This is part of it (you give up a *lot* of constitutional protections while in uniform), but there is another, far more important reason: Every member of a given military branch is fully expected to be capable of fighting. The Marines have a saying "Every Marine is a rifleman", and it holds true for every branch (even as a USAF electronics/avionics technician, I was still trained to use, strip, assemble and clean an M-16, and I had to maintain a minimum proficiency of marksmanship with it.)
This has its roots in one aspect of combat - a salient of enemy soldiers breaking through the front. Even as late as the Battle of The Bulge (WWII), rear-echelon troops such as cooks and mechanics had to quickly stop what they were doing and start shooting back. Most of them sucked at it, but without the combat training they did get? They would have been even easier pickings, and likely would have allowed Germany to prolong the war for years longer than it had lasted.
I see no problems with requiring a basic level of combat ability and readiness. It instills a sense of physical fitness, a level of discipline (a slob generally cannot run 5 miles, aim a weapon worth a damn, etc), and gives them at least some modicum of stature with their fellow soldiers (who would otherwise consider them to be far, far worse than a POG. We give each other crap as it is, but at least everyone knows that everyone else had at least some level of martial training.)
For creativity, a small bullpen may be best. Think an office with four people in it, and a lot of room. I don't think that is what managers really want.
I worked in a situation like that once - it was actually pretty awesome. Four of us were in one room, and we were able to accurately gauge everyone's level of busyness before interrupting, hold an impromptu meeting right there on the spot to hash out ideas, or just kick back and grind out code/docs/etc. Thanks to my little tobacco habit, if I wanted time alone to think, I stepped outside with a laptop and did just that. Otherwise, it was a great way to incubate ideas or get a boatload of work done.
The only caveat is that you'd better get along as a team and be pretty tight socially with each other, but otherwise it was one of the best office layouts I'd ever worked in.
Mostly managers complain about open floor plans because they have to actually prove that they have an entire day's worth of work to do and justify their salary.
Nah - they can always stuff the excess time with meetings.
Anyone ever evaluated and stacked up web logs of Germans to those of Americans?
I've worked for a German company as a sysadmin - it stacks up about even, with a heavy bias towards Germans surfing for the unauthorized bits as you move lower down the pay scale. Mind you, they were in the US at the time, so maybe they treated it as a bit of a break from the usual, but still...
To be fair though, most of the developers and higher-ups on the German side didn't bother at all (then again, more than a few of them were too busy getting it on with the secretaries, coworkers, and other female staff... even the interim CEO was sent back to DE after a bit of scandal, along with a public relations manager who at the time was carrying his unborn child. No idea how he got that news past his wife...)
Long story short - they're just as human, and it's a lot more complex than you think.
(On the plus side, those mofos are *fun* to get drunk with.)
It allows you to use one of those wind-up radios that they make for camping and emergencies. I have a Level II Armature Radio License, which allows me to use the built-in flashlight in addition to the radio itself.
Okay - in all seriousness, there are times when I wish I could get a policy adopted to block the hell out of facebook. OTOH, there are times when I think it's a good thing that employees can take a few minutes here and there to let their brains wander - and that article is why. Folks do spend more hours doing work stuff than their parents did, and thanks to smartphones/VPN, that work very often gets unrealistic deadlines, and thus the excess work often goes home with them.
I'm fortunate in that most of my work nowadays centers around R&D, which means few instances now where I'd be stuck on a conference call at midnight Sunday (deployments, yay!), or suchlike, but all too often it's getting to be the norm in most jobs to work during hours that are traditionally considered not to be working hours.
I could get behind this one - Musk is one of the few actually doing something about getting people into space, and actually making it a paying enterprise.
As someone who once worked for Project Senior Trend, the sibling post has it dead-on.
It was much preferable for the USAF to have folks think that ET stopped by, than to let them realize that what they were really seeing were F-117s flying overhead (mind you, nearly all sorties were done at night, but things happen, and dawn/dusk is kind of an awkward time, at least visually.) In profile (side or front/rear), the jet has a saucer-like shape, and definitely something that doesn't look like an ordinary civilian or military aircraft. Funny enough, the Soviets were more than happy to foster and even encourage alien conspiracy theories, if only to keep their own population from thinking that they saw some secret military project flying overhead.
Other notable examples of military aircraft that would cause confusion and optical illusions? The SR-71/A-12 in its early days, the B-47 flying wing, and its grandkid, the B-2 bomber.
Not sure if it is an option for you, but can you take public transit?
Someone does the driving and you can read/sleep, etc.
