I predict that the tide of public opinion will change and get behind the effort to fix the problem when Polar Bears finally go extinct in the wild.
I think you are a nice guy who wrongly believes that others are also nice. I advise you to stand in the middle of a Singapore 'medicine' market hugging a stuffed dodo until you realize exactly how much the extinction of large interesting creatures means to most people.
Oh, right. That's ok. As long as it's limited to people whom someone, somewhere, for reason's you'll never know, has decided to call 'known terrorists'.
Phew.
That's a weight off my mind.
I guess it seemed like there was a problem, but really, there wasn't.
Well, I'm off to sit in a field of cotton wool hugging a giant kitten, in Fluffiton, the land where everything is soft and fluffy.
Seriously, though, people don't distinguish enough between the Vietnam War as a whole and the often very effective efforts of the US military within that war.
The US didn't get 'ripped to pieces' in Vietnam. In purely military terms, their decisions and strategies (with the exception of the strategic bombing campaign) were most effective. The Viet Cong were practically wiped out by the end of the war, and the US successfully used not just high-tech solutions but grass-roots small-unit tactics. The battle for 'hearts and minds' was lost by the ARVN long before the GIs got a go at it.
Unwinnable disaster? Why yes. 'ripped to pieces' due to reliance on long range bombardment? Not at all. Like the current war in Iraq, it was a political failure that the military tried to fix but couldn't.
Good point -- my requirements were vague. The requirement is to get him to stop laughing, or drastically reduce the giggle frequency. It's currently about 100-150 a day, but clustered; there'll be one every minute for a while, then none for hours.
Music won't work, as I have no sound source available and I just can't work while listening to music because I get too into the music.
'Nuclear' solutions such as reporting him to the boss aren't good as this is a small freindly company and I don't really want to be the first guy to change that.
My favorite suggestion so far is to locate a known giggle-inducing blog and spike it in some way -- perhaps by posting in the guise of a guy who was just sacked for giggling all the darn time.
By the way, thanks to all those who have given suggestions.
My local lawyer, for example, used to get about 20% of the town's law traffic 10 years ago. It's now computerized and processes far more documents and communications, at a far faster rate, than it ever used to. It still gets about 20% of the town's law traffic, as its competitors have upgraded in exactly the same way. The courts, of course, recieve far more documents and messages from these lawyers than they ever used to, but the courts themselves have also computerized (just barely) and can handle the extra traffic.
In terms of 'productivity', I'd think that the lawyers, paralegals, court administrators and so on have improved by 10 times. In terms of how much useful stuff gets done, it's exactly constant.
So yeah, by all means integrate Google technology with your cornflakes to achieve a further tenfold increase in productivity. Go right ahead.
In more important news, I currently have a co-worker who spends all day reading his friend's blogs (which doesn't bother me) and giggling over the witty posts he finds (which is driving me fucking mad). Can any slashdotters suggest a solution that will not result in jail or in me being considered 'not a team player'?
I worked for a long time in the US, in a cubicle, and I hated cubicles (I hate shoulder-height 'half cubicles' even more, though). I can't say why, I just hate them, and I think everyone agrees with me.
In the UK, as you say, cubicles are very rare and open-plan is the rule. Where I work now, there's about 8-16 people, working on roughly the same sort of thing at the same level, in one room. It works fine. But at most places I've worked, entire floors or half-floors are open plan -- maybe 200-500 people per floor. This is awful.
The reasons it's awful are:
1 -- the 'Space Odyssey' effect. Cielings tend to be pretty low in new build offices, and when the ceiling is low and goes on forever, covered in striplights, the dazzle effect when you look into the distance is horrible for me.
2 -- higher proportion of flourescent lights. In a small room, people bring in lamps if they don't have a window. In a floor of 500 people, there's no point, so unless you are right at the edge the only light sources are flickering ones. argh.
3 -- distraction. In a real classic UK office, I'm within 'being annoyed by personal phone calls' radius of maybe 50 or 100 people!
