Eventually, little-by-little, policies involving longer hours and lower wages are the result.
Such policies are rational only if longer hours actually increase productivity over the long haul, or if they increase productivity over the short haul and changing workers is cheap. In my experience, neither is true for software development.
If you're tired one day on the assembly line, it's not a big problem; you screw up a few widgets that you never see again. But with software, you have to live with every mistake until you clean it up or throw it out. And as code size increases, tracking down the root cause of bugs to those mistakes becomes more and more expensive. The solution isn't to work more, it's to work less, so that you make fewer mistakes and that you're peppy enough to kill the few you do make right away.
And turnover costs for software are huge. Developers spend a ton of time learning about the product and code base, and when you lose an employee, you lose all of that investment. A similar logic, albeit less dramatic, applies to burnout; it takes a long time for people to fully recover from a death march.
So in software, the work-em-til-they-drop approach is generally economically shortsighted. It doesn't have much to do with capitalism, and it has a lot to do with how irrationally short-sighted people can be.
And I know whereof I speak. I've done death marches before, but am now mainly doing Extreme Programming projects. On my last project we left on time pretty much every day, and our bug rates were well below one per developer-month. Going into production was smooth and easy. And whenever people wanted to take vacations, we took vacations, even if it was the week before a release. And the management was very happy with how much stuff we produced for them. It was great!
There are many other (and more appropriate) places than the Sveasoft forums to discuss GPL issues, such as here on Slashdot.
There are better places to discuss your own GPL compliance than your own forums? It would seem to me that unless you're trying to cover something up, the very best place to talk about that is on your own site.
This procedure does have one problem, though: you won't catch when a file got deleted. You could do a script that compares the (sorted ?) file listings of the tar.gz that lists all files that were present in 1.tar.gz but are missing in 2.tar.gz and thus have to be deleted.
I use rsync for this. I've never used SVN, but for CVS, I have two directories, the real version and the CVS version. You can have rsync update from the real to the CVS directory and delete anything different while excluding the CVS directories.
I agree heartily with about 98% with this, especially this part:
Serious practitioners know that source code by itself is virtually worthless--you need access to, and the good will of, the people that designed and implemented it. That's what's precious.
But if you do have to start reverse-engineering the product, the source code can be useful. Assuming that you can get it to build and run in a debugger, that is.
Or, if the code base contains a good automated test suite, that makes it very much worth the effort. Then you can trace the what of the code back to the why of the tests.
My advice would be to consider that you're starting the project from scratch.
The problem with this is there are probably a number of executives who think that by buying the psuedo-tangible assets, they've gotten a big leg up on a from-scratch project. I think your advice is accurate, but the poster is going to have a hell of a time getting the execs to have the same expectation. And unless he does, it's going to be a long slog of insane deadlines and disappointed bosses.
Personally, I'd consider this a fantastic time to update my resume.
As a worker at the company, you (meaning a generic "you", of course) can't affect the company fortunes in a strategic way - only the owners and leadership (often the same people) can do that.
That's probably true for a large company. But for small ones, that's far from the truth. In the small ones, each person can make a huge difference. And it's the small ones most likely to grant big chunks of options.
Having a good job in a company I like should be incentive enough (social reinforcers are the most powerful ones, after all). Adding stock potions is not likely to change that motivation substantially
True for some people, but not all. I do a fair bit of work for Silicon Valley startups, and have for many years. I still am sometimes willing to take options. And when I do, I'm much more willing to raise a ruckus if I think they aren't handling my investment well. When it's just a job, I'm more likely to say, "Well, it's their money."
If you can make a better investor or customer demo by ignoring or papering over serious problems, you tend to do so if it will bring you closer to that magical moment. The better long-term path may have been to really solve these problems, but that could mean taking a hit on stock price, or a delayed IPO, right?
I'd agree that some people make this analysis, but I think most of the ones who do it are wrong. The error they make is thinking that there will be one magical moment. That's a plausible dream, of course. And in hindsight, looking at companies like Google, it can really seem like all the work adds up to one inevitable event.
But in practice, that's bullshit. Running a scam requires you to have a lot of control over when you take the money and run. (If you're not familiar with con artists, I'd recommend starting with Con Man: A Master Swindler's Own Story and The Big Con.) And that's not the life of a small company these days; the uncertainty of investment and the unpredictability of the market makes it impossible to say when you'll be able to IPO. (For example, look at Shopping.com, which had a huge lag between filing and actual IPO.) And investors these days are much, much more careful than they were back in the day; they look for performance, not just dazzle.
So these days, I think the incentives are better aligned. It may not be perfect, but there are times when options are a good choice, both for the company and for the employee.
I don't really see the great charm of stock options, specifically as part of your employment renumeration.
Look at it this way. There's some money you need to get by, and it's good to take that in cash. But for every dollar between that floor and your market rate, an early-stage company has to borrow that from somewhere.
