Maybe playing Tetris is what makes this guy tick. Who can say? The customer has a project. It is expected to take X hours. An engineer gets it done in X hours to your satisfaction. If 0.9*X is spent playing Tetris...who cares? Everyone at the end game got what they want.
Me, I get most of my best ideas in the shower in the morning before I go in to work. Should I bill the customer for all the time I spend in the tub?
Seriously - it's about the bottom line here. Is everyone happy? That's the final metric. What happens along the path is secondary to that.
No, perfectly serious. Problem is you're assuming a constant workload and a perfect equivalence between workers.
Although I'm a coder we are often put as "leads" in projects. Think "manager lite". And I did put a guy on a team I was leading who mostly plays Tetris. And sleeps in his cube.
The thing is - he knows more about the system than I do. Way more. The task I gave him took him an afternoon. Would have taken me two weeks, minimum. He banged it out, it worked perfectly, he went back to his Tetris. I'm happy, he's happy, my manager is happy we made the schedule, the customer is happy.
We're all happy so I don't see a problem.
I work more than he does, sure. But only because I have to. I'm not as good. I don't begrudge him one single bit.
Oh, and by the way, I'm on my daily 10 minute break. Back to actual work for me. Have a nice 8 hour day doing.....whatever it is you do.
You sound terribly mismanaged, and understandably a little bit bitter about it.
Let me tell you something. Best managers view programmers as black boxes. Work requests go in, work comes out. If work>=schedule, then you have a good programmer and that's that. Doesn't matter if he plays Tetris 39 hours a week. If the project gets done, done right, on schedule - why would you care about anything else?
The worst managers are micro managing nitwits like the one you work for. Seriously, he has a stopwatch and is timing your one single ten minute break? If you take an extra minute or two do you get written up or talked to? Sounds like kindergarten to me. No thanks.
Look around some. You might just find a job that doesn't make you die of hypertension by your 50th birthday. They do exist, you know. You can work, put in good solid days and make good product - and not be treated like a member of a chain gang.
CE6 development is no longer done through Platform Builder. It's a Visual Studio plugin. But - only for VS 2005. They've never updated it. Even if I wanted to upgrade I couldn't.
When we invaded Okinawa the Japanese military ordered the civilian population to kill themselves rather than submit to the Americans, because we would rape and kill them all. Of course that wasn't true - but the people believed them. Mothers strangled sons, entire families ate rat poison, families would walk up to the edge of a cliff, throw their infants off then hold hands and jump. Mass suicide. Horrific.
Now scale that up to the entire island of Honshu.
The body count was actually lower by dropping the bombs and forcing the surrender. That's why it was so vitally important to get the emperor to call the whole thing off. Instead of a few hundred thousand dead you'd have numbers in the tens of millions. It was part of the Japanese culture. Never surrender. That's why they treated our POWs so poorly. They simply didn't understand the western notions of capture and ransom - our culture handles these notions in exactly the opposite way.
It's awful to have to say that nuking an whole town full of civilians, women and children was appropriate. But really - lives were saved this way. It's horrible, I know. But war always is - that's why it's best avoided altogether.
It's not that this particular case has 173 patent infringements, and 2 were ones IBM promised not to use so the project is pooched anyways. That's not it at all. Sure - the end result is the same for this Hercules emulator but that's not the point.
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did. Therefore the 500 or so patents that they claim are off limits to open source obviously aren't. Their promise is useless because now we know that as soon as it is expedient they will use these patents against open source.
In other words this Hercules emulator is merely the litmus test for IBM's open source patent promise, with lousy (but sadly typical) results.
Who cares how the particles get inside the cancer cells? Does it matter if we use microscopic needles and inject every single cancer cell or just throw a bunch of square pegs at square holes and hope for the best?
The end result is that the medicine winds up where it should be, and doesn't seem to be accumulating where it shouldn't.
