I think the point he was trying to make was that every new fashion or idea starts out as something outrageous in the current context, and then goes on to become "right" some time later, and either goes on to be proven "wrong" even later or goes on to be a long-standing "correct" meme. Like the men's tie or natural selection. Authority of the person making the outrageous leap can lend to quicker adoptions, but any new fashion or idea will be met with resistance by people who have buy-in to the current system. I think the fashion analogy holds.
Perhaps a 2-liter of Mountain Dew before breakfast is a bit much. At least there's one person taking your job seriously, even if it isn't you.:) You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I completely disagree. I worked for a guy like you once. Want to know what happened to the company?
Training the hire to use an API isn't what I was talking about, and wasn't your first assertion. You said unskilled. UNskilled. Not partially skilled, or somewhat green, but completely without any prior skill at programming. Getting them up to speed on the programming toolkit you currently use is completely different than training them to be a programmer, so you already seem to be a bit self-contradictory now... but I digress.
Programming is both a long-learned skill and a natural knack. You're not going to get quality code out of throwing a "Java in 21 days" book at an unskilled hire, no matter how you slice it. Good programmers come from experience programming, period.
You may be lucky, or as incredibly intuitive as you claim to be with regards to a person's completely untested programming ability. In combination with a gross excess of time, you could simply crash instead of crashing and burning.
I would not drive on a bridge or work in a structure whose hiring of architects and subsequent building used the same method. Nor would I fly in such a plane. Bring in a newbie and throw a specification and some books at him. Yeah.
Engineering is engineering, and your project sounds critical. You are running an e-commerce site that is entrusted with personal and financial information. It doesn't sound like a great candidate for the infinite monkeys approach, no matter how hopeful you are that they're exceptionally bright chimps.
You never answered my dobule jeapordy. Bzzzzzzzzzt. Best of luck. Bonus questions: Did you work in a tech-support management or some other non-project based job just before this one? Has your project actually met its milestones or will you be pining for a "pain-in-the-ass prima donna" or another extension some time soon?
I said you ought to hire well, not hire assholes. You seem to think that paying good money automatically neccessitates a pain-in-the-ass prima donna who has to have work re-done. If you're doing your job hiring, it doesn't have to be that way. You can weed out attitude and programming skill in the first couple of weeks if you're not training. If you are training the new blood to be a programmer, their programming skills are a complete crap shoot. If you're trusing important projects to that practice, I wish you and your company the very best of luck.
I'll go double jeapordy on the wild assumptions based on your charming attitude: You're of the school of thought that people with no programming skills can manage large programming projects?
Teaching costs time and money. Trying to train up non-programmers is a cheapskate recipe for disaster. If the project is in any way important or time sensitive, do a good job of picking a couple of knowledgible and driven programmers and pay them well. If the project is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Repeat after me: "There is no such thing as a redundant array of inexpensive programmers".
Let me guess, you manage tech support or some other non-project-based job. Unskilled and eager may work at a variety of tasks, but there has to be a knack for programming for the person to succeed at it. Yes, you just may get a Tiger Woods or Stephen Hawking or Linus Torvalds by scouring the homeless shelters, but the odds ain't good. And you'll never know if things panned out until you put them in the thick of it... you need to see the person actually programming. Which costs time and money you could have just used to hire someone good in the first place.
My advice to the original poster: Prove you're a worthy programmer and employee by doing hard work on things like open source projects before entering the workforce. Don't leave the country unless you have more than just the job shortage as a reason. If you do, go to the UK. They know Americans are hard workers, the work visas are a lot easier to get than here, it's a very American-friendly place to live, and though the cost of living is higher you get about 3 times the amount of vacation/sick pay as here.
The free service (up to 5 domains) at ZoneEdit would be helpful in conjuction with this strategy. I've been using the service for a while now and though the site isn't much to look at, I've never had a DNS outage with them.
No, CD Library no only can work with computer, but also can operate it manually. Just dial the snob on the CD Library and users can see the number changes on the display....
The rest of the web site seems to have quite a bit of translation humor in it as well.
You're saying a man who invented complex ficticious languages and cultures for his own personal amusement is incapable of creating extra complexity in a written work just for the sake of it?
Do you think there is a neccessary deep hidden meaning in every detail of his writing, or is it possible that Tolkien wrote so much because it amused him to do so? I think the complexity of Tolkien's work speaks more to his interest in his own imaginings than any sort of literary high-ground.
