I run hot-cold on Wheldon. Firefly truly does rock, and I was very sad when the show was cancelled (but got over it like a well adjusted adult.) I almost didn't start watching it though because it was Wheldon and I hate (with a passion) Buffy.
Maybe I just hate highschool so much I can't not hate Buffy. On the other hand, I was exposed to it indirectly by being married to a Buffy addict, and even they had to agree the show really sucked for the last several seaons.
My first job out of college I had an office. Great atmosphere, a door that even locked, lots of creative people... overall very cool. I was also on the critical path for multiple software projects and the "pushes" people went through to finish a project that are usually followed by some time off did not work that way for me. After going through the ringer with one project, the next would come along and put me through it again, and sometimes I had many projects at once going through that process. I threw myself at the work (2 years of 60-70 hour weeks, worked most weekends) thinking hard work and loyalty would be rewarded. They weren't.
My second job is with a fortune 100 company, which is 100% cubes. It is considered to be a successful company. It is possible to advance here with hard work and initiative, and the management culture here is less dysfunctional. I initially experienced dismay at having to accept a 'cube' and embrace what I thought of as the "Dilbert" life. While other similarities to Dilbert have inevitably manifested, I've none-the-less enjoyed working here far more than my previous hipster, avant-garde, offices-with-doors employer. I've pulled a few long weeks but that's always been tempered by some easier ones.
Cubes = evil? No. Cubes = more sources of distractions? Yes. So you have to educate yourself and learn how to manage it.
For sure, the World of Warcraft forums are a wasteland of whiners. Every once in awhile I'll go there and I'm quickly reminded of why I don't waste my time with them in general. On the forums, everyone's a game designer, everyone knows how it should be, and "Bliz is screwing us."
Well... almost a wasteland...
THAT being said, I think what people find frustrating is the fact that they are rarely acknowledged. Usually by the time extremely obvious problems have been discussed (and, admittedly, some elegant and insightful solutions proposed), Blizzard has not responded yet. Then, the Blizzard rep will start a thread that says what the next patch is going to do to address it long after the posters have given up on anything bein done in the first place.
I think part of the problem might be that the Blizzard reps on the forums have almost no access to the developers themselves... that's my guess.
Cooler servers and cooler rooms are the answer, ideally with cooler rooms being the result of cooler servers.
The issue of computing with respect to its impact on the environment hasn't gotten too much notice. On a bedroom-level scale the biggest concern is heat. Data-centers with tens of thousands of 1-U systems and fileservers packed into 40-machine-per-tiles densities can become a very taxing drain on the power infrastructure. When you think about what's being consumed on the other end of the wire to generate that electricity, at that scale green computing becomes something to think about.
I bet if they named their product 'iBeEvil' they'd have the same number of installations.
How many joe-blow users read these pop-up install dialogs. "What? iBeEvil? Oh - a security fix from Micrsoft. Yes, install, if it lets me get to what I clicked on."
I've seen extremely beefy NFS file-servers go into a crash-reboot-crash cycle after the first crash because all of the hosts trying to remount the filesystem completely crush the machine before it is fully up to speed. We've had to unplug the network cables on the server to prevent the mount storm for killing the server again.
Note, this is enterprise-grade hardware hooked up to million-dollar disk arrays.
Now, is that entirely from dealing with the networking stack? No. Not quite. However, consider this. It takes time to checksum headers and data. It takes time unwrap packets. If you have a ton of clients raining requests for data on your server, it's not hard to see that dealing with the networking bookkeeping could impact the throughput of requests. ie: Database servers and web servers are two things that come to mind here in addition to file servers.
Btw, note that this another part of the "platform" initiative/orientation. While Intel's track-record has not been great in many respects, they do have a good track-record of success with "platforms." eg: Centrino was a "platform."
There are two cash-cows that Microsoft will defend vigorously. Office, and Exchange. Outlook as a mailer is no big deal. But email/calendaring integration are what make it so attractive to businesses. Interoperating w/ exchange will be the way to kill it and I'm not sure if that M$ will ever sit still long enough for that to happen.
I think it would be better if Sunbird and the OSS community designed a good calendaring/email (Sunbird/T-Bird) solution that worked well stand-alone because it would be easier to implement and they could innovate some nice alternatives to the suckitude of exchange. But a standalone solution may not be able to penetrate the marketshare Exchange has.
In any case, this is the number one thing I'm watching in the OSS community - an exchange killer. As mentioned before, when one manifests the folks in Redmond will be running scared.
Yes - Evolution and Connector are bridging the gap for now, but they are not quite 100% of the way there.
I was there when AOL enabled usenet access. The flood of users with no netiquette or, as it seemed to me at the time, common sense, drove me out of almost every newsgroup I followed.
Good point about the shopping mall experience. I'm an ex-apple employee and still use a mac at home. I've walked into the local Apple store several times and I've always felt a little put off by the fact that aside from an iPod or some accessory, I can't walk out with anything for less than $1000.00, which puts it far beyond the reach of impulse-buy or 'extravagent gift' in my eyes. But $500.00. Not bad.
