When I moved to Atlanta I lived right in the heart of Buckhead and was two blocks from my office. I walked every day. It was awesome. A 10 minute walk was faster than a 30 minute (with traffic) commute, plus I didn't have to pay for parking. And I just enjoyed walking.
After two months I realized I never drove anymore, I just used the MARTA or Uber, so I sold my car.
The year I lived in Atlanta like that was awesome. No car payment, no car hassles, and I could drink at dinner every night without worries. Now I moved away from the city to a small town and had to buy a car again, and I'm actually sorta sad about it.
Actually LEGO was not doing fine before. In 2003-ish it was on the verge of bankruptcy. They did a massive reinvention which included gender-branding and licensing of pop culture. Which in just a few years has turned them back into a juggernaut.
Here's an article but its not the one I'm thinking of. There was a print article in Forbes or something about 2-3 years ago.
Well here's another thought I meant to capture but hit submit too fast. End result is, my daughter now plays with LEGOs and builds stuff. Which is a good thing.
Maybe when I was younger and intellectual and thoughtful and stuff I worried about things like this. Now I'm just a pragmatic old fart who is just happy that his daughter plays with LEGO and likes machines and mathematics. i don't really care whether she wants to wear pink frilly dresses or dirty blue jeans.
Well, here's my anecdote with a sample size of n=2. I have a son and a daughter.
When I bought my very first LEGO set for them, it was a generic box of plain shapes. Something like this.
My son played with them. My daughter didn't. So I bought this and mixed the pieces in. The "draw" of the cutesy pieces drew my daughter in. Now she plays with all the pieces.
So...yeah. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think they just "color it pink". Probably a bunch of focus testing and playtesting occurs so they know what draws girls to the toys.
Now, a related question...why did pink and cats draw her in? Is it innate? Or is it something she was taught by society? To that question, I have no answer.
At my old company, we rolled our own system using perl (or python or ruby or whatever you want) and Doxygen and autopod. This made a Javadoc-ish-looking website. Doxygen is pretty powerful in what is generated, based upon the source code decorators. So we nightly generated the HTML from our git and hg repos and threw that html docset into a templating system a web designer made for us. And we were able to make one doc set using only APIs that had certain keywords or @public=true in the comments, and then another website that revealed absolutely everything for the internal developers.
And to be honest it wasn't that hard. Maybe 2 days of scripting to get it done.
Wow....Doom 3 is considered retro and nostalgia? Holy crap do I feel old. Cause I remember when Doom 3 was, in itself, a throwback to retro and nostalgia. Which means I'm double-retro'd and double-nostalgia'd.
When I was 25: I knew every spec, every component, research and purchased them individually, hand-assembled the hardware, and optimized for performance so I could play Half Life.
When I was 35: I had xoticpc build me a spec'd PC in the high end so I could play Skyrim.
Now: I bought a macbook off the shelf. I honestly don't even know how much RAM I have.
I actually completely agree. I studied music for one semester in college before I changed to engineering, and so I heard a lot of baroque and so forth harpsichord music.
I also, back in the day, used high-speed tape-to-tape cassette recording. I remember recording somethings like Metallica (old school metallica) and being surprised and how similar, sped up, it sounds like classical harpsichord music.
I haven't tried listening to archetypical country sped up.
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all
Actually a Slashdot article from last year says that's not true, it was more expensive in the US.
Now there's always more to the story. I'm sure the Google closed factory has lots of other reasons, and this being Slashdot I'm sure many people will point out to me how I'm completely wrong. And maybe I am. But my point is, someone tried it and came to the conclusion that it costs that much more to make goods in the US that its not worth it.
What city are you in that literally "every" UberX car (I'm assuming UberX because there are some strict requirements for the Black Car and up service) is messy and unwashed? I've had both, nice clean cars and awful cars. And you give the awful cars and drivers 1-star ratings. And if the ratings go too low Uber fires that driver (that's what one driver told me anyways).
