By putting an ISBN on your work, it is available in every wholesalers and retailer's database. Your book can be ordered anywhere by anyone.
Except it can't.
While the ISBN helps simplify distribution, it does nothing to guarantee it. There are thousands upon thousands of "books in print", all with valid ISBN numbers, for which it can be effectively impossible for generic book sellers to obtain for you.
This is particularly true for niche academic books published by tiny niche publishers. Once upon a time I worked for Computer Literacy Bookshops who largely thrived on their very unique network of publishing contacts that allowed them to obtain practically any academic text available.
Yet despite their fantastic relationship building, even CLB had a hell of a difficult time obtaining many obscure titles. For example, there are many texts...with ISBNs...that were only ever intended to be sold to a particular customer (typically a school or trade guild/union). Getting them to sell to anyone else can be impossible. There were a lot that would sell to their 1 intended client...and CLB...but absolutely no one else.
The Internet and Self-Publishing has changed a lot of that game, but not all of it by a long shot, especially among scholars of more esoteric subjects.
"No business in its collective right mind makes a major capex, on IT or anything else, until the idea is fully fully analyzed for ROI and risk.."
What's a "major" capex? $50k? $1M? $50m?
The fact is the more business leverages the Internet the more the marketplace demands they move at Internet speeds. That means making smaller changes with less information at a much faster rate. Let the market decide, not the bean counters. By the time your company has "fully analyzed for ROI and risk" your competition has already executed and eaten your lunch.
Risk still must be mitigated, but rather then wasting time and resources pre-analyzing the hell out of an idea, the idea is put into the field as quickly as possible in the smallest working form possible. Analyze the real world data as a feedback loop. If the market loves it, bravo, double down. If they hate it, drop it, you haven't invested much. If they like it, but not love it, adapt and double down.
Sounds like Scrum for Business? Yep, it does, doesn't it.;-)
When I hear these arguments they always seem to be coming from the point of view of IT, and IT's point of view hasn't changed in 20 years.
It is not however, aligned with the business's point of view. What. So. Ever.
The business world has been changing, faster and faster, and constantly is looking for an edge over its competitors. Increasingly business is viewing this "Cant' Do!" attitude from their IT departments as liabilities rather then engines. It's why IT is considered overhead, not investment.
Until recently we had folks still on IE6 at our company, because of this Can't Do attitude from our IT drones. When I meet with a VP and have to tell them they could have feature X in two weeks if we weren't still stuck with IE6, but since we are it either can't be done or will take 3 months (long after feature X has lost its time-sensitive relevance). They aren't blaming me...rather they're looking for blood from the inept IT department. From the VP's point of view he knows he can just click the Update button and boom, done. So what the hell is he paying the IT department so much for if it's taking them literally YEARS to perform the same 2 SECOND task?!
Yes, yes, I know. There's a world of difference between updating 1 computer and updating 1,000. You know what? Bullshit. There is only a difference because you suck balls at your job. Seriously, go learn PowerShell, go learn something. Because frankly any "Senior IT Professional" that has a harder time updating 1,000 machines then a non-technical user has updating their own machine, simply isn't an Senior IT Professional. Hell, I expect higher proficiency from unpaid IT interns.
Get off your fat IT asses and learn to empower your company's business visions, or become irrelevant and replaced. Decide quickly, because no one is going to wait around for you.
This "real programming" won't ever completely move outside of Office.
From a pure engineering perspective doing so is the only thing that makes sense. But what engineers don't get are the logistics, the corporate politics, everything that isn't at all about engineering that surrounds engineering efforts.
Business logic in Excel sheets abounds because it bypasses all that internal company overhead. It bypasses the budgets, the turf wars, the compliance checks, the transfer of domain knowledge, all of it. Programming Perl declared that, "A Perl script is 'correct' if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.". Excel et al are the business's version of Perl. Much like the Camel, it wasn't built to be pretty; It was built to survive in hostile environments.
Horse Shit was a good choice for the title of your post, because that's exactly what it is.
