It just doesn't make sense to stifle employees. Programming is an intensely creative and mentally rigorous activity. Nobody forms art companies and puts artists in suits and expects them to work do they? In reference to a recent slashdot feature on burnout, some of this "making employees comfortable" stuff, is underhanded though, as it entices them to make work their home, and thus the company squeezes much more out of them (here, have a soda, stay until 12 at night, we'll give you a massage). You can't make people so comfortable that they overwork...burnout is extremely expensive. People HAVE to stop and do something stupid and pointless that takes no mental activity. This is why I don't feel guilty when I actually take a real lunch break (what's that right?), or read some magazine article (usually a techie magazine), or just follow some links on slashdot. The mind has to recoup so that it can afford to be creative.
I dropped out of college because I couldn't stand being so excruciatingly bored...being addressed in the same audience as the dolts who decided upon, arrival, to major in comp sci because it was "cool" and had absolutely no clue. Even starting with 400 level courses my freshman year, it was basically an oral regurgitation of reference material. When you went to an English class, did the professor just read the dictionary aloud to you? College can stuff things into your head (which any intelligent person can do themselves), but it CAN'T/make/ you smarter, or make you pick up ideas faster, or make you intuitively understand something. Those are all gained from talent and experience (which college, in my experience, gives one absolutely NONE of). Why do I need to pay XX grand to have some professor regurgitate a book I can read for myself, or go on long diatribes on his "pet" topic? Boring waste of time. Anything I ever actually/learned/ I did on my/own/ initiative, not because somebody was trying to stuff facts in my head. BTW, I now work for the actual university I dropped out of (about a 1 month time period between dropping out and getting hired). And I'm valuable not because of the stuff I would have had stuffed in my head (all of which would pretty much be irrelevent anyway...things change so fast), but for my ability and willingness to learn and adapt, and creativeness. Having performed tedious, mundane and rote comp sci material does not help. College can expand your horizons, but only if you entered it with a narrow, closed mind in the first place.
Yes, Mozilla is late through no fault of its own. BUT, just witness the amount of stuff that has COME OUT of the mozilla effort! All sorts of secondary and tertiary projects were spawned. All sorts of good stuff has come out of the Mozilla effort, let alone NGLayout and renderer. Everybody has been bashing and FUDing Mozilla since its inception.
Ok, this is ironic, but Mozilla just munged the entire first part of my post. I basically said that he/didn't/ believe that quote, that he was merely quoting Metcalfe as believing that.
"Open source is like Communism. Communism failed. Therefore, open source is doomed to failure." In fact, he is quoting/Metcalfe/ as saying this. He does not believe it himself./He/ believes that open source is NOT like communism, but INSTEAD is like an academic environment. This article is blatently ANTI-political. He imparts that the OSS community NOT be swayed by politics. He is renouncing politics.
This is dumb. So if I develop software with Delphi or Visual Basic (god forbid), then I cannot put those words in my meta keywords? What about Java? What if I like Coke? What if I wear Levi's, and have a Dell. What if I sell any of these things? This is ridiculous. Meta tags are for categorization, and searching. To claim that is the same as trademark infringement is preposterous.
No one is "supposed" to take work out of the secure area, or home, but it does happen. Somebody brings in a laptop and copies files. They connect to the net. They copy files to their desktop and then use that later to connect. That's how the Chinese spy supposedly stole the secrets. It's just too common.
This basically comes down to whether or not the child would want to live as disable/disfigured/crippled as it is. This is the same question as the euthanasia question, except the child cannot answer. Those who oppose euthanasia will naturally oppose this. I don't oppose euthanasia, but some care has to be taken in deciding, on the child's behalf, whether or not it could stand to live. If the child is gruesomely and dibilitatingly disfigured and disabled without any hope of being able to leave a painless, peacefull life, let alone a good one, then I'm not morally against euthanizing it. In fact I think the insistence of many anti-euthanists to FORCE people to live miserable suffering lives is reprehensible and highly immoral. Incidentally most of this people are Christians who insist on forcing their belief and worship of their god on others, which includes not having the sympathy to put one out of their misery.
