I was going to point out a few logical fallacies in that post, since I noticed they started at the very first sentence, but there were so many, it's not worth it. Overall there are so many incorrect statements (and the logical fallacies I mentioned), I can understand why that particular poster is not interested in space travel. He (or she) has absolutely no knowledge of the facts, of spin-off technology, or any clear picture of the requirements or results.
Maybe that's the problem: it's an age group that isn't interested because many are ignorant of everything around the topic.
Of course, that would not be all of that generation. Just a large segment.
It's always possible to tie in raises and job performance evals with the documentation. If it's not documented, it wasn't done. But then, I'm a pain that way. The pass/fail rubric they're using for you is absurd, doesn't serve you or the company, and is something I'd never tolerate, but that helps only me and my people. I want to make sure I'm working with people that know what they're doing, but can be flexible according to the situation, but I'm also a pain about some things, like documentation of what's been done and what's happened with clients. I haven't had to worry about this particular issue, but if I did, I'd basically set up the standard that if I can't read the doc on it, it hasn't been done. If it's not done, why are you getting paid?
That's not far from firing someone, but there's a distinction.
I know what you mean about the hotshot -- always at least one. (It's more fun when there's two and you can watch their pissing contest.) I'm lucky, though, that I can be the bastard dictating terms. Well, sort of lucky, it took years of work to make the company, but I'm lucky it worked out. That also means that I can trump anything a hotshot says by pointing out if they are that good, they can make it on their own, and that I must be better because I not only did the job, but documented it as well, and that was when I had to do all the work. I don't play that card often, but sometimes I think just the fact that I can play it is what keeps me from having to.
There's a time to be a buddy, and there's a time to be a boss.
This is an excellent point. I don't advocate dishonesty, but you could point out to them that they are asking you to justify your time and personnel, which is essentially what is going on here. Point out that you have to show your boss what is going on and prove that you need two people. Without their logs, you can show what you're doing, but not what they're doing. It's even possible they could eliminate one or both positions unless you have proof that they are both kept active and busy -- and that proof would be their logs. If there are no logs, you can't prove they're busy.
They will log their calls or you will find people who can follow simple instructions.
I'm willing to bet that was written by someone who has never run his own department or business. It would be nice if one could do that, but in the real world, if you've got an employee that does 90% of the job well, then you're damned lucky. Sure, you can fire them, but there's a good chance their replacement won't do as well as they do. Logging and documentation are two areas programmers, admins, and other IT people are notoriously poor in. People can claim to do that in an interview, but once someone else tells them he's never done it, they won't bother with it either.
It's hard to find good employees and you don't want to replace a 90% fit with an unknown that could be 90% bad.
If MS cameout with an intersteller star ship tomorrow, people like you would bitch that this idea has been around for decades, and that it's not new.
What does that have to do with anything? MS won't. They can't. Your point is so hypothetical it has nothing to do with reality. A lot of the complaining about MS is because they don't innovate. The come out with things everyone else has done, then make it sound important because they're doing it. This is just another example. There's a lot of FOSS robot software out, now MS does it and acts like it's new. The day MS comes out with interstellar travel is the day that there are already a dozen ships on the market that can do it better.
That said, because if MS's history, I always keep a wary eye on what they do and how the implement stuff. I also hate Vista's EULA, and CTCP. SO I am not a MS fanboy by a long shot.
And above all, leave out that stuff about having a busy life outside of work. How can you call yourself a dedicated coder if you do things like go home at night or have a life?
And you have the nerve to submit to Ask Slashdot!
Some people just don't seem to understand that coding isn't a way of life. It is life.
That's close to my thought. A simple Java browser that uses RMI to run other classes that make up applications.
I can't see what you mean by an easier alternative to Swing. Do you mean from the programming end? I've found Swing easier to program with than some GUIs I looked at and tried to code in.
If he knew medicine and could control the immune system in the human body as well as he and his company can control computers, just imagine the biological viruses we'd have faced by now. Every day your heart would stop beating for no reason and they'd have to restart it with CPR, but nobody would think that was odd.