If they borrow it from an outside investor, then they have to pay a hefty risk premium. After all, the investor can't really know much about the prospects of the company.
If they borrow it from you, then A) you have a stronger incentive to make the company a success, and B) because of your inside knowledge, you should more able to value the shares than some outside investor. You and the company can then split the difference between the "true" value and what an outside investor would demand, so everybody wins.
Of course, as you imply, the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket approach of investing heavily in the company you work for is a risky investment strategy. But it can be a hell of a lot of fun.
fully funding your IRA, 401K, SEP IRA, what-have-you [...] Paying quarterly taxes is a bitch
Well, there's no way to make it cheaper, but there are ways to make it easier. For the last few years I've used companies that let me, more or less, outsource the paperwork to somebody else. I've heard them called employer-of-record services.
The basic deal is that I go on doing my contracting thing, except that when we get to signing the paperwork, I have my client call them. Then the shell company invoices my client and pays me regular paychecks after deducting for whatever benefits (401k, health, dental, life insurance) that I choose to buy from the menu of options they've set up.
It's great in that it let me focus on the stuff I like (finding and doing the work) while they take care of all of hassle of benefits, invoicing, and taxes. It's especially nice to have them play bad cop when a client is late paying an invoice.
I've used Zero Chaos in the past, but didn't like them much. A couple of years back I switched to mybizoffice.com which, other than the dorky name, has been great. They've been flexible about contracts and billing arrangements, and they always pay on time.
Yeah, that democracy stuff lets the wrong people have a say. Thank goodness there are script kiddies to prevent that. We should get together and buy a gift for them. How about some nice brown shirts?
I realize that he's got just as much of a right to say whatever he wants, but it troubles me that some people are looking to this as an authoritative source of information. IOW, he's biased.
Having an opinion doesn't mean that he's biased. Some people can separate the two. And he pretty clearly has.
He's honest about his opinions, makes clear where he gets his data, and has a simple formula that he used to do the totals and the map. Out of the history I have in my RSS reader, his tally had Bush leading 14 times, Kerry leading 13 times, and them tieing once. As far as I can tell it's an honest effort to present the poll results in a useful format. He even provides the data as a CSV, so you can run the numbers as you please.
So unless you have some proof that he's fudging the numbers, maybe you can lay off your apparently biased accusations of bias?
God said that if we seek Him, we shall find Him. This is a scientific experiment that anyone willing can participate in by himself in order to answer this question.
Look, I'm glad you have your faith and have many friends of varying faiths, whom I respect immensely. But it'd gratify me immensely if you'd not go dragging science into this.
Because when you do, I'll have to point that no, this isn't science. You haven't proven anything other than that when people go looking to believe something, sometimes they do. You'll need further experiments to prove anything about what they're talking to.
And living here in California, I find that people are a little ahead of you in their lab work. They try talking not just to your particular god, but to a vast variety of gods, both historical and recently made up. They also try talking to trees, rocks, bodies of water, real historical figures, wild animals, astronomical objects, imaginary historical figures, pet bunny rabbits, various internal organs, and a variety of alleged internal structures like energy bodies and chakras.
And guess what: They've all had success. So based on this evidence, I can think of two theories. A) your particular god is a pretty small part of the vast unseen world, or B) people can talk to and believe in pretty much anything if they work at it.
Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life.
Ok, this argument always makes me crazy. Not only is it weak science, but it's lousy, lousy theology. I hear Christians describe it as a God-of-the-gaps approach to science.
What these guys do is say, "Well, in these areas where nobody can refute the science, we'll call that the domain of science. Micro-evolution? Heck, plenty of evidence, so there's no hand-of-god stuff there. But in the areas we don't understand yet? That's clearly the work of an all-powerful creator, and you evil secular humanists should stop poisioning the minds of the children by suggesting otherwise. Oh! Think of the children!"
Now I'm not religious, but I have friends who are sincere Christians, and they like this as little as I do. Since science is always peeling back the veil of mystery, if you figure that God is only in the shadows, God has been getting smaller since Galileo's day. Poor, tiny God! No wonder the creationists need to leap to his defense; he might disappear altogether!
Instead, my friends' take is that God is behind everything, in everything, sustains everything. By doing science, by a making careful examination of what they see as God's works, they feel like they are exposing the magnificient beauty of the creator's work. To them, science is to the universe what art history is to art: not a threat, but a sincere tribute.
I just have a hard time believing that evolution gave us, the human race, our start.
Hear, hear! Personally, I also have a hard time believing that the same force that keeps the planets in motion is the one that makes things fall down. I know scientists say that it's all some "gravity" thing, but it just seems too weird.
I mean, sure, they say they have a lot of evidence and math and stuff. But I tried looking at some of it, and it made me all sleepy. So I figure that's some all-powerful creator guy trying to tell me that the gravity thing is bunk, and it's just his will keeping things in the place where he thinks they should be.