You have confused an Agile SDLC with a rapid development schedule. There is no intrinsic link between the two.
Practically the entire industry at this point is embracing and headed towards Agile, be it Scrum or what have you. For new projects, for mature projects, for infrastructure projects, for everything.
To the mods that pushed this crap to +5 Insightful, I can only hope the meta-mods have the "insight" to slap your asses to the back of the mod line forever.
It should be noted for the sake of intellectual honesty that ext2 was far from first filesystem to implement this and other anti-fragmentation methods. Like most (all?) technology found in Linux, it's been copied, reinvented, or re-evolved from previous efforts by other people in other systems.
I wish it were so, I really do. I miss working from home.
But honestly, there is just no level of electronic communication technology that can substitute for proximity. Companies have spent millions upon millions trying to provide every possible electronic communication method ever invented...and they still can't hold a candle to physical proximity. The perks of being remote really need to be huge to outweigh the negatives of being remote. For any job where strong collaboration, innovation, and low latency are key those negatives of being remote are huge, nearly impossible to overcome.
Most Scrum teams use Post-It note and a white board. Post-It notes! Not because excellent Scrum tracking software doesn't exist, but because time spent dicking around with "electronic communication technology" is completely wasted effort. Web cam doesn't work 'cause the kids are downloading p0rn, speaker phone has delays that interrupt people or force people to repeat themselves, the ticket software isn't allowing ticket type Foo to be converted to a type Bar, whatever.
When all is said and done nearly everyone that uses electronic communication technology spends as least as much time fighting it as they think they save by using it. All the while they're losing extremely important intangibles of a tightly bonded team, water cooler inspiration, etc.
How do you manage to make physical proximity versus remote meaningful (or even possible) in a large scale company with large lines of business, all around the world? If you have tens of thousands of employees (or over a hundred thousand, even), it becomes unrealistic to have everyone that would need to work close together out of the same office, in which case they may as well just be remote.
Easy, you break the groups up into teams. You don't need all 20,000 employees in the same spot. But any given team of 5-7 absolutely can and should be.
I work with incredible people and have for over a decade, so it's hard to differentiate one group from another, but I'll tell you -- the guys who work remotely? They're the ones who are on a thing until it's done. They aren't pushing the work onto someone else at 4:55PM, because they can't wait to get home. They're the ones on for hours after work, because work still needs done and fires still need putting out and they care about their work and their clients. They're the ones checking in over night or in the middle of the weekend just to see if everything is okay. They're the ones carrying pagers and cell phones to be available 24x7, even if they're not on stand-by. And since most of these people have ten or twenty years of experience (some even more), I would expect nothing less from them.
Why are you having so many fires to fight? At every hour of the day, every day of the week, never ending? Why have you chosen to accept this sorry state of affairs? Have you become so hardened you can't even imagine a better way?
Maybe, just maybe...if all those smart, committed people actually worked as a team you could start fixing problems and producing more rather then just putting out fires all the time. Better for the customers, better for the company, and better for all of you who no longer need to work crazy hours fighting fires caused by things that should have been fixed years ago.
I used to work like you. Incredibly hard, incredibly dedicated, and filled with incredible pride each time I Saved The Day by putting out yet another fire. I used to run to fires, I loved the thrill of it. But you know what? I realized I was one of those very smart people working very, very dumb. Older and hopefully wiser, I look at fires now as warning lights rather then beacons.
I used to be a huge advocate of telecommuting and did it myself for the better part of a decade.
For years now I've been seeing a growing wave of Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, being adopted. Very much for the better. And while it's technically possible to use these methods with remote team members, it's far from ideal.
No matter how much technology you throw at the problem (IM, video, holograms), the reality is you throw away practically all the possible gains when team members are remote. Hell, just having the team spread out farther then a couple cubes away is incredibly detrimental. And it isn't about the ease of distracting your co-worker all the time (which anyone would agree is bad). No, it's about the ease of collaborating with your team member.