I needed bigger space, so I'm using new drives I bought about 16 months ago that have all been working well. The data drives are all in RAID5 arrays under mdadm. Before that, I noticed that when I still used Windows, I would have drive failures about every six months or so. Once I switched over to Linux (about 2000), I found the drives stopped failing. Since then, I've had 2 drive failures, all hard failures, and no more software caused failures. I'm not planning on swapping out my drives before they fail. The boot/system drives are backed up, along with the data files, on a system that will soon be moved off site. I may, at some point, convert the mdadm RAID5 clusters with hardware based RAID, but if I do, I'll wait until I can get controllers that allow hot swapping. When I get to that point, to make sure business runs easier, I might swap them out every year or so, but I doubt it. As one other poster said, if a drive lasts 6 months, usually it will keep going and I'd rather not change it.
That was my very first thought. The last sentence ("Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence") assumes that Diebold can make a secure ATM without any proof that they can. I doubt Diebold could secure a system even if it were in a sealed room with no network connections, used only to hold the NOC list, had a pressure sensitive floor around it, was behind a locked door, and had Tom Cruise repellant in the air vent.
That's a very simplistic and childish view and it makes me wonder how much you've dealt with lawyers.
I deal with them almost every day and the woman I'm dating is a paralegal. I rarely meet a lawyer (actually never have) that lives down to the stereotypes.
I've found many lawyers very helpful with their advice and time, but that might also be because they're my clients and love the services I provide. The more I've worked with them, the more I can see why they work the way they do and I can also see how the uninformed, without experience or knowledge of how they work could misinterpret what they do if such a person were more interested in denigrating people instead of understanding them.
I think lawyers are great, but then again, that may just be because their fees pay my bills and more.
So either you get everything you want, or you have cancer? Get a grip.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Logical fallacy: False Dilemma. I did not say there were only two choices or extremes. You decided to limit your choices to that out of infinitely many. Why would you want to narrow everything down, unless you needed to set up a straw man argument so you could feel manly when you attacked it.
As for being grateful, you may not have everything you want. It could be better. It could be worse. You can complain about things not being what you want or you can appreciate what you have and act to make it better. Whining doesn't help.
As for taking your bosses job (and again, you use the logical fallacy of a false dilemma: it's all one or the other), that rarely works, but, then again, you must know that since I'm sure you're running some mega corp by now because you've taken a lot of bosses jobs with your logical abilities, quick thinking, sharp insight, and ability to think circles around your superiors, right? Or you angry because you hate your job, think that's what you should do, but have never really been able to get anywhere?
No. All one has to do is check the IMDB (but I can remember it because I know what I was doing the summer it came out). It was the summer of 1983.
That's not much of a difference, though. I do remember that being a big deal with the Mac back then and, as I said, there was speech tech easily available to the average user at the time.
I don't think it's out of line that Broderick's character would have had a speech synthesizer. I had an Apple//e when "War Games" came out and was seriously looking at an AppleCat modem at the time. I can't say I actually had one while the movie was playing, but it was out and available and I bought it a little later and it had speech synthesis. I also had bought a Mockingboard about a month after the movie came out to use the speech synthesis (and later sent it back). While thsoe were built for the Apple//e, the tech was out and he could have had one. I was working with using speech synthesis and an alarm system in my dorm room. I don't find it far fetched he could have been using one for alerts when he wasn't at the computer or for other reasons. I found it quite believable.
I also felt it was clear that he he hooked up the speech when Ally Sheedy made a comment, making it clear that it was his system providing the voice, not the WOPPR. The rest of the time, the speech was more like subtitles in a way. Once the speech was established, it allowed them to use it as an easy way for people to know what was going on without having to show the screen or have a character read each message from WOPPR. True, it would not have talked to him all the time, only at his home, but it was a gimmick that had no effect on the plot.
Overall it was one of the more believable things I've seen Hollyweird do with technology or with action films where a bullet blows people back 10 feet, yet didn't have that same kinetic energy when it left the shooter's gun.