Not really a good alternative for many folks.
Until recently, I was down to one vehicle, and the days the missus needed the car, I had to take public transportation. Here's how that went:
First she has to get me to the train station (I live in a rural area - nearest light rail station was 10 miles away), then I spent an hour on the thing going to the same place that I could reach in 30 minutes if I drove there by car (...why? Because the train has to stop at every station along the way). Then there's the whole idea of not wanting to bring out expensive gear (phone, laptop, whatever) in front of folks who might want that gear worse than you do, and would be more than willing to take it from you. I won't go in-depth on the subject of how crowded the trains get during morning rush, the singularly uncomfortable seats (which are designed not for comfort, but to be hosed-down on occasion), and etc.
[...] assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market." [...]
Umm, unless you're an academic, charitable, think-tank or governmental institution, profit and market pretty much drives what you do as an organization. Google, as a publicly-traded company, is going to have to at least cater to that whole making-a-profit thing once in awhile.
I remember when the iPhone was released and people said the same thing.
Google is sitting on a mountain of IP for both projects. Some companies look a bit beyond next quarter's results.
Bit of a difference, though... the iPhone, when it first came out, actually provided a lot of gee-whiz stuff that (as it turns out) folks actually wanted and could use. It also had at least some competition at the time - blackberries predominant among them in North America. The difference was the UI, a *much* larger screen, and a greatly expanded set of features. The price was also not too far out of reach; a top-end Blackberry cost something like $500-$600 anyway, so $699 (I think?) for a mid-range iPhone 1 wasn't a bad deal.
Google Glass? Umm, okay. It costs far more than it delivers (as in, what does it really *do* besides display and record video/audio for that much money?)
Driverless cars? A better feature proposition (it'd make the commute much easier and enjoyable), but the feature is limited to certain roads/speeds, and after seeing the price hikes for a hybrid, one can only imagine what the driverless feature set will cost you as someone out shopping for a new car.
It's all about use cases. My wife uses her iPad for the same reasons you do, but she rarely bothers with a full-blown PC. For her, the iPad is great for road trips, small vacations, etc.
On my part, I rarely bother with a tablet; I have/use CG applications that a tablet simply could not keep up with, if anything were even written for them in that vein. Plus, I prefer the larger screens, bulkiness be damned.
I remember playing D&D back in the 80s. For me, it was soon replaced by video games.
~~
I remember eventually replacing the D&D books with a D&D video game (on a Commodore 64).
Still played from the books off and on for years, though - it was amazing how many military folks played D&D back in the late '80s (at least in the USAF), and sometimes nearly the whole squadron would get together for a massive session on occasion (it got hard to play after a certain amount of alcohol, but damn it got funnier.)
Just ditch Trident. Why do we need more browser engines? What is wrong with WebKit? Why waste man hours and money on this waste of time project instead of helping with the development of WebKit?
Indeed, and besides, if it's using the Trident engine (and the same JS engine), then WTF - it's basically going to be IE 12.
Tact is nice, but why does it always have to come from the side of the non-believer ?
You deal in absolutes; in an age where even voluntary prayer is discouraged (if not banned) in public schools, "always" doesn't even come close to being true. I only mention that because it does go both ways, and has for quite awhile now.
You do bring up a good point though - if you're in the minority, how best are you going to win converts - by showing kindness and tact, or by swinging superiority like a cudgel? Consider that your movement becomes what it attracts, and attracts according to behavior.
TBH, it doesn't matter, though you are incorrect on more than a few points: Saturnalia ends a few days prior to Christmas. Traditionally, Christmas begins on December 25th and lasts until Epiphany (January 8) - well outside of most pagan calendars, which centered around or ended on the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21).
As far as timing, there's are credible studies that disagree with the born-in-the-spring trope as well; I can hunt them down if you'd like and as time permits.
Now, as for OT: The original tweet was snark at the most, kind of cute, and could have been ignored outside of a vocal minority. But no, he had to double-down on the stupid and be a dick about it. Seriously... dude should have left it where it was; instead he lent credence to those who hollered about it, and only amplified something that could potentially harm his career later on (albeit indirectly).
Okay, I get that there is a vast difference between science and religion (as their should be!) - that said, Neil, dude - there's also a difference between posting verifiable objective truths and, well, being a dick about it.
I know, downmod me if you don't like it, but think for a minute first... there are 7 billion humans on this planet, so don't you think we should, you know, at least try to get along, to show some consideration and kindness? I'm certainly not going to bust into any of Dr. DeGrasse-Tyson's celebrations and go out of my way to tell him why the reason he celebrates it is bullshit - even if I had verifiable fact to provide in support of my doing so.
