Vegas is likely a poor example because if they can't disagree on gambling, they'll likely disagree on strippers. That makes things a bit more complicated than necessary. But the exercise, in principle, is a good one I think.
And so what if a person's "way of living" is offended? People get too damn offended in today's world (and frankly, you probably don't want someone who is so easily offended working for you, do you? That makes things - legally and socially - a bit dicey.)
K, so it's a difficult week of their life, a new experience, and a new challenge. But they stepped outside their comfort zone and did something "outside the box". That's important in life and in a person's ability.
What's more, they did it with their work team. If the project was "outside the box" for enough of them, then it could very well be useful as a bonding/sharing experience.
Well, that's just the thing, though: it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing (smashed or sober) proposition.
Consider: in many parts of Europe, alcohol is still much more common a beverage. You drink it when you want a drink that isn't water, much like people do here in the US with soda (though hopefully to a less excessive degree). There are drunks, lushes, winos and the like, sure. But as societies, they've learned the value in alcoholic moderation.
In all likelihood, your boss would not get smashed. He might be the only sober one in the room, even. But the option would be there to have a couple so your ability to think unabated by social frustrations or your coworkers' irritations could be enhanced.
Sure, I suppose there's some liability involved. But so what? Chalk it up to "yet something else lawyers are afraid of", I suppose. I doubt we'll see a return to that in my lifetime.
I'm a "good beer" man, myself, but straight Jack works in a pinch. Have enough whiskey and a man's able to work with even the most irritating SOB.
As a guy who is "very married" and who has the uncanny ability to illicit tears, disgust, and offense from the most beautiful women almost at whim (actually, it's usually an effort not to), I'd suspect somewhere in the 20-point range.
I should also note that extremely hideous (usually overweight and under-dressed) women seem to have a somewhat opposite, if mixed, effect. I'd say it's a 75/25 split between "my brain hurts and must be refreshed" and the ability to come up with some of the most astounding insults ever heard.
My personal inclination is to eye attractive women suspiciously and distrustfully. If it's just something like seeing them walking down the street, then yes, I get stupid. But if there's any sort of interaction required, my guard goes up and I'm instantly suspicious (at least until familiarity is established).
Did they use multiple hot women of varied intelligence to see if the relative agitation level of the male subject impacted their test scores? I suspect it might; thus has been my experience.
Yep. Alcohol is not used enough in today's work world. And by "used" I mean it in a positive sense, a constructive sense.
Most people have inhibitions up the wazoo. They're tense and cloistered in one way or another, and they've got their Issues. Get them liquored up a bit and those things go out the door, to a large degree: the true person shines out a bit, and the level of caring about how one comes out decreases.
It's too bad the 3-martini lunch went out of style. It'd do great things for teamwork.
How does such an exercise assume a non-diverse team? I wouldn't enjoy going to Vegas, but I can see the value in such an exercise.
Think of a movie like The Breakfast Club: a diverse group of people in a contentious situation with outside forces that are in opposition. Eventually, the characters pull together and work together. That's what the GP was talking about.
Actually, the exercise would likely work better if nobody in the group wanted to do it - ie, it was hard for all of them - and that they could get out of it only by finishing it. You know, a challenge which builds character. You could pay for them to take a week long backpacking trip (if they're all in reasonable shape); you could send them on a remote deployment where the situation is quite unpleasant; hell, you could send them to one of those week-long tactical training camps in Arizona with the requirement that it's a team-based event or some such thing so they'd stick together. Like it or not, if they're the least bit competitive, they'd work at the task at hand to a successful completion. And they'd grow as a team.
Personally, I'd not want any tech employee who wasn't competitive and didn't have drive. Yeah, such an experiment is going to fail if they've got inhibitions about excitement and experience. But they're also going to be shit employees if they don't like it, to one degree or another.
Calling such people "misanthrope" is a bit harsh, I think.
Someone who is intelligent, competent, and has a difficult time finding acceptance (or even a modicum of comfort-with-others) in new environments could very easily get falsely labeled a misanthrope. If they're capable and know up from down, calling them self-important is a wee bit counter-productive - and I dare say, quite possibly why they'd be viewed as misanthropic.