I also own a wind-tunnel system. Dual 1 gig G4's that I had to spend $300.00 to quiet down to barely acceptable levels.
I'm seriously considering picking one of these bad-boys up.
I'm not completely sure I get this. I read both Brad and Mena's posts on the journal. They've talked quite a bit about preserving the Live Journal community and making it better. What I don't understand is how this helps 6 Apart make more money, which ought to be the whole idea behind the merger from the business side. I can appreciate Brad doesn't enjoy the business side of running a business, so I can see what he personally gets out of it. Can anyone familiar with this aspect of 6 Apart comment?
It seems to me at some point they will need to think about how to get their users to cough up more dough, or how to mine their user base for dough (selling lists/personal info).
No, they are saying "this individual did not make a signficant or new contribution to the field. He therefore did not satisfy the requirements of the degree. It took us awhile to figure that out."
I'm a little surprised at how many "5" posts preceded yours without mentioning this fact. That is, that a PhD represents a contribution to the field of knowledge; an incremental improvement in the area of "what is known."
A PhD based on falsified data is not a contribution to the field.
There's a problem with slowing down and backing off.
Lots of people will not realize you want to get by them and they may not even notice you. Time after time I gain on people who are pacing an 18-wheeler for god knows what reason - passing with the cruise on - wtf? - and I wait patiently for a little bit, and they sit and sit, and then I get on their bumper, and they suddenly notice me in their rear-view mirror and get on with finishing their pass.
In other words, sometimes you need to get people's attention and communicate your intention. Becoming visibly large in the rear-view mirror breaks into the automated cerebellum processes and forces an interrupt, thus causing the driver ahead to disengage the mental auto-pilot.
Slashdot Mirror
"Disturbing" wasn't the best choice of words.
Given Buffy.... more like extremely unoriginal.
Hey, thanks for the info on that.
I run hot-cold on Wheldon. Firefly truly does rock, and I was very sad when the show was cancelled (but got over it like a well adjusted adult.) I almost didn't start watching it though because it was Wheldon and I hate (with a passion) Buffy.
Maybe I just hate highschool so much I can't not hate Buffy. On the other hand, I was exposed to it indirectly by being married to a Buffy addict, and even they had to agree the show really sucked for the last several seaons.
Am I the only one distrubed by JW's obsession with them?
I haven't really seen this discussed anywhere. On the other hand, I haven't looked very hard.
Just curious.
My first job out of college I had an office. Great atmosphere, a door that even locked, lots of creative people... overall very cool. I was also on the critical path for multiple software projects and the "pushes" people went through to finish a project that are usually followed by some time off did not work that way for me. After going through the ringer with one project, the next would come along and put me through it again, and sometimes I had many projects at once going through that process. I threw myself at the work (2 years of 60-70 hour weeks, worked most weekends) thinking hard work and loyalty would be rewarded. They weren't.
My second job is with a fortune 100 company, which is 100% cubes. It is considered to be a successful company. It is possible to advance here with hard work and initiative, and the management culture here is less dysfunctional. I initially experienced dismay at having to accept a 'cube' and embrace what I thought of as the "Dilbert" life. While other similarities to Dilbert have inevitably manifested, I've none-the-less enjoyed working here far more than my previous hipster, avant-garde, offices-with-doors employer. I've pulled a few long weeks but that's always been tempered by some easier ones.
Cubes = evil? No. Cubes = more sources of distractions? Yes. So you have to educate yourself and learn how to manage it.
"It's awesome! It's completely radical and kicks ass! It's completely awesome!"
e _spkr/1549
- How Jeff Waugh described every Gnome project and technology development at OSCON 2005.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2005/view/
What he said. Can we add this topic to the kill-file so we need never waste our time with it again?
Besides, I couldn't kill low level alliance with impunity if they did...
X-D
What are the simple, obvious solutions? I think Blizzard would be stupid to regulate this any more than making such kills not worth any honor.
For sure, the World of Warcraft forums are a wasteland of whiners. Every once in awhile I'll go there and I'm quickly reminded of why I don't waste my time with them in general. On the forums, everyone's a game designer, everyone knows how it should be, and "Bliz is screwing us."
Well... almost a wasteland...
THAT being said, I think what people find frustrating is the fact that they are rarely acknowledged. Usually by the time extremely obvious problems have been discussed (and, admittedly, some elegant and insightful solutions proposed), Blizzard has not responded yet. Then, the Blizzard rep will start a thread that says what the next patch is going to do to address it long after the posters have given up on anything bein done in the first place.
I think part of the problem might be that the Blizzard reps on the forums have almost no access to the developers themselves... that's my guess.
The reason their new fab is their first 300mm wafer facillity is because Intel paved the way last year.
