Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft has turned incredibly aggressive (yes, even compared to the past) and has been playing a bit dirty with respect to phone stuff? First, an ex-Microsoft guy takes over at Nokia where he, surprise surprise, decides to implement a massive seachange in mobile strategy that includes dumping an existing effort in which millions had been invested and instead jumping into bed with Microsoft. Then some lawyer with close ties to Microsoft comes out with some preposterous claim about how using Linux kernel headers entails the derivative works provision of the GPL, thus creating "serious legal problems" for Android.
Who knows for sure, but it sure does smell like some kind of desperate business strategy. Which I guess makes sense, since mobile seems to be the way things are going and they've flailed so hard in that space...
I really can't help but wonder how much of this insanity is being driven by the display manufacturers who keep squashing vertical space right on out of computer displays.
the people who built it failed to do their jobs correctly. if there's one thing i can't stand, it's when technology is done wrong by people who don't know what they're doing, then foistered upon others by a heavy hand of management. if the system doesn't make the controllers happy, it's wrong. they're not whiney users... the system sucks.
most large companies these days have heavy duty software license auditing and control systems. i find it hard to believe that ms doesn't have such a system.
therefore it really seems to me that this is probably an outside contractor or marketing company... who will probably never get business from ms again...
i don't really understand how whether or not i properly use capitalization in postings on a message board convey whether or not i read through documentation when working, but regardless...
i've always thought the purpose of writing is to convey meaning. there are formal rules for spelling, punctuation and grammar - but these rules only serve the purpose of helping the author to convey the message they are attempting to convey. they are tools, nothing more.
in the above example, i was stating an opinion on something that affects a lot of different people in different ways. since it was an opinion, i specifically chose to use all lowercase to help create a tone and inflection of "an informal offering of an opinion" rather than a "stark, institutional bequeathment of knowledge to the minions" in my opinion, i do not judge quality of writing based on proper adherance to the applicable spelling, grammar and punctuation rules but rather whether or not the message itself was of quality and how well it was conveyed.
--adam
ps. bequeathment is not a real word. but i used it anyway - and guess what, people will understand what i was trying to convey.
you just read a nine paragraph statement and the only response you were able to muster was a complaint about the lack of capitalization. did you even read the paragraphs you're complaining about?
how i do think this reflects upon you? well... let's just say that you're definitely not a manager that i would ever want.
you may wish to consider a career in government.
--adam
ps. in case you don't know; all lowercase is a style device, not an ignorance of the rules of punctuation.
while i don't have too much knowledge as to the effects of the dotcom boom and bust nationally and globally, i have formed a few opinions on what has happened locally.
while the boom sucked in a number of ways: computer jobs became glamourous and attracted a lot of goldrushers or hollywood ego types, which made working in these types of jobs a little obnoxious. the people who i hated in high school who were stuck up and going to fancy colleges found themselves getting rich in marketing and management positions, riding on the backs of the geeks who actually did the work. the talent pool was suddenly flooded with people who weren't really into what they were doing but they were doing it because that is where the money was. etc..
it also did a few cool things: it provided a way for slackers, artists, writers, etc to actually earn a living wage. (not exemplary salaries, but salaries that actually made it possible for them to live reasonably comfortably in the bay area) suddenly people that had been making peanuts could make a decent salary 30-50K and live comfortably knowing that they could pay their bills and some were gaining a skill that could turn into a career.
unfortunately, things got out of hand when the aforementioned fancy college educated folks had a little too much money to play around with and traders saw a wave of hype which they could ride to grow their assets. idiotic companies with pathetic business plans, idiot management and stupid ideas were recieving insane amounts of venture capital, which they were happy to spend the majority on things like office adornments, lame marketing and other things irrelevant to the core products they were building.
when this all was happening, the rest of the economy grew to support all these new businesses needing services and now that they're all gone, not only is the technology industry affected, but also the industries they relied upon and the industries those industries relied upon. hopefully the ripple won't be catastrophic.
personally, i was happy to see the bubble burst at first for the reasons i listed above. i was sick of hollywood ego internet types and this sudden 'coolness' that surrounded all things internet. i was also sick of seeing people who had no real interest in technology at all get filthy rich off of the hype.