A better characteristic descriptor would probably be "socially clueless". I know a lot of guys who come across harsh - myself included. They are usually some of the most open people I've known; they're also very amiable - but havent' a clue how to relate to others unlike themselves.
what harm could he now do to the city network? he was fired, the password has already been disclosed to the mayor about a year ago... or have they forgotten to change the passwords?
Likely none, and they realize this. But they've imprisoned a man - a competent, intelligent man - for over a year now. They've ruined his ability to do what he evidently got a great deal of satisfaction from (noted due to his level of competency). They've smeared his good name, lied about him, and ruined his life.
I suspect they're quite worried about him getting out. On the outside, he'd be able to sue the life out of them and/or the city - and if the city gets sued, then those who invoked the lawsuit will face scrutiny.
Oh yeah, and again, the "smart, competent" bit. What was it about the mental stability of IT workers, nurses, and postal workers and our propensity to go off the deep and which is so wantonly stereotyped in the media? Oh, right. They're probably at least a little concerned that the guy would kill them all in their sleep. I don't doubt he's thought about it, wistfully (there's likely not much else for him to do).
Surely a better analogy would be the awesomeness that is Web 2.0. It's the hottest thing going, but once you get up there and start learning what's going on, you realize that it's just a bunch of hot expanded gas that got you where you are, and currently things above look pretty thin.
I don't know about that. I've read quite a bit about "rocket enthusiasts" who are doing just that - launching rockets into space. Amateur radio enthusiasts come to mind. Something like, oh, this.
Provided the pre-symptom incubation period is fairly long, a deadly virus CAN spread far and wide.
Let's say there's a flu mutation which has a 3-month incubation period, give or take a couple weeks. It has a mortality rate of 50%. However, we don't know about it until three months after the first couple infections - by which time it's likely that the majority of people who will catch it, have caught it. Voila, you've got a pandemic on your hands to which there is no prevention: it's only a matter of time until you find out whether you're one of the lucky few who will die (and no, with 50% of the world's population dying, I do not say they are lucky with any humor).
Actually, I think torrent bandwidth probably went down as a total, even. Between litigation and all the almost-ad-free TV available online (and porn, don't forget the porn) there's no incentive to wait several hours to several months for a torrent of questionable quality to finish downloading.
So torrents used to compose 40% of traffic. Now it's 20%. What's changed in the last year?
* youporn.com and similar sites have popped up where they did not previously. * hulu.com now exists.
That right there could easily cover 90% of people's media interests. Especially now that I'm not really into movies as much as I used to be (they suck more, and TV shows are, in some ways, getting better).
For the initially posted reviews, it'd have been useful if they'd benchmarked against the current OS X 10.5 release as well - to show a comparison between OS X 10.5 and 10.6. Otherwise, the significance of 10.6 vs. Ubuntu is pretty minimal.
As far as their review is concerned, it would appear that they did not fix the most serious performance-related issues in OS X, and the linux kernel is/may be slowly getting less efficient due to the "just add more stuff, let distros sort it out" approach to development.
And so much for 10.6 being a 'rewrite' of many of the subsystems to increase performance. It would appear that the major performance issues still remain: multi-threading/context switching is as slow as a dog on a hot southern July afternoon, still. It might be better than 10.5, but we don't see 10.5 on the list of what they tested, so there's little way to know.
GCC compile speeds aren't surprising, either; what is surprising is why they didn't look into the massive discrepancy on something like that. My guess: optimization on OS X w/ GCC was negligible or non-existent, resulting in the quicker compile.
What kind of regressions are we talking about, here?
I know that 9.04 had a number of hardware support regressions. hdparm -C doesn't work properly on my system, and neither does the ability to use a bay based multi-card USB reader.
Seems that since version 7, Ubuntu has had more regressions than it's fixed with each subsequent release.
One possible way to solve this is to figure out how to scale single processes over multiple cores. As far as I know, that hasn't been done yet, and I don't even know if it's possible. But if it is possible, that adaptability seems like it'd kick the whole "programming for multiple cores" thing in the ass pretty readily.
Multithreading? Check, we've got that. Multiprocess? Sure, we've got that too, though there are still a lot of applications which don't do it, or do it wrong. But if it could be done transparently (at the OS level), it'd be a win-win for everyone, I think - even if there was a 10-20% overall performance penalty as a result. It'd at least buy us some time in trying to figure out how to either increase clock speeds again or how to effectively program for multiple cores.