All I'm saying is this: Dude, show some frickin' *tact* next time.
Paul Graham is correct (posting anonymously to keep my "foes" quota manageable).
No reason to hate someone if their argument is coherent and clear. So let's see what we have here...
The exact same complaints about wages were no doubt made when Jackie Robinson integrated USA baseball, or Red Aurbach began recruiting African American players.
Bad comparison; Jackie Robinson was a US-born citizen, as were his pioneer contemporaries. He wasn't shipped into the job from overseas and threatened with deportation if he bitched about his pay. He also didn't have rival baseball teams clamoring Congress for tickets to import more black players. Also, your argument sets up a strawman for later, the part which I won't even bother to address due to the fact that it is also irrelevant.
The arguments against Graham's do not suggest that programming will be weaker, or that the software industry will be weaker, by allowing H1B recruits.
False argument: no one is credibly arguing that importation of a rockstar H1B-holders would weaken programming or the software industry in the US --if that were truly the case (it most often isn't).
I can say however, as someone who once worked at an H1-B-happy corporation, that I've found one big fat problem: cultural and language difficulties have often gotten in the way of communication within a given team, causing information and data to take up to twice as long to get across (especially if a conference phone is involved). I am confident that others have also found this to be a problem, and I defy you to prove otherwise.
Show me how do you measure what a great programmer is?
Why, the ability to work 110 hours each week to crank out working code for $15/hr, of course!
Of course, it's easy for the VC types to demand more foreign (read: cheap and abusable) labor... it allows them (and their beneficiaries, the start-ups) to spend less money on overhead like employee salaries, and more money on infrastructure, executive bonuses, wild parties... shit like that.
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say it was a big, fat marketing ploy to make the best off of two bad things (the breach and the fact that critics panned the movie even before the whole hacking thing).
Slashdot Mirror
This is part of it (you give up a *lot* of constitutional protections while in uniform), but there is another, far more important reason: Every member of a given military branch is fully expected to be capable of fighting. The Marines have a saying "Every Marine is a rifleman", and it holds true for every branch (even as a USAF electronics/avionics technician, I was still trained to use, strip, assemble and clean an M-16, and I had to maintain a minimum proficiency of marksmanship with it.)
This has its roots in one aspect of combat - a salient of enemy soldiers breaking through the front. Even as late as the Battle of The Bulge (WWII), rear-echelon troops such as cooks and mechanics had to quickly stop what they were doing and start shooting back. Most of them sucked at it, but without the combat training they did get? They would have been even easier pickings, and likely would have allowed Germany to prolong the war for years longer than it had lasted.
I see no problems with requiring a basic level of combat ability and readiness. It instills a sense of physical fitness, a level of discipline (a slob generally cannot run 5 miles, aim a weapon worth a damn, etc), and gives them at least some modicum of stature with their fellow soldiers (who would otherwise consider them to be far, far worse than a POG. We give each other crap as it is, but at least everyone knows that everyone else had at least some level of martial training.)
For creativity, a small bullpen may be best. Think an office with four people in it, and a lot of room. I don't think that is what managers really want.
I worked in a situation like that once - it was actually pretty awesome. Four of us were in one room, and we were able to accurately gauge everyone's level of busyness before interrupting, hold an impromptu meeting right there on the spot to hash out ideas, or just kick back and grind out code/docs/etc. Thanks to my little tobacco habit, if I wanted time alone to think, I stepped outside with a laptop and did just that. Otherwise, it was a great way to incubate ideas or get a boatload of work done.
The only caveat is that you'd better get along as a team and be pretty tight socially with each other, but otherwise it was one of the best office layouts I'd ever worked in.
Mostly managers complain about open floor plans because they have to actually prove that they have an entire day's worth of work to do and justify their salary.
Nah - they can always stuff the excess time with meetings.
Anyone ever evaluated and stacked up web logs of Germans to those of Americans?
I've worked for a German company as a sysadmin - it stacks up about even, with a heavy bias towards Germans surfing for the unauthorized bits as you move lower down the pay scale. Mind you, they were in the US at the time, so maybe they treated it as a bit of a break from the usual, but still...
To be fair though, most of the developers and higher-ups on the German side didn't bother at all (then again, more than a few of them were too busy getting it on with the secretaries, coworkers, and other female staff... even the interim CEO was sent back to DE after a bit of scandal, along with a public relations manager who at the time was carrying his unborn child. No idea how he got that news past his wife...)