But that's my experience, in Atlanta. I love Uber in ATL. And all the drivers I've talked to (maybe 8-10) like working for Uber. And a ride from Hartsfield to Buckhead? $50-60 with taxi, $25 with UberX.
Ha, good point! I didn't think IW was that good yet I played it to completion (which I don't do very often with games) so it must have been good enough.
The problem, other than the console-itis, was that the original DE was SOOOO good, it would have been hard to step into those shoes.
That's....a very sad story. How old is your niece? If she's only 15-20 then this makes sense. I bet when she's 30-40 it might suddenly matter to her to see the audio tapes of her father.
Or maybe not. Some people grow into things like this. Others don't.
One the one hand, being a pragmatic engineer and business strategist, I agree with you. Amazon's drone project would never really work.
On the other hand, I really WANT it to work. And, historically speaking, whenever radical disruptive change happened there were people who always said "that will never work", backed up by plenty of sound reasoning and scientific fact.
Yeah, sure, say what you will about how smart you are. I'm just saying.....disruptive technologies tend to either a) catch everyone by surprise or b) had lots of naysayers or c) both.
I'm not trying to be a pedantic jerk, but I think this article and comment thread touches on a VERY important issue and I want to make sure we have all the facts right so we can analyze it.
Who are these people that lay awake at night worrying about whether someone will have an abortion?
The same people who lay awake at night worried about people dying of starvation and/or violence. Whether or not you agree with whether an unborn child is alive or not, in their worldview the unborn child is alive, thus it is murder.
Whether or not you are pro-life or pro-choice, I think understanding the pro-life worldview is not difficult. Its the same as whether or not you believe the earth is flat, or only 6,000 years old. Even if you don't believe it, you can at least intellectually comprehend that there are people that do.
Set up a VM server...Oracle Virtualbox is free. Run integration/platform testing and maybe even development on shared VMs. Don't be scared to spin up new VMs a lot for any reason
Have a bug/task/defect tracking system. Either run bugzilla or JIRA or buy a cloud service like Atlassian's.
Decide on source code control and use it. Either Mercurial or Git is probably your best choice nowadays. Host your own or pay the relatively cheap rate for a cloud service
If your team is small, run your sprints in short spurts. When I have 2-4 person teams we do 1-week sprints. Daily standups are in a shared chatroom.
Continuous integration. Automated nightly builds/unit/system tests with emailed reports to the team. Always be ready to ship.
Don't skimp on your QC/test cycle...you'll hate yourself later when you have to pay down the technical debt. But in my experience new features/bulletpoints on the marketing slides sells more than the occasional bug takes away.
Play to your strengths. Be agile. React quickly to marketing changes. Some customer wants to buy but you don't do something? Promise it withing 6 weeks and then frickin' do it.
Good luck, dude. Its a fun and fulfilling endeavor.
Thank you. I was fairly surprised when I read that line in the summary and tried to Google it but couldn't find anything. I guess I should have RTFA instead of just RTFS
When I was Civil Service IT, I had frickin' awesome benefits (sick leave AND annual leave?? And sick leave doesn't have max carryover?!? And I can use sick leave as paternity leave?!?!?!?!?), I got 3 hours a week PAID to go to the gym (link), and I got to work a 9/80 schedule.
In the private sector job I'm at now, where you have to, you know, actually produce results on time and under budget, I'm frequently working nights and long hours because if I don't get our release done by a certain date, our customer won't pay us and I won't have a job.
But yeah, despite the awesomeness of the benefits and work life of civil service, it can be pretty soul-crushing to not actually do anything relevant and important. I spent most of my time making powerpoint slides of our enterprise architecture. And I probably got between 80-120 emails a day. And usually had at least 3-5 meetings.
Contrast that with my current commercial corporate job, I am directly responsible for delivery and revenue so I'm usually left alone so I can actually deliver.
Slashdot Mirror
Dwarf Fortress!!!!!!!!!1!!!1eleventy!!!!!
Here's a pretty cool article about Tarn Adams. His lifestyle sounds pretty similar to the guy in the cabin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html
Plural of anecdote is not data, etc etc., but....