So basically users are attributed to privelages (i.e., ok "all" privelage, you are user root, ok "user" privelage, you are user foo), instead of privelages being assigned to users (ok, root, you have a handfull of powerfull system privalages, ok user, you have a handfull of harmless privalages).
Privaleges basically need to be assigned to users, not the other way around. The new definition of "group" would then be a class of attributes which belong to a number of users. So you would automatically become part of a privelage "group" once you shared all the same privelages. I think this one user to many attributes is a lot better for the aforementioned reasons (so you crack ping, all you get is Socket_privelage, ha). The problem then, is, someone ALWAYS MUST have the Modify_privelages privelage. If this disappears, well, you can't change privelages basically. Then whomever had this privelage would be the "root". In fact, this user could have logins disabled, and actually have the whole account disabled, revoke all it's other privelages (no execution, etc.), so that to crack the system you basically have to get access to this administrator user, or another user with sufficient privelages granted by the dummy administrator account.
The DM makes the final decision on those things. A DM may very well decide that a theif will not progress significantly without experience pickpocketing. Some of the things you list do make sense. A more experienced soldier probably could fall from a greater height without dying than an unexperienced one, although this should probably have more to do with dexterity, not experience. I would say robin hood was more of a fighter who stole, than a theif. He didn't go around picking pockets for a living.
Some things are really flawed. Like the magic system. And abilities not improving. And humans only being able to be one class at a time.
I really can't stand those atrociously inane commercials intel has been putting on. You really have to be brain dead to not balk at them. Really...your chip is going to help me not only get ON the internet, but IN it. Wow that's great. Can I have another shot of ignorance please. Wait, maybe if my CPU is fast it will make MY internet (which I am IN) FASTER! This is too cool I guess I don't even need a modem or NIC now...since the PIII will get me in the internet. I wonder if I need an ISP.
I'm not a newbie to *nix by quite a stretch now (maybe a few years ago)...I've been using *nix systems for quite a while, albeit as a "user", not an administrator. I year ago I installed Red Hat (well, a Linux friend of mine suggested it). I played around with it for a bit but I never really "needed" it for anything, and was running out of drive space, so I removed it. I'm now feeling my computer's age, and would like to transition it to a Linux system, and perhaps make it a nat/router/proxy for my tiny (well, right now 2-computer) home network.
It's a 100mhz Pentium, and although I haven't had much experience with Linux distros (except the nightmarish package-installation step), I'm thinking of going with a newer fringe distro, Stampede, because of its pgcc pentium-optimized kernel (my first choice was Debian...but I want the optimizations). I would eventually like to recompile the kernel (rite of passage I guess), to throw out the junk I don't need. I guess I could just get pgcc myself and recompile any of the other distributions right? Or just set a pentium flag for gcc...I guess pgcc is supposed to be better.
Programming is fundamentally a creative, imaginative, and intellectual process. Being that, things only get WORSE if you force people to code faster or longer or harder. That's why bugs multiply. That's why throwing more peopl at a late project makes it later. Much of the industry is working under the wrong model. They view programmers as assembly people on an assembly line. Everybody does their thing and at the end a perfect product comes out. This is fundamentally wrong. Would you ask a scientist to work 80 hour weeks and expect his research to happen faster?
What needs to be done, and what is currently done correctly in some segments (some game companies), is that there needs to be a partition created for purely Research and Development. This research and development should be ongoing and unaffected by the external considerations of PHBs and marketroids, like advertisements, deadlines, and IPOs. Another group who actually/makes/ the project should communicate with the R&D group and use what they've come up with if they can. This happens in some gaming companies (a segment notorious for its fast pace and deadlines). They've learned that they'll just kill their projects by forcing everybody faster. They set aside an R&D group which develops things the actually product coders can use. This is why you see game engines being developed separately from games. This is why you see some games from a given company all having the same general interface or look and feel. The R&D group produces the non-time-critical things. The other group produces the content and the actual product. I would much rather be working under the R&D model, where I could actually develop/better/ things than just more/crappy/ things. I think the industry needs to just treat programmers as scientists...put em on some floor away from other people...give em beverages, music, free reign, close the doors, and just wait for the magic to happen. You can't force magic.