Long story short - they're just as human, and it's a lot more complex than you think.
(On the plus side, those mofos are *fun* to get drunk with.)
"Armature radio license"?
It allows you to use one of those wind-up radios that they make for camping and emergencies. I have a Level II Armature Radio License, which allows me to use the built-in flashlight in addition to the radio itself.
I'm the BOFH, bitch - block this (*grabs crotch*)
Okay - in all seriousness, there are times when I wish I could get a policy adopted to block the hell out of facebook. OTOH, there are times when I think it's a good thing that employees can take a few minutes here and there to let their brains wander - and that article is why. Folks do spend more hours doing work stuff than their parents did, and thanks to smartphones/VPN, that work very often gets unrealistic deadlines, and thus the excess work often goes home with them.
I'm fortunate in that most of my work nowadays centers around R&D, which means few instances now where I'd be stuck on a conference call at midnight Sunday (deployments, yay!), or suchlike, but all too often it's getting to be the norm in most jobs to work during hours that are traditionally considered not to be working hours.
I could get behind this one - Musk is one of the few actually doing something about getting people into space, and actually making it a paying enterprise.
Then we get the 'aliens at Area 51' stories and every teenage boy on the planet knows about the base.
They know about... that base.
The USAF owns something like 1/3 of Nevada as test range. Area 51/Groom Lake is only a very, very small piece of it.
As someone who once worked for Project Senior Trend, the sibling post has it dead-on.
It was much preferable for the USAF to have folks think that ET stopped by, than to let them realize that what they were really seeing were F-117s flying overhead (mind you, nearly all sorties were done at night, but things happen, and dawn/dusk is kind of an awkward time, at least visually.) In profile (side or front/rear), the jet has a saucer-like shape, and definitely something that doesn't look like an ordinary civilian or military aircraft. Funny enough, the Soviets were more than happy to foster and even encourage alien conspiracy theories, if only to keep their own population from thinking that they saw some secret military project flying overhead.
Other notable examples of military aircraft that would cause confusion and optical illusions? The SR-71/A-12 in its early days, the B-47 flying wing, and its grandkid, the B-2 bomber.
Not sure if it is an option for you, but can you take public transit?
Someone does the driving and you can read/sleep, etc.
Not really a good alternative for many folks.
Until recently, I was down to one vehicle, and the days the missus needed the car, I had to take public transportation. Here's how that went:
First she has to get me to the train station (I live in a rural area - nearest light rail station was 10 miles away), then I spent an hour on the thing going to the same place that I could reach in 30 minutes if I drove there by car (...why? Because the train has to stop at every station along the way). Then there's the whole idea of not wanting to bring out expensive gear (phone, laptop, whatever) in front of folks who might want that gear worse than you do, and would be more than willing to take it from you. I won't go in-depth on the subject of how crowded the trains get during morning rush, the singularly uncomfortable seats (which are designed not for comfort, but to be hosed-down on occasion), and etc.
[...] assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market." [...]
Umm, unless you're an academic, charitable, think-tank or governmental institution, profit and market pretty much drives what you do as an organization. Google, as a publicly-traded company, is going to have to at least cater to that whole making-a-profit thing once in awhile.
I remember when the iPhone was released and people said the same thing.
Google is sitting on a mountain of IP for both projects. Some companies look a bit beyond next quarter's results.
Bit of a difference, though... the iPhone, when it first came out, actually provided a lot of gee-whiz stuff that (as it turns out) folks actually wanted and could use. It also had at least some competition at the time - blackberries predominant among them in North America. The difference was the UI, a *much* larger screen, and a greatly expanded set of features. The price was also not too far out of reach; a top-end Blackberry cost something like $500-$600 anyway, so $699 (I think?) for a mid-range iPhone 1 wasn't a bad deal.
Google Glass? Umm, okay. It costs far more than it delivers (as in, what does it really *do* besides display and record video/audio for that much money?)
Driverless cars? A better feature proposition (it'd make the commute much easier and enjoyable), but the feature is limited to certain roads/speeds, and after seeing the price hikes for a hybrid, one can only imagine what the driverless feature set will cost you as someone out shopping for a new car.
I can agree easily to that - a good tablet will outlast a good mobile phone by miles. I think the only real limiting factor would be the battery.
It's all about use cases. My wife uses her iPad for the same reasons you do, but she rarely bothers with a full-blown PC. For her, the iPad is great for road trips, small vacations, etc.