Is Harvard business school or joe blow MBA mill really producing management that is unable to assess risk and intelligently apply reason to their decision making process? Think about it.
Reason doesn't really enter into it; the political considerations at large companies often trump any actual facts. For an interesting study of this, see this article that has evidence that being a good manager often has nothing to do with being a sucessful manager (that is, one who gets promoted).
I wonder if this is some sort of an American thing. Are people in Europe and Asia making decisions like this?
I've worked on four continents, and so far it seems universal to me. I think of it as the human equivalent of the dominance games that chimps spend an awful lot of time on.
Got any pointers? This technical genius would like to further himself out of the cannon fodder box and into something more lucrative.
Ok, here's my own analysis, based mainly on my personal experience. It may or may not work for you.
Everybody has different capacities, and we tend to develop in the areas where we're strongest and ignore the areas where we're weakest. If you're here on Slashdot, likely you've gloried in things that go well with a traditional IQ and ignored politics.
Basically, there are two paths to pursue. One is to pursue the kind of natural, intuitive understanding of people that a politician has. The other is to try to get an intellectual grip on the problem. I think both are necessary.
Regarding the intellectual stuff, two books I found very useful were Chimpanzee Politics and Impro. Both gave me insight into the mechanisms of human dominance dynamics. The first helped by showing what it looks like in our nearest living relatives. The other, which contains an improvisational theater instructor's notes, breaks it down in detail and gives some exercises. Also worth reading are books by and for people who are strong politically but weak intellectually. A lot of management books and sales handbooks are fascinating to me; they focus on very different things than I would have bothered looking at.
And then there's just practice, both of analysis and of doing. Theater can be a good way to explore both aspects. Some movies and TV shows are great for analysis; after reading Chimpanzee Politics I found gangster movies really interesting as the power dynamics are clearer. And of course, there's plenty of opportunity for both observation and participation in your average office.
One thing it too me a while to get over: the notion that things are supposed to be done in a rational way. Politics has almost nothing to do with that. It used to make me crazy, but now I see that as the price to be paid for building an organization out of half-evolved monkeys. Complaining that people are rarely rational is like complaining that bits have only two values: there might be better ways to do things, but you gotta work with what you have.
NVI is a good minimialistic vi [...] unless your a dirty dirty emacs hippy
Sweet! Now we've brought editor religion into the distro war article. Next I'd like to see a little grammar cop action, followed by some media-is-too-liberal vs media-is-too-conservative bickering. For the main event, frothing fundamentalist Randites can instruct us all in how to pronounce Ayn, while carefully being snotty enough that they can't be accused of being unselfish. Then, when everybody tries to shout them down, somebody can end the thread by making Nazi comparisons.
Oh, please. If you'll read what I said, I'm saying it's not malice. And there's no need for a conspiracy. But I've seen both sides of this. I helped run a small site that got bogus lawyer threats, and I've worked for a company that used the threat of legal action to get people to to what they wanted, knowing that they couldn't win. Honest, it really happens.
First, it was a fuckup. That's clear, they admitted it, end of story. [...] I know it screws up the schemas of the slashdot crowd, but there's really not this global conspiracy to screw you personally.
I'm not saying they're mean, that the Trilateral Comission is behind this, or that they're working at the behest of the CIA. I'm saying they mainly are concerned with getting what they want. And because they're unusually insulated from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to be indifferent to their effects on ordinary people.
Second, "what they want" in this case is for pedophiles to stop using Nintendo to screw up kids.
What they want is to protect their trademarks and their reputation. There's no particular reason to think they're carefully focusing on pedophiles. The point of their cease-and-desist-bot was probably to stop search engine bait from using Nintendo trademarks; if they were serious about stopping a pedophile the last thing they'd do is send a "please don't use our trademarks" letter to the sicko.
And the reason they made a big public apology is that they got a fucking huge amount of bad press. This is just another side of protecting their public image. But you can bet that when their lawyer-bot bothers other innocent people, ones who get less press, free video game systems are not the general result.
Third, there's no case for indifference because they did everything they could to fix the fuckup.
They did? I missed the press release where they said they'd review their process to make sure that only people actually violating their trademarks for commercial gain would get legal threats. Could you point me to that?
Maybe you don't mind getting threats like that, but reasonable people feel that some people and corporations are using their resources to threaten people with ruinously expensive lawsuits just to get their way. Personally, I think it's an abuse of power, and I'd like to see it stop.
I understand the desire to knee-jerk and think the man is out to get us, but I think the truth, in this case, is a little more mundane.
Yes, that people with money and power are frequently just indifferent to how their use of it affects people as long as they get what they want. Are you sure that's a step up from malice?
identified a group of people who stole over 1.7 million credit card numbers as well as a passport-forging facility in Bulgaria
Those bastards. Stealing credit card numbers is one thing, but they stole a whole passport-forging facility!