4 -- fear. The fact that there are always people moving around behind me translates into constant alertness (for me at least).
5 -- despair. A grid of 500 desks just makes the fundamental pointlessness of work a lot more obvious.
I have worked in open-plan places (in America & Asia) that take steps to improve things -- for example, giving the open-plan zone an irregular twisting shape helps a bit, having private rooms around the edge helps a bit, having gaps or balconies helps, and actually open-plan offices like this, where you aren't exposed to the whole floor all the time, aren't bad. But London in particular seems to go for the 'endless bright white expanse of flourescent lights' and it's really grim.
most of the religious beliefs are in contradiction with science.
Until about 40 years ago, most scientists were religious people. For all I know, they still are (I don't go round asking them). Most scientific theories were developed in an environment of religion, and most religious beliefs emerged from cultures that had at least some vague concept of forming theories about natural phenomena and testing them by trial and error. Ever since long before Galileo sat in his Vatican-funded observatory (it's a pity he didn't keep out of politics, though!) and Newton took time out from his theological studies to formulate a few laws of motion, people have had, among various other things, religion and science.
It's just rational humanists such as you who have trouble with this. And it's fine for you to have trouble with it -- you have a perfect right to believe that religion and science are somehow opposites locked in eternal conflict. But you ought to be aware that it's just your belief, just as some folks belive the End Times are Coming or God Hates Fags.
computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul
The fact that you believe it's impossible is part of your faith -- it's not a fact about neuroscience and souls. Otherwise there wouldn't be any religious neuroscientists, which I observe not to be the case.
Put your faith down and talk about facts -- even Creationists can do that, on a good day, with a favorable wind. The main difference between a creationist and a rational humanist is that the creationist understands that they are running on faith.
To clarify, I realize that UTF-8 isn't necessarily three bytes per character. It's usually three bytes per character for me, but it can be as few as 1 and as many as 7 -- which is a lot less efficient than even a constant 7 bytes would be, for many tasks. Of course, if you then handle the UTF-8 with software that follows the Unix Way, and treats strings as byte arrays -- I'm looking particularly at Ruby here but there are a lot of programs to be named and shamed -- then even collecting together a whole character as opposed to a byte may involve a layer of code that you have to worry about.
So, your first step is to convert it to UTF-16, or, more likely in reality, 'UCS-2'. Now it has zero bytes in it. CRASH! goes the Tower of Babel, which likes things to start at 1 -- much in the manner of VB5 programs.
I'd be in favor of the change just because anything that undermines the Unix Tower of Babel -- the dependency on ASCII which complicates text handling sooooo much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago -- is good. Even Java gets it. Even Apple (finally) get it. Unix Is Teh Problem.
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?) It's bad because it allows people to write code like:
(a line repeated, with subtle variations, several hundred times in the code of a certain ubiquitous editor).
And, lo and behold, the above does not work, but once it appears in a few thousand places it's impossible to fix, and a vast towering structure of fixes made by people who don't really understand why it's an issue is built.
So, even though the proposed change would be hugely inconvenient for a huge number of people, I'm in favor, because I want the world to grow the fork up and understand that text != byte array some time while I'm still alive.
Besides, if the border guard thinks the passport is "secure", then he'll spend less time thinking about that person and just rely on the big "OK" that pops on his screen when he swipes the thing instead of evaluating the person with his brain and guts.
Good. I've been evaluated by the 'brain and guts' of a few immigration officials in my life and I haven't acquired much faith in the process. Better a flawed electronic system than a guy who just won't let you in because he doesn't like the way you look.
When he said "We were allowing media to drive the message..." I thought:
You're right! You actually realized -- you realized that trying to constantly synergize with the media and IP divisions of sony is what's paralyzed the game division! Someone at Sony actually finally understands that you can't spend all your time interacting with other divisions of your company -- you have to interact with what customers want as well!
