you don't use a bag/backpack, you use panniers, which allow you to carry a lot more stuff and keep it neat and tidy. I can easily go from full-on-rain gear (riding for an hour in the Pacific North West you get soaked quite thoroughly) to office gear in a snap.
Also if you have a shower before riding in to work you don't smell, you just need to towel dry and change, the smell is not caused by the sweat itself, but by the bacteria living on your skin, so if you shower before leaving you'll be clean and not smelly.
If it's really hot you're going to sweat even standing on the bus or walking on the sidewalk, it's not that riding to work automagically makes you sweat more, if at all riding at the "right" pace for your distance with wicking riding clothes you sweat *less* due to the sweat evaporating more easily.
why not put your wax-sealed letter inside another "normal" letter? if your "outside" letter is one of those bubble-wrap ones it should work pretty well...
... pricing an e-book $13 when the paperback is $6 is a much more visible issue for the average e-book buyer, at least judging from the various comments on amazon's message boards.
if I were you I would read the book 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood, as it's a very good treatment of the "what would happen if I could go back in time with what I know now" dilemma...
do you really think he'd resign if his health was 100%? The fact that he's stepping down is definitely worrying, it's not likely he's stepping down to go work for another company or doing something else.
And no, I don't know him in person, but I definitely respect him and his accomplishments, and wish him well, and I'm sure a lot of others are feeling the same way.
... increases is content disappearing for no reason. For example UMG has disabled all songs longer than a certain amount 8+ months ago (which affects a lot people listening to classical and jazz, but not only, for example try to listen to the 2112 album by Rush on spotify...) and it hasn't been fixed yet
I love the idea of spotify and would sign up in a heartbeat even at $30/month, but not with this kind of issues where a record company can arbitrarily mess with your account and you have no recourse.
we aren't talking about being rich or making a lot of money here, we're talking about making a LIVING WAGE which is fast becoming impossible unless you are able to be in certain professions.
Where in my comment did I say anything about "complaining someone else makes more"? I talked about "making a living" which in my book is basically being able to provide for food, shelter, medical care and a minimum of entertainment: I never said that food needs to be a 5-star meal every day, or that shelter needs to have 12 bedrooms or that entertainment is getting Sting to play at your birthday party.
seems like you, like a lot of other people, assume that people can only love idle pursuits. What if you love and are good at building violins (say)? it's not an easy job, it takes dedication and a lifetime to master, but could you do it? could you make a comfortable living at it as things stand now?
Can society as a whole survive and improve where if you aren't sitting in a chair in front of a computer you can't pay your bills?
Like you say, supply/demand, why shouldn't there be focus on increasing demand for all sorts of jobs rather than beating the drum of "retrain or starve" or "be your own entrepreneur or else"? Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, some people just want to wake up, go to their workshop and spend hours making just the perfect dovetail by hand, but those people aren't going to be making a living as things stand now, and that's not fair.
All in all, America has pushed into a high-expertise economy.
I disagree, work has always been high-expertise, anything that's not high-expertise you can do yourself without hiring anybody else. The issue is that IMHO a large portion of high-expertise jobs has all but disappeared whether via automation (a lot simpler to do woodworking with power tools vs by hand, and let's not even talk about CNC) or via outsourcing (whether it's outsourcing manufacturing or tech stuff).
What happens when a significant portion of the population has aptitude to become expert only in jobs/careers which are automated or outsourced? I am sure there are thousands of unemployed people right now that would be amazing cabinetmakers, for example, or luthiers, or blacksmiths, but without any chance whatsoever of starting a career in that field.
There is more to life than writing the next Farmville or troubleshooting a network, for the people that are good at this and love it, hey, it's great, but there ought to be a way forward for the others that doesn't end with "and would you like fries with that".
For a self-motivated individual of at least average intelligence there is a shrinking number of excuses for not possessing in-demand skills.
let me know how your self motivated learning gets you past the "HR wall" where if you don't have x years of industry experience in language/environment y your resume goes to the trash pile...
When pretty much every entry level job is outsourced and ageism not being unknown in the tech sector, it seems really difficult for anybody in their 30s/40s to "self motivate" themselves into a tech/development career.
If I was trying to get into programming right now and had no prior experience I'd go the app store route: with a reasonable investment (say, a last generation imac + a last generation ipad + a last generation ipod touch, which could be purchased refurbished directly from apple for likely $1.5k or so) you can get in, and if you are able to create some good quality apps it would likely help a lot with the job search.