I imagine them jacking up a grubby old three-story building in the bad part of town, backing a big-ass truck up under it, and driving it off to a remote countryside location. The guy who lived in the apartment on the top floor must have been really perplexed!
it seems that the consensus among the beta testers is that the game is ready. there are no major known bugs that i've ever come across, and there are very few glitches to speak of. [...]
the bad rep that SOE got was from SWG, and it was deserved in that case. that game still isn't ready for production [...]
And to me, that's the important distinction. If you wait until your grand vision is done, it never will be. I think the optimum is to get something minimal but solid out ASAP, and then let your future development be influenced by the early adopters, rather than designer fantasies of what people will want.
There's a fine MMORPG called Puzzle Pirates that took this approach. They have a massive vision that will take them years to finish. They got something out early, first as a free beta and then as a for-pay 1.0 version. It's perfectly fun as is, and they add new features often enough that things are always getting more interesting. And because many of their users have been in on it and been listened to for quite a while, they're hugely supportive.
If you want to blame me, fine. Sadly, I have bigger concerns than the morality of unsolicited email, giving someone a tool to spider popular websites and search engines (complete with auto-correcting open proxy support), amongst other things.
Yes, I do blame you. To get a few hundred bucks in your pocket, you're helping create tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs to other people. Heck, if you're working for a big spammer, the trouble you help make could cost others millions.
I have a lot more respect for the crackheads who steal stuff out of cars in my neighborhood. Why? Well A, they're in the grips of a drug addiction; you're doing this with a clear head. And B, they're selling the stuff they steal for maybe 20 cents on the dollar, whereas your waste/profit ratio is 1-3 orders of magnitude worse.
The only reason you and your employers aren't in jail is that the laws haven't caught up with you yet. But they will. A fine example of this comes from Con Man: A Master Swindler's Own Story. Many of the things he pulled happened to be legal at the time he started in the 1890s. But they're all illegal today precisely because people like him took advantage of the gap between "wrong" and "illegal". And I look forward to the day you and your kind end up, like him, in prison.
If you really have "bigger concerns" than the waste of millions of dollars and the annoyance of millions of people, you'd better be the leader of a medium-sized country. Otherwise, you're just a sad loser who can't even be honest with himself about the harm he's causing.
There is the rub. Do you write tests for your tests?
I write tests for test infrastructure, but not the tests themselves. I also sometimes use test coverage analyzers to make sure production code doesn't go untested. I could also write tests for the tests, but I don't for three reasons.
One is that I do test-driven development, meaning that I see every test go red before I make it pass. Another is that the tests are usually pretty easy to inspect, so I don't need additional confidence to know that they're working.
And the biggest reason is that it isn't an economical way to reduce bugs. I'm already below one bug per developer month, and those are usually quite mild. The percentage of those bugs that would be caught by testing tests is pretty small. The added expense of testing the tests just wouldn't make sense on the sorts of projects I do.
I'm sick of people like you, who think their way is the right way. I leave people like you alone to do whatever they wish to do, so long as it doesn't affect me. Why the hell can't you provide the same courtsey?
First off, I agree that if somebody is actually watching the TV, then turning it off is rude. I wouldn't do it. But a lot of times, TVs are just left on in public and semi-public spaces when nobody cares. Or even worse, when everybody present actively wants them off.
And we are gradually realizing that television, although sometimes enjoyable, is not entirely benign. Scientific American published a fine article on the addictive potential of TV. It seems that TV, especially programs made with modern editing styles, trigger hardwired behavior to look at motion. It also appears to cause Attention Deficit Disorder in children. And everybody knows how distracting it can be, how it gets in the way of conversation.
So to me, TV in public and semi-public spaces seems pretty analogous to smoking. Some people enjoy it, but the common mode of use means it bothers others. The big difference is that smoking requires an active smoker to do something every few minutes, whereas the TV runs until somebody actively turns it off.
The question, then, is how to negotiate the use of common space. Everybody just wants to be let alone to do their thing, but some people feel that involves having a TV on, and others feel that involves having the TV off. Personally, I think the search for a simple, universal answer is a waste of time. As with smoking, I think the important thing is that people find an answer together, one that everybody can live with.
Spammers, virus copiers and script kiddies will simply be hunted down for sport and tortured on live TV.
Right up until Ah-nold shows up and ruins everything by surviving!
Right now, he is Governator of the state with the biggest interest in terminating spammers. If he managed to start The Internet Dickwad Running Game, his job approval ratings would be through the fucking roof. I think the hard part would be arranging the extradition treaty with Florida, but perhaps he could do it like the Israelis and just send in teams of commandos to kidnap the spammers.
Noting how popular the federal do-not-call list is, I'd guess if that he could simultaneously solve the spam problem and create a #1 reality show, he could skip "President" and go right to "Emperor".
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually, little-by-little, policies involving longer hours and lower wages are the result.
Such policies are rational only if longer hours actually increase productivity over the long haul, or if they increase productivity over the short haul and changing workers is cheap. In my experience, neither is true for software development.
