Remember, make the job assigner decide not TOP priority, but where exactly on the list, so when other people complain, you can point to new jobs added above theirs. The goal is to get the suits hassling each other, not you.
And this trick works even with one person: instead of playing them off against others, you play them off against their own desires. Never ask how important something is, or when they want it done. Instead, ask what they want done first. Then you do that thing until it's done and say, "ok, what's next?"
This, by the way, is exactly how Extreme Programming works.
I think that ultimately, the blacklisting approach is 1) a losing battle
Great! You shouldn't use it, then. It works for me.
I don't get what the problem is with using a labeling approach to spam
Labeling only works at a certain spam volume. I'd guess spam is maybe 75% of my mail. Now I just route all of that to a folder, which I look at occasionally. But it's getting to be too much to even scan for mistakes; I now often flush it after just a glance at the TOC.
Now imagine you send me mail that gets misidentified as spam. I'll probably delete it unread. You'll never know. At least with a blocklist you'd find out that your mail was misidentified.
And the stories I've heard about nonprofit organizations that send a mass-email to their constituencies, and one irate person who may have been on the list accidentally complains, somehow they get on spews, or some such list, and all of a sudden, they have real trouble communicating with people.
It takes a lot more than one irate person to get a listing on the blocklists I use.
This whole approach is just, IMHO using a bear trap for a mouse.
Spam is a mouse? From the stats I've seen, it's approaching 50% of all email volume, and growing exponentially. That's a mighty big mouse. So far, even bear traps like SPEWS have only had small effect on the problem.
No, actually, terrorism is when you traumatize people who would have otherwise remained uninvolved in order to create pressure for change. So, literally, SPEWS and it's ilk are terrorism of the highest form.
Really, you need to get out more. My refusal to take email from spammy ISPs is not remotely like hopping onto a bus with 20 pounds of explosives wrapped with roofing nails.
You see, I don't have a choice of ISPs where I live.
I don't believe it. There may be only one cheap choice, but there are plenty of choices. Even if only one company provides broadband to your doorstep, you can still buy email services from a legitimate company. Or you can send your email via dialup to an 800 number. Or satellite. Or via T1. Or webmail.
Actully, I could be forced to use SPEWS, and I wouldn't necessairly even know it.
Uh, that's not forced. That's just ignorance. If your local ISP uses SPEWS and won't let you opt out (something I've never heard of) then you can always by email service from some other vendor.
What about people who can't afford to live in a better neighborhood
That sucks for them, doesn't it. But how much time do you spend helping out people in the inner city? Not nearly as much as you're spending bitching about things that you're too lazy or too cheap to fix, I'd wager.
Although your mom might live in a one stoplight town, she prolly doesn't own a major buisness that needs lots of bandwidth, correct?
If you need lots of bandwidth, then put your servers somewhere they can get it. The whole point of the Internet is that you need not care where something is.
You must sign contracts to run large websites, and to move them, you'd have to break that contract.
If you can no longer send out email because your provider has gotten on blocklists, you should be able to get out of your contract pretty easily. It wasn't a problem for me.
Plus, what happens if the new ISP you've just moved to is put on SPEWS?
Then you, having learned a lesson from the first one, get to collect on the substantial penalty clause you wrote into your contract. It works for me.
popular fan site [...] just doesn't have the cash/time to move around whenever it feels like.
If you don't have time to do something right, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
The problem is that many people, for a variety of reasons (geography being one) can't change ISPs,
I'd be intrigued to hear the actual details on this. My mom lives in a town with one stoplight, 80 miles from the nearest metropolitan area, and she has several ISPs to choose from. Can you really not dial an 800 number from wherever you live?
and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move). So what does this do? It certainly doesn't help anyone!
Well, that's not quite the case. It has made you aware of the problem. You'll keep your eye out for a solution. And now you know exactly how much you matter to your ISP.
But that aside, I think there can be value in boycotts. There are some corporations whose practices I don't like, so I don't do business with them. (Those who hire telemarketers are one example.) There are some ISPs who allow spam; I don't accept mail from them.
Whether or not this results in actual behavioral change is almost beside the point. Take my girlfriend, a dedicated vegetarian for the last 15 years. She'll refuse to eat something with even a trace amount of gelatin. Is that really going to change anything? Probably not. But I respect her devotion to the principles behind her choice.
I feel the same way about spam. If people want to help fund an ISP that is helping to ruin the internet, hey, they can do that. But they shouldn't expect to use that same internet to get ahold of me.