This said I remember the programs I wrote when I had learned how to program only a year before, and even taking into consideration that in the early 80s there wasn't really nearly as much learning material as there was now, still a year experience is IMHO only good for an entry level position, of which there are nearly none to be had as I was saying above.
And regarding the topic at hand no, I don't think it's good at all to have a "two speed" society where a small percentage of people rakes in the dough and a large percentage of people struggles to survive: that should be self-evident, not to mention the fact that a society where the only jobs to be had that enable a decent middle-class standard of living are "brain-type" jobs doesn't seem balanced either.
Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, or to sit in front of a desk all day and stare at a computer screen, other people are a lot better at painting, or woodworking, or construction, or teaching, or plumbing, or building bridges, or all sorts of other job types, and they should have the chance to make a living at what they are good at instead of being told over and over again that unless you have a certain set of skills you'll never be able to live comfortably (I don't mean being rich, I mean living comfortably, which is what a much larger portion of society used to be able to do in the 50s and 60s).
There is more to training than "time spent in the trenches"
- learning a new language/paradigm often allows you to think of your current language/environment in new ways - often at a conference/training there will be BOF sessions and/or Q&As that are worth a lot more than the training/conference themselves, but if you're not there you won't see them - at a conference/training you can expand your network, so next time your company is hiring you can remember that person xxx at course yyy was great to work with and you can try to refer them - if your company sends you to an expensive conference/training it's saying that they care about your career enough to invest in it, rather than treating you like a shelf-limited resource - training/conferences can expose you to different areas that you would not necessarily work in, and often this exposure translates in insights directly applicable to your area
of course the % of companies that actually see their employees as a valuable resource instead of as an easily replaced cog is exceedingly small, after all companies that force developers to work on antiquated PCs with postage-stamp monitors and on rickety dollar store chairs aren't likely to spend 3-4k/year + time off for their education...
Programming is the same. I would much rather a programmer actually put more thought into algorithms and design than churning out code.
the thing is, often you do need to write boilerplate-ish code (think unit tests), or code where you know EXACTLY what you want to do already, so maximal coding throughput is still very important: very few people spend their working time writing code where every line requires a lot of thought, most people will write code where maybe 20% of it is non-trivial and requires a lot of investigation, and 80% is "trivial" code to support the 20%. The more experience you have the more likely the ratio skews towards "yadda yadda, I already know what this should look like" vs "never seen this before".
... "editor" typing speed is even more so, I can't believe how many times I have seen coworkers blindly typing everything out where a macro could have made them type 1/10th of the characters, not to mention how much faster they could be with an editor that supports rectangular copy+paste, automatic indenting, justification, alignment, auto-complete etc. etc. etc.
A medium-speed typist that's fully proficient in their editor of choice can output a LOT more lines of code than a super-fast typist that treats their editor as a dummy typewriter. Of course if you have a fast typist fully conversant in their editor (especially emacs;) ) it can make their productivity quite amazing when they are "in the zone".
... web ads can rob 2 hours from a macbook air's life, the main reason why the battery lasts longer in the no-flash case is because the ads aren't loaded, once all ads move to HTML5 I don't think there'll be that much of a difference.
not only all countries but my own, I would like to be able to whitelist to
- my work IP - my home internet provider
and that's it, if I travel I can always stop restrictions temporarily, but there should be no reason why any location but the two above should be able to access my email account on a regular basis.
If Google wanted to make things simpler for users, you could also have the option to restrict by geolocation, given how good it is nowadays it should be trivial to say 'allow connections only from this city'
I am not sure how you can be proud of working 32 hours in a row on difficult security issues, nothing against your team but I wouldn't want any (and security-sensitive especially) code written at the 31th hour of a caffeine-fueled marathon by an exhausted developer... I do understand that 'we worked 32 hours in a row, we need to go home' sounds good to managers, but every single metric shows pretty clearly that working normal (as in, 8 a day) hours leads to much higher quality code.
from my perspective yes, zero, driving a car is a privilege and is a big responsibility: it's really, really easy to kill somebody with a car, especially if they are a pedestrian, or on a bicycle, or motorbike, or if you cross the median momentarily and head-on another vehicle.
It is already plenty hard enough sometimes to drive with adverse lighting conditions (especially at night, when you are already tired) without adding any impairing substance (alcohol, drugs,...) in the mix.
Drinking is not mandatory to 'have fun' or 'go out' or 'eat at a restaurant' and if somebody does want to exercise their right to have that bottle of wine with dinner, or a few beers with friends, hey, be my guest, but don't drive afterwards, period.