If you're tired one day on the assembly line, it's not a big problem; you screw up a few widgets that you never see again. But with software, you have to live with every mistake until you clean it up or throw it out. And as code size increases, tracking down the root cause of bugs to those mistakes becomes more and more expensive. The solution isn't to work more, it's to work less, so that you make fewer mistakes and that you're peppy enough to kill the few you do make right away.
And turnover costs for software are huge. Developers spend a ton of time learning about the product and code base, and when you lose an employee, you lose all of that investment. A similar logic, albeit less dramatic, applies to burnout; it takes a long time for people to fully recover from a death march.
So in software, the work-em-til-they-drop approach is generally economically shortsighted. It doesn't have much to do with capitalism, and it has a lot to do with how irrationally short-sighted people can be.
And I know whereof I speak. I've done death marches before, but am now mainly doing Extreme Programming projects. On my last project we left on time pretty much every day, and our bug rates were well below one per developer-month. Going into production was smooth and easy. And whenever people wanted to take vacations, we took vacations, even if it was the week before a release. And the management was very happy with how much stuff we produced for them. It was great!
There are many other (and more appropriate) places than the Sveasoft forums to discuss GPL issues, such as here on Slashdot.
There are better places to discuss your own GPL compliance than your own forums? It would seem to me that unless you're trying to cover something up, the very best place to talk about that is on your own site.
This procedure does have one problem, though: you won't catch when a file got deleted. You could do a script that compares the (sorted ?) file listings of the tar.gz that lists all files that were present in 1.tar.gz but are missing in 2.tar.gz and thus have to be deleted.
I use rsync for this. I've never used SVN, but for CVS, I have two directories, the real version and the CVS version. You can have rsync update from the real to the CVS directory and delete anything different while excluding the CVS directories.
I agree heartily with about 98% with this, especially this part:
Serious practitioners know that source code by itself is virtually worthless--you need access to, and the good will of, the people that designed and implemented it. That's what's precious.
But if you do have to start reverse-engineering the product, the source code can be useful. Assuming that you can get it to build and run in a debugger, that is.
Or, if the code base contains a good automated test suite, that makes it very much worth the effort. Then you can trace the what of the code back to the why of the tests.
My advice would be to consider that you're starting the project from scratch.
The problem with this is there are probably a number of executives who think that by buying the psuedo-tangible assets, they've gotten a big leg up on a from-scratch project. I think your advice is accurate, but the poster is going to have a hell of a time getting the execs to have the same expectation. And unless he does, it's going to be a long slog of insane deadlines and disappointed bosses.
Personally, I'd consider this a fantastic time to update my resume.
As a worker at the company, you (meaning a generic "you", of course) can't affect the company fortunes in a strategic way - only the owners and leadership (often the same people) can do that.
That's probably true for a large company. But for small ones, that's far from the truth. In the small ones, each person can make a huge difference. And it's the small ones most likely to grant big chunks of options.
Having a good job in a company I like should be incentive enough (social reinforcers are the most powerful ones, after all). Adding stock potions is not likely to change that motivation substantially
True for some people, but not all. I do a fair bit of work for Silicon Valley startups, and have for many years. I still am sometimes willing to take options. And when I do, I'm much more willing to raise a ruckus if I think they aren't handling my investment well. When it's just a job, I'm more likely to say, "Well, it's their money."
If you can make a better investor or customer demo by ignoring or papering over serious problems, you tend to do so if it will bring you closer to that magical moment. The better long-term path may have been to really solve these problems, but that could mean taking a hit on stock price, or a delayed IPO, right?
I'd agree that some people make this analysis, but I think most of the ones who do it are wrong. The error they make is thinking that there will be one magical moment. That's a plausible dream, of course. And in hindsight, looking at companies like Google, it can really seem like all the work adds up to one inevitable event.
But in practice, that's bullshit. Running a scam requires you to have a lot of control over when you take the money and run. (If you're not familiar with con artists, I'd recommend starting with Con Man: A Master Swindler's Own Story and The Big Con.) And that's not the life of a small company these days; the uncertainty of investment and the unpredictability of the market makes it impossible to say when you'll be able to IPO. (For example, look at Shopping.com, which had a huge lag between filing and actual IPO.) And investors these days are much, much more careful than they were back in the day; they look for performance, not just dazzle.
So these days, I think the incentives are better aligned. It may not be perfect, but there are times when options are a good choice, both for the company and for the employee.
I don't really see the great charm of stock options, specifically as part of your employment renumeration.
Look at it this way. There's some money you need to get by, and it's good to take that in cash. But for every dollar between that floor and your market rate, an early-stage company has to borrow that from somewhere.
If they borrow it from an outside investor, then they have to pay a hefty risk premium. After all, the investor can't really know much about the prospects of the company.
If they borrow it from you, then A) you have a stronger incentive to make the company a success, and B) because of your inside knowledge, you should more able to value the shares than some outside investor. You and the company can then split the difference between the "true" value and what an outside investor would demand, so everybody wins.