This is too cool...I have a lame 100mhz which I've been too cheap to upgrade/replace for, uhh, 4 years now (I'm waiting for Athlon to go to.18, yeah), and I love playing old games. XCom, Wolf3d, DoomI/II, and recently Duke3d (640x480, oh yeah). Can't wait for the cool stuff to come out with this being open-sourced.
I too didn't know what PHB was off the bat, even though I am an avid Dilbert fan. After a while of starting the day by reading a Dilbert strip and perusing Slashdot, a bulb when on in my head and I derived that PHB was Pointy Haired Boss.
And to produce the best over all listener, you would train it against random noise levels within a range (with a weight towards what it will be used for most). And if you want better performance, just throw some more neurons at it. Fidelity goes up.
Who ever said science is god (besides scientology freaks)? I don't think any scientist in any definition of the word would ever make an equation between the two. If someone is trying to do this they are really not scientists and rather charlatans.
Actually, designing a low-drip spout is rather useful. I hate drippy spouts. I'm sure pot and carafe makers might care. The biscuit dunking is rather frivolous though.
I love the 6-page British tea-making specification. Hilarious.
Isn't this sort of a rerun...we already had an article that basically debunked the conventional wisdom that dvoraks were so much greater. I wouldn't mind it if we all used dvoraks though, because the qwerty unevenly distributes keys (not to say that it is slower...left hand is just used a lot).
So basically the Transitional GPL sits in between the GPL (requirement of open distribution) and the LGPL (allows bundling with non-open code), by allowing authors of modifications/additions to decide whether they want to allow the company to profit from their changes or not. Sounds good to me.
Hey! I posted this yesterday and nothing happened...there is a good article at The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991001-000005.html
Sort of what I guessed actually. Cool stuff. A hybrid software/hardware CPU, the hardware part implementing very fast micro-instructions, while the software part translates from one instruction set to the native one.
Slashdot Mirror
It just doesn't make sense to stifle employees. Programming is an intensely creative and mentally rigorous activity. Nobody forms art companies and puts artists in suits and expects them to work do they? In reference to a recent slashdot feature on burnout, some of this "making employees comfortable" stuff, is underhanded though, as it entices them to make work their home, and thus the company squeezes much more out of them (here, have a soda, stay until 12 at night, we'll give you a massage). You can't make people so comfortable that they overwork...burnout is extremely expensive. People HAVE to stop and do something stupid and pointless that takes no mental activity. This is why I don't feel guilty when I actually take a real lunch break (what's that right?), or read some magazine article (usually a techie magazine), or just follow some links on slashdot. The mind has to recoup so that it can afford to be creative.
I dropped out of college because I couldn't stand being so excruciatingly bored...being addressed in the same audience as the dolts who decided upon, arrival, to major in comp sci because it was "cool" and had absolutely no clue. Even starting with 400 level courses my freshman year, it was basically an oral regurgitation of reference material. When you went to an English class, did the professor just read the dictionary aloud to you? College can stuff things into your head (which any intelligent person can do themselves), but it CAN'T /make/ you smarter, or make you pick up ideas faster, or make you intuitively understand something. Those are all gained from talent and experience (which college, in my experience, gives one absolutely NONE of). Why do I need to pay XX grand to have some professor regurgitate a book I can read for myself, or go on long diatribes on his "pet" topic? Boring waste of time. Anything I ever actually /learned/ I did on my /own/ initiative, not because somebody was trying to stuff facts in my head. BTW, I now work for the actual university I dropped out of (about a 1 month time period between dropping out and getting hired). And I'm valuable not because of the stuff I would have had stuffed in my head (all of which would pretty much be irrelevent anyway...things change so fast), but for my ability and willingness to learn and adapt, and creativeness. Having performed tedious, mundane and rote comp sci material does not help. College can expand your horizons, but only if you entered it with a narrow, closed mind in the first place.
Yes, Mozilla is late through no fault of its own. BUT, just witness the amount of stuff that has COME OUT of the mozilla effort! All sorts of secondary and tertiary projects were spawned. All sorts of good stuff has come out of the Mozilla effort, let alone NGLayout and renderer. Everybody has been bashing and FUDing Mozilla since its inception.