The 451 code asks the remote mail server to try again later. If you keep an eye on your logs, this gives you the chance to correct incorrectly blocked legit correspondents. And interestingly, a lot of spammers try only once, so it isn't as much as a resource drain as you'd think.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism.
Don't be an idiot. Terrorism is when people bleed and die. Some of your email didn't get through. Nobody is forced to use SPEWS; every piece of your mail was rejected by servers whose admins chose to use SPEWS.
Blocking entire IP blocks is akin to boycotting a company whose policies you don't like. Or refusing to go to a bad neighborhood. Or voting against a candidate just because you don't like the last president from that party. Or supporting trade sanctions against a country that engages in terrorism or human rights abuses. All of these put pressure on a group of people in response to actions taken by a relatively small portion of that group.
In some ways, that sucks; there's no reason for some poor shmoe at Nike to get laid off just because his company does something that a bunch of people don't like. But sometimes that's the only way to get the message across to the people who can solve the problem.
SPEWS, for all its flaws, works. I used to keep my boxes at an ISP who started sheltering spammers; I wouldn't have known about it except for SPEWS. Thank goodness I did; the spam, and the ISP's willingness to ignore my complaints about it, were a sign of their impending doom. I got out ASAP, and the contract with my new ISP now includes substantial penalties for getting listed.
You still need a database. Or do you plan to just scan the 16GM of memory byte by byte to fine what you're looking for?
You might need a database. I don't. And no professional programmer should need one, either. If you don't have to screw around with continually loading and unloading stuff, it's easy to keep your objects in ways that make accessing the data zippy.
Consider a word processor. Or Quake. Or Google. Those all store plenty of information, and none of them use a database. And I'd bet they don't go through the memory byte by byte when they need to show it.
Spam to me is all those emails about porn sites, viagra, college degrees, and all the other unwanted crap that ends up in my inbox. If we did not have any spam, the kinds listed above, would anyone complain about emails from persons running for public office?
Spam isn't about content, it's about behavior. Whether it's porn, politics, or poetry, if it's sent in bulk to people who didn't ask for it, it's spam.
The same principle applies in the real world. If I come to your house with a bullhorn at 4 am and rant away, it doesn't matter what I'm saying; the police will gladly haul me off, even if I'm reading the Bill of Rights out loud.
Second off, the conclusion is fallacious. The problem supposedly demonstrated is not so much too much technology as too little socialization, though for my money, the problem is the sudden removal of habit-forming face-to-face interpersonal communcication.
Oh, please. Humans, just like the rest of the great apes, are social animals. Face-to-face communication isn't some weird drug; it's been part of our evolution for millions of years. Like sunlight, exercise, or vitamin C, we can do without social relationships for limited periods of time, but we need them to flourish.
People need to remember that, just like every other living thing, they evolved in a particular environmental niche. I like technology a lot, but I try to keep in mind that every technology-induced distortion of our lives can have unexpected consequences. A fine example is artificial light: the disrupted sleep schedules it enables can cause depression, but it took us a long time to realize that.
Maybe shifting more towards computer-mediated communication will have absolutely no side effects. But I wouldn't bet that way. There's a lot going on that most people don't notice and scientists are only starting to understand. For example, consider the recent discovery that the odor of mail sweat improves women's moods. I look forward to seeing the RFC to add that MIME type.
In any case, even if you were entirely right, which you aren't, and even if you had fully supported that proposition, which you hadn't even attempted, you still provide no grounds to assert the patent is "obviously frivilous."
Hi! I guess you haven't noticed yet, but on Slashdot, there are more than just two people here. I wasn't the one who made the comments that you're frothing about. I was answering your rhetorical question, "How could a jury ever be wrong about a patent?"
And you may also not have noticed that Slashdot isn't a courtroom or a debating society. Some of us are just turning up to have a discussion, which is substantially different than an argument.
In a discussion, people are not immediately obliged to "evidecnce your point", "fully support your position", or "provide grounds to assert". I'm not making an "allegation"; I gave my opinion. If you are interested in how I came by it, you're welcome to ask.
I certainly claim no expertise on the details of patent law. But as a citizen, I am entitled to have an opinion on the purpose of IP law. And as a guy who works in Silicon Valley and who has been doing web stuff since gopher was the dominant tool, I think I have some knowledge of the practical effects of IP law on innovation, and also on the obviousness of particular inventions. If you wanna chat about those topics, that'd be swell.