however, now my opinion has changed a little. a lot of my friends are in fairly gnarly positions as a result of the layoffs. they weren't trying to get rich, and never were. they just wanted a honest living wage for a days work. they had the promise of a career and living wage for the years to come laid out before them and now it's all vanished into thin air.
in one way, i think it's a good thing, because the boom distracted people from what they really wanted to do with their lives. while doing operations for a dotcom may pay decent, it's not the most productive thing to do with one's eight hours a day in the grand scheme of things. (given that someone is not completely a geek at heart) now people are being forced to reevaluate themselves and their master plans for life, some are going back to college, some are persuing art, others are getting involved in vocations that they've been meaning to do for a while and i think that that is a very good thing.
i think that it is also a good thing for technology. now that there are less distractions and promise of riches for geeks working on bunk technologies, there will a decent talent pool of geeks looking to work for a decent wage on something that is technologically cool. that is also pretty exciting. while venture capitalists may be stopping the handouts, they're not going to stop completely and now they're not going to have nearly as many proposals to review. i'm hoping that in the next couple years we'll see a number of new companies that are doing stuff that is truly innovative.
hemos emailed me yesterday and asked if it was cool that it be posted. i moved it to a machine with better bandwidth/cpu and said sure. then of course, i watched for it to happen and have been watching the performance/logs of the script. how it would fare under the well-known "slashdot effect" was definitely one thing i wanted to watch.
when it initially got bogged down due to a mis-tuned apache, i posted the above comment.
The resume is on there at the suggestion of someone on craigslist who said that I should put it on there. I thought it was a bit slimey but at the same time I figured that it couldn't hurt.
As far as it getting posted to Slashdot, I didn't post it and I *do* know the guy who posted it but I did not ask him to do so, nor did he tell me before he did it. (and his text is a bit cheesy, no?):)
As far as useful statistics and normalizing based on total number posted. I am planning on adding that stuff. For the second version, I'm planning on adding normalizing, moving averages by day (right now it's only tallied by month) and possibly some other stats. (I've recieved a few good ideas from a few people and I've got some emails out to some math folks about how I might be able to do some interesting forecast graphs)
Slashdot Mirror
fprintf("Regret: %f\n",test_error);
Who knows for sure, but it sure does smell like some kind of desperate business strategy. Which I guess makes sense, since mobile seems to be the way things are going and they've flailed so hard in that space...
I really can't help but wonder how much of this insanity is being driven by the display manufacturers who keep squashing vertical space right on out of computer displays.
the people who built it failed to do their jobs correctly. if there's one thing i can't stand, it's when technology is done wrong by people who don't know what they're doing, then foistered upon others by a heavy hand of management. if the system doesn't make the controllers happy, it's wrong. they're not whiney users... the system sucks.
most large companies these days have heavy duty software license auditing and control systems. i find it hard to believe that ms doesn't have such a system.
therefore it really seems to me that this is probably an outside contractor or marketing company... who will probably never get business from ms again...
i don't really understand how whether or not i properly use capitalization in postings on a message board convey whether or not i read through documentation when working, but regardless...
i've always thought the purpose of writing is to convey meaning. there are formal rules for spelling, punctuation and grammar - but these rules only serve the purpose of helping the author to convey the message they are attempting to convey. they are tools, nothing more.
in the above example, i was stating an opinion on something that affects a lot of different people in different ways. since it was an opinion, i specifically chose to use all lowercase to help create a tone and inflection of "an informal offering of an opinion" rather than a "stark, institutional bequeathment of knowledge to the minions" in my opinion, i do not judge quality of writing based on proper adherance to the applicable spelling, grammar and punctuation rules but rather whether or not the message itself was of quality and how well it was conveyed.
--adam
ps. bequeathment is not a real word. but i used it anyway - and guess what, people will understand what i was trying to convey.
you just read a nine paragraph statement and the only response you were able to muster was a complaint about the lack of capitalization. did you even read the paragraphs you're complaining about?
how i do think this reflects upon you? well... let's just say that you're definitely not a manager that i would ever want.
you may wish to consider a career in government.