When the components are mixed together in water, they assemble into particles about 70 nanometres in diameter. The researchers can then administer the nanoparticles into the bloodstream of patients, where the particles circulate until they encounter 'leaky' blood vessels that supply the tumours with blood. The particles then pass through the vessels to the tumour, where they bind to the cell and are then absorbed.
So maybe that counts as targeted. Maybe not. I don't care either way - it works, regardless of semantics.
I am not a member of PETA or anything like that but the thing that really irritates me about animal abuse is the animal can not speak up in its own defense.
That's it in a nutshell. Thanks to PETA, if anyone says they're for the humane treatment of animals - anyone listening these days might assume that you're one of these nutbags.
It's a shame that we all have to issue a disclaimer when we say we're against animal abuse.
There is something better. In every measurable way SSD is better. Better power consumption, better shock/drop resistance, lower heat, no noise, near zero seek times, they already can run SATA3, and longer lifetimes. Yes - longer lifetimes. Check this guy's math and you'll see what I mean.
The only thing that keeps them off the mainstream currently is price, which Moore's law will quickly fix.
I've always been a slow adopter of new technology. Hell, in high school I thought CDs were a passing fad. I can admit that. But this though...this one is easy. I don't think I've ever seen a technology upgrade that so completely outshined its predecessor in my life.
I agree that spinning disks will have their place for a while, much in the same way ice houses were still needed when the first refrigerators were being made. Only necessary during the transition to the better tech. Likewise, if the price were to match rotating media dollar for dollar today - you'd never see a spinning hd ever again, except in legacy systems.
If they didn't engineer cigarettes to be as addictive as possible with additives and adjuncts, I'd agree with you. But we both know there is an entire industry aimed at making cigarettes as addictive as possible to take away your right to choose.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever tried to quit? Most smokers I know have tried once or twice. What was that like?
Still feel like you're 100% in control of your decision to smoke? If you're not, who is?
The tobacco industry is. And since they're calling the shots to some degree, they hold some degree of the responsibility. As I see it - yes. They do in fact kill people. With malice and forethought, 100%.
Read this if you are able then get back to me. Don't know about you, but if you offered me a few hundred thousand with the caveat that I'd have to undergo genital debriding - I'd pass.
Now read this and tell me if you think smoking is simply a personal choice. The tobacco industry has teams of chemists and scientists working to make cigarettes as addictive as possible - to take away your right to choose.
If they decided it would be worth more money for them to grind you up and feed you to pigs, they would.
Right now you are bringing in more money than they are paying you. Hence your employment. If that wasn't the case you wouldn't be there. And if the penalty for murder was less steep, the odds of getting caught smaller, and if there was a pig food shortage - you'd be screwed.
It should come as no surprise when a company does something less evil than that for money. The bar is set pretty high. So allowing people to spoof caller ID for cash? Mere child's play.
OP was exactly right about corporations being sociopaths. It's probably one of the most insightful things I've ever seen on/.
The mad part is that there is some 6 figure salesgoon who figured it would be an excellent idea to make a list of people they've pissed off, call them up, ask them how happy they are - and then try to upsell them.
I realize this lady wasn't acting of her own volition. The insane part is TWC deciding that an occasion of their own incompetence was an excellent opportunity for a sale.
Just because your connection to Verizon is up doesn't mean their connection to some other arbitrary network is working reliably.
I use Time Warner and a cablemodem.
One day, my net connect starts getting "spotty". Connect. Disconnect. Repeat all day long. After a couple of days it goes down altogether. I put in the call. Guy comes out and looks at the cable and shows me where a squirrel had been nibbling at it. Replaces the cable bit on the pole, off he goes. Cable goes right back down again. Put in another call. Another guy shows up, twiddles something, gets a good meter reading, and bails. Repeat this for about three months. Last guy finally fixes the problem - a router box upstream was foobaring my entire block's connection. Nobody on my block was getting internet, cable, anything through TWC. Dozens of customers complaining daily and it took them three months to finally figure out "gee the whole block is down, let's go look at the router for this block."