I'm seeing a significant re-thinking of the use of out-sourcing/off-shoring, specifically because a good Scrum team of half a dozen people in house can drastically outperform any number of off-shore contractors. The economics make more sense to keep the work in house. But they have to be a team, and they have to be co-located, period. Anything else and you just don't get remotely close to the same performance...which means there's no real benifit of an in house group, which means the most sensible choice is to out-source it to India.
--
If you're a Rambo-style rock star who is loath to work with anyone else, most especially face to face, your days are numbered. Simply because anyone with just half your skill can easily out perform you in every way if they are part of a solid Agile team and you're still a lone wolf. I'm not comparing you against an entire team, I'm comparing just you against just one member of a good team.
In other words, 6 lone wolf rock stars will get destroyed by 6 average, typical workers who work together as a team. And the team members will do it without working 15 hour days.
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS. In this modern day and age there's just no reason for it, especially not for a price anyone would call "expensive".
Dual BIOS setups are ideal, but the ability to backup the current BIOS in case it needs to be rolled back is a must reguardless.
Actually it's not. The First Amendment only applies to the Government. Private citizens and corporations (corporations are people, my friend) are not subject to it.
it's entirely possible to eat reasonably, exercise a lot, and *still* not lose weight.
Possible? Sure.
Typical? Common? Not in the slightest.
The reality is that such cases are exceedingly rare, fractions of a single percent rare. Yet despite the fact we're talking about 1 in 1000 cases of obesity, the vast majority of obese people grab onto this "I'm just big boned" myth. They dismiss diet/exercise as "failed" because they've decided to believe something else is to blame. Thyroid, food allergies, now gut bacteria, there's always some reason it's not diet and exercise.
The fact is the vast majority of obese people are addicted to high calorie food. No different then if they were shooting smack into their veins, addicted. And just like any addict they will grab onto any excuse they can so long as it means they don't have to give up their habit.
This is hardly a fringe position. I only add the suggestion to it that rather then start with crazy fad diets (that have zero "peer-reviewed studies"), that people start simply by not eating trash like pure sugar and pounds of cheese. If you need a "peer-reviewed study" to convince you that not eating complete shit is a good thing, you're already beyond hope.
And I add the advice to those who have fat friends and family, to stop giving them "gifts" of complete shit such as candy and pounds of cheese.
None of this is the slightest bit outrageous. But ya know what is outrageous? You and your ilk that demand "peer-reviewed studies" before you'll even consider the idea that chowing down on donuts and brie might not do wonderful things to your waist line.
Yet, 99.999% of the time obese people are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound.
Whatever fad diet of the month, whatever "ground breaking" research, they grab onto it all...but they never, ever drop the candy bars, cookies, cheese, cake, bacon, etc. It's an addiction, no less disgusting and debilitating then crystal meth.
Yet, what do their friends and families do? They send them endless gifts of candy, cookies, cheese/salami baskets. Are you people that fucking insane and heartless?! Would you send gifts of whiskey to an alcoholic friend?! What is wrong with you people!
---
It's a simple and tragic combination of sugar/fat addicts who have a hard time quitting, and a society that thinks it's OK to constantly pressure them to take another hit.
The only valid way to view someone eating a candy is to imagine someone shooting heroine into their veins.
And even if we did eliminate it, we'd need to do so very, VERY slowly. Otherwise house prices would plummet, again, and stay down.
Rising home equity is one of, if not the primary driving force in the economy. Home owners upgrade their home, buy new appliances, refinish cabinets, add decks, borrow against it to buy a boat, etc. Renters...keep on using the same 20 year old microwave they bought in college. The depressed housing market is the #1 reason the economy is recovering so slowly.
Lowering home prices doesn't by itself make them more affordable, especially not if it comes at the cost of reducing future equity.
And since housing prices will be permanently reduced you're effectively stealing from Peter (local/state governments that will see reduced property tax revenues) to pay Paul (increased income tax revenue).
Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.
Then it all falls apart...
95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.
Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.