Ok, this is ironic, but Mozilla just munged the entire first part of my post. I basically said /didn't/ believe that quote, that he was merely quoting Metcalfe as believing that.
that he
"Open source is like Communism. Communism failed. Therefore, open source is doomed to failure." In fact, he is quoting /Metcalfe/ as saying this. He does not believe it himself. /He/ believes that open source is NOT like communism, but INSTEAD is like an academic environment. This article is blatently ANTI-political. He imparts that the OSS community NOT be swayed by politics. He is renouncing politics.
This is dumb. So if I develop software with Delphi or Visual Basic (god forbid), then I cannot put those words in my meta keywords? What about Java? What if I like Coke? What if I wear Levi's, and have a Dell. What if I sell any of these things? This is ridiculous. Meta tags are for categorization, and searching. To claim that is the same as trademark infringement is preposterous.
No one is "supposed" to take work out of the secure area, or home, but it does happen. Somebody brings in a laptop and copies files. They connect to the net. They copy files to their desktop and then use that later to connect. That's how the Chinese spy supposedly stole the secrets. It's just too common.
This basically comes down to whether or not the child would want to live as disable/disfigured/crippled as it is. This is the same question as the euthanasia question, except the child cannot answer. Those who oppose euthanasia will naturally oppose this. I don't oppose euthanasia, but some care has to be taken in deciding, on the child's behalf, whether or not it could stand to live. If the child is gruesomely and dibilitatingly disfigured and disabled without any hope of being able to leave a painless, peacefull life, let alone a good one, then I'm not morally against euthanizing it. In fact I think the insistence of many anti-euthanists to FORCE people to live miserable suffering lives is reprehensible and highly immoral. Incidentally most of this people are Christians who insist on forcing their belief and worship of their god on others, which includes not having the sympathy to put one out of their misery.
So basically users are attributed to privelages (i.e., ok "all" privelage, you are user root, ok "user" privelage, you are user foo), instead of privelages being assigned to users (ok, root, you have a handfull of powerfull system privalages, ok user, you have a handfull of harmless privalages).
Privaleges basically need to be assigned to users, not the other way around. The new definition of "group" would then be a class of attributes which belong to a number of users. So you would automatically become part of a privelage "group" once you shared all the same privelages. I think this one user to many attributes is a lot better for the aforementioned reasons (so you crack ping, all you get is Socket_privelage, ha). The problem then, is, someone ALWAYS MUST have the Modify_privelages privelage. If this disappears, well, you can't change privelages basically. Then whomever had this privelage would be the "root". In fact, this user could have logins disabled, and actually have the whole account disabled, revoke all it's other privelages (no execution, etc.), so that to crack the system you basically have to get access to this administrator user, or another user with sufficient privelages granted by the dummy administrator account.
The DM makes the final decision on those things. A DM may very well decide that a theif will not progress significantly without experience pickpocketing. Some of the things you list do make sense. A more experienced soldier probably could fall from a greater height without dying than an unexperienced one, although this should probably have more to do with dexterity, not experience. I would say robin hood was more of a fighter who stole, than a theif. He didn't go around picking pockets for a living.
Some things are really flawed. Like the magic system. And abilities not improving. And humans only being able to be one class at a time.
Wow...they can do a series of movies for each of:
Dragon Lance
Forgotten Realms
Ravenloft
Dark Sun
-generic ad&d-
They could even use Dungeon Master magazine scenerios to make a tv show out of. Cool.
I really can't stand those atrociously inane commercials intel has been putting on. You really have to be brain dead to not balk at them. Really...your chip is going to help me not only get ON the internet, but IN it. Wow that's great. Can I have another shot of ignorance please. Wait, maybe if my CPU is fast it will make MY internet (which I am IN) FASTER! This is too cool I guess I don't even need a modem or NIC now...since the PIII will get me in the internet. I wonder if I need an ISP.
Oh yeah...I discovered Linux.com is an excellent, pretty comprehensive site for tweaks, etc., which I don't think was around a year ago.