No. He gave them the program for the Enterprise holodeck. Their computer promptly realized it was an emergency situation, which means the holodeck program immediately created a program of Moriarty acting as a 1930s hard boiled detective and it took over the entire ship.
I doubt even Windows caused more crashes than that holodeck. Why they never just infected the Borg with the holodeck software I'll never know.
It would be nice if you could fix everything wrong, but that's not the way things go. Often fixing something will cost you your job and there may not be another available.
A lot of things aren't right. Who told you life is fair? Your Mother?
A business is run by those in chare of it who have the ability and, more or less, the right to run it their way. They don't won't it fixed and in many companies, trying to fix it will only cost you your job and any good reference you had.
That's life. That's reality. Sometimes it's hard to deal with, sometimes it isn't fair, and usually you can't fix what you'd like to. Deal with it and move on.
but I was not hired (or paid) for teaching my boss to run his shop in addition to tech stuff
We all have to do things that we didn't expect in our jobs. If that's all you have to do, then go home and spend hours being thankful you're not digging ditches or working for bosses that constantly insult you or that you have a job that pays for a place to live and heat and water and electricity, or that you have an education that allows you to work in a well paying job, or that you're healthy enough to go into work each day instead of spending most of your time seeing doctors to deal with cancer or MS or something else.
I don't think I've yet heard of a job where the person in it ended up doing exactly what s/he expected or wanted to do.
Honestly, that is a small problem in the scheme of things. If it's big enough to make your life that miserable, do one of two things: find another job or step into the Total Perspective Vortex.
Maybe instead of Ask Slashdot, this should be, "Whining Slashdot."
Considering that, and I'm speaking not just as a former student, but as a former teacher, there is a delicate balance in all professors between ego and laziness, most of what is taught in college is in the text books. As for handouts, I found it pretty easy to file them as well. As for notes -- you mean someone who is scribbling notes in a hurry actually takes them in good enough handwriting that OCR would be able to read them without a lot of prompting? I should have mentioned that a lot of similar material like that is included in my 4 drawers. You have to think to file them in folders, and the same thought is needed to figure out which directory to put them in, but a lot more is needed to photograph papers so they are legible. If it's that important, a sheet-feed scanner would be more practical, but there's the difference between theory and practice: it's not as easy to batch convert as it sounds.
I've also found that there is a lot more of value to learn from practical experience than from pedants.
That's about it. I used to transfer photos to video professionally. We had a nice rig with lighting and a video camera mounted on a stand. We had to do a lot of adjusting of focus because of different types of phots and other issues. More often that not it was not just put down and click, then move on to the next one. If you're dealing with letters, and you're not scanning, you'll have problems with some fonts and other oddities that make sure many shots won't turn out as perfect as you'd think.
I have my own business. I keep all my bills, receipts of deductable expenses, home records, and so on. I keep personal records 7 years except in special cases. I just take the bill, when I get it (and most bills are e-mail now!) and put it in the envolope for the biller for that year. At the end of the year I spend less than 30 minutes writing up labels for the next year and when I get time, I burn the stuff that is past 7 years old. For "all those blls" I've never needed more than 4 filing drawers, which can be stacked as one cabinet that doesn't take up much space, or I use the two cabinets (2 drawers each) as legs for one of my desks.
I thought about keeping things electronically, but then I realize I'd have to take time to scan them and file them and that would take a lot more time, over all, than just dropping them in folders. If you want, you can spend all that time scanning. I prefer not to, but then again, I have a life and would rather be cycling or rock climbing than scanning bills.
This, to me, sounds like a geek gone wild, over thinking the solution and trying to come up with a hi-tech answer to a low-tech problem that really doesn't need an answer if one uses a little common sense and simple organization.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to point out a few logical fallacies in that post, since I noticed they started at the very first sentence, but there were so many, it's not worth it. Overall there are so many incorrect statements (and the logical fallacies I mentioned), I can understand why that particular poster is not interested in space travel. He (or she) has absolutely no knowledge of the facts, of spin-off technology, or any clear picture of the requirements or results.
Maybe that's the problem: it's an age group that isn't interested because many are ignorant of everything around the topic.