Then it became clear that he meant 'media' in the 'news media' sense. So I gave up on Sony again.
Guys, guys! I'm talking to you, guys, the Web 2.0 guys over in the corner there huddled round your 5th generation mobile phone. Yes, that means you, with the blond goatee!
Okay, now I have your attention, I have instructions for you. Yes, you _do_ have to obey. Otherwise I'll take away your black iPods and send your girlfriends back to Japan. Yes, scary huh?
Now: STOP USING THE TERM 'MASHUP'. If you _must_ use it, use it in its original (musical) sense. On NO account use it again and again and again just to mean 'broadcasting substandard content from a stupid location'.
Okay, did you all get that? Good. Now go away somewhere and spend your parent's money. Bye! Yeah, I love you too!
The sentence you chose is vulnerable to a lot of factors that make translation difficult. It contains a contraction, for one thing. Worse, it contains a pronoun, so all at once it's subject to problems among languages with gendered pronouns versus those without -- that's why the gender gets thrown away in the German, Italian, Portuguese, and French versions. It also contains a past participle predicate, which is another construction that has analogues in many languages but different actual meanings (hence the Japanese version).
All the same, it does pinpoint how freakin' amazingly awful Babelfish Korean is. Even Japanese is better.
A while ago (as in several years ago) I went to Subway and got a sandwich there that was full of staples (due to the way that particular Subway franchise worked at that time -- it was basically like something out of Mad Max). Generally speaking, I left most of the sandwich, although I'm sure there are areas of my gut that are beautifully organized even now.
I wrote a little funny (and educational!) story about it, but I was advised not to post it anywhere because of the libel risk. I felt really guilty because I knew that other people were very likely finding their diet enriched with unwanted stationery.
Now, though, I don't feel so guilty. I feel kind of relieved.
I look at CVs by the bucketload and the limiting factor on how many I can interview is without doubt articulacy and literacy. The American's aren't bad at all, at least not on their actual CVs, but the Europeans and developing nations REGARDLESS of first language write something in between 'semi-literate English with random capitalization and punctuation' and 'word salad'.
The average quality of spelling, grammar, and above all intelligibility is actually higher on Slashdot, and I'm not interviewing for McJobs, either -- people come with MBAs from the University of Boiled Potato, Northern England, Europe and they literally can't finish a sentence that they start, ON THEIR RESUME for crying out loud.
And sadly, the limiting factor on their effectiveness when eventually hired will likely be their ability to write a document or email that anyone actually reads.
For any level above pure code monkey / DBA / assistant to the guy who plugs stuff in, communication is all. So WHY is there no basic certification? If one existed, it'd be a big factor for me.
To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:
If I want to find out about some general topic, I use wikipedia. If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN. If I want detailed facts, I use a bookshop, still as true today as it was before teh n3t started. If I'm looking for a line from a half-remembered song, I use google.
In other words, google is strong when you want 'something that contains text X' but not strong for 'a page that describes 'X''. And Google's attempts to preserve quality can actually become a nightmare -- that's how Search Engine Optimization got to be a big business.
I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.
Well, a lot of people have posted some good mockery of Lucas now. But, even though there's enough and it's gotten old, I'm going to come along some time later and post MORE mockery, mockery that's increasingly silly and boring and actually undermines your memories of the original, quite good, mockery.
And, uh, that was it.
Seriously, though, I think his remarks only go to show what was obvious anyway -- like much of Hollywood, he doesn't understand that people are more willing to pay for _good_ movies than for tired, conservative, big-budget rehashes. So he looks and sees that the market for T.C.B.B.R.s is weak -- and from that deduces that cinema is dead.
New PCs will cost $1,500-$2,000. Darn few existing corporate PCs will have the video horsepower needed to run Aero, Vista's primary upgrade inducement. You need 256MB of video RAM to run Aero properly, no matter what Microsoft's marketing says. I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM. Upgrade? While in the PC, add memory: Vista needs a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The hardware cost of the RAM may be less than your labor costs getting that installed in every PC. If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well.