"obviously frivilous" how? Why would you possibly imagine a patent is obviously frivilous after surviving a jury trial?
I haven't looked at this patent closely, but I've seen a lot of others that are indeed moronic. But that doesn't mean people can't win with them, even at a jury trial. Why? Two reasons:
One, what is "obvious" to any professional programmer will not be obvious to somebody on a jury. A lot of people think Bill Gates invented the internet; how in the world will they be able to tell the difference between an obvious, trivial use of cookies and a subtle one?
Two, the patent system is in dire need of readjustment. So even if it turns out that lame patents (e.g., one-click ordering) are perfectly legal, this only means that the laws are wrong. The point of patents is to encourage people to invest in research that benefits all of us. But most software patents and business method patents that I hear of only serve as discouragement.
The problem is all the first time dirvers wanting to rip out the difficult clutch and put in an easier automatic transmission and want to make the steering 'better' so it isn't so hard to use. [...] That said there is room for improvement, but that doesn' mean a wholesale change to the UI is needed.
I note that both Porsche and Alfa Romeo offer hybrid manual/automatic transmissions. When you want them to act like a manual, they do. When you ask them to be automatic, they are.
So it seems like even in the difficult world of physical objects, there are solutions to this problem. Surely we can do just as well; our raw material is infinitely flexible, after all.
it can provide direct financial support to terrorists
Can you honestly think of no solution to this problem? Hint: in a real market, it's known as insider trading. See my other post if you really can't figure out a way to prevent it.
The problem I had with it was the potential for abuse.
Please. The whole point of using a market-driven solution is that markets have been around a long time, so we have a lot of tools to deal with the problems that crop up.
What you're talking about is insider trading. In a political event futures market, the scenario goes like this:
A terrorist decides to blow up a landmark. Say, the Eiffel Tower.
He goes to the futures market and discovers that the current odds are a million to one against.
He starts placing bets. This shifts the odds. To, say, 10,000:1
He places more bets. The odds shift to 100:1
He blows up the Eiffel tower.
Profit!
Except that he is not exactly laughing all the way to the bank because a) the pattern of trading will be, in retrospect, obvious to anybody who looks; b) all of the money is in the hands of the Department of Defense, who just might take an interest in who's getting big payouts, and c) the amount of money in an idea futures market like this will be very small, so even if he gets away with everything, his expenses will outweigh his costs.
As long as the idea futures markets are reasonably open and have a moderately competent regulator, abuse won't be a big problem. And if it is, then it's also self-correcting; sensible people don't bet in rigged games.
In any program that "simplifies" something, there is a danger of oversimplification. In making the impact of the interface milder, you will dilute your capability to use it for actual work.
This is potentially true, but not necessarily so. There are three basic UI options, and you guys are just arguing about two of them. Respective examples of which are the Unix shell, the original Mac interface, and the NeXT interface (which is the origin of MacOS X).
The shell is great for experts, but completely hostile to novices. The basic Mac interface is great for novices, but really limits experts. The right solution is to make the interface work for both novices and experts, and a find solution for that is having multiple modes of interaction.
Sure, the Porsche can ride a little rough and be kind of touchy. Heck it's even expensive to maintain. Do you want one for free?
You miss something about this magic Porsche. Anytime anybody improves one, yours is magically better: if somebody else puts a stereo in, you get one for free. And most of the people who care about improving them are fellow owners and drivers. Ergo, you want to get as many people as possible to be driving your model of magic Porsche.
A good UI, one that helps novices get started, means a bigger user base. A bigger user base means more code contributions, more people to help you in a pinch, more FAQs and forums and Wikis and tools.
At the very least you should visit a professional therapist and have them give you a psychiatric evaluation.
Indeed. As various people have pointed out, it could be all sort of things, including ADD, depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, a variety of cognitive impairments, and who know what else.
For the original poster, or anybody who is having substantial trouble leading the kind of life they want, it's worth talking to a professional or three to rule out things that they already know how to fix.
It's also worth ruling out the kinds of things that were not part of our evolutionary history. So take a month to sleep on a regular schedule driven by daylight, eat relatively simple, unprocessed food, get regular exercise, avoid drugs (including caffeine and alcohol), consume minimal TV, and so on. See if that has any effect on your problems; if not, feel free to resume your previous lifestyle.