Of course, that would not be all of that generation. Just a large segment.
They'll care about it when it's practical for some of them to take a trip into space or to the Moon.
Youth, by nature, tends to be more shortsighted than mature adults. We'll also likely see a change as that generation ages.
It's always possible to tie in raises and job performance evals with the documentation. If it's not documented, it wasn't done. But then, I'm a pain that way. The pass/fail rubric they're using for you is absurd, doesn't serve you or the company, and is something I'd never tolerate, but that helps only me and my people. I want to make sure I'm working with people that know what they're doing, but can be flexible according to the situation, but I'm also a pain about some things, like documentation of what's been done and what's happened with clients. I haven't had to worry about this particular issue, but if I did, I'd basically set up the standard that if I can't read the doc on it, it hasn't been done. If it's not done, why are you getting paid?
That's not far from firing someone, but there's a distinction.
I know what you mean about the hotshot -- always at least one. (It's more fun when there's two and you can watch their pissing contest.) I'm lucky, though, that I can be the bastard dictating terms. Well, sort of lucky, it took years of work to make the company, but I'm lucky it worked out. That also means that I can trump anything a hotshot says by pointing out if they are that good, they can make it on their own, and that I must be better because I not only did the job, but documented it as well, and that was when I had to do all the work. I don't play that card often, but sometimes I think just the fact that I can play it is what keeps me from having to.
There's a time to be a buddy, and there's a time to be a boss.
This is an excellent point. I don't advocate dishonesty, but you could point out to them that they are asking you to justify your time and personnel, which is essentially what is going on here. Point out that you have to show your boss what is going on and prove that you need two people. Without their logs, you can show what you're doing, but not what they're doing. It's even possible they could eliminate one or both positions unless you have proof that they are both kept active and busy -- and that proof would be their logs. If there are no logs, you can't prove they're busy.
They will log their calls or you will find people who can follow simple instructions.
I'm willing to bet that was written by someone who has never run his own department or business. It would be nice if one could do that, but in the real world, if you've got an employee that does 90% of the job well, then you're damned lucky. Sure, you can fire them, but there's a good chance their replacement won't do as well as they do. Logging and documentation are two areas programmers, admins, and other IT people are notoriously poor in. People can claim to do that in an interview, but once someone else tells them he's never done it, they won't bother with it either.
It's hard to find good employees and you don't want to replace a 90% fit with an unknown that could be 90% bad.
Close.
It's Windows XP with a new OS X coat.
If MS cameout with an intersteller star ship tomorrow, people like you would bitch that this idea has been around for decades, and that it's not new.
What does that have to do with anything? MS won't. They can't. Your point is so hypothetical it has nothing to do with reality. A lot of the complaining about MS is because they don't innovate. The come out with things everyone else has done, then make it sound important because they're doing it. This is just another example. There's a lot of FOSS robot software out, now MS does it and acts like it's new. The day MS comes out with interstellar travel is the day that there are already a dozen ships on the market that can do it better.
That said, because if MS's history, I always keep a wary eye on what they do and how the implement stuff. I also hate Vista's EULA, and CTCP. SO I am not a MS fanboy by a long shot.
If you have to prove you aren't, then you are.
And above all, leave out that stuff about having a busy life outside of work. How can you call yourself a dedicated coder if you do things like go home at night or have a life?
And you have the nerve to submit to Ask Slashdot!
Some people just don't seem to understand that coding isn't a way of life. It is life.
I'm approaching 40, so I guess I can enter wise-old-man-mode
Oh, man. Thanks. I haven't had a laugh that good in weeks.
I think I'd add a bit and say, "You can't explain to someone who doesn't care to understand."
That's close to my thought. A simple Java browser that uses RMI to run other classes that make up applications.
I can't see what you mean by an easier alternative to Swing. Do you mean from the programming end? I've found Swing easier to program with than some GUIs I looked at and tried to code in.
Hal
If he knew medicine and could control the immune system in the human body as well as he and his company can control computers, just imagine the biological viruses we'd have faced by now. Every day your heart would stop beating for no reason and they'd have to restart it with CPR, but nobody would think that was odd.