I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn.:-/
I still own a 2048x1536, 24 inch "tube" and while it's plenty old, it's not the slightest bit blurry. Over a decade old and still a better picture then any LCD on the market.
Snark all you like, but CRTs didn't go out of style over image quality or resolution.
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The fact is practically NO ONE designs article content on the web to ever be read in multiple columns, side by side, no matter how many you could fit on a single screen. They're all designed for a single column, on a single browser, taking up much or all the width of the screen, very much including "HD" screens. They do this not least of which because that's how users view their site.
So the column is centered on the screen, so what? That doesn't mean they expect people to only run their browser that wide, quite the contrary: http://www.houseofblues.com/ See all that content on the sides in the background image? By design.
"HD" was marketing BS that allowed laptop makers to offer crappy, lower resolution screens while making clueless users think they were getting gold. That's just reality, plain and simple.
Thank GOD for the likes of Apple, finding a way to leverage marketing spin to get high resolution screens back on laptops, and thus forcing everyone else to follow.
A high res 16:10 is a productivity screen. 16:9 is a media consumption (primary video) screen, period. That's what it was designed for, that is what it does best, at the expense of every other use case.
In fact, the entire point of a wide screen monitor is so you can get more done (ie, more done at once.)
I call Bullshit.
The entire point of wide screen monitors was for playing video content, period. Mostly as a meaningless marketing ploy ("Yes, our monitor is HD!"), it had absolutely nothing to do with usability, productivity, or additional space to get "more done at once".
That's what high res monitors were all about. Devices that once were common, but now after the rise of "HD" are hard to find and very expensive when you do.
In bulk, it would literally take 3 seconds of time on a drill press to absolutely and forever disable the camera on any smart phone without affecting anything else.
A simple jig to align the phone on the press, a depth stop set to drill through the lens and if you're really concerned the sensor chip, but no deeper. Trivial, cheap, absolute.
With the help of Cygwin there's more or less nothing I would ever do on a Unix/Linux system that I can't do on a Windows system, and do it easier, and typically faster and more reliably. And that includes software development targeted at Unix.
The inverse however, just isn't so and most likely never, ever will be.
So the choice is really:
The best of Windows + The best of Linux
vs
The best of Linux
Despite the fact that I'm an old school Unix guy and still strongly prefer it for my work systems (servers), the fact is Unix lost the "workstation" market a decade ago and there's just no sane reason to believe they'd ever capture the "gamer" market, for all the same reasons and more.
Both the GPL and BSD license thoroughly prevent anyone from ever "stealing" your code. The difference is not what can happen to your code, but rather what can happen to someone elses code.
BSD doesn't try to dictate what other people do with their work. Whereas the entire reason for the GPL's existence is to limit the freedoms other people have over their own work.
The biggest misconception GPL advocates have is that the GPL exists to protect software creators. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The GPL is entirely constructed to maximize the power of the end users, not the creators.
With BSD software, not only are you giving away the source code, but you are giving it away with even fewer restrictions than with GPL.
But you're not forced to give all of it away, as you effectively are with the GPL.
If you've created something that you'd like to give back to the community, you can. -And it's very often in your own best interests to do so. If however, you've created something that, at least for now, you'd prefer not to give away, well you're free to do that instead.
The BSD model has proven that you don't need to twist peoples arms to get them to give back generously to the community. It's proven that people can have the freedom to choose whatever business model they feel is best for them, and the community still benefits greatly. Often more so then a GPL model.
GPL... Among many freedoms it takes away, it destroys the freedom to select a business model of your choice. And worse, the few business models that the GPL does allow for are intrinsically very, very bad on the whole. You're either forcing odd hardware/software partnerships like the poster above, or you're relying upon creating sloppy software and weak documentation in order to ensure a market for your "support services". The later, IMHO, is a primary cause behind the quality issues that have forever plagued GPL software quality, design, and documentation.
Lets face it, most programmers are extremely bad...they just don't have the knack for it, software is a rare talent. Of the young ones maybe 1 in 10 on a good day is worth anything....Time Passes...
