? This has been around for quite a while.
There are two problems here:
Developers use cutting edge libraries that are released before the distributions release new versions (like using libqt 4.6 when debian has 4.4), and that people don't want to bother with the package system (which would Just Work when you use libraries supported by the distribution).
It ate all of the Not-So Grand Canyons?
I think that somewhere in the Microsoft World of Fantasy, 40ft barge poles are probably legal tender.
In that world, everything costs 38 feet of bargepole.
simply suck at everything
Very few people suck at everything, and nobody here has made that claim.
You're insisting that nobody sucks at starting and running a company, and that if people just thought harder, they'd be able to invent the next must-have widget, start a company to produce, market and sell that widget, and furthermore: do all of this all by themselves.
Working hard until you're 80% gets you a rat oiler. If you walked up to the average person on the street and demanded that they invent something right this second, you'd get a blank stare.
Do you know how I did it? I worked for someone else for years, and during that time I was exposed to a particular piece of software that was utter crap yet had been one of the top contenders in the industry. I realized I could do better, did so, and my former employer became one of my first clients. Had I worked in some other industry, perhaps I'd never have found that necessity (the mother of invention) and continued to be "just an employee" or worse: thinking I could set out on my own and blowing my savings trying to sell rat oilers.
I'm talking about owning and operating your own business.
Very well, 3 billion presidents, or owners or whatever you wish to title yourself. Either way, even with all the productivity and efficiency improvements of the past millenia, a single person alone doesn't get very far. My own company consists of an office manager, a salesperson, me and an assistant coder. If I had to stop everything and make angry calls every time a client forgot to pay their bill or dress up in a suit and drive around town for daily product demos, nothing would get done. I provide my employees with value commensurate with the value they provide to me. 'Round these parts we call this Capitalism.
I don't laugh at my employees for failing to start their own business, having done it myself I'm solidly convinced it's not something that everyone is capable of doing, nor is it some kind of failure on their part for not doing so. Numbers back me up on this: 55% of small businesses close in 5 years. I doubt that those who failed didn't work "efficient" enough, no matter how efficiently one might produce rat oilers, if there's no market for your product you're going to fail.
The problem in Brave New World is that the work-place was evolved from employees to CEOs
In Brave New World, people were created "CEO"s: the Alphas. And people were created to be employees: the Deltas and Epsilons. Thus my admonition: a Delta or Epsilon are incapable of advancing beyond what they were created to be. Within the book, Alphas and Betas are taught to be grateful that the Deltas and Epsilons are there to do all the hard work, just as the Deltas and Epsilons are grateful that Alphas and Betas are there to make the hard decisions.
And that's how my companies have grown. With me becoming way more efficient.
Great, glad you've achieved that. All I ask is that you recognize that you're atypical. You were able to find something that you can sell to others, something that very few people ever achieve beyond the old standby of selling their time and labor. Not only that, you've apparently been blessed with sufficient talent to produce, market and sell it yourself without assistance.
I'm not familiar with "epsilons and deltas".
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. You should read it sometime.
Anyway, a world of 3 billion CEOs would collapse as surely as a world of 3 billion followers. Where would your companies be now if you had to do 100% of the work yourself?
blah blah blah you too can be an Alpha or a Beta blah blah
Taunting the Epsilons and Deltas is bad form.
If TSA agents had cameras on them, they wouldn't be able to take whatever they please from people's luggage.
These losers are obviously soft on crime!
Because there is no door. In all but one airport that I've been in in the US, the path between the "secure area" and the rest of the airport consisted of a very long hallway for everyone to line up in with a rope or short banister down the middle. People entering the "secure area" kept to one side, people leaving were on the other.
Even if there was a door with no handles on the outside, it would have to open in order to let people out, at which point someone could walk right in anyway.
Turnstiles are a nice thought, but the problem is most of them are too small to get luggage through the turnstile.
That one exception I mentioned was O'Hare. There, a large revolving glass door (wide enough for me, my luggage, my coat, and the carryon I was dragging) was put up for exiting from the secure area. A large wired-up floor mat on the "wrong" side of the door made it pretty clear that if I had tried to go "backwards" through the revolving door, it would stop and probably sound an alarm to let everyone know I'm trying to sneak into the security area.
The only thing I learned when we used PDF forms a few years ago was ... don't do it. Just no. Really, don't.
PDF forms with javascript for web submission? I agree.