I'm sure that will sound crazy to the Slasdot crowd, but it's really just Debugging 101: if something isn't working, get back to a known good configuration. When I tried it, I discovered that my hackish random sleep schedule and my fondness for large amounts of caffeine and sugar were great short-term productivity aids but had terrible long-term impact.
Now, I avoid using an alarm clock (which forces me to get enough sleep) and if I use caffeine as a productivity-enhancer, I make sure to kick the habit once the crisis is past. And I keep an eye on the glycemic index of the food I eat.
Of course, I don't expect this to help everybody; people vary a great deal. But it worked for me, and I encourage anybody who feels blocked by themselves to use their hacker debugging powers to find out what it is.
Yoga would be great to "get he kinks out" from sitting at the desk, solely as a stretching exercise, some nit-pickers can argue then its really not Yoga but simply stretching, in either case it'd be good.
Yoga, at least according to my yoga teacher, was developed and preserved by people who meditate, as a way of preparing the body for meditation. Ever been feeling tense or sleepy and stretched your shoulders to wake up and focus? It's basically a highly organized form of doing that.
It sure works for me; I'm substantially more productive when I do yoga regularly. And the code I produce when I'm relaxed is also much better; when I'm feeling stressed it's much harder to take the time to do something right.
It's all well and good asking for people who have been fooled by these, but to be fair, how many people who ever have thought those things were genuine are likely to ever find out about this action?
Well, the lawyers could run fake UI ads to find 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, make the job assigner decide not TOP priority, but where exactly on the list, so when other people complain, you can point to new jobs added above theirs. The goal is to get the suits hassling each other, not you.
And this trick works even with one person: instead of playing them off against others, you play them off against their own desires. Never ask how important something is, or when they want it done. Instead, ask what they want done first. Then you do that thing until it's done and say, "ok, what's next?"
This, by the way, is exactly how Extreme Programming works.
I think that ultimately, the blacklisting approach is 1) a losing battle
Great! You shouldn't use it, then. It works for me.
I don't get what the problem is with using a labeling approach to spam
Labeling only works at a certain spam volume. I'd guess spam is maybe 75% of my mail. Now I just route all of that to a folder, which I look at occasionally. But it's getting to be too much to even scan for mistakes; I now often flush it after just a glance at the TOC.
Now imagine you send me mail that gets misidentified as spam. I'll probably delete it unread. You'll never know. At least with a blocklist you'd find out that your mail was misidentified.
And the stories I've heard about nonprofit organizations that send a mass-email to their constituencies, and one irate person who may have been on the list accidentally complains, somehow they get on spews, or some such list, and all of a sudden, they have real trouble communicating with people.
It takes a lot more than one irate person to get a listing on the blocklists I use.
This whole approach is just, IMHO using a bear trap for a mouse.
Spam is a mouse? From the stats I've seen, it's approaching 50% of all email volume, and growing exponentially. That's a mighty big mouse. So far, even bear traps like SPEWS have only had small effect on the problem.
No, actually, terrorism is when you traumatize people who would have otherwise remained uninvolved in order to create pressure for change. So, literally, SPEWS and it's ilk are terrorism of the highest form.
Really, you need to get out more. My refusal to take email from spammy ISPs is not remotely like hopping onto a bus with 20 pounds of explosives wrapped with roofing nails.
You see, I don't have a choice of ISPs where I live.
I don't believe it. There may be only one cheap choice, but there are plenty of choices. Even if only one company provides broadband to your doorstep, you can still buy email services from a legitimate company. Or you can send your email via dialup to an 800 number. Or satellite. Or via T1. Or webmail.
Actully, I could be forced to use SPEWS, and I wouldn't necessairly even know it.
Uh, that's not forced. That's just ignorance. If your local ISP uses SPEWS and won't let you opt out (something I've never heard of) then you can always by email service from some other vendor.
What about people who can't afford to live in a better neighborhood
That sucks for them, doesn't it. But how much time do you spend helping out people in the inner city? Not nearly as much as you're spending bitching about things that you're too lazy or too cheap to fix, I'd wager.
Although your mom might live in a one stoplight town, she prolly doesn't own a major buisness that needs lots of bandwidth, correct?
If you need lots of bandwidth, then put your servers somewhere they can get it. The whole point of the Internet is that you need not care where something is.
You must sign contracts to run large websites, and to move them, you'd have to break that contract.
If you can no longer send out email because your provider has gotten on blocklists, you should be able to get out of your contract pretty easily. It wasn't a problem for me.