--adam
ps. in case you don't know; all lowercase is a style device, not an ignorance of the rules of punctuation.
while i don't have too much knowledge as to the effects of the dotcom boom and bust nationally and globally, i have formed a few opinions on what has happened locally.
while the boom sucked in a number of ways: computer jobs became glamourous and attracted a lot of goldrushers or hollywood ego types, which made working in these types of jobs a little obnoxious. the people who i hated in high school who were stuck up and going to fancy colleges found themselves getting rich in marketing and management positions, riding on the backs of the geeks who actually did the work. the talent pool was suddenly flooded with people who weren't really into what they were doing but they were doing it because that is where the money was. etc..
it also did a few cool things: it provided a way for slackers, artists, writers, etc to actually earn a living wage. (not exemplary salaries, but salaries that actually made it possible for them to live reasonably comfortably in the bay area) suddenly people that had been making peanuts could make a decent salary 30-50K and live comfortably knowing that they could pay their bills and some were gaining a skill that could turn into a career.
unfortunately, things got out of hand when the aforementioned fancy college educated folks had a little too much money to play around with and traders saw a wave of hype which they could ride to grow their assets. idiotic companies with pathetic business plans, idiot management and stupid ideas were recieving insane amounts of venture capital, which they were happy to spend the majority on things like office adornments, lame marketing and other things irrelevant to the core products they were building.
when this all was happening, the rest of the economy grew to support all these new businesses needing services and now that they're all gone, not only is the technology industry affected, but also the industries they relied upon and the industries those industries relied upon. hopefully the ripple won't be catastrophic.
personally, i was happy to see the bubble burst at first for the reasons i listed above. i was sick of hollywood ego internet types and this sudden 'coolness' that surrounded all things internet. i was also sick of seeing people who had no real interest in technology at all get filthy rich off of the hype.
however, now my opinion has changed a little. a lot of my friends are in fairly gnarly positions as a result of the layoffs. they weren't trying to get rich, and never were. they just wanted a honest living wage for a days work. they had the promise of a career and living wage for the years to come laid out before them and now it's all vanished into thin air.
in one way, i think it's a good thing, because the boom distracted people from what they really wanted to do with their lives. while doing operations for a dotcom may pay decent, it's not the most productive thing to do with one's eight hours a day in the grand scheme of things. (given that someone is not completely a geek at heart) now people are being forced to reevaluate themselves and their master plans for life, some are going back to college, some are persuing art, others are getting involved in vocations that they've been meaning to do for a while and i think that that is a very good thing.
i think that it is also a good thing for technology. now that there are less distractions and promise of riches for geeks working on bunk technologies, there will a decent talent pool of geeks looking to work for a decent wage on something that is technologically cool. that is also pretty exciting. while venture capitalists may be stopping the handouts, they're not going to stop completely and now they're not going to have nearly as many proposals to review. i'm hoping that in the next couple years we'll see a number of new companies that are doing stuff that is truly innovative.
hehehe. fixed. :)
hemos emailed me yesterday and asked if it was cool that it be posted. i moved it to a machine with better bandwidth/cpu and said sure. then of course, i watched for it to happen and have been watching the performance/logs of the script. how it would fare under the well-known "slashdot effect" was definitely one thing i wanted to watch.
when it initially got bogged down due to a mis-tuned apache, i posted the above comment.
Well...
:)
The resume is on there at the suggestion of someone on craigslist who said that I should put it on there. I thought it was a bit slimey but at the same time I figured that it couldn't hurt.
As far as it getting posted to Slashdot, I didn't post it and I *do* know the guy who posted it but I did not ask him to do so, nor did he tell me before he did it. (and his text is a bit cheesy, no?)
As far as useful statistics and normalizing based on total number posted. I am planning on adding that stuff. For the second version, I'm planning on adding normalizing, moving averages by day (right now it's only tallied by month) and possibly some other stats. (I've recieved a few good ideas from a few people and I've got some emails out to some math folks about how I might be able to do some interesting forecast graphs)
--adam
the slashdot effect is in effect. we underestimated the traffic it would generate and are moving the script to a bigger machine now.
if you can't get to it, please bear with us and try again in a few hours.
thanks again
--adam