So a few weeks later, a lady calls me. A customer survey drone wanting to know about my "experience". I tell her how frustrating the whole thing was. How does she conclude the call?
By asking if I'd consider a package deal to have my telephone run through their modem too.
It seems everyone wants to be a "software engineer", but nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
I don't see the problem there.
Not every programmer you're going to run into is going to be a brilliant assembly level kernel hacker. Some of them (these days anyway) are going to be mediocre. Using libraries that a lot of people have looked at, found the bugs for, and documented so that the "hard stuff" works reliably gives these people a chance at success. Not everyone coding these days is some uberhacker. Code that works is really the bottom line here.
Reason being - programming has moved from a small niche position to an industry. And the demand for programming is large. And the number of people who can perform difficult tasks like coding in assembly is small. Wizards are rare and demand is larger than that. So how do you bridge that gap? Easy languages and tools and lots of libraries to increase the number of available programmers that can meet the demand. Let the gurus stick to the heavy stuff and let the mediocre programmers spend their time solving tasks in their ability range.
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Fooey. How do you calculate the value of thought?
Maybe playing Tetris is what makes this guy tick. Who can say? The customer has a project. It is expected to take X hours. An engineer gets it done in X hours to your satisfaction. If 0.9*X is spent playing Tetris...who cares? Everyone at the end game got what they want.
Me, I get most of my best ideas in the shower in the morning before I go in to work. Should I bill the customer for all the time I spend in the tub?
Seriously - it's about the bottom line here. Is everyone happy? That's the final metric. What happens along the path is secondary to that.
No, perfectly serious. Problem is you're assuming a constant workload and a perfect equivalence between workers.
Although I'm a coder we are often put as "leads" in projects. Think "manager lite". And I did put a guy on a team I was leading who mostly plays Tetris. And sleeps in his cube.
The thing is - he knows more about the system than I do. Way more. The task I gave him took him an afternoon. Would have taken me two weeks, minimum. He banged it out, it worked perfectly, he went back to his Tetris. I'm happy, he's happy, my manager is happy we made the schedule, the customer is happy.
We're all happy so I don't see a problem.
I work more than he does, sure. But only because I have to. I'm not as good. I don't begrudge him one single bit.
Oh, and by the way, I'm on my daily 10 minute break. Back to actual work for me. Have a nice 8 hour day doing.....whatever it is you do.
You sound terribly mismanaged, and understandably a little bit bitter about it.
Let me tell you something. Best managers view programmers as black boxes. Work requests go in, work comes out. If work>=schedule, then you have a good programmer and that's that. Doesn't matter if he plays Tetris 39 hours a week. If the project gets done, done right, on schedule - why would you care about anything else?
The worst managers are micro managing nitwits like the one you work for. Seriously, he has a stopwatch and is timing your one single ten minute break? If you take an extra minute or two do you get written up or talked to? Sounds like kindergarten to me. No thanks.
Look around some. You might just find a job that doesn't make you die of hypertension by your 50th birthday. They do exist, you know. You can work, put in good solid days and make good product - and not be treated like a member of a chain gang.
CE6 development is no longer done through Platform Builder. It's a Visual Studio plugin. But - only for VS 2005. They've never updated it. Even if I wanted to upgrade I couldn't.
I know it seems wrong to nuke a city. I agree that it does seem wrong to do. But you don't understand the Japanese mindset at the time.
Dropping the bomb saved lives. Here, read this.
When we invaded Okinawa the Japanese military ordered the civilian population to kill themselves rather than submit to the Americans, because we would rape and kill them all. Of course that wasn't true - but the people believed them. Mothers strangled sons, entire families ate rat poison, families would walk up to the edge of a cliff, throw their infants off then hold hands and jump. Mass suicide. Horrific.
Now scale that up to the entire island of Honshu.