Of course, as you imply, the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket approach of investing heavily in the company you work for is a risky investment strategy. But it can be a hell of a lot of fun.
fully funding your IRA, 401K, SEP IRA, what-have-you [...] Paying quarterly taxes is a bitch
Well, there's no way to make it cheaper, but there are ways to make it easier. For the last few years I've used companies that let me, more or less, outsource the paperwork to somebody else. I've heard them called employer-of-record services.
The basic deal is that I go on doing my contracting thing, except that when we get to signing the paperwork, I have my client call them. Then the shell company invoices my client and pays me regular paychecks after deducting for whatever benefits (401k, health, dental, life insurance) that I choose to buy from the menu of options they've set up.
It's great in that it let me focus on the stuff I like (finding and doing the work) while they take care of all of hassle of benefits, invoicing, and taxes. It's especially nice to have them play bad cop when a client is late paying an invoice.
I've used Zero Chaos in the past, but didn't like them much. A couple of years back I switched to mybizoffice.com which, other than the dorky name, has been great. They've been flexible about contracts and billing arrangements, and they always pay on time.
It's just as well that his site is knocked off.
Yeah, that democracy stuff lets the wrong people have a say. Thank goodness there are script kiddies to prevent that. We should get together and buy a gift for them. How about some nice brown shirts?
I realize that he's got just as much of a right to say whatever he wants, but it troubles me that some people are looking to this as an authoritative source of information. IOW, he's biased.
Having an opinion doesn't mean that he's biased. Some people can separate the two. And he pretty clearly has.
He's honest about his opinions, makes clear where he gets his data, and has a simple formula that he used to do the totals and the map. Out of the history I have in my RSS reader, his tally had Bush leading 14 times, Kerry leading 13 times, and them tieing once. As far as I can tell it's an honest effort to present the poll results in a useful format. He even provides the data as a CSV, so you can run the numbers as you please.
So unless you have some proof that he's fudging the numbers, maybe you can lay off your apparently biased accusations of bias?
God said that if we seek Him, we shall find Him. This is a scientific experiment that anyone willing can participate in by himself in order to answer this question.
Look, I'm glad you have your faith and have many friends of varying faiths, whom I respect immensely. But it'd gratify me immensely if you'd not go dragging science into this.
Because when you do, I'll have to point that no, this isn't science. You haven't proven anything other than that when people go looking to believe something, sometimes they do. You'll need further experiments to prove anything about what they're talking to.
And living here in California, I find that people are a little ahead of you in their lab work. They try talking not just to your particular god, but to a vast variety of gods, both historical and recently made up. They also try talking to trees, rocks, bodies of water, real historical figures, wild animals, astronomical objects, imaginary historical figures, pet bunny rabbits, various internal organs, and a variety of alleged internal structures like energy bodies and chakras.
And guess what: They've all had success. So based on this evidence, I can think of two theories. A) your particular god is a pretty small part of the vast unseen world, or B) people can talk to and believe in pretty much anything if they work at it.
Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life.
Ok, this argument always makes me crazy. Not only is it weak science, but it's lousy, lousy theology. I hear Christians describe it as a God-of-the-gaps approach to science.
What these guys do is say, "Well, in these areas where nobody can refute the science, we'll call that the domain of science. Micro-evolution? Heck, plenty of evidence, so there's no hand-of-god stuff there. But in the areas we don't understand yet? That's clearly the work of an all-powerful creator, and you evil secular humanists should stop poisioning the minds of the children by suggesting otherwise. Oh! Think of the children!"
Now I'm not religious, but I have friends who are sincere Christians, and they like this as little as I do. Since science is always peeling back the veil of mystery, if you figure that God is only in the shadows, God has been getting smaller since Galileo's day. Poor, tiny God! No wonder the creationists need to leap to his defense; he might disappear altogether!
Instead, my friends' take is that God is behind everything, in everything, sustains everything. By doing science, by a making careful examination of what they see as God's works, they feel like they are exposing the magnificient beauty of the creator's work. To them, science is to the universe what art history is to art: not a threat, but a sincere tribute.
I just have a hard time believing that evolution gave us, the human race, our start.
Hear, hear! Personally, I also have a hard time believing that the same force that keeps the planets in motion is the one that makes things fall down. I know scientists say that it's all some "gravity" thing, but it just seems too weird.
I mean, sure, they say they have a lot of evidence and math and stuff. But I tried looking at some of it, and it made me all sleepy. So I figure that's some all-powerful creator guy trying to tell me that the gravity thing is bunk, and it's just his will keeping things in the place where he thinks they should be.
Is Harvard business school or joe blow MBA mill really producing management that is unable to assess risk and intelligently apply reason to their decision making process? Think about it.
Reason doesn't really enter into it; the political considerations at large companies often trump any actual facts. For an interesting study of this, see this article that has evidence that being a good manager often has nothing to do with being a sucessful manager (that is, one who gets promoted).