I needed bigger space, so I'm using new drives I bought about 16 months ago that have all been working well. The data drives are all in RAID5 arrays under mdadm. Before that, I noticed that when I still used Windows, I would have drive failures about every six months or so. Once I switched over to Linux (about 2000), I found the drives stopped failing. Since then, I've had 2 drive failures, all hard failures, and no more software caused failures. I'm not planning on swapping out my drives before they fail. The boot/system drives are backed up, along with the data files, on a system that will soon be moved off site. I may, at some point, convert the mdadm RAID5 clusters with hardware based RAID, but if I do, I'll wait until I can get controllers that allow hot swapping. When I get to that point, to make sure business runs easier, I might swap them out every year or so, but I doubt it. As one other poster said, if a drive lasts 6 months, usually it will keep going and I'd rather not change it.
Then there's mdadm for Linux. I've found it to work wonderfully. And it's free.
That was my very first thought. The last sentence ("Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence") assumes that Diebold can make a secure ATM without any proof that they can. I doubt Diebold could secure a system even if it were in a sealed room with no network connections, used only to hold the NOC list, had a pressure sensitive floor around it, was behind a locked door, and had Tom Cruise repellant in the air vent.
Logical fallacy: False dilemma.
You lose. Thank you for playing.
That's a very simplistic and childish view and it makes me wonder how much you've dealt with lawyers.
I deal with them almost every day and the woman I'm dating is a paralegal. I rarely meet a lawyer (actually never have) that lives down to the stereotypes.
I've found many lawyers very helpful with their advice and time, but that might also be because they're my clients and love the services I provide. The more I've worked with them, the more I can see why they work the way they do and I can also see how the uninformed, without experience or knowledge of how they work could misinterpret what they do if such a person were more interested in denigrating people instead of understanding them.
I think lawyers are great, but then again, that may just be because their fees pay my bills and more.
You've got way too much time on your hands and way too much anger that you don't know what to deal with.
Go troll someone else.
So either you get everything you want, or you have cancer? Get a grip.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Logical fallacy: False Dilemma. I did not say there were only two choices or extremes. You decided to limit your choices to that out of infinitely many. Why would you want to narrow everything down, unless you needed to set up a straw man argument so you could feel manly when you attacked it.
As for being grateful, you may not have everything you want. It could be better. It could be worse. You can complain about things not being what you want or you can appreciate what you have and act to make it better. Whining doesn't help.
As for taking your bosses job (and again, you use the logical fallacy of a false dilemma: it's all one or the other), that rarely works, but, then again, you must know that since I'm sure you're running some mega corp by now because you've taken a lot of bosses jobs with your logical abilities, quick thinking, sharp insight, and ability to think circles around your superiors, right? Or you angry because you hate your job, think that's what you should do, but have never really been able to get anywhere?
No. All one has to do is check the IMDB (but I can remember it because I know what I was doing the summer it came out). It was the summer of 1983.
That's not much of a difference, though. I do remember that being a big deal with the Mac back then and, as I said, there was speech tech easily available to the average user at the time.
I don't think it's out of line that Broderick's character would have had a speech synthesizer. I had an Apple //e when "War Games" came out and was seriously looking at an AppleCat modem at the time. I can't say I actually had one while the movie was playing, but it was out and available and I bought it a little later and it had speech synthesis. I also had bought a Mockingboard about a month after the movie came out to use the speech synthesis (and later sent it back). While thsoe were built for the Apple //e, the tech was out and he could have had one. I was working with using speech synthesis and an alarm system in my dorm room. I don't find it far fetched he could have been using one for alerts when he wasn't at the computer or for other reasons. I found it quite believable.
I also felt it was clear that he he hooked up the speech when Ally Sheedy made a comment, making it clear that it was his system providing the voice, not the WOPPR. The rest of the time, the speech was more like subtitles in a way. Once the speech was established, it allowed them to use it as an easy way for people to know what was going on without having to show the screen or have a character read each message from WOPPR. True, it would not have talked to him all the time, only at his home, but it was a gimmick that had no effect on the plot.