Now, Vista is a trainwreck, but unless there is some gigantic inexplicable performance disaster between current versions and the released build, the above is very much in the 'obvious fabricated attention-grabbing FUD' area of truthiness. Given that Vista works fine without with 128Mb video RAM and 512Mb system RAM, the argument above boils down to 'Hi guys, I need hits on my articles so I'm going to make preposterous claims and get linked to!'
If I were spreading Vista FUD, I'd focus on the much more difficult question of 'what will it actually do for you? Specifically, what does it do that Win2k doesn't?' Sadly, the main answer is 'Well, Microsoft will make sure that new stuff doesn't run on Win2k'.
For the major stakeholders, i.e. IP holders, it's quite useful. It's just useless to _people_.
I, for one, am happy and proud to be part of this next Microsoft step into the 'products that people actively try and avoid' space. Further initiatives are to include a portable game platform that makes the sound of a crying baby, and a new mouse that randomly fires blasts of deadly, mutagenic radiation, all the time, for no reason. Also Vista.
It's all a difference in philosophy. Old Microsoft was about _giving_ people what they wanted, in the hope that they would then _give_ money in return. They would send people out who would discover needs (like the need for a Euro sign character, which the planet's committees and standards groups never grasped the point of) and then fulfil those needs. This kinda sorta worked a bit, but it was a bit pedestrian. Since 2000, New Microsoft has been focusing on actively _taking_ money out of the marketplace and _avoiding_ giving value in return. The Zune is part of this -- see, it has complex and interesting features, but they're there to prevent you from extracting value from it. It's like when they suddenly started charging for the Office /.NET interop package; they created useful functionality, in such a way that nobody could actually derive benefit from it.
Basically, what MS understands that nobody else on the planet really grasps is that V + P = K, where:
V = value delivered to the rest of the world P = profit for MS K = some constant
See how decreasing V is just like increasing P? It's brilliant once you get it. So this Zune serves to drive V down just a little bit further. Next step? PROFIT!!!
When I say 'profit' I must admit I mean 'ever decreasing relevancy'. But that's because I'm not a technical visionary like Steve Ballmer.
As I understand it, Second Life is parametric solids rather than vertices -- much like POV. Is it possible to import POV files (that are mesh-free) into Second Life? It would be great if the existing body of POV objects could be used more widely.
Hm, well, I don't really like cutting edge things, because I'm very lazy, and because so many things go from 'cutting edge' to 'dead' with no in-between. But in terms of where the interesting effort is going, I personally tend to think:
PHP -- I know, I know. But there's a great deal of interesting webby work happening in it, especially if you like CMSes / knowledge sharing tools.
C# -- Tons of stuff going on, a very powerful platform that is only just beginning to be explored, and then of course the fact that so many projects are being ported to it and that 2.0 was so different from 1.1 tends to generate activity as well.
Java -- the language of academia -- so many algorithms are developed as Java and then repackaged or ported to other environments that Java continues to be the key place to look in a lot of disciplines.
C -- still your one stop shop for system programming.
C++ -- still your one stop shop for financial programming, game programming, and other areas where systems are both complex and performance critical, and also perhaps the language with the highest quality of technical software engineering being done in it (boost).
In other words, it's not the newest and most interesting languages that have interesting work done on them. It's the same old languages as ever. I guess the relative newcomer is C#.
I know what you mean about Perl5 vs Perl6 -- just because Perl6 is in Death Valley doesn't say anything bad about Perl5. All the same, I get the impression that PHP kind of stole Perl5's web crown at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that the tide of public opinion will change and get behind the effort to fix the problem when Polar Bears finally go extinct in the wild.
I think you are a nice guy who wrongly believes that others are also nice. I advise you to stand in the middle of a Singapore 'medicine' market hugging a stuffed dodo until you realize exactly how much the extinction of large interesting creatures means to most people.