I wonder if this is some sort of an American thing. Are people in Europe and Asia making decisions like this?
I've worked on four continents, and so far it seems universal to me. I think of it as the human equivalent of the dominance games that chimps spend an awful lot of time on.
Got any pointers? This technical genius would like to further himself out of the cannon fodder box and into something more lucrative.
Ok, here's my own analysis, based mainly on my personal experience. It may or may not work for you.
Everybody has different capacities, and we tend to develop in the areas where we're strongest and ignore the areas where we're weakest. If you're here on Slashdot, likely you've gloried in things that go well with a traditional IQ and ignored politics.
Basically, there are two paths to pursue. One is to pursue the kind of natural, intuitive understanding of people that a politician has. The other is to try to get an intellectual grip on the problem. I think both are necessary.
Regarding the intellectual stuff, two books I found very useful were Chimpanzee Politics and Impro. Both gave me insight into the mechanisms of human dominance dynamics. The first helped by showing what it looks like in our nearest living relatives. The other, which contains an improvisational theater instructor's notes, breaks it down in detail and gives some exercises. Also worth reading are books by and for people who are strong politically but weak intellectually. A lot of management books and sales handbooks are fascinating to me; they focus on very different things than I would have bothered looking at.
And then there's just practice, both of analysis and of doing. Theater can be a good way to explore both aspects. Some movies and TV shows are great for analysis; after reading Chimpanzee Politics I found gangster movies really interesting as the power dynamics are clearer. And of course, there's plenty of opportunity for both observation and participation in your average office.
One thing it too me a while to get over: the notion that things are supposed to be done in a rational way. Politics has almost nothing to do with that. It used to make me crazy, but now I see that as the price to be paid for building an organization out of half-evolved monkeys. Complaining that people are rarely rational is like complaining that bits have only two values: there might be better ways to do things, but you gotta work with what you have.
NVI is a good minimialistic vi [...] unless your a dirty dirty emacs hippy
Sweet! Now we've brought editor religion into the distro war article. Next I'd like to see a little grammar cop action, followed by some media-is-too-liberal vs media-is-too-conservative bickering. For the main event, frothing fundamentalist Randites can instruct us all in how to pronounce Ayn, while carefully being snotty enough that they can't be accused of being unselfish. Then, when everybody tries to shout them down, somebody can end the thread by making Nazi comparisons.
Get to it, boys! Time's a-wastin'!
Take the tinfoil hat off.
Oh, please. If you'll read what I said, I'm saying it's not malice. And there's no need for a conspiracy. But I've seen both sides of this. I helped run a small site that got bogus lawyer threats, and I've worked for a company that used the threat of legal action to get people to to what they wanted, knowing that they couldn't win. Honest, it really happens.
First, it was a fuckup. That's clear, they admitted it, end of story. [...] I know it screws up the schemas of the slashdot crowd, but there's really not this global conspiracy to screw you personally.
I'm not saying they're mean, that the Trilateral Comission is behind this, or that they're working at the behest of the CIA. I'm saying they mainly are concerned with getting what they want. And because they're unusually insulated from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to be indifferent to their effects on ordinary people.
Second, "what they want" in this case is for pedophiles to stop using Nintendo to screw up kids.
What they want is to protect their trademarks and their reputation. There's no particular reason to think they're carefully focusing on pedophiles. The point of their cease-and-desist-bot was probably to stop search engine bait from using Nintendo trademarks; if they were serious about stopping a pedophile the last thing they'd do is send a "please don't use our trademarks" letter to the sicko.
And the reason they made a big public apology is that they got a fucking huge amount of bad press. This is just another side of protecting their public image. But you can bet that when their lawyer-bot bothers other innocent people, ones who get less press, free video game systems are not the general result.
Third, there's no case for indifference because they did everything they could to fix the fuckup.
They did? I missed the press release where they said they'd review their process to make sure that only people actually violating their trademarks for commercial gain would get legal threats. Could you point me to that?
Maybe you don't mind getting threats like that, but reasonable people feel that some people and corporations are using their resources to threaten people with ruinously expensive lawsuits just to get their way. Personally, I think it's an abuse of power, and I'd like to see it stop.
I understand the desire to knee-jerk and think the man is out to get us, but I think the truth, in this case, is a little more mundane.
Yes, that people with money and power are frequently just indifferent to how their use of it affects people as long as they get what they want. Are you sure that's a step up from malice?
identified a group of people who stole over 1.7 million credit card numbers as well as a passport-forging facility in Bulgaria
Those bastards. Stealing credit card numbers is one thing, but they stole a whole passport-forging facility!
I imagine them jacking up a grubby old three-story building in the bad part of town, backing a big-ass truck up under it, and driving it off to a remote countryside location. The guy who lived in the apartment on the top floor must have been really perplexed!