The body count was actually lower by dropping the bombs and forcing the surrender. That's why it was so vitally important to get the emperor to call the whole thing off. Instead of a few hundred thousand dead you'd have numbers in the tens of millions. It was part of the Japanese culture. Never surrender. That's why they treated our POWs so poorly. They simply didn't understand the western notions of capture and ransom - our culture handles these notions in exactly the opposite way.
It's awful to have to say that nuking an whole town full of civilians, women and children was appropriate. But really - lives were saved this way. It's horrible, I know. But war always is - that's why it's best avoided altogether.
Typical response from a child. When told you should educate yourself about what you're trying to attack
And:
you're going to have to lose the whiny bitch attitude before you'll have any chance
Just saying.
You serve your master well. And you will be rewarded.
My favorite Robot Chicken bit is Boba Fett. It just destroys me. Especially this bit.
Absolutely killed me first time I saw it. Wiping tears away pointing at the screen.
It's not that this particular case has 173 patent infringements, and 2 were ones IBM promised not to use so the project is pooched anyways. That's not it at all. Sure - the end result is the same for this Hercules emulator but that's not the point.
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did. Therefore the 500 or so patents that they claim are off limits to open source obviously aren't. Their promise is useless because now we know that as soon as it is expedient they will use these patents against open source.
In other words this Hercules emulator is merely the litmus test for IBM's open source patent promise, with lousy (but sadly typical) results.
Who cares how the particles get inside the cancer cells? Does it matter if we use microscopic needles and inject every single cancer cell or just throw a bunch of square pegs at square holes and hope for the best?
The end result is that the medicine winds up where it should be, and doesn't seem to be accumulating where it shouldn't.
BTW, in the above referenced Nature article it says this:
When the components are mixed together in water, they assemble into particles about 70 nanometres in diameter. The researchers can then administer the nanoparticles into the bloodstream of patients, where the particles circulate until they encounter 'leaky' blood vessels that supply the tumours with blood. The particles then pass through the vessels to the tumour, where they bind to the cell and are then absorbed.
So maybe that counts as targeted. Maybe not. I don't care either way - it works, regardless of semantics.
I am not a member of PETA or anything like that but the thing that really irritates me about animal abuse is the animal can not speak up in its own defense.
That's it in a nutshell. Thanks to PETA, if anyone says they're for the humane treatment of animals - anyone listening these days might assume that you're one of these nutbags.
It's a shame that we all have to issue a disclaimer when we say we're against animal abuse.
The only thing that keeps them off the mainstream currently is price, which Moore's law will quickly fix.
Likewise, if the price were to match rotating media dollar for dollar today - you'd never see a spinning hd ever again, except in legacy systems.
There is something better. In every measurable way SSD is better. Better power consumption, better shock/drop resistance, lower heat, no noise, near zero seek times, they already can run SATA3, and longer lifetimes. Yes - longer lifetimes. Check this guy's math and you'll see what I mean.
The only thing that keeps them off the mainstream currently is price, which Moore's law will quickly fix.
I've always been a slow adopter of new technology. Hell, in high school I thought CDs were a passing fad. I can admit that. But this though...this one is easy. I don't think I've ever seen a technology upgrade that so completely outshined its predecessor in my life.
I agree that spinning disks will have their place for a while, much in the same way ice houses were still needed when the first refrigerators were being made. Only necessary during the transition to the better tech. Likewise, if the price were to match rotating media dollar for dollar today - you'd never see a spinning hd ever again, except in legacy systems.
But yeah, I thought the same thing too. "Blessed is he who pays my electricity bill this month!"
Live gives you lemons, make lemonade. I've always been that kind of a guy.
It's ok, I *revel* in it.
I know you do. It's called trolling - you didn't invent it.
Well if you won't give up smoking or coffee, might I suggest you at least give decaf a shot?
G'nite numbnuts. Shine on you crazy diamond.