Sure, I may be bitter, but I'm also right.
Oh, right. That's ok. As long as it's limited to people whom someone, somewhere, for reason's you'll never know, has decided to call 'known terrorists'.
Phew.
That's a weight off my mind.
I guess it seemed like there was a problem, but really, there wasn't.
Well, I'm off to sit in a field of cotton wool hugging a giant kitten, in Fluffiton, the land where everything is soft and fluffy.
Ok, ya trolled me
Seriously, though, people don't distinguish enough between the Vietnam War as a whole and the often very effective efforts of the US military within that war.
The US didn't get 'ripped to pieces' in Vietnam. In purely military terms, their decisions and strategies (with the exception of the strategic bombing campaign) were most effective. The Viet Cong were practically wiped out by the end of the war, and the US successfully used not just high-tech solutions but grass-roots small-unit tactics. The battle for 'hearts and minds' was lost by the ARVN long before the GIs got a go at it.
Unwinnable disaster? Why yes. 'ripped to pieces' due to reliance on long range bombardment? Not at all. Like the current war in Iraq, it was a political failure that the military tried to fix but couldn't.
Good point -- my requirements were vague. The requirement is to get him to stop laughing, or drastically reduce the giggle frequency. It's currently about 100-150 a day, but clustered; there'll be one every minute for a while, then none for hours.
Music won't work, as I have no sound source available and I just can't work while listening to music because I get too into the music.
'Nuclear' solutions such as reporting him to the boss aren't good as this is a small freindly company and I don't really want to be the first guy to change that.
My favorite suggestion so far is to locate a known giggle-inducing blog and spike it in some way -- perhaps by posting in the guise of a guy who was just sacked for giggling all the darn time.
By the way, thanks to all those who have given suggestions.
My local lawyer, for example, used to get about 20% of the town's law traffic 10 years ago. It's now computerized and processes far more documents and communications, at a far faster rate, than it ever used to. It still gets about 20% of the town's law traffic, as its competitors have upgraded in exactly the same way. The courts, of course, recieve far more documents and messages from these lawyers than they ever used to, but the courts themselves have also computerized (just barely) and can handle the extra traffic.
In terms of 'productivity', I'd think that the lawyers, paralegals, court administrators and so on have improved by 10 times. In terms of how much useful stuff gets done, it's exactly constant.
So yeah, by all means integrate Google technology with your cornflakes to achieve a further tenfold increase in productivity. Go right ahead.
In more important news, I currently have a co-worker who spends all day reading his friend's blogs (which doesn't bother me) and giggling over the witty posts he finds (which is driving me fucking mad). Can any slashdotters suggest a solution that will not result in jail or in me being considered 'not a team player'?
I worked for a long time in the US, in a cubicle, and I hated cubicles (I hate shoulder-height 'half cubicles' even more, though). I can't say why, I just hate them, and I think everyone agrees with me.
In the UK, as you say, cubicles are very rare and open-plan is the rule. Where I work now, there's about 8-16 people, working on roughly the same sort of thing at the same level, in one room. It works fine. But at most places I've worked, entire floors or half-floors are open plan -- maybe 200-500 people per floor. This is awful.
The reasons it's awful are:
1 -- the 'Space Odyssey' effect. Cielings tend to be pretty low in new build offices, and when the ceiling is low and goes on forever, covered in striplights, the dazzle effect when you look into the distance is horrible for me.
2 -- higher proportion of flourescent lights. In a small room, people bring in lamps if they don't have a window. In a floor of 500 people, there's no point, so unless you are right at the edge the only light sources are flickering ones. argh.
3 -- distraction. In a real classic UK office, I'm within 'being annoyed by personal phone calls' radius of maybe 50 or 100 people!
4 -- fear. The fact that there are always people moving around behind me translates into constant alertness (for me at least).