I really don't understand why people are so willing to be lenient when it comes to drinking & driving but only when it comes to themselves: I am sure that they'd not be just as ok with the pilot of their plane to drink & fly? or maybe their bus driver to drink & drive? or what about the firefighter driving the fire truck?
And what about if you have ONE drink and drive home and kill somebody? How many times are you going to replay the accident in your mind and think 'if I hadn't drunk that beer maybe my reflexes would've been just faster enough that I could have avoided the accident'? Do you really want to be in that situation? to spend the rest of your life wondering 'what if I hadn't'?
#1 first offense doesn't mean the first time the person did it, only the first time they got caught #2 you can still kill somebody the first time you drink and drive, it's not like the first time you do there's a magical force field protecting you/the pedestrian or something #3 it's not that hard: if you drink YOU DO NOT DRIVE, period. take a cab, take transit, have a designated driver, you name it, risking other people's lives because you are too cheap to take a cab is ridiculous, you had the money to buy drinks, you should have the money to get home without endangering others.
From my perspective there is no line to draw, first time 5 years w/o a license, second time lose your license forever, period.
... personal users: how can you get people wanting to develop for your OS/ecosystem if you charge them a LOT of money for the toolchain/msdn/...?
I can see how a software house should have to pay for MSDN/VC++/etc. for their devs (since they after all make money) but personal developers should be able to have the full version of the toolchain (with full msdn, not 'limited' versions) in order to compete with os/x (xcode etc., all free) or linux/unix/FOSS (gcc/emacs/... all free). I really do not think the income MS makes from enthusiasts buying msdn/vc++ access is worth the loss in mental market share in terms of all the devs migrating to other platforms where they don't have to "pay to play".
you might also want to check data on how much easier it is to learn new languages (machine & human) when you already know several, most people in their 40s nowadays will likely have forgotten more languages than somebody right out of university has ever learned and so will quite easily pick new ones up if needed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you run the risk of being fired for not showing up on a day when weather is unsuitable for cycling, you still have to own, fuel, and insure a car.
what do you do when your car breaks down? do you get fired? or when there is an accident and the road is backed up forever?
With proper clothing and proper tires a bike is a lot more reliable than a car...
you don't use a bag/backpack, you use panniers, which allow you to carry a lot more stuff and keep it neat and tidy. I can easily go from full-on-rain gear (riding for an hour in the Pacific North West you get soaked quite thoroughly) to office gear in a snap.
Also if you have a shower before riding in to work you don't smell, you just need to towel dry and change, the smell is not caused by the sweat itself, but by the bacteria living on your skin, so if you shower before leaving you'll be clean and not smelly.
If it's really hot you're going to sweat even standing on the bus or walking on the sidewalk, it's not that riding to work automagically makes you sweat more, if at all riding at the "right" pace for your distance with wicking riding clothes you sweat *less* due to the sweat evaporating more easily.
why not put your wax-sealed letter inside another "normal" letter? if your "outside" letter is one of those bubble-wrap ones it should work pretty well...
... pricing an e-book $13 when the paperback is $6 is a much more visible issue for the average e-book buyer, at least judging from the various comments on amazon's message boards.
if I were you I would read the book 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood, as it's a very good treatment of the "what would happen if I could go back in time with what I know now" dilemma...
do you really think he'd resign if his health was 100%? The fact that he's stepping down is definitely worrying, it's not likely he's stepping down to go work for another company or doing something else.
And no, I don't know him in person, but I definitely respect him and his accomplishments, and wish him well, and I'm sure a lot of others are feeling the same way.
... increases is content disappearing for no reason. For example UMG has disabled all songs longer than a certain amount 8+ months ago (which affects a lot people listening to classical and jazz, but not only, for example try to listen to the 2112 album by Rush on spotify...) and it hasn't been fixed yet
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/long_songs_are_missing
I love the idea of spotify and would sign up in a heartbeat even at $30/month, but not with this kind of issues where a record company can arbitrarily mess with your account and you have no recourse.
we aren't talking about being rich or making a lot of money here, we're talking about making a LIVING WAGE which is fast becoming impossible unless you are able to be in certain professions.
Where in my comment did I say anything about "complaining someone else makes more"? I talked about "making a living" which in my book is basically being able to provide for food, shelter, medical care and a minimum of entertainment: I never said that food needs to be a 5-star meal every day, or that shelter needs to have 12 bedrooms or that entertainment is getting Sting to play at your birthday party.
seems like you, like a lot of other people, assume that people can only love idle pursuits. What if you love and are good at building violins (say)? it's not an easy job, it takes dedication and a lifetime to master, but could you do it? could you make a comfortable living at it as things stand now?