Plus, what happens if the new ISP you've just moved to is put on SPEWS?
Then you, having learned a lesson from the first one, get to collect on the substantial penalty clause you wrote into your contract. It works for me.
popular fan site [...] just doesn't have the cash/time to move around whenever it feels like.
If you don't have time to do something right, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
The problem is that many people, for a variety of reasons (geography being one) can't change ISPs,
I'd be intrigued to hear the actual details on this. My mom lives in a town with one stoplight, 80 miles from the nearest metropolitan area, and she has several ISPs to choose from. Can you really not dial an 800 number from wherever you live?
and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move). So what does this do? It certainly doesn't help anyone!
Well, that's not quite the case. It has made you aware of the problem. You'll keep your eye out for a solution. And now you know exactly how much you matter to your ISP.
But that aside, I think there can be value in boycotts. There are some corporations whose practices I don't like, so I don't do business with them. (Those who hire telemarketers are one example.) There are some ISPs who allow spam; I don't accept mail from them.
Whether or not this results in actual behavioral change is almost beside the point. Take my girlfriend, a dedicated vegetarian for the last 15 years. She'll refuse to eat something with even a trace amount of gelatin. Is that really going to change anything? Probably not. But I respect her devotion to the principles behind her choice.
I feel the same way about spam. If people want to help fund an ISP that is helping to ruin the internet, hey, they can do that. But they shouldn't expect to use that same internet to get ahold of me.
If you suspect you are relaying, the MAPS Transport Security Initiative has information for over 70 mail servers. I didn't even know there were that many.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism.
Don't be an idiot. Terrorism is when people bleed and die. Some of your email didn't get through. Nobody is forced to use SPEWS; every piece of your mail was rejected by servers whose admins chose to use SPEWS.
Blocking entire IP blocks is akin to boycotting a company whose policies you don't like. Or refusing to go to a bad neighborhood. Or voting against a candidate just because you don't like the last president from that party. Or supporting trade sanctions against a country that engages in terrorism or human rights abuses. All of these put pressure on a group of people in response to actions taken by a relatively small portion of that group.
In some ways, that sucks; there's no reason for some poor shmoe at Nike to get laid off just because his company does something that a bunch of people don't like. But sometimes that's the only way to get the message across to the people who can solve the problem.
SPEWS, for all its flaws, works. I used to keep my boxes at an ISP who started sheltering spammers; I wouldn't have known about it except for SPEWS. Thank goodness I did; the spam, and the ISP's willingness to ignore my complaints about it, were a sign of their impending doom. I got out ASAP, and the contract with my new ISP now includes substantial penalties for getting listed.
You still need a database. Or do you plan to just scan the 16GM of memory byte by byte to fine what you're looking for?
You might need a database. I don't. And no professional programmer should need one, either. If you don't have to screw around with continually loading and unloading stuff, it's easy to keep your objects in ways that make accessing the data zippy.
Consider a word processor. Or Quake. Or Google. Those all store plenty of information, and none of them use a database. And I'd bet they don't go through the memory byte by byte when they need to show it.
Imagine 1GB of processor core clock speed memory. That would be friggin amazing for databases :)
Better, imagine 16 GB of RAM and get rid of the database entirely.
Spam to me is all those emails about porn sites, viagra, college degrees, and all the other unwanted crap that ends up in my inbox. If we did not have any spam, the kinds listed above, would anyone complain about emails from persons running for public office?
Spam isn't about content, it's about behavior. Whether it's porn, politics, or poetry, if it's sent in bulk to people who didn't ask for it, it's spam.
The same principle applies in the real world. If I come to your house with a bullhorn at 4 am and rant away, it doesn't matter what I'm saying; the police will gladly haul me off, even if I'm reading the Bill of Rights out loud.
Second off, the conclusion is fallacious. The problem supposedly demonstrated is not so much too much technology as too little socialization, though for my money, the problem is the sudden removal of habit-forming face-to-face interpersonal communcication.
Oh, please. Humans, just like the rest of the great apes, are social animals. Face-to-face communication isn't some weird drug; it's been part of our evolution for millions of years. Like sunlight, exercise, or vitamin C, we can do without social relationships for limited periods of time, but we need them to flourish.
People need to remember that, just like every other living thing, they evolved in a particular environmental niche. I like technology a lot, but I try to keep in mind that every technology-induced distortion of our lives can have unexpected consequences. A fine example is artificial light: the disrupted sleep schedules it enables can cause depression, but it took us a long time to realize that.