5 -- despair. A grid of 500 desks just makes the fundamental pointlessness of work a lot more obvious.
I have worked in open-plan places (in America & Asia) that take steps to improve things -- for example, giving the open-plan zone an irregular twisting shape helps a bit, having private rooms around the edge helps a bit, having gaps or balconies helps, and actually open-plan offices like this, where you aren't exposed to the whole floor all the time, aren't bad. But London in particular seems to go for the 'endless bright white expanse of flourescent lights' and it's really grim.
most of the religious beliefs are in contradiction with science.
Until about 40 years ago, most scientists were religious people. For all I know, they still are (I don't go round asking them). Most scientific theories were developed in an environment of religion, and most religious beliefs emerged from cultures that had at least some vague concept of forming theories about natural phenomena and testing them by trial and error. Ever since long before Galileo sat in his Vatican-funded observatory (it's a pity he didn't keep out of politics, though!) and Newton took time out from his theological studies to formulate a few laws of motion, people have had, among various other things, religion and science.
It's just rational humanists such as you who have trouble with this. And it's fine for you to have trouble with it -- you have a perfect right to believe that religion and science are somehow opposites locked in eternal conflict. But you ought to be aware that it's just your belief, just as some folks belive the End Times are Coming or God Hates Fags.
computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul
The fact that you believe it's impossible is part of your faith -- it's not a fact about neuroscience and souls. Otherwise there wouldn't be any religious neuroscientists, which I observe not to be the case.
Put your faith down and talk about facts -- even Creationists can do that, on a good day, with a favorable wind. The main difference between a creationist and a rational humanist is that the creationist understands that they are running on faith.
To clarify, I realize that UTF-8 isn't necessarily three bytes per character. It's usually three bytes per character for me, but it can be as few as 1 and as many as 7 -- which is a lot less efficient than even a constant 7 bytes would be, for many tasks. Of course, if you then handle the UTF-8 with software that follows the Unix Way, and treats strings as byte arrays -- I'm looking particularly at Ruby here but there are a lot of programs to be named and shamed -- then even collecting together a whole character as opposed to a byte may involve a layer of code that you have to worry about.
So, your first step is to convert it to UTF-16, or, more likely in reality, 'UCS-2'. Now it has zero bytes in it. CRASH! goes the Tower of Babel, which likes things to start at 1 -- much in the manner of VB5 programs.
I'd be in favor of the change just because anything that undermines the Unix Tower of Babel -- the dependency on ASCII which complicates text handling sooooo much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago -- is good. Even Java gets it. Even Apple (finally) get it. Unix Is Teh Problem.
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?) It's bad because it allows people to write code like:
if(string[index] == '.' || string[index] == '?' || string[index] == '!') sentenceEnd = true;
(a line repeated, with subtle variations, several hundred times in the code of a certain ubiquitous editor).
And, lo and behold, the above does not work, but once it appears in a few thousand places it's impossible to fix, and a vast towering structure of fixes made by people who don't really understand why it's an issue is built.
So, even though the proposed change would be hugely inconvenient for a huge number of people, I'm in favor, because I want the world to grow the fork up and understand that text != byte array some time while I'm still alive.
Besides, if the border guard thinks the passport is "secure", then he'll spend less time thinking about that person and just rely on the big "OK" that pops on his screen when he swipes the thing instead of evaluating the person with his brain and guts.
Good. I've been evaluated by the 'brain and guts' of a few immigration officials in my life and I haven't acquired much faith in the process. Better a flawed electronic system than a guy who just won't let you in because he doesn't like the way you look.
When he said "We were allowing media to drive the message..." I thought:
You're right! You actually realized -- you realized that trying to constantly synergize with the media and IP divisions of sony is what's paralyzed the game division! Someone at Sony actually finally understands that you can't spend all your time interacting with other divisions of your company -- you have to interact with what customers want as well!
Then it became clear that he meant 'media' in the 'news media' sense. So I gave up on Sony again.