Now that same group is older, however most of that top 10% has moved on to bigger and better things...because they're talented enough and motivated enough to do so. The remaining 90% that sucked when they were young? They still suck, they're just more expensive now.
So while 1 in 10 young programmers might be good... Only 1 in 100 older programmers will be good (since again, the other 9 moved on and up).
So as a hiring manager it's hard to look at an older programer and not wonder... If this guy was any good, what is he still doing programming?
Slashdot Mirror
I love the nipple too, however...
They've removed the mouse buttons for the nipple-mouse too...rendering it completely useless. :-/
Except it can't.
While the ISBN helps simplify distribution, it does nothing to guarantee it. There are thousands upon thousands of "books in print", all with valid ISBN numbers, for which it can be effectively impossible for generic book sellers to obtain for you.
This is particularly true for niche academic books published by tiny niche publishers. Once upon a time I worked for Computer Literacy Bookshops who largely thrived on their very unique network of publishing contacts that allowed them to obtain practically any academic text available.
Yet despite their fantastic relationship building, even CLB had a hell of a difficult time obtaining many obscure titles. For example, there are many texts...with ISBNs...that were only ever intended to be sold to a particular customer (typically a school or trade guild/union). Getting them to sell to anyone else can be impossible. There were a lot that would sell to their 1 intended client...and CLB...but absolutely no one else.
The Internet and Self-Publishing has changed a lot of that game, but not all of it by a long shot, especially among scholars of more esoteric subjects.
"No business in its collective right mind makes a major capex, on IT or anything else, until the idea is fully fully analyzed for ROI and risk.."
What's a "major" capex? $50k? $1M? $50m?
The fact is the more business leverages the Internet the more the marketplace demands they move at Internet speeds. That means making smaller changes with less information at a much faster rate. Let the market decide, not the bean counters. By the time your company has "fully analyzed for ROI and risk" your competition has already executed and eaten your lunch.
Risk still must be mitigated, but rather then wasting time and resources pre-analyzing the hell out of an idea, the idea is put into the field as quickly as possible in the smallest working form possible. Analyze the real world data as a feedback loop. If the market loves it, bravo, double down. If they hate it, drop it, you haven't invested much. If they like it, but not love it, adapt and double down.
Sounds like Scrum for Business? Yep, it does, doesn't it. ;-)
When I hear these arguments they always seem to be coming from the point of view of IT, and IT's point of view hasn't changed in 20 years.
It is not however, aligned with the business's point of view. What. So. Ever.
The business world has been changing, faster and faster, and constantly is looking for an edge over its competitors. Increasingly business is viewing this "Cant' Do!" attitude from their IT departments as liabilities rather then engines. It's why IT is considered overhead, not investment.
Until recently we had folks still on IE6 at our company, because of this Can't Do attitude from our IT drones. When I meet with a VP and have to tell them they could have feature X in two weeks if we weren't still stuck with IE6, but since we are it either can't be done or will take 3 months (long after feature X has lost its time-sensitive relevance). They aren't blaming me...rather they're looking for blood from the inept IT department. From the VP's point of view he knows he can just click the Update button and boom, done. So what the hell is he paying the IT department so much for if it's taking them literally YEARS to perform the same 2 SECOND task?!
Yes, yes, I know. There's a world of difference between updating 1 computer and updating 1,000. You know what? Bullshit. There is only a difference because you suck balls at your job. Seriously, go learn PowerShell, go learn something. Because frankly any "Senior IT Professional" that has a harder time updating 1,000 machines then a non-technical user has updating their own machine, simply isn't an Senior IT Professional. Hell, I expect higher proficiency from unpaid IT interns.
Get off your fat IT asses and learn to empower your company's business visions, or become irrelevant and replaced. Decide quickly, because no one is going to wait around for you.
This "real programming" won't ever completely move outside of Office.
From a pure engineering perspective doing so is the only thing that makes sense. But what engineers don't get are the logistics, the corporate politics, everything that isn't at all about engineering that surrounds engineering efforts.