Stuff like this has been around for a while. I got some stuff back in '03 called Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty or something like that for stress relief. It has many of the same physical attributes of this d3o stuff, and even moves/shapes the same way when not-firm. I'd make a ball from it and throw it against the wall, or punch the ball. It was great stress relief for the time (I spent a lot of time on the phone for support). Within a certain threshold, it was/is malleable, but hit it and it's very firm.
I also have a pair of Impact Gel shoe inserts. They work in much the same way, though they are a different type of material. On impact, they get hard. They help markedly with heavy walking on hard materials.
I think stuff like this has been around for quite some time. This company is just taking the same basic thing, putting it in a brand-recognizable 'container', finding a good application for it and marketing it up the wazoo. Kind of like Apple does with all their products.
Even when plastics are pre-sorted, the cost of recycling them is significantly higher than the cost of newly produced plastic. This is when the binned 'type' plastics are free, vs. oil-for-money.
Except for it costing money, instead of making money, to recycle plastics.
The only reason Westerners think there's money in recycling is because the government(s) pay subjects to recycle due to the offset it provides in reduced landfill load. If that.
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).
You are correct; however, look at the 100+ years prior to the Great Depression. While there were peaks and valleys in the economy, they were relatively minor and short lived. The economy was stable; likewise, there was not significant inflation. Some would argue that this is similar to stagflation, but the growth was somewhat related to population growth (as it should be, barring drastic breakthroughs).
Simply, the great depression was directly related to abolition of the gold standard and the adoption of fiat currencies and Keynesian philosophy. With the introduction of fiat currencies and the ability to borrow from the future for economic stimulus, you are increasing the depth and height of the peaks and valleys and causing inflation. Each subsequent recession is followed by a larger (and necessary) recovery until the system breaks from the inability to support any more debt.
Now, if you're able to pay off the debt in times of surplus and even things out, you could conceivably keep things going without much of a problem. You'd stabilize inflation by keeping the supply of money low. However, that's not what happens; the debt, essentially, gets ignored and pushed off to the next administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Vegas is likely a poor example because if they can't disagree on gambling, they'll likely disagree on strippers. That makes things a bit more complicated than necessary. But the exercise, in principle, is a good one I think.
And so what if a person's "way of living" is offended? People get too damn offended in today's world (and frankly, you probably don't want someone who is so easily offended working for you, do you? That makes things - legally and socially - a bit dicey.)
K, so it's a difficult week of their life, a new experience, and a new challenge. But they stepped outside their comfort zone and did something "outside the box". That's important in life and in a person's ability.
What's more, they did it with their work team. If the project was "outside the box" for enough of them, then it could very well be useful as a bonding/sharing experience.
Well, that's just the thing, though: it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing (smashed or sober) proposition.
Consider: in many parts of Europe, alcohol is still much more common a beverage. You drink it when you want a drink that isn't water, much like people do here in the US with soda (though hopefully to a less excessive degree). There are drunks, lushes, winos and the like, sure. But as societies, they've learned the value in alcoholic moderation.
In all likelihood, your boss would not get smashed. He might be the only sober one in the room, even. But the option would be there to have a couple so your ability to think unabated by social frustrations or your coworkers' irritations could be enhanced.
Sure, I suppose there's some liability involved. But so what? Chalk it up to "yet something else lawyers are afraid of", I suppose. I doubt we'll see a return to that in my lifetime.
I'm a "good beer" man, myself, but straight Jack works in a pinch. Have enough whiskey and a man's able to work with even the most irritating SOB.
As a guy who is "very married" and who has the uncanny ability to illicit tears, disgust, and offense from the most beautiful women almost at whim (actually, it's usually an effort not to), I'd suspect somewhere in the 20-point range.
I should also note that extremely hideous (usually overweight and under-dressed) women seem to have a somewhat opposite, if mixed, effect. I'd say it's a 75/25 split between "my brain hurts and must be refreshed" and the ability to come up with some of the most astounding insults ever heard.
My personal inclination is to eye attractive women suspiciously and distrustfully. If it's just something like seeing them walking down the street, then yes, I get stupid. But if there's any sort of interaction required, my guard goes up and I'm instantly suspicious (at least until familiarity is established).
Did they use multiple hot women of varied intelligence to see if the relative agitation level of the male subject impacted their test scores? I suspect it might; thus has been my experience.