Other way around. Being dysfunctional in the first place causes increased MySpace and YouTube use.
And, uh, I guess it also causes Slashdot posts such as this one.
Guys, guys! I'm talking to you, guys, the Web 2.0 guys over in the corner there huddled round your 5th generation mobile phone. Yes, that means you, with the blond goatee!
Okay, now I have your attention, I have instructions for you. Yes, you _do_ have to obey. Otherwise I'll take away your black iPods and send your girlfriends back to Japan. Yes, scary huh?
Now: STOP USING THE TERM 'MASHUP'. If you _must_ use it, use it in its original (musical) sense. On NO account use it again and again and again just to mean 'broadcasting substandard content from a stupid location'.
Okay, did you all get that? Good. Now go away somewhere and spend your parent's money. Bye! Yeah, I love you too!
Twits.
The sentence you chose is vulnerable to a lot of factors that make translation difficult. It contains a contraction, for one thing. Worse, it contains a pronoun, so all at once it's subject to problems among languages with gendered pronouns versus those without -- that's why the gender gets thrown away in the German, Italian, Portuguese, and French versions. It also contains a past participle predicate, which is another construction that has analogues in many languages but different actual meanings (hence the Japanese version).
All the same, it does pinpoint how freakin' amazingly awful Babelfish Korean is. Even Japanese is better.
A while ago (as in several years ago) I went to Subway and got a sandwich there that was full of staples (due to the way that particular Subway franchise worked at that time -- it was basically like something out of Mad Max). Generally speaking, I left most of the sandwich, although I'm sure there are areas of my gut that are beautifully organized even now.
I wrote a little funny (and educational!) story about it, but I was advised not to post it anywhere because of the libel risk. I felt really guilty because I knew that other people were very likely finding their diet enriched with unwanted stationery.
Now, though, I don't feel so guilty. I feel kind of relieved.
And yet... has it? After all, isn't the biggest monster of all... MANKIND??
I look at CVs by the bucketload and the limiting factor on how many I can interview is without doubt articulacy and literacy. The American's aren't bad at all, at least not on their actual CVs, but the Europeans and developing nations REGARDLESS of first language write something in between 'semi-literate English with random capitalization and punctuation' and 'word salad'.
The average quality of spelling, grammar, and above all intelligibility is actually higher on Slashdot, and I'm not interviewing for McJobs, either -- people come with MBAs from the University of Boiled Potato, Northern England, Europe and they literally can't finish a sentence that they start, ON THEIR RESUME for crying out loud.
And sadly, the limiting factor on their effectiveness when eventually hired will likely be their ability to write a document or email that anyone actually reads.
For any level above pure code monkey / DBA / assistant to the guy who plugs stuff in, communication is all. So WHY is there no basic certification? If one existed, it'd be a big factor for me.
To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:
If I want to find out about some general topic, I use wikipedia.
If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN.
If I want detailed facts, I use a bookshop, still as true today as it was before teh n3t started.
If I'm looking for a line from a half-remembered song, I use google.
In other words, google is strong when you want 'something that contains text X' but not strong for 'a page that describes 'X''. And Google's attempts to preserve quality can actually become a nightmare -- that's how Search Engine Optimization got to be a big business.
I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.
Well, a lot of people have posted some good mockery of Lucas now. But, even though there's enough and it's gotten old, I'm going to come along some time later and post MORE mockery, mockery that's increasingly silly and boring and actually undermines your memories of the original, quite good, mockery.
And, uh, that was it.
Seriously, though, I think his remarks only go to show what was obvious anyway -- like much of Hollywood, he doesn't understand that people are more willing to pay for _good_ movies than for tired, conservative, big-budget rehashes. So he looks and sees that the market for T.C.B.B.R.s is weak -- and from that deduces that cinema is dead.