Business logic in Excel sheets abounds because it bypasses all that internal company overhead. It bypasses the budgets, the turf wars, the compliance checks, the transfer of domain knowledge, all of it. Programming Perl declared that, "A Perl script is 'correct' if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.". Excel et al are the business's version of Perl. Much like the Camel, it wasn't built to be pretty; It was built to survive in hostile environments.
Horse Shit was a good choice for the title of your post, because that's exactly what it is.
You have confused an Agile SDLC with a rapid development schedule. There is no intrinsic link between the two.
Practically the entire industry at this point is embracing and headed towards Agile, be it Scrum or what have you. For new projects, for mature projects, for infrastructure projects, for everything.
To the mods that pushed this crap to +5 Insightful, I can only hope the meta-mods have the "insight" to slap your asses to the back of the mod line forever.
It should be noted for the sake of intellectual honesty that ext2 was far from first filesystem to implement this and other anti-fragmentation methods. Like most (all?) technology found in Linux, it's been copied, reinvented, or re-evolved from previous efforts by other people in other systems.
I wish it were so, I really do. I miss working from home.
But honestly, there is just no level of electronic communication technology that can substitute for proximity. Companies have spent millions upon millions trying to provide every possible electronic communication method ever invented...and they still can't hold a candle to physical proximity. The perks of being remote really need to be huge to outweigh the negatives of being remote. For any job where strong collaboration, innovation, and low latency are key those negatives of being remote are huge, nearly impossible to overcome.
Most Scrum teams use Post-It note and a white board. Post-It notes! Not because excellent Scrum tracking software doesn't exist, but because time spent dicking around with "electronic communication technology" is completely wasted effort. Web cam doesn't work 'cause the kids are downloading p0rn, speaker phone has delays that interrupt people or force people to repeat themselves, the ticket software isn't allowing ticket type Foo to be converted to a type Bar, whatever.
When all is said and done nearly everyone that uses electronic communication technology spends as least as much time fighting it as they think they save by using it. All the while they're losing extremely important intangibles of a tightly bonded team, water cooler inspiration, etc.
Easy, you break the groups up into teams. You don't need all 20,000 employees in the same spot. But any given team of 5-7 absolutely can and should be.
Why are you having so many fires to fight? At every hour of the day, every day of the week, never ending? Why have you chosen to accept this sorry state of affairs? Have you become so hardened you can't even imagine a better way?
Maybe, just maybe...if all those smart, committed people actually worked as a team you could start fixing problems and producing more rather then just putting out fires all the time. Better for the customers, better for the company, and better for all of you who no longer need to work crazy hours fighting fires caused by things that should have been fixed years ago.
I used to work like you. Incredibly hard, incredibly dedicated, and filled with incredible pride each time I Saved The Day by putting out yet another fire. I used to run to fires, I loved the thrill of it. But you know what? I realized I was one of those very smart people working very, very dumb. Older and hopefully wiser, I look at fires now as warning lights rather then beacons.
I used to be a huge advocate of telecommuting and did it myself for the better part of a decade.
For years now I've been seeing a growing wave of Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, being adopted. Very much for the better. And while it's technically possible to use these methods with remote team members, it's far from ideal.
No matter how much technology you throw at the problem (IM, video, holograms), the reality is you throw away practically all the possible gains when team members are remote. Hell, just having the team spread out farther then a couple cubes away is incredibly detrimental. And it isn't about the ease of distracting your co-worker all the time (which anyone would agree is bad). No, it's about the ease of collaborating with your team member.
I'm seeing a significant re-thinking of the use of out-sourcing/off-shoring, specifically because a good Scrum team of half a dozen people in house can drastically outperform any number of off-shore contractors. The economics make more sense to keep the work in house. But they have to be a team, and they have to be co-located, period. Anything else and you just don't get remotely close to the same performance...which means there's no real benifit of an in house group, which means the most sensible choice is to out-source it to India.