Thus, there is no incentive whatsoever for the phone companies to enforce caller-id.
Well, I wouldn't go that far. They must make a fantastic amount of money on CallerId; if it becomes untrustworthy, they'll lose a lot of dough.
it seems that the consensus among the beta testers is that the game is ready. there are no major known bugs that i've ever come across, and there are very few glitches to speak of. [...]
the bad rep that SOE got was from SWG, and it was deserved in that case. that game still isn't ready for production [...]
And to me, that's the important distinction. If you wait until your grand vision is done, it never will be. I think the optimum is to get something minimal but solid out ASAP, and then let your future development be influenced by the early adopters, rather than designer fantasies of what people will want.
There's a fine MMORPG called Puzzle Pirates that took this approach. They have a massive vision that will take them years to finish. They got something out early, first as a free beta and then as a for-pay 1.0 version. It's perfectly fun as is, and they add new features often enough that things are always getting more interesting. And because many of their users have been in on it and been listened to for quite a while, they're hugely supportive.
If you want to blame me, fine. Sadly, I have bigger concerns than the morality of unsolicited email, giving someone a tool to spider popular websites and search engines (complete with auto-correcting open proxy support), amongst other things.
Yes, I do blame you. To get a few hundred bucks in your pocket, you're helping create tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs to other people. Heck, if you're working for a big spammer, the trouble you help make could cost others millions.
I have a lot more respect for the crackheads who steal stuff out of cars in my neighborhood. Why? Well A, they're in the grips of a drug addiction; you're doing this with a clear head. And B, they're selling the stuff they steal for maybe 20 cents on the dollar, whereas your waste/profit ratio is 1-3 orders of magnitude worse.
The only reason you and your employers aren't in jail is that the laws haven't caught up with you yet. But they will. A fine example of this comes from Con Man: A Master Swindler's Own Story. Many of the things he pulled happened to be legal at the time he started in the 1890s. But they're all illegal today precisely because people like him took advantage of the gap between "wrong" and "illegal". And I look forward to the day you and your kind end up, like him, in prison.
If you really have "bigger concerns" than the waste of millions of dollars and the annoyance of millions of people, you'd better be the leader of a medium-sized country. Otherwise, you're just a sad loser who can't even be honest with himself about the harm he's causing.
There is the rub. Do you write tests for your tests?
I write tests for test infrastructure, but not the tests themselves. I also sometimes use test coverage analyzers to make sure production code doesn't go untested. I could also write tests for the tests, but I don't for three reasons.
One is that I do test-driven development, meaning that I see every test go red before I make it pass. Another is that the tests are usually pretty easy to inspect, so I don't need additional confidence to know that they're working.
And the biggest reason is that it isn't an economical way to reduce bugs. I'm already below one bug per developer month, and those are usually quite mild. The percentage of those bugs that would be caught by testing tests is pretty small. The added expense of testing the tests just wouldn't make sense on the sorts of projects I do.
I'm sick of people like you, who think their way is the right way. I leave people like you alone to do whatever they wish to do, so long as it doesn't affect me. Why the hell can't you provide the same courtsey?
First off, I agree that if somebody is actually watching the TV, then turning it off is rude. I wouldn't do it. But a lot of times, TVs are just left on in public and semi-public spaces when nobody cares. Or even worse, when everybody present actively wants them off.
And we are gradually realizing that television, although sometimes enjoyable, is not entirely benign. Scientific American published a fine article on the addictive potential of TV. It seems that TV, especially programs made with modern editing styles, trigger hardwired behavior to look at motion. It also appears to cause Attention Deficit Disorder in children. And everybody knows how distracting it can be, how it gets in the way of conversation.
So to me, TV in public and semi-public spaces seems pretty analogous to smoking. Some people enjoy it, but the common mode of use means it bothers others. The big difference is that smoking requires an active smoker to do something every few minutes, whereas the TV runs until somebody actively turns it off.
The question, then, is how to negotiate the use of common space. Everybody just wants to be let alone to do their thing, but some people feel that involves having a TV on, and others feel that involves having the TV off. Personally, I think the search for a simple, universal answer is a waste of time. As with smoking, I think the important thing is that people find an answer together, one that everybody can live with.
Because the Average Human is the cause of the problems of the Internet.
The way I look at it, if the rest of us were really so superior, we would have build in advance technologies that an average human could use well.
Right now, he is Governator of the state with the biggest interest in terminating spammers. If he managed to start The Internet Dickwad Running Game, his job approval ratings would be through the fucking roof. I think the hard part would be arranging the extradition treaty with Florida, but perhaps he could do it like the Israelis and just send in teams of commandos to kidnap the spammers.
Noting how popular the federal do-not-call list is, I'd guess if that he could simultaneously solve the spam problem and create a #1 reality show, he could skip "President" and go right to "Emperor".
That September will finally end?
Wow, for just a moment that gave me hope. You cruel, cruel bastard.
(For those saying, "WTF?", see this.)