On my part, I rarely bother with a tablet; I have/use CG applications that a tablet simply could not keep up with, if anything were even written for them in that vein. Plus, I prefer the larger screens, bulkiness be damned.
I remember playing D&D back in the 80s. For me, it was soon replaced by video games.
~~
I remember eventually replacing the D&D books with a D&D video game (on a Commodore 64).
Still played from the books off and on for years, though - it was amazing how many military folks played D&D back in the late '80s (at least in the USAF), and sometimes nearly the whole squadron would get together for a massive session on occasion (it got hard to play after a certain amount of alcohol, but damn it got funnier.)
Just ditch Trident. Why do we need more browser engines? What is wrong with WebKit? Why waste man hours and money on this waste of time project instead of helping with the development of WebKit?
Indeed, and besides, if it's using the Trident engine (and the same JS engine), then WTF - it's basically going to be IE 12.
Tact is nice, but why does it always have to come from the side of the non-believer ?
You deal in absolutes; in an age where even voluntary prayer is discouraged (if not banned) in public schools, "always" doesn't even come close to being true. I only mention that because it does go both ways, and has for quite awhile now.
You do bring up a good point though - if you're in the minority, how best are you going to win converts - by showing kindness and tact, or by swinging superiority like a cudgel? Consider that your movement becomes what it attracts, and attracts according to behavior.
TBH, it doesn't matter, though you are incorrect on more than a few points: Saturnalia ends a few days prior to Christmas. Traditionally, Christmas begins on December 25th and lasts until Epiphany (January 8) - well outside of most pagan calendars, which centered around or ended on the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21).
As far as timing, there's are credible studies that disagree with the born-in-the-spring trope as well; I can hunt them down if you'd like and as time permits.
Now, as for OT: The original tweet was snark at the most, kind of cute, and could have been ignored outside of a vocal minority. But no, he had to double-down on the stupid and be a dick about it. Seriously... dude should have left it where it was; instead he lent credence to those who hollered about it, and only amplified something that could potentially harm his career later on (albeit indirectly).
Okay, I get that there is a vast difference between science and religion (as their should be!) - that said, Neil, dude - there's also a difference between posting verifiable objective truths and, well, being a dick about it.
I know, downmod me if you don't like it, but think for a minute first... there are 7 billion humans on this planet, so don't you think we should, you know, at least try to get along, to show some consideration and kindness? I'm certainly not going to bust into any of Dr. DeGrasse-Tyson's celebrations and go out of my way to tell him why the reason he celebrates it is bullshit - even if I had verifiable fact to provide in support of my doing so.
All I'm saying is this: Dude, show some frickin' *tact* next time.
Paul Graham is correct (posting anonymously to keep my "foes" quota manageable).
No reason to hate someone if their argument is coherent and clear. So let's see what we have here...
The exact same complaints about wages were no doubt made when Jackie Robinson integrated USA baseball, or Red Aurbach began recruiting African American players.
Bad comparison; Jackie Robinson was a US-born citizen, as were his pioneer contemporaries. He wasn't shipped into the job from overseas and threatened with deportation if he bitched about his pay. He also didn't have rival baseball teams clamoring Congress for tickets to import more black players. Also, your argument sets up a strawman for later, the part which I won't even bother to address due to the fact that it is also irrelevant.
The arguments against Graham's do not suggest that programming will be weaker, or that the software industry will be weaker, by allowing H1B recruits.
False argument: no one is credibly arguing that importation of a rockstar H1B-holders would weaken programming or the software industry in the US --if that were truly the case (it most often isn't).
I can say however, as someone who once worked at an H1-B-happy corporation, that I've found one big fat problem: cultural and language difficulties have often gotten in the way of communication within a given team, causing information and data to take up to twice as long to get across (especially if a conference phone is involved). I am confident that others have also found this to be a problem, and I defy you to prove otherwise.
It would be easier to set secure VPN servers and ship them laptops, if you truly want to argue logistics. ;)
If you don't have to ask who they are, then they won't need an H1-B to get here. Seriously.
Show me how do you measure what a great programmer is?
Why, the ability to work 110 hours each week to crank out working code for $15/hr, of course!
Of course, it's easy for the VC types to demand more foreign (read: cheap and abusable) labor... it allows them (and their beneficiaries, the start-ups) to spend less money on overhead like employee salaries, and more money on infrastructure, executive bonuses, wild parties... shit like that.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, eh?
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say it was a big, fat marketing ploy to make the best off of two bad things (the breach and the fact that critics panned the movie even before the whole hacking thing).