--
If you're a Rambo-style rock star who is loath to work with anyone else, most especially face to face, your days are numbered. Simply because anyone with just half your skill can easily out perform you in every way if they are part of a solid Agile team and you're still a lone wolf. I'm not comparing you against an entire team, I'm comparing just you against just one member of a good team.
In other words, 6 lone wolf rock stars will get destroyed by 6 average, typical workers who work together as a team. And the team members will do it without working 15 hour days.
If you're relying upon 3rd party cookies for SSO, you're doing it wrong.
Very, very wrong.
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS. In this modern day and age there's just no reason for it, especially not for a price anyone would call "expensive".
Dual BIOS setups are ideal, but the ability to backup the current BIOS in case it needs to be rolled back is a must reguardless.
Actually it's not. The First Amendment only applies to the Government. Private citizens and corporations (corporations are people, my friend) are not subject to it.
Possible? Sure.
Typical? Common? Not in the slightest.
The reality is that such cases are exceedingly rare, fractions of a single percent rare. Yet despite the fact we're talking about 1 in 1000 cases of obesity, the vast majority of obese people grab onto this "I'm just big boned" myth. They dismiss diet/exercise as "failed" because they've decided to believe something else is to blame. Thyroid, food allergies, now gut bacteria, there's always some reason it's not diet and exercise.
The fact is the vast majority of obese people are addicted to high calorie food. No different then if they were shooting smack into their veins, addicted. And just like any addict they will grab onto any excuse they can so long as it means they don't have to give up their habit.
What outrageous claim?
How to not be a fat ass: Eat less, move more.
This is hardly a fringe position. I only add the suggestion to it that rather then start with crazy fad diets (that have zero "peer-reviewed studies"), that people start simply by not eating trash like pure sugar and pounds of cheese. If you need a "peer-reviewed study" to convince you that not eating complete shit is a good thing, you're already beyond hope.
And I add the advice to those who have fat friends and family, to stop giving them "gifts" of complete shit such as candy and pounds of cheese.
None of this is the slightest bit outrageous. But ya know what is outrageous? You and your ilk that demand "peer-reviewed studies" before you'll even consider the idea that chowing down on donuts and brie might not do wonderful things to your waist line.
Sure, there can be dozens of factors.
Yet, 99.999% of the time obese people are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound.
Whatever fad diet of the month, whatever "ground breaking" research, they grab onto it all...but they never, ever drop the candy bars, cookies, cheese, cake, bacon, etc. It's an addiction, no less disgusting and debilitating then crystal meth.
Yet, what do their friends and families do? They send them endless gifts of candy, cookies, cheese/salami baskets. Are you people that fucking insane and heartless?! Would you send gifts of whiskey to an alcoholic friend?! What is wrong with you people!
---
It's a simple and tragic combination of sugar/fat addicts who have a hard time quitting, and a society that thinks it's OK to constantly pressure them to take another hit.
The only valid way to view someone eating a candy is to imagine someone shooting heroine into their veins.
And even if we did eliminate it, we'd need to do so very, VERY slowly. Otherwise house prices would plummet, again, and stay down.
Rising home equity is one of, if not the primary driving force in the economy. Home owners upgrade their home, buy new appliances, refinish cabinets, add decks, borrow against it to buy a boat, etc. Renters...keep on using the same 20 year old microwave they bought in college. The depressed housing market is the #1 reason the economy is recovering so slowly.
Lowering home prices doesn't by itself make them more affordable, especially not if it comes at the cost of reducing future equity.
And since housing prices will be permanently reduced you're effectively stealing from Peter (local/state governments that will see reduced property tax revenues) to pay Paul (increased income tax revenue).
http://www.freebsd.org/donations/
Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.
Then it all falls apart...
95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.
Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.
I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn. :-/
I still own a 2048x1536, 24 inch "tube" and while it's plenty old, it's not the slightest bit blurry. Over a decade old and still a better picture then any LCD on the market.
Snark all you like, but CRTs didn't go out of style over image quality or resolution.