Maybe shifting more towards computer-mediated communication will have absolutely no side effects. But I wouldn't bet that way. There's a lot going on that most people don't notice and scientists are only starting to understand. For example, consider the recent discovery that the odor of mail sweat improves women's moods. I look forward to seeing the RFC to add that MIME type.
In any case, even if you were entirely right, which you aren't, and even if you had fully supported that proposition, which you hadn't even attempted, you still provide no grounds to assert the patent is "obviously frivilous."
Hi! I guess you haven't noticed yet, but on Slashdot, there are more than just two people here. I wasn't the one who made the comments that you're frothing about. I was answering your rhetorical question, "How could a jury ever be wrong about a patent?"
And you may also not have noticed that Slashdot isn't a courtroom or a debating society. Some of us are just turning up to have a discussion, which is substantially different than an argument.
In a discussion, people are not immediately obliged to "evidecnce your point", "fully support your position", or "provide grounds to assert". I'm not making an "allegation"; I gave my opinion. If you are interested in how I came by it, you're welcome to ask.
I certainly claim no expertise on the details of patent law. But as a citizen, I am entitled to have an opinion on the purpose of IP law. And as a guy who works in Silicon Valley and who has been doing web stuff since gopher was the dominant tool, I think I have some knowledge of the practical effects of IP law on innovation, and also on the obviousness of particular inventions. If you wanna chat about those topics, that'd be swell.
"obviously frivilous" how? Why would you possibly imagine a patent is obviously frivilous after surviving a jury trial?
I haven't looked at this patent closely, but I've seen a lot of others that are indeed moronic. But that doesn't mean people can't win with them, even at a jury trial. Why? Two reasons:
One, what is "obvious" to any professional programmer will not be obvious to somebody on a jury. A lot of people think Bill Gates invented the internet; how in the world will they be able to tell the difference between an obvious, trivial use of cookies and a subtle one?
Two, the patent system is in dire need of readjustment. So even if it turns out that lame patents (e.g., one-click ordering) are perfectly legal, this only means that the laws are wrong. The point of patents is to encourage people to invest in research that benefits all of us. But most software patents and business method patents that I hear of only serve as discouragement.
But what are the lawyers going to do with $48 million dollars worth of retail coupons towards a Linux distribution purchase?
Move up the food chain and become script kiddies?
The problem is all the first time dirvers wanting to rip out the difficult clutch and put in an easier automatic transmission and want to make the steering 'better' so it isn't so hard to use. [...] That said there is room for improvement, but that doesn' mean a wholesale change to the UI is needed.
I note that both Porsche and Alfa Romeo offer hybrid manual/automatic transmissions. When you want them to act like a manual, they do. When you ask them to be automatic, they are.
So it seems like even in the difficult world of physical objects, there are solutions to this problem. Surely we can do just as well; our raw material is infinitely flexible, after all.
it can provide direct financial support to terrorists
Can you honestly think of no solution to this problem? Hint: in a real market, it's known as insider trading. See my other post if you really can't figure out a way to prevent it.
Please. The whole point of using a market-driven solution is that markets have been around a long time, so we have a lot of tools to deal with the problems that crop up.
What you're talking about is insider trading. In a political event futures market, the scenario goes like this:
- A terrorist decides to blow up a landmark. Say, the Eiffel Tower.
- He goes to the futures market and discovers that the current odds are a million to one against.
- He starts placing bets. This shifts the odds. To, say, 10,000:1
- He places more bets. The odds shift to 100:1
- He blows up the Eiffel tower.
- Profit!
Except that he is not exactly laughing all the way to the bank because a) the pattern of trading will be, in retrospect, obvious to anybody who looks; b) all of the money is in the hands of the Department of Defense, who just might take an interest in who's getting big payouts, and c) the amount of money in an idea futures market like this will be very small, so even if he gets away with everything, his expenses will outweigh his costs.As long as the idea futures markets are reasonably open and have a moderately competent regulator, abuse won't be a big problem. And if it is, then it's also self-correcting; sensible people don't bet in rigged games.
In any program that "simplifies" something, there is a danger of oversimplification. In making the impact of the interface milder, you will dilute your capability to use it for actual work.
This is potentially true, but not necessarily so. There are three basic UI options, and you guys are just arguing about two of them. Respective examples of which are the Unix shell, the original Mac interface, and the NeXT interface (which is the origin of MacOS X).