Can society as a whole survive and improve where if you aren't sitting in a chair in front of a computer you can't pay your bills?
Like you say, supply/demand, why shouldn't there be focus on increasing demand for all sorts of jobs rather than beating the drum of "retrain or starve" or "be your own entrepreneur or else"? Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, some people just want to wake up, go to their workshop and spend hours making just the perfect dovetail by hand, but those people aren't going to be making a living as things stand now, and that's not fair.
I disagree, work has always been high-expertise, anything that's not high-expertise you can do yourself without hiring anybody else. The issue is that IMHO a large portion of high-expertise jobs has all but disappeared whether via automation (a lot simpler to do woodworking with power tools vs by hand, and let's not even talk about CNC) or via outsourcing (whether it's outsourcing manufacturing or tech stuff).
What happens when a significant portion of the population has aptitude to become expert only in jobs/careers which are automated or outsourced? I am sure there are thousands of unemployed people right now that would be amazing cabinetmakers, for example, or luthiers, or blacksmiths, but without any chance whatsoever of starting a career in that field.
There is more to life than writing the next Farmville or troubleshooting a network, for the people that are good at this and love it, hey, it's great, but there ought to be a way forward for the others that doesn't end with "and would you like fries with that".
let me know how your self motivated learning gets you past the "HR wall" where if you don't have x years of industry experience in language/environment y your resume goes to the trash pile...
When pretty much every entry level job is outsourced and ageism not being unknown in the tech sector, it seems really difficult for anybody in their 30s/40s to "self motivate" themselves into a tech/development career.
If I was trying to get into programming right now and had no prior experience I'd go the app store route: with a reasonable investment (say, a last generation imac + a last generation ipad + a last generation ipod touch, which could be purchased refurbished directly from apple for likely $1.5k or so) you can get in, and if you are able to create some good quality apps it would likely help a lot with the job search.
This said I remember the programs I wrote when I had learned how to program only a year before, and even taking into consideration that in the early 80s there wasn't really nearly as much learning material as there was now, still a year experience is IMHO only good for an entry level position, of which there are nearly none to be had as I was saying above.
And regarding the topic at hand no, I don't think it's good at all to have a "two speed" society where a small percentage of people rakes in the dough and a large percentage of people struggles to survive: that should be self-evident, not to mention the fact that a society where the only jobs to be had that enable a decent middle-class standard of living are "brain-type" jobs doesn't seem balanced either.
Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, or to sit in front of a desk all day and stare at a computer screen, other people are a lot better at painting, or woodworking, or construction, or teaching, or plumbing, or building bridges, or all sorts of other job types, and they should have the chance to make a living at what they are good at instead of being told over and over again that unless you have a certain set of skills you'll never be able to live comfortably (I don't mean being rich, I mean living comfortably, which is what a much larger portion of society used to be able to do in the 50s and 60s).
I can now have 8 additional new modifiers for my emacs configuration :)
There is more to training than "time spent in the trenches"
- learning a new language/paradigm often allows you to think of your current language/environment in new ways
- often at a conference/training there will be BOF sessions and/or Q&As that are worth a lot more than the training/conference themselves, but if you're not there you won't see them
- at a conference/training you can expand your network, so next time your company is hiring you can remember that person xxx at course yyy was great to work with and you can try to refer them
- if your company sends you to an expensive conference/training it's saying that they care about your career enough to invest in it, rather than treating you like a shelf-limited resource
- training/conferences can expose you to different areas that you would not necessarily work in, and often this exposure translates in insights directly applicable to your area
of course the % of companies that actually see their employees as a valuable resource instead of as an easily replaced cog is exceedingly small, after all companies that force developers to work on antiquated PCs with postage-stamp monitors and on rickety dollar store chairs aren't likely to spend 3-4k/year + time off for their education...
and the security answers! I wonder if anybody has picked the "mother's maiden name" option, in that case that would make identity theft even easier...
not to mention, who keeps the security question AND answer stored in clear in their database instead of at least one-way hashing the answer?
Programming is the same. I would much rather a programmer actually put more thought into algorithms and design than churning out code.
the thing is, often you do need to write boilerplate-ish code (think unit tests), or code where you know EXACTLY what you want to do already, so maximal coding throughput is still very important: very few people spend their working time writing code where every line requires a lot of thought, most people will write code where maybe 20% of it is non-trivial and requires a lot of investigation, and 80% is "trivial" code to support the 20%. The more experience you have the more likely the ratio skews towards "yadda yadda, I already know what this should look like" vs "never seen this before".