After a period of time the regex parasite eventually wraps its tentacles around your brain stem, bending you to its will. This has the superficial appearance of understanding, but it's actually just shooting your brain full of mind altering substances to keep you docile.
Regexes are something that you're infected with or not. Most of the people who are (like myself) wouldn't try to parse text without the nifty shortcuts it provides. The occasional squirt of dopamine is nice, too.
Nice argument, but do you really think that third parties have to justify the means others took to get a benefit? Your tidy little example doesn't address the fact that the bad action that spawned the secondary benefit was going to happen regardless. If you live life adhering to an ethics textbook examples, you're in for a rude awakening on the greyness that is real life.
Are we not supposed to use the eugenics information the Nazis collected toward any sort of benefit, simply because the means by which they were collected was attrocious? The attrocities have already occurred. You cannot reasonably construe usage of the information as condoning attrocities. It is not the most human and humane thing to do to turn bad into good when possible?
The DNS issue is out of my hands currently... does that make the information I can collect from Verisign's expoitation useless? No. I'm going to make something of it.
You laugh, but can you think of a system that is better poised to process the wealth of human information into self-realization? Think about it, they've created a system that weighs useful information against useless and makes assertions as to its qualitative value. Since there are only a handful of humans involved, the only way to approach the problem is to automate it. This means giving a machine the ability to have some sort of persistent context to processing information. Isn't being self-aware just having a persistent context that includes yourself and your place in the world? Heck, for all we know Google just may be thinking for itself.
I have found a couple common misspellings of my domain that are still available. By looking at the contents of the sessions on my site I see that the users who come in on certain misspellings actually stick around a bit. Either they ended up on my site by accident and liked it, or sitefinder actually helped me (and them) out by pointing them to the correct site. I don't currently have enough visitors from those misspellings to justify purchasing them, but Verisign has just given me a free service that is of at least some value.
I agree that it breaks DNS, and that it is an unfair use of their position (just imagine when they start removing non-Verisign registered domains from the list of suggestions!). Generating lists of domain misspellings in referer logs is certainly in Verisign's best interest, since some users will want to scoop them up.
If it's "it is", it's "it's" not "its". I used to confuse them as well, but I couldn't resist commenting on the comment complaining about apostrophe's.
Yes, that last apostrophe was meant to fuck with you.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. By the description of how the system works, there is a resistive force applied when you fly toward / against one of the soft walls, and the last thing you need is an additional factor to contend with while landing on a particularly short strip like SAN. Fortunately, none of our high-rises are anywhere near as impressive as massive as other cities, so maybe it won't be as attractive of a target.
Actually, I'm mistaken... I saw a screen pop up, and after checking the FAQ it appears I could have refused the update. I was in the middle of playing one of the games they ripped from me and I was maddly clicking the wheel at the time, so I inadvertently (sp?) accepted.
I purchased a B&W sidekick in November of last year, and all of the puzzle games were marginally playable due to the underpowered processor of the SK (or the inefficiency of the game depending on your perspective). But I loved the SK, having all of your stuff synced to the network was great and it was a handy gadget. On wednesday of this week my local T-Mobile store finally had the Color SK in. Wow. It looks great and the web and the camera functions are both much more usable now.
Last night, I was playing Rat Maze at the very time they performed the update. I hated the game up until that point, and I actually discovered I liked it with the new speed. Likewise, the Shuffle game was mediocre on the B&W but the Color was much snappier. 4 games on it, and now I had only one... well, one and a quarter. The 'Snobored' easter egg game they consoled me with in the notification email was essentially the same thing as one I'd programmed in AppleSoft Basic on my Franklin Ace 1200 back in the day. Grrrr.
Inexplicably, my old B&W SK still has the games.
I sent them a couple of emails chewing them out for removing them.
This is old news... to check compatibility between Outlook and the USPS, Microsoft started beta testing sending virii through snail mail a short while back.
Re:Why a mule?
on
More Clones!
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Since mules are a cross between a donkey and a horse, would this also be the first half-ass cloning?
Firstly, take any advice from me with a grain of salt, I'm not a successful indie artist... I'm just an indie artist. Firstly, you've done something good. You're on slashdot. You have managed to get free marketing in a venue where people "get" the idea of sampling a product before purchasing it, and many see the value in paying for a product they already have for free. This is a good thing.