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The fact is practically NO ONE designs article content on the web to ever be read in multiple columns, side by side, no matter how many you could fit on a single screen. They're all designed for a single column, on a single browser, taking up much or all the width of the screen, very much including "HD" screens. They do this not least of which because that's how users view their site.
So the column is centered on the screen, so what? That doesn't mean they expect people to only run their browser that wide, quite the contrary: http://www.houseofblues.com/ See all that content on the sides in the background image? By design.
"HD" was marketing BS that allowed laptop makers to offer crappy, lower resolution screens while making clueless users think they were getting gold. That's just reality, plain and simple.
Thank GOD for the likes of Apple, finding a way to leverage marketing spin to get high resolution screens back on laptops, and thus forcing everyone else to follow.
A high res 16:10 is a productivity screen. 16:9 is a media consumption (primary video) screen, period. That's what it was designed for, that is what it does best, at the expense of every other use case.
I call Bullshit.
The entire point of wide screen monitors was for playing video content, period. Mostly as a meaningless marketing ploy ("Yes, our monitor is HD!"), it had absolutely nothing to do with usability, productivity, or additional space to get "more done at once".
That's what high res monitors were all about. Devices that once were common, but now after the rise of "HD" are hard to find and very expensive when you do.
I can't imagine that's a serious concern.
In bulk, it would literally take 3 seconds of time on a drill press to absolutely and forever disable the camera on any smart phone without affecting anything else.
A simple jig to align the phone on the press, a depth stop set to drill through the lens and if you're really concerned the sensor chip, but no deeper. Trivial, cheap, absolute.
With the help of Cygwin there's more or less nothing I would ever do on a Unix/Linux system that I can't do on a Windows system, and do it easier, and typically faster and more reliably. And that includes software development targeted at Unix.
The inverse however, just isn't so and most likely never, ever will be.
So the choice is really:
The best of Windows + The best of Linux
vs
The best of Linux
Despite the fact that I'm an old school Unix guy and still strongly prefer it for my work systems (servers), the fact is Unix lost the "workstation" market a decade ago and there's just no sane reason to believe they'd ever capture the "gamer" market, for all the same reasons and more.
Both the GPL and BSD license thoroughly prevent anyone from ever "stealing" your code. The difference is not what can happen to your code, but rather what can happen to someone elses code.
BSD doesn't try to dictate what other people do with their work. Whereas the entire reason for the GPL's existence is to limit the freedoms other people have over their own work.
The biggest misconception GPL advocates have is that the GPL exists to protect software creators. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The GPL is entirely constructed to maximize the power of the end users, not the creators.
But you're not forced to give all of it away, as you effectively are with the GPL.
If you've created something that you'd like to give back to the community, you can. -And it's very often in your own best interests to do so. If however, you've created something that, at least for now, you'd prefer not to give away, well you're free to do that instead.
The BSD model has proven that you don't need to twist peoples arms to get them to give back generously to the community. It's proven that people can have the freedom to choose whatever business model they feel is best for them, and the community still benefits greatly. Often more so then a GPL model.
GPL... Among many freedoms it takes away, it destroys the freedom to select a business model of your choice. And worse, the few business models that the GPL does allow for are intrinsically very, very bad on the whole. You're either forcing odd hardware/software partnerships like the poster above, or you're relying upon creating sloppy software and weak documentation in order to ensure a market for your "support services". The later, IMHO, is a primary cause behind the quality issues that have forever plagued GPL software quality, design, and documentation.
Well, you're half right.
Lets face it, most programmers are extremely bad...they just don't have the knack for it, software is a rare talent. Of the young ones maybe 1 in 10 on a good day is worth anything. ...Time Passes...
Now that same group is older, however most of that top 10% has moved on to bigger and better things...because they're talented enough and motivated enough to do so. The remaining 90% that sucked when they were young? They still suck, they're just more expensive now.
So while 1 in 10 young programmers might be good... Only 1 in 100 older programmers will be good (since again, the other 9 moved on and up).
So as a hiring manager it's hard to look at an older programer and not wonder... If this guy was any good, what is he still doing programming?