Don't forget the roguelikes.
rogue, moria, angband (my favorite), nethack, omega, and the variants.
Good stuff. Not for everyone. But good stuff.
Specfically, why I see so many Powerbooks there every year.
Cooler servers and cooler rooms are the answer, ideally with cooler rooms being the result of cooler servers.
The issue of computing with respect to its impact on the environment hasn't gotten too much notice. On a bedroom-level scale the biggest concern is heat. Data-centers with tens of thousands of 1-U systems and fileservers packed into 40-machine-per-tiles densities can become a very taxing drain on the power infrastructure. When you think about what's being consumed on the other end of the wire to generate that electricity, at that scale green computing becomes something to think about.
I don't know. Whenver I'm using windows I'm amazed ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-u don't work. What the fuck was Gates thinking?
I bet if they named their product 'iBeEvil' they'd have the same number of installations.
How many joe-blow users read these pop-up install dialogs. "What? iBeEvil? Oh - a security fix from Micrsoft. Yes, install, if it lets me get to what I clicked on."
You're wrong.
I've seen extremely beefy NFS file-servers go into a crash-reboot-crash cycle after the first crash because all of the hosts trying to remount the filesystem completely crush the machine before it is fully up to speed. We've had to unplug the network cables on the server to prevent the mount storm for killing the server again.
Note, this is enterprise-grade hardware hooked up to million-dollar disk arrays.
Now, is that entirely from dealing with the networking stack? No. Not quite. However, consider this. It takes time to checksum headers and data. It takes time unwrap packets. If you have a ton of clients raining requests for data on your server, it's not hard to see that dealing with the networking bookkeeping could impact the throughput of requests. ie: Database servers and web servers are two things that come to mind here in addition to file servers.
Btw, note that this another part of the "platform" initiative/orientation. While Intel's track-record has not been great in many respects, they do have a good track-record of success with "platforms." eg: Centrino was a "platform."
There are two cash-cows that Microsoft will defend vigorously. Office, and Exchange. Outlook as a mailer is no big deal. But email/calendaring integration are what make it so attractive to businesses. Interoperating w/ exchange will be the way to kill it and I'm not sure if that M$ will ever sit still long enough for that to happen.
I think it would be better if Sunbird and the OSS community designed a good calendaring/email (Sunbird/T-Bird) solution that worked well stand-alone because it would be easier to implement and they could innovate some nice alternatives to the suckitude of exchange. But a standalone solution may not be able to penetrate the marketshare Exchange has.
In any case, this is the number one thing I'm watching in the OSS community - an exchange killer. As mentioned before, when one manifests the folks in Redmond will be running scared.
Yes - Evolution and Connector are bridging the gap for now, but they are not quite 100% of the way there.
I was there when AOL enabled usenet access. The flood of users with no netiquette or, as it seemed to me at the time, common sense, drove me out of almost every newsgroup I followed.
And now they are leaving.
Irony.
Good point about the shopping mall experience. I'm an ex-apple employee and still use a mac at home. I've walked into the local Apple store several times and I've always felt a little put off by the fact that aside from an iPod or some accessory, I can't walk out with anything for less than $1000.00, which puts it far beyond the reach of impulse-buy or 'extravagent gift' in my eyes. But $500.00. Not bad.
I also own a wind-tunnel system. Dual 1 gig G4's that I had to spend $300.00 to quiet down to barely acceptable levels.
I'm seriously considering picking one of these bad-boys up.
It's not like you can't buy MS Office for the Mac.
I'm not completely sure I get this. I read both Brad and Mena's posts on the journal. They've talked quite a bit about preserving the Live Journal community and making it better. What I don't understand is how this helps 6 Apart make more money, which ought to be the whole idea behind the merger from the business side. I can appreciate Brad doesn't enjoy the business side of running a business, so I can see what he personally gets out of it. Can anyone familiar with this aspect of 6 Apart comment?
It seems to me at some point they will need to think about how to get their users to cough up more dough, or how to mine their user base for dough (selling lists/personal info).
No, they are saying "this individual did not make a signficant or new contribution to the field. He therefore did not satisfy the requirements of the degree. It took us awhile to figure that out."
I'm a little surprised at how many "5" posts preceded yours without mentioning this fact. That is, that a PhD represents a contribution to the field of knowledge; an incremental improvement in the area of "what is known."
A PhD based on falsified data is not a contribution to the field.
There's a problem with slowing down and backing off.
Lots of people will not realize you want to get by them and they may not even notice you. Time after time I gain on people who are pacing an 18-wheeler for god knows what reason - passing with the cruise on - wtf? - and I wait patiently for a little bit, and they sit and sit, and then I get on their bumper, and they suddenly notice me in their rear-view mirror and get on with finishing their pass.
In other words, sometimes you need to get people's attention and communicate your intention. Becoming visibly large in the rear-view mirror breaks into the automated cerebellum processes and forces an interrupt, thus causing the driver ahead to disengage the mental auto-pilot.