New PCs will cost $1,500-$2,000. Darn few existing corporate PCs will have the video horsepower needed to run Aero, Vista's primary upgrade inducement. You need 256MB of video RAM to run Aero properly, no matter what Microsoft's marketing says. I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM. Upgrade? While in the PC, add memory: Vista needs a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The hardware cost of the RAM may be less than your labor costs getting that installed in every PC. If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista, I'm happy for you. I don't believe you, but I hope your upgrade goes well.
Now, Vista is a trainwreck, but unless there is some gigantic inexplicable performance disaster between current versions and the released build, the above is very much in the 'obvious fabricated attention-grabbing FUD' area of truthiness. Given that Vista works fine without with 128Mb video RAM and 512Mb system RAM, the argument above boils down to 'Hi guys, I need hits on my articles so I'm going to make preposterous claims and get linked to!'
If I were spreading Vista FUD, I'd focus on the much more difficult question of 'what will it actually do for you? Specifically, what does it do that Win2k doesn't?' Sadly, the main answer is 'Well, Microsoft will make sure that new stuff doesn't run on Win2k'.
Yes, well done
For the major stakeholders, i.e. IP holders, it's quite useful. It's just useless to _people_.
I, for one, am happy and proud to be part of this next Microsoft step into the 'products that people actively try and avoid' space. Further initiatives are to include a portable game platform that makes the sound of a crying baby, and a new mouse that randomly fires blasts of deadly, mutagenic radiation, all the time, for no reason. Also Vista.
It's all a difference in philosophy. Old Microsoft was about _giving_ people what they wanted, in the hope that they would then _give_ money in return. They would send people out who would discover needs (like the need for a Euro sign character, which the planet's committees and standards groups never grasped the point of) and then fulfil those needs. This kinda sorta worked a bit, but it was a bit pedestrian. Since 2000, New Microsoft has been focusing on actively _taking_ money out of the marketplace and _avoiding_ giving value in return. The Zune is part of this -- see, it has complex and interesting features, but they're there to prevent you from extracting value from it. It's like when they suddenly started charging for the Office /
Basically, what MS understands that nobody else on the planet really grasps is that V + P = K, where:
V = value delivered to the rest of the world
P = profit for MS
K = some constant
See how decreasing V is just like increasing P? It's brilliant once you get it. So this Zune serves to drive V down just a little bit further. Next step? PROFIT!!!
When I say 'profit' I must admit I mean 'ever decreasing relevancy'. But that's because I'm not a technical visionary like Steve Ballmer.
As I understand it, Second Life is parametric solids rather than vertices -- much like POV. Is it possible to import POV files (that are mesh-free) into Second Life? It would be great if the existing body of POV objects could be used more widely.
Incidentally 10/10 to SketchUp for what it does.
Hm, well, I don't really like cutting edge things, because I'm very lazy, and because so many things go from 'cutting edge' to 'dead' with no in-between. But in terms of where the interesting effort is going, I personally tend to think:
PHP -- I know, I know. But there's a great deal of interesting webby work happening in it, especially if you like CMSes / knowledge sharing tools.
C# -- Tons of stuff going on, a very powerful platform that is only just beginning to be explored, and then of course the fact that so many projects are being ported to it and that 2.0 was so different from 1.1 tends to generate activity as well.
Java -- the language of academia -- so many algorithms are developed as Java and then repackaged or ported to other environments that Java continues to be the key place to look in a lot of disciplines.
C -- still your one stop shop for system programming.
C++ -- still your one stop shop for financial programming, game programming, and other areas where systems are both complex and performance critical, and also perhaps the language with the highest quality of technical software engineering being done in it (boost).
In other words, it's not the newest and most interesting languages that have interesting work done on them. It's the same old languages as ever. I guess the relative newcomer is C#.
I know what you mean about Perl5 vs Perl6 -- just because Perl6 is in Death Valley doesn't say anything bad about Perl5. All the same, I get the impression that PHP kind of stole Perl5's web crown at some point.