Yep. Alcohol is not used enough in today's work world. And by "used" I mean it in a positive sense, a constructive sense.
Most people have inhibitions up the wazoo. They're tense and cloistered in one way or another, and they've got their Issues. Get them liquored up a bit and those things go out the door, to a large degree: the true person shines out a bit, and the level of caring about how one comes out decreases.
It's too bad the 3-martini lunch went out of style. It'd do great things for teamwork.
How does such an exercise assume a non-diverse team? I wouldn't enjoy going to Vegas, but I can see the value in such an exercise.
Think of a movie like The Breakfast Club: a diverse group of people in a contentious situation with outside forces that are in opposition. Eventually, the characters pull together and work together. That's what the GP was talking about.
Actually, the exercise would likely work better if nobody in the group wanted to do it - ie, it was hard for all of them - and that they could get out of it only by finishing it. You know, a challenge which builds character. You could pay for them to take a week long backpacking trip (if they're all in reasonable shape); you could send them on a remote deployment where the situation is quite unpleasant; hell, you could send them to one of those week-long tactical training camps in Arizona with the requirement that it's a team-based event or some such thing so they'd stick together. Like it or not, if they're the least bit competitive, they'd work at the task at hand to a successful completion. And they'd grow as a team.
Personally, I'd not want any tech employee who wasn't competitive and didn't have drive. Yeah, such an experiment is going to fail if they've got inhibitions about excitement and experience. But they're also going to be shit employees if they don't like it, to one degree or another.
Calling such people "misanthrope" is a bit harsh, I think.
Someone who is intelligent, competent, and has a difficult time finding acceptance (or even a modicum of comfort-with-others) in new environments could very easily get falsely labeled a misanthrope. If they're capable and know up from down, calling them self-important is a wee bit counter-productive - and I dare say, quite possibly why they'd be viewed as misanthropic.
A better characteristic descriptor would probably be "socially clueless". I know a lot of guys who come across harsh - myself included. They are usually some of the most open people I've known; they're also very amiable - but havent' a clue how to relate to others unlike themselves.
what harm could he now do to the city network? he was fired, the password has already been disclosed to the mayor about a year ago... or have they forgotten to change the passwords?
Likely none, and they realize this. But they've imprisoned a man - a competent, intelligent man - for over a year now. They've ruined his ability to do what he evidently got a great deal of satisfaction from (noted due to his level of competency). They've smeared his good name, lied about him, and ruined his life.
I suspect they're quite worried about him getting out. On the outside, he'd be able to sue the life out of them and/or the city - and if the city gets sued, then those who invoked the lawsuit will face scrutiny.
Oh yeah, and again, the "smart, competent" bit. What was it about the mental stability of IT workers, nurses, and postal workers and our propensity to go off the deep and which is so wantonly stereotyped in the media? Oh, right. They're probably at least a little concerned that the guy would kill them all in their sleep. I don't doubt he's thought about it, wistfully (there's likely not much else for him to do).
Surely a better analogy would be the awesomeness that is Web 2.0. It's the hottest thing going, but once you get up there and start learning what's going on, you realize that it's just a bunch of hot expanded gas that got you where you are, and currently things above look pretty thin.
So jaunt on over there and visit, silly.
I don't know about that. I've read quite a bit about "rocket enthusiasts" who are doing just that - launching rockets into space. Amateur radio enthusiasts come to mind. Something like, oh, this.
Provided the pre-symptom incubation period is fairly long, a deadly virus CAN spread far and wide.
Let's say there's a flu mutation which has a 3-month incubation period, give or take a couple weeks. It has a mortality rate of 50%. However, we don't know about it until three months after the first couple infections - by which time it's likely that the majority of people who will catch it, have caught it. Voila, you've got a pandemic on your hands to which there is no prevention: it's only a matter of time until you find out whether you're one of the lucky few who will die (and no, with 50% of the world's population dying, I do not say they are lucky with any humor).
That reminds me of Marble Madness, to some degree. I thought that was much more fun than Tetris. It was like Lemmings + Tetris, in 3D with 'physics'.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the extensive boot times every morning.
Actually, I think torrent bandwidth probably went down as a total, even. Between litigation and all the almost-ad-free TV available online (and porn, don't forget the porn) there's no incentive to wait several hours to several months for a torrent of questionable quality to finish downloading.