In reality though, a lot of crap (especially government crap) still has to be done on paper, and until HTML+CSS gets to the point where I can reliably reproduce a form on paper, PDF is the best option, ahead of Word documents with 50,000 underscores that wordwrap when someone tries to write in them.
That, or find someone with a typewriter.
If I took some pictures from each person and shuffled them around to other people, would I be crossing the photostreams?
Given that just the other day they had to completely lock down Newark and rescan everyone because someone walked right around security, I think it's an apt comparison.
You can fly to the other side of the world in a day for a few week's average wage.
Sure, but once you're there, you cannot legally get a job. Free movement of people is not the same as free movement of their labor.
It'll be a great idea right up until some joker starts sending signals telling all the other cars to stop so that he can just drive straight through. Just like the systems in use now to allow emergency vehicles to override stoplights.
The problem is that when the shape is covered with snow, the snow glows whatever the light behind it is in whichever shape the snow happens to be in, that's why the one driver went straight through a left turn signal: they saw a green circle.
On pictures of snowed-in traffic lights, I've only seen shields which curve down past the 9 and 3 o'clock positions.
Those aren't shields against weather, they're shields against the other drivers seeing when the light is about to turn red.
and the light on top (vertical hang) or to the left (horizontal hang) is *red*.
The problem is what comes after that? There's no standard for "left turn yield" versus "protected left turn" signals. Near my own house there's one intersection with 4 bulbs (red, yellow, green, green arrow) and a different intersection with one red bulb on top and a square of four lights below it (yellow arrow and green arrow on the left, yellow and green on the right). I've seen other places where red+green in a left turn lane means yield. From the wreck in the summary, it sounds like a thin layer of snow had covered a left turn arrow and diffused the light enough to make it look round.
against the recommendations of professionals.
Can you find anyone who was recommending against these bulbs before they were installed, or as they say, is hindsight 20/20? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody actually knew that the lightbulbs were why snow didn't stick to the streetlights, since that's the way they've always been (maybe there had been tests run with florescent bulbs previous to the LED bulbs?).
Most of the driving rules, in terms of real safety, are overly cautious. "Best Practice" guidelines at best
The driving rules are designed to protect drivers who obey the rules from other drivers who are obeying the rules, thus we're commanded on what side of the road to drive on, who goes first at a stop sign, what lanes you're allowed to turn from, when we're allowed to pass slow drivers, and so on.
The problem is that nothing but attentiveness and reaction time will protect people from drivers who are not obeying the rules.
And it's only 2000 pages when double spaced large print with giant margins. The senate bill had fewer words than War and Peace.
Oh wait, I guess the Republicans have a point, nobody's ever read all the way through War and Peace.
I think the problem is that nobody has seen truly free movement of labor for centuries.
With free movement of labor, most of those Americans who are whining about losing their jobs could take what they've got and move to a cheaper country where they could find new jobs (perhaps even the job they lost) and as an added bonus they could live like kings for a while off of their saved wealth (or if they were smart, continue to save it so that they could retire like kings).
where said algorithm is a trade secret and is described in an addendum to the contract
I have never been in a situation where this has happened. The NDA always comes first. Once I've signed the NDA, I can see what I'm working on and then can say yes or no and sign the contract or move on with my life.
If someone gives me a contract with no NDA and I decline to sign it, they have no contractual authority to tell me what to do with the contract. If the contract is so offensive that I decide that not only should I not sign it, but I think I should tell others that I think the company has an offensive contract, then they shouldn't have any recourse other than to fire their lawyers for not thinking about this possibility.
That seems to be what they're talking about.
Before it will work well they will have to implement nico nico features like chaining and looping (especially looping so people don't have to create 5 minute long video of just waiting for the person to push a button). Preferably without the scrolling comments.
It's a "bug" in slashdot's HTML or something. There's a <div style="display: block;" id="slug-Bottom" class="slug"></div> tag with no content that is located in the HTML just after the QOTD but the stylesheet places it just above the QOTD on the right side of the screen. I haven't installed adblock and both fsdn and slashdot's domains are allowed in NoScript so it doesn't seem to be a blocked ad, and otherwise has no content at all. It sticks up far enough that it covers the bottom right corner of the reply box when you're replying to a story itself or replying to the last comment of the story. According to DOM Inspector, its rules come from http://a.fsdn.com/sd/idlecore-tidied.css?T_2_5_0_283 and has a width of 336px and a height of 250px and is absolutely positioned at the right, with "bottom: 100%" which places the bottom 100% from the bottom of the footer div (in other words, it ends at the top of the footer div).