When I moved to Atlanta I lived right in the heart of Buckhead and was two blocks from my office. I walked every day. It was awesome. A 10 minute walk was faster than a 30 minute (with traffic) commute, plus I didn't have to pay for parking. And I just enjoyed walking.
After two months I realized I never drove anymore, I just used the MARTA or Uber, so I sold my car.
The year I lived in Atlanta like that was awesome. No car payment, no car hassles, and I could drink at dinner every night without worries. Now I moved away from the city to a small town and had to buy a car again, and I'm actually sorta sad about it.
Actually LEGO was not doing fine before. In 2003-ish it was on the verge of bankruptcy. They did a massive reinvention which included gender-branding and licensing of pop culture. Which in just a few years has turned them back into a juggernaut.
Here's an article but its not the one I'm thinking of. There was a print article in Forbes or something about 2-3 years ago.
http://www.fastcompany.com/304...
Well here's another thought I meant to capture but hit submit too fast. End result is, my daughter now plays with LEGOs and builds stuff. Which is a good thing.
Maybe when I was younger and intellectual and thoughtful and stuff I worried about things like this. Now I'm just a pragmatic old fart who is just happy that his daughter plays with LEGO and likes machines and mathematics. i don't really care whether she wants to wear pink frilly dresses or dirty blue jeans.
Well, here's my anecdote with a sample size of n=2. I have a son and a daughter.
When I bought my very first LEGO set for them, it was a generic box of plain shapes. Something like this.
My son played with them. My daughter didn't. So I bought this and mixed the pieces in. The "draw" of the cutesy pieces drew my daughter in. Now she plays with all the pieces.
So...yeah. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think they just "color it pink". Probably a bunch of focus testing and playtesting occurs so they know what draws girls to the toys.
Now, a related question...why did pink and cats draw her in? Is it innate? Or is it something she was taught by society? To that question, I have no answer.
At my old company, we rolled our own system using perl (or python or ruby or whatever you want) and Doxygen and autopod. This made a Javadoc-ish-looking website. Doxygen is pretty powerful in what is generated, based upon the source code decorators. So we nightly generated the HTML from our git and hg repos and threw that html docset into a templating system a web designer made for us. And we were able to make one doc set using only APIs that had certain keywords or @public=true in the comments, and then another website that revealed absolutely everything for the internal developers.
And to be honest it wasn't that hard. Maybe 2 days of scripting to get it done.
Wow....Doom 3 is considered retro and nostalgia? Holy crap do I feel old. Cause I remember when Doom 3 was, in itself, a throwback to retro and nostalgia. Which means I'm double-retro'd and double-nostalgia'd.
When I was 25: I knew every spec, every component, research and purchased them individually, hand-assembled the hardware, and optimized for performance so I could play Half Life.
When I was 35: I had xoticpc build me a spec'd PC in the high end so I could play Skyrim.
Now: I bought a macbook off the shelf. I honestly don't even know how much RAM I have.
So how come if I say "The Theory of creationism" on Slashdot I'll get crucified?
How come that theory shouldn't be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution?
I actually completely agree. I studied music for one semester in college before I changed to engineering, and so I heard a lot of baroque and so forth harpsichord music.
I also, back in the day, used high-speed tape-to-tape cassette recording. I remember recording somethings like Metallica (old school metallica) and being surprised and how similar, sped up, it sounds like classical harpsichord music.
I haven't tried listening to archetypical country sped up.
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all
Actually a Slashdot article from last year says that's not true, it was more expensive in the US.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Now there's always more to the story. I'm sure the Google closed factory has lots of other reasons, and this being Slashdot I'm sure many people will point out to me how I'm completely wrong. And maybe I am. But my point is, someone tried it and came to the conclusion that it costs that much more to make goods in the US that its not worth it.
What city are you in that literally "every" UberX car (I'm assuming UberX because there are some strict requirements for the Black Car and up service) is messy and unwashed? I've had both, nice clean cars and awful cars. And you give the awful cars and drivers 1-star ratings. And if the ratings go too low Uber fires that driver (that's what one driver told me anyways).