I'm not a newbie to *nix by quite a stretch now (maybe a few years ago)...I've been using *nix systems for quite a while, albeit as a "user", not an administrator. I year ago I installed Red Hat (well, a Linux friend of mine suggested it). I played around with it for a bit but I never really "needed" it for anything, and was running out of drive space, so I removed it. I'm now feeling my computer's age, and would like to transition it to a Linux system, and perhaps make it a nat/router/proxy for my tiny (well, right now 2-computer) home network.
It's a 100mhz Pentium, and although I haven't had much experience with Linux distros (except the nightmarish package-installation step), I'm thinking of going with a newer fringe distro, Stampede, because of its pgcc pentium-optimized kernel (my first choice was Debian...but I want the optimizations). I would eventually like to recompile the kernel (rite of passage I guess), to throw out the junk I don't need. I guess I could just get pgcc myself and recompile any of the other distributions right? Or just set a pentium flag for gcc...I guess pgcc is supposed to be better.
Well, just wondering if anybody had any thoughts.
Programming is fundamentally a creative, imaginative, and intellectual process. Being that, things only get WORSE if you force people to code faster or longer or harder. That's why bugs multiply. That's why throwing more peopl at a late project makes it later. Much of the industry is working under the wrong model. They view programmers as assembly people on an assembly line. Everybody does their thing and at the end a perfect product comes out. This is fundamentally wrong. Would you ask a scientist to work 80 hour weeks and expect his research to happen faster?
/makes/ the project should communicate with the R&D group and use what they've come up with if they can. This happens in some gaming companies (a segment notorious for its fast pace and deadlines). They've learned that they'll just kill their projects by forcing everybody faster. They set aside an R&D group which develops things the actually product coders can use. This is why you see game engines being developed separately from games. This is why you see some games from a given company all having the same general interface or look and feel. The R&D group produces the non-time-critical things. The other group produces the content and the actual product. I would much rather be working under the R&D model, where I could actually develop /better/ things than just more /crappy/ things. I think the industry needs to just treat programmers as scientists...put em on some floor away from other people...give em beverages, music, free reign, close the doors, and just wait for the magic to happen. You can't force magic.
What needs to be done, and what is currently done correctly in some segments (some game companies), is that there needs to be a partition created for purely Research and Development. This research and development should be ongoing and unaffected by the external considerations of PHBs and marketroids, like advertisements, deadlines, and IPOs. Another group who actually
This is too cool...I have a lame 100mhz which I've been too cheap to upgrade/replace for, uhh, 4 years now (I'm waiting for Athlon to go to .18, yeah), and I love playing old games. XCom, Wolf3d, DoomI/II, and recently Duke3d (640x480, oh yeah). Can't wait for the cool stuff to come out with this being open-sourced.
I too didn't know what PHB was off the bat, even though I am an avid Dilbert fan. After a while of starting the day by reading a Dilbert strip and perusing Slashdot, a bulb when on in my head and I derived that PHB was Pointy Haired Boss.
And to produce the best over all listener, you would train it against random noise levels within a range (with a weight towards what it will be used for most). And if you want better performance, just throw some more neurons at it. Fidelity goes up.
Who ever said science is god (besides scientology freaks)? I don't think any scientist in any definition of the word would ever make an equation between the two. If someone is trying to do this they are really not scientists and rather charlatans.
Actually, designing a low-drip spout is rather useful. I hate drippy spouts. I'm sure pot and carafe makers might care. The biscuit dunking is rather frivolous though.
I love the 6-page British tea-making specification. Hilarious.
Isn't this sort of a rerun...we already had an article that basically debunked the conventional wisdom that dvoraks were so much greater. I wouldn't mind it if we all used dvoraks though, because the qwerty unevenly distributes keys (not to say that it is slower...left hand is just used a lot).
damn slashdot stripped all my
So basically the Transitional GPL sits in between the GPL (requirement of open distribution) and the LGPL (allows bundling with non-open code), by allowing authors of modifications/additions to decide whether they want to allow the company to profit from their changes or not. Sounds good to me.
Oh yeah, tha article is titled:
New Transmeta patent reveals x86-killer design
duh
Hey! I posted this yesterday and nothing happened...there is a good article at The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991001-000005.html
Sort of what I guessed actually. Cool stuff. A hybrid software/hardware CPU, the hardware part implementing very fast micro-instructions, while the software part translates from one instruction set to the native one.