The shell is great for experts, but completely hostile to novices. The basic Mac interface is great for novices, but really limits experts. The right solution is to make the interface work for both novices and experts, and a find solution for that is having multiple modes of interaction.
Sure, the Porsche can ride a little rough and be kind of touchy. Heck it's even expensive to maintain. Do you want one for free?
You miss something about this magic Porsche. Anytime anybody improves one, yours is magically better: if somebody else puts a stereo in, you get one for free. And most of the people who care about improving them are fellow owners and drivers. Ergo, you want to get as many people as possible to be driving your model of magic Porsche.
A good UI, one that helps novices get started, means a bigger user base. A bigger user base means more code contributions, more people to help you in a pinch, more FAQs and forums and Wikis and tools.
% sudo mtr www.yahoo.com
Packets Pings
Hostname %Loss Rcv Snt Last Best Avg Worst
1. myhost 0% 9 9 0 0 0 2
2. sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net 0% 9 9 14 13 14 15
3. border5.g3-4.speakeasy-29.sfo.pnap. 0% 9 9 14 13 18 46
4. core4.ge2-0-bbnet2.sfo.pnap.net 0% 9 9 15 14 51 207
5. so-1-3-0.0.ar4.sfo1.gblx.net 0% 9 9 17 14 21 62
6. pos1-1.core1.SanFrancisco1.Level3.n 0% 9 9 14 14 16 18
7. so-4-0-0.mp2.SanFrancisco1.Level3.n 0% 9 9 16 14 20 54
8. so-2-0-0.mp2.SanJose1.Level3.net 0% 9 9 18 15 17 18
9. gige10-1.ipcolo3.SanJose1.Level3.ne 0% 9 9 16 16 17 19
10. unknown.Level3.net 0% 9 9 17 17 17 19
11. w7.scd.yahoo.com 0% 9 9 18 15 17 19
think of the _interruption_ time it involves.
According to an IBM study quoted in McConnell's Rapid Development, it takes the average programmer 15 minutes to recover fully from an interruption.
At the very least you should visit a professional therapist and have them give you a psychiatric evaluation.
Indeed. As various people have pointed out, it could be all sort of things, including ADD, depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, a variety of cognitive impairments, and who know what else.
For the original poster, or anybody who is having substantial trouble leading the kind of life they want, it's worth talking to a professional or three to rule out things that they already know how to fix.
It's also worth ruling out the kinds of things that were not part of our evolutionary history. So take a month to sleep on a regular schedule driven by daylight, eat relatively simple, unprocessed food, get regular exercise, avoid drugs (including caffeine and alcohol), consume minimal TV, and so on. See if that has any effect on your problems; if not, feel free to resume your previous lifestyle.
I'm sure that will sound crazy to the Slasdot crowd, but it's really just Debugging 101: if something isn't working, get back to a known good configuration. When I tried it, I discovered that my hackish random sleep schedule and my fondness for large amounts of caffeine and sugar were great short-term productivity aids but had terrible long-term impact.
Now, I avoid using an alarm clock (which forces me to get enough sleep) and if I use caffeine as a productivity-enhancer, I make sure to kick the habit once the crisis is past. And I keep an eye on the glycemic index of the food I eat.
Of course, I don't expect this to help everybody; people vary a great deal. But it worked for me, and I encourage anybody who feels blocked by themselves to use their hacker debugging powers to find out what it is.
Yoga would be great to "get he kinks out" from sitting at the desk, solely as a stretching exercise, some nit-pickers can argue then its really not Yoga but simply stretching, in either case it'd be good.
Yoga, at least according to my yoga teacher, was developed and preserved by people who meditate, as a way of preparing the body for meditation. Ever been feeling tense or sleepy and stretched your shoulders to wake up and focus? It's basically a highly organized form of doing that.
It sure works for me; I'm substantially more productive when I do yoga regularly. And the code I produce when I'm relaxed is also much better; when I'm feeling stressed it's much harder to take the time to do something right.
I thought it was $13 or a Celine Dionne CD. Yeah, I'm still waiting too.
Wow, I'd pay $13 to get rid of a Celine Dionne CD.
It's all well and good asking for people who have been fooled by these, but to be fair, how many people who ever have thought those things were genuine are likely to ever find out about this action?
Well, the lawyers could run fake UI ads to find 'em.