But that's my experience, in Atlanta. I love Uber in ATL. And all the drivers I've talked to (maybe 8-10) like working for Uber. And a ride from Hartsfield to Buckhead? $50-60 with taxi, $25 with UberX.
I'm no Uber shill, but I guess I'm a fanboy.
Good one! I think this one is also apropos:
http://xkcd.com/1102/
Ha, good point! I didn't think IW was that good yet I played it to completion (which I don't do very often with games) so it must have been good enough.
The problem, other than the console-itis, was that the original DE was SOOOO good, it would have been hard to step into those shoes.
Check out the animated Invasion movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Does IMHO a much more faithful representation of what the MI is really like.
That's....a very sad story. How old is your niece? If she's only 15-20 then this makes sense. I bet when she's 30-40 it might suddenly matter to her to see the audio tapes of her father.
Or maybe not. Some people grow into things like this. Others don't.
I'm of two minds on this.
One the one hand, being a pragmatic engineer and business strategist, I agree with you. Amazon's drone project would never really work.
On the other hand, I really WANT it to work. And, historically speaking, whenever radical disruptive change happened there were people who always said "that will never work", backed up by plenty of sound reasoning and scientific fact.
Yeah, sure, say what you will about how smart you are. I'm just saying.....disruptive technologies tend to either a) catch everyone by surprise or b) had lots of naysayers or c) both.
50k a year isn't too bad if you were debt-free. Imagine no rent, car payment, mortgage, student loan bills, etc.
So part of the path to wealth/early retirement? Get rid of your debt! (easier said than done, I know)
Check out this link....scroll down to the section on "Engine Sound".
http://auto.ferrari.com/en_en/...
They actually tune it musically.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population
I'm not sure that's accurate. You're thinking MacBook and iPad, but let's think iPhone and iPod.
I only have a few minutes, but I found this: http://www.mactech.com/content/study-looks-demographics-iphone-ipod-touch-users
Most iPhone users only have an income of >25k, Since the US median is 60k, that means that the iPhone is sold to basically everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
I'm not trying to be a pedantic jerk, but I think this article and comment thread touches on a VERY important issue and I want to make sure we have all the facts right so we can analyze it.
Who are these people that lay awake at night worrying about whether someone will have an abortion?
The same people who lay awake at night worried about people dying of starvation and/or violence. Whether or not you agree with whether an unborn child is alive or not, in their worldview the unborn child is alive, thus it is murder.
Whether or not you are pro-life or pro-choice, I think understanding the pro-life worldview is not difficult. Its the same as whether or not you believe the earth is flat, or only 6,000 years old. Even if you don't believe it, you can at least intellectually comprehend that there are people that do.
Play to your strengths. Be agile. React quickly to marketing changes. Some customer wants to buy but you don't do something? Promise it withing 6 weeks and then frickin' do it.
Good luck, dude. Its a fun and fulfilling endeavor.
Maybe he'll bump into ISIS....
Thank you. I was fairly surprised when I read that line in the summary and tried to Google it but couldn't find anything. I guess I should have RTFA instead of just RTFS
Well...
When I was Civil Service IT, I had frickin' awesome benefits (sick leave AND annual leave?? And sick leave doesn't have max carryover?!? And I can use sick leave as paternity leave?!?!?!?!?), I got 3 hours a week PAID to go to the gym (link), and I got to work a 9/80 schedule.
In the private sector job I'm at now, where you have to, you know, actually produce results on time and under budget, I'm frequently working nights and long hours because if I don't get our release done by a certain date, our customer won't pay us and I won't have a job.
But yeah, despite the awesomeness of the benefits and work life of civil service, it can be pretty soul-crushing to not actually do anything relevant and important. I spent most of my time making powerpoint slides of our enterprise architecture. And I probably got between 80-120 emails a day. And usually had at least 3-5 meetings.
Contrast that with my current commercial corporate job, I am directly responsible for delivery and revenue so I'm usually left alone so I can actually deliver.