So torrents used to compose 40% of traffic. Now it's 20%. What's changed in the last year?
* youporn.com and similar sites have popped up where they did not previously.
* hulu.com now exists.
That right there could easily cover 90% of people's media interests. Especially now that I'm not really into movies as much as I used to be (they suck more, and TV shows are, in some ways, getting better).
For the initially posted reviews, it'd have been useful if they'd benchmarked against the current OS X 10.5 release as well - to show a comparison between OS X 10.5 and 10.6. Otherwise, the significance of 10.6 vs. Ubuntu is pretty minimal.
As far as their review is concerned, it would appear that they did not fix the most serious performance-related issues in OS X, and the linux kernel is/may be slowly getting less efficient due to the "just add more stuff, let distros sort it out" approach to development.
And so much for 10.6 being a 'rewrite' of many of the subsystems to increase performance. It would appear that the major performance issues still remain: multi-threading/context switching is as slow as a dog on a hot southern July afternoon, still. It might be better than 10.5, but we don't see 10.5 on the list of what they tested, so there's little way to know.
GCC compile speeds aren't surprising, either; what is surprising is why they didn't look into the massive discrepancy on something like that. My guess: optimization on OS X w/ GCC was negligible or non-existent, resulting in the quicker compile.
What kind of regressions are we talking about, here?
I know that 9.04 had a number of hardware support regressions. hdparm -C doesn't work properly on my system, and neither does the ability to use a bay based multi-card USB reader.
Seems that since version 7, Ubuntu has had more regressions than it's fixed with each subsequent release.
One possible way to solve this is to figure out how to scale single processes over multiple cores. As far as I know, that hasn't been done yet, and I don't even know if it's possible. But if it is possible, that adaptability seems like it'd kick the whole "programming for multiple cores" thing in the ass pretty readily.
Multithreading? Check, we've got that. Multiprocess? Sure, we've got that too, though there are still a lot of applications which don't do it, or do it wrong. But if it could be done transparently (at the OS level), it'd be a win-win for everyone, I think - even if there was a 10-20% overall performance penalty as a result. It'd at least buy us some time in trying to figure out how to either increase clock speeds again or how to effectively program for multiple cores.
Stuff like this has been around for a while. I got some stuff back in '03 called Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty or something like that for stress relief. It has many of the same physical attributes of this d3o stuff, and even moves/shapes the same way when not-firm. I'd make a ball from it and throw it against the wall, or punch the ball. It was great stress relief for the time (I spent a lot of time on the phone for support). Within a certain threshold, it was/is malleable, but hit it and it's very firm.
I also have a pair of Impact Gel shoe inserts. They work in much the same way, though they are a different type of material. On impact, they get hard. They help markedly with heavy walking on hard materials.
I think stuff like this has been around for quite some time. This company is just taking the same basic thing, putting it in a brand-recognizable 'container', finding a good application for it and marketing it up the wazoo. Kind of like Apple does with all their products.
Even when plastics are pre-sorted, the cost of recycling them is significantly higher than the cost of newly produced plastic. This is when the binned 'type' plastics are free, vs. oil-for-money.
Except for it costing money, instead of making money, to recycle plastics.
The only reason Westerners think there's money in recycling is because the government(s) pay subjects to recycle due to the offset it provides in reduced landfill load. If that.
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).
I suspect you could correct for packet loss through a RAIP (Redundant Array of Independent Pigeons) configuration. RUDP?
You are correct; however, look at the 100+ years prior to the Great Depression. While there were peaks and valleys in the economy, they were relatively minor and short lived. The economy was stable; likewise, there was not significant inflation. Some would argue that this is similar to stagflation, but the growth was somewhat related to population growth (as it should be, barring drastic breakthroughs).
Simply, the great depression was directly related to abolition of the gold standard and the adoption of fiat currencies and Keynesian philosophy. With the introduction of fiat currencies and the ability to borrow from the future for economic stimulus, you are increasing the depth and height of the peaks and valleys and causing inflation. Each subsequent recession is followed by a larger (and necessary) recovery until the system breaks from the inability to support any more debt.
Now, if you're able to pay off the debt in times of surplus and even things out, you could conceivably keep things going without much of a problem. You'd stabilize inflation by keeping the supply of money low. However, that's not what happens; the debt, essentially, gets ignored and pushed off to the next administration.