... "editor" typing speed is even more so, I can't believe how many times I have seen coworkers blindly typing everything out where a macro could have made them type 1/10th of the characters, not to mention how much faster they could be with an editor that supports rectangular copy+paste, automatic indenting, justification, alignment, auto-complete etc. etc. etc.
A medium-speed typist that's fully proficient in their editor of choice can output a LOT more lines of code than a super-fast typist that treats their editor as a dummy typewriter. Of course if you have a fast typist fully conversant in their editor (especially emacs ;) ) it can make their productivity quite amazing when they are "in the zone".
... web ads can rob 2 hours from a macbook air's life, the main reason why the battery lasts longer in the no-flash case is because the ads aren't loaded, once all ads move to HTML5 I don't think there'll be that much of a difference.
not only all countries but my own, I would like to be able to whitelist to
- my work IP
- my home internet provider
and that's it, if I travel I can always stop restrictions temporarily, but there should be no reason why any location but the two above should be able to access my email account on a regular basis.
If Google wanted to make things simpler for users, you could also have the option to restrict by geolocation, given how good it is nowadays it should be trivial to say 'allow connections only from this city'
My team pulled a 32 hour session last week.
I am not sure how you can be proud of working 32 hours in a row on difficult security issues, nothing against your team but I wouldn't want any (and security-sensitive especially) code written at the 31th hour of a caffeine-fueled marathon by an exhausted developer... I do understand that 'we worked 32 hours in a row, we need to go home' sounds good to managers, but every single metric shows pretty clearly that working normal (as in, 8 a day) hours leads to much higher quality code.
At what point do we draw the line? Zero alcohol?
from my perspective yes, zero, driving a car is a privilege and is a big responsibility: it's really, really easy to kill somebody with a car, especially if they are a pedestrian, or on a bicycle, or motorbike, or if you cross the median momentarily and head-on another vehicle.
It is already plenty hard enough sometimes to drive with adverse lighting conditions (especially at night, when you are already tired) without adding any impairing substance (alcohol, drugs, ...) in the mix.
Drinking is not mandatory to 'have fun' or 'go out' or 'eat at a restaurant' and if somebody does want to exercise their right to have that bottle of wine with dinner, or a few beers with friends, hey, be my guest, but don't drive afterwards, period.
I really don't understand why people are so willing to be lenient when it comes to drinking & driving but only when it comes to themselves: I am sure that they'd not be just as ok with the pilot of their plane to drink & fly? or maybe their bus driver to drink & drive? or what about the firefighter driving the fire truck?
And what about if you have ONE drink and drive home and kill somebody? How many times are you going to replay the accident in your mind and think 'if I hadn't drunk that beer maybe my reflexes would've been just faster enough that I could have avoided the accident'? Do you really want to be in that situation? to spend the rest of your life wondering 'what if I hadn't'?
#1 first offense doesn't mean the first time the person did it, only the first time they got caught
#2 you can still kill somebody the first time you drink and drive, it's not like the first time you do there's a magical force field protecting you/the pedestrian or something
#3 it's not that hard: if you drink YOU DO NOT DRIVE, period. take a cab, take transit, have a designated driver, you name it, risking other people's lives because you are too cheap to take a cab is ridiculous, you had the money to buy drinks, you should have the money to get home without endangering others.
From my perspective there is no line to draw, first time 5 years w/o a license, second time lose your license forever, period.
... personal users: how can you get people wanting to develop for your OS/ecosystem if you charge them a LOT of money for the toolchain/msdn/...?
I can see how a software house should have to pay for MSDN/VC++/etc. for their devs (since they after all make money) but personal developers should be able to have the full version of the toolchain (with full msdn, not 'limited' versions) in order to compete with os/x (xcode etc., all free) or linux/unix/FOSS (gcc/emacs/... all free). I really do not think the income MS makes from enthusiasts buying msdn/vc++ access is worth the loss in mental market share in terms of all the devs migrating to other platforms where they don't have to "pay to play".
that is one software update away
I would like to see the software update that gives ipads front/back-facing video cameras...
you might also want to check data on how much easier it is to learn new languages (machine & human) when you already know several, most people in their 40s nowadays will likely have forgotten more languages than somebody right out of university has ever learned and so will quite easily pick new ones up if needed.