If they didn't engineer cigarettes to be as addictive as possible with additives and adjuncts, I'd agree with you. But we both know there is an entire industry aimed at making cigarettes as addictive as possible to take away your right to choose.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever tried to quit? Most smokers I know have tried once or twice. What was that like?
Still feel like you're 100% in control of your decision to smoke? If you're not, who is?
The tobacco industry is. And since they're calling the shots to some degree, they hold some degree of the responsibility. As I see it - yes. They do in fact kill people. With malice and forethought, 100%.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyways.
The McDonalds case is 100% on the money.
Read this if you are able then get back to me. Don't know about you, but if you offered me a few hundred thousand with the caveat that I'd have to undergo genital debriding - I'd pass.
Now read this and tell me if you think smoking is simply a personal choice. The tobacco industry has teams of chemists and scientists working to make cigarettes as addictive as possible - to take away your right to choose.
You're not nearly as clever as you think you are.
If they decided it would be worth more money for them to grind you up and feed you to pigs, they would.
Right now you are bringing in more money than they are paying you. Hence your employment. If that wasn't the case you wouldn't be there. And if the penalty for murder was less steep, the odds of getting caught smaller, and if there was a pig food shortage - you'd be screwed.
Read up on the tobacco industry for current examples of what I'm talking about. They kill about half a million people in the United States every year, and all for profit. Money.
It should come as no surprise when a company does something less evil than that for money. The bar is set pretty high. So allowing people to spoof caller ID for cash? Mere child's play.
OP was exactly right about corporations being sociopaths. It's probably one of the most insightful things I've ever seen on /.
...disturbing.
Those CD of the Month clubs are prior art.
Although you did do the clever thing and add "with a computer", so it'll probably fly.
They never made any sequels to Highlander.
No, I get it. That's not the mad part.
The mad part is that there is some 6 figure salesgoon who figured it would be an excellent idea to make a list of people they've pissed off, call them up, ask them how happy they are - and then try to upsell them.
I realize this lady wasn't acting of her own volition. The insane part is TWC deciding that an occasion of their own incompetence was an excellent opportunity for a sale.
Just because your connection to Verizon is up doesn't mean their connection to some other arbitrary network is working reliably.
I use Time Warner and a cablemodem.
One day, my net connect starts getting "spotty". Connect. Disconnect. Repeat all day long. After a couple of days it goes down altogether. I put in the call. Guy comes out and looks at the cable and shows me where a squirrel had been nibbling at it. Replaces the cable bit on the pole, off he goes. Cable goes right back down again. Put in another call. Another guy shows up, twiddles something, gets a good meter reading, and bails. Repeat this for about three months. Last guy finally fixes the problem - a router box upstream was foobaring my entire block's connection. Nobody on my block was getting internet, cable, anything through TWC. Dozens of customers complaining daily and it took them three months to finally figure out "gee the whole block is down, let's go look at the router for this block."
So a few weeks later, a lady calls me. A customer survey drone wanting to know about my "experience". I tell her how frustrating the whole thing was. How does she conclude the call?
By asking if I'd consider a package deal to have my telephone run through their modem too.
This entire planet is mad, you know.
It seems everyone wants to be a "software engineer", but nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
I don't see the problem there.
Not every programmer you're going to run into is going to be a brilliant assembly level kernel hacker. Some of them (these days anyway) are going to be mediocre. Using libraries that a lot of people have looked at, found the bugs for, and documented so that the "hard stuff" works reliably gives these people a chance at success. Not everyone coding these days is some uberhacker. Code that works is really the bottom line here.
Reason being - programming has moved from a small niche position to an industry. And the demand for programming is large. And the number of people who can perform difficult tasks like coding in assembly is small. Wizards are rare and demand is larger than that. So how do you bridge that gap? Easy languages and tools and lots of libraries to increase the number of available programmers that can meet the demand. Let the gurus stick to the heavy stuff and let the mediocre programmers spend their time solving tasks in their ability range.
It's simply market pressure.