However, for a pre-order scenario to work you really need to add value to pre-ordering it. You can do this by giving it away before selling, but the only ones who will bite are the ones who only want to listen to your music on a manufactured CD delivered at some point in the future, or wish to contribute based solely on the music they already have for free. So far, from your account of the situation, this number is zero. Now, if you relase a few of the tracks and make it so the rest aren't made available until a certain number of pre-sales are placed, then you're getting somewhere. Put some documentation on the web as far as how close you are to your goals. If you make it less expensive to purchase the CD on a pre-order, that helps too. I have 2 CD singles with mixes completed, the current plan is to release one outright and not release the second until sales of the first and pre-sales from the second will cover my costs.
Another plan for my music is to see if there's any chance in hell I can get it covered on slashdot. Perhaps your $4000 wasn't wasted, it just got funneled into sales in a way contrary to your expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
TinyPerl
I think the point he was trying to make was that every new fashion or idea starts out as something outrageous in the current context, and then goes on to become "right" some time later, and either goes on to be proven "wrong" even later or goes on to be a long-standing "correct" meme. Like the men's tie or natural selection. Authority of the person making the outrageous leap can lend to quicker adoptions, but any new fashion or idea will be met with resistance by people who have buy-in to the current system. I think the fashion analogy holds.
Perhaps a 2-liter of Mountain Dew before breakfast is a bit much. At least there's one person taking your job seriously, even if it isn't you. :) You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I completely disagree. I worked for a guy like you once. Want to know what happened to the company?
Training the hire to use an API isn't what I was talking about, and wasn't your first assertion. You said unskilled. UNskilled. Not partially skilled, or somewhat green, but completely without any prior skill at programming. Getting them up to speed on the programming toolkit you currently use is completely different than training them to be a programmer, so you already seem to be a bit self-contradictory now... but I digress.
Programming is both a long-learned skill and a natural knack. You're not going to get quality code out of throwing a "Java in 21 days" book at an unskilled hire, no matter how you slice it. Good programmers come from experience programming, period.
You may be lucky, or as incredibly intuitive as you claim to be with regards to a person's completely untested programming ability. In combination with a gross excess of time, you could simply crash instead of crashing and burning.
I would not drive on a bridge or work in a structure whose hiring of architects and subsequent building used the same method. Nor would I fly in such a plane. Bring in a newbie and throw a specification and some books at him. Yeah.
Engineering is engineering, and your project sounds critical. You are running an e-commerce site that is entrusted with personal and financial information. It doesn't sound like a great candidate for the infinite monkeys approach, no matter how hopeful you are that they're exceptionally bright chimps.
You never answered my dobule jeapordy. Bzzzzzzzzzt. Best of luck. Bonus questions: Did you work in a tech-support management or some other non-project based job just before this one? Has your project actually met its milestones or will you be pining for a "pain-in-the-ass prima donna" or another extension some time soon?
I said you ought to hire well, not hire assholes. You seem to think that paying good money automatically neccessitates a pain-in-the-ass prima donna who has to have work re-done. If you're doing your job hiring, it doesn't have to be that way. You can weed out attitude and programming skill in the first couple of weeks if you're not training. If you are training the new blood to be a programmer, their programming skills are a complete crap shoot. If you're trusing important projects to that practice, I wish you and your company the very best of luck.
I'll go double jeapordy on the wild assumptions based on your charming attitude: You're of the school of thought that people with no programming skills can manage large programming projects?
Teaching costs time and money. Trying to train up non-programmers is a cheapskate recipe for disaster. If the project is in any way important or time sensitive, do a good job of picking a couple of knowledgible and driven programmers and pay them well. If the project is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Repeat after me: "There is no such thing as a redundant array of inexpensive programmers".
Let me guess, you manage tech support or some other non-project-based job. Unskilled and eager may work at a variety of tasks, but there has to be a knack for programming for the person to succeed at it. Yes, you just may get a Tiger Woods or Stephen Hawking or Linus Torvalds by scouring the homeless shelters, but the odds ain't good. And you'll never know if things panned out until you put them in the thick of it... you need to see the person actually programming. Which costs time and money you could have just used to hire someone good in the first place.
My advice to the original poster: Prove you're a worthy programmer and employee by doing hard work on things like open source projects before entering the workforce. Don't leave the country unless you have more than just the job shortage as a reason. If you do, go to the UK. They know Americans are hard workers, the work visas are a lot easier to get than here, it's a very American-friendly place to live, and though the cost of living is higher you get about 3 times the amount of vacation/sick pay as here.
The free service (up to 