Overall it was one of the more believable things I've seen Hollyweird do with technology or with action films where a bullet blows people back 10 feet, yet didn't have that same kinetic energy when it left the shooter's gun.
No. He gave them the program for the Enterprise holodeck. Their computer promptly realized it was an emergency situation, which means the holodeck program immediately created a program of Moriarty acting as a 1930s hard boiled detective and it took over the entire ship.
I doubt even Windows caused more crashes than that holodeck. Why they never just infected the Borg with the holodeck software I'll never know.
It would be nice if you could fix everything wrong, but that's not the way things go. Often fixing something will cost you your job and there may not be another available.
A lot of things aren't right. Who told you life is fair? Your Mother?
A business is run by those in chare of it who have the ability and, more or less, the right to run it their way. They don't won't it fixed and in many companies, trying to fix it will only cost you your job and any good reference you had.
That's life. That's reality. Sometimes it's hard to deal with, sometimes it isn't fair, and usually you can't fix what you'd like to. Deal with it and move on.
but I was not hired (or paid) for teaching my boss to run his shop in addition to tech stuff
We all have to do things that we didn't expect in our jobs. If that's all you have to do, then go home and spend hours being thankful you're not digging ditches or working for bosses that constantly insult you or that you have a job that pays for a place to live and heat and water and electricity, or that you have an education that allows you to work in a well paying job, or that you're healthy enough to go into work each day instead of spending most of your time seeing doctors to deal with cancer or MS or something else.
I don't think I've yet heard of a job where the person in it ended up doing exactly what s/he expected or wanted to do.
Honestly, that is a small problem in the scheme of things. If it's big enough to make your life that miserable, do one of two things: find another job or step into the Total Perspective Vortex.
Maybe instead of Ask Slashdot, this should be, "Whining Slashdot."
Considering that, and I'm speaking not just as a former student, but as a former teacher, there is a delicate balance in all professors between ego and laziness, most of what is taught in college is in the text books. As for handouts, I found it pretty easy to file them as well. As for notes -- you mean someone who is scribbling notes in a hurry actually takes them in good enough handwriting that OCR would be able to read them without a lot of prompting? I should have mentioned that a lot of similar material like that is included in my 4 drawers. You have to think to file them in folders, and the same thought is needed to figure out which directory to put them in, but a lot more is needed to photograph papers so they are legible. If it's that important, a sheet-feed scanner would be more practical, but there's the difference between theory and practice: it's not as easy to batch convert as it sounds.
I've also found that there is a lot more of value to learn from practical experience than from pedants.
Unless one is a geek gone wild.
That's about it. I used to transfer photos to video professionally. We had a nice rig with lighting and a video camera mounted on a stand. We had to do a lot of adjusting of focus because of different types of phots and other issues. More often that not it was not just put down and click, then move on to the next one. If you're dealing with letters, and you're not scanning, you'll have problems with some fonts and other oddities that make sure many shots won't turn out as perfect as you'd think.
I have my own business. I keep all my bills, receipts of deductable expenses, home records, and so on. I keep personal records 7 years except in special cases. I just take the bill, when I get it (and most bills are e-mail now!) and put it in the envolope for the biller for that year. At the end of the year I spend less than 30 minutes writing up labels for the next year and when I get time, I burn the stuff that is past 7 years old. For "all those blls" I've never needed more than 4 filing drawers, which can be stacked as one cabinet that doesn't take up much space, or I use the two cabinets (2 drawers each) as legs for one of my desks.
I thought about keeping things electronically, but then I realize I'd have to take time to scan them and file them and that would take a lot more time, over all, than just dropping them in folders. If you want, you can spend all that time scanning. I prefer not to, but then again, I have a life and would rather be cycling or rock climbing than scanning bills.
This, to me, sounds like a geek gone wild, over thinking the solution and trying to come up with a hi-tech answer to a low-tech problem that really doesn't need an answer if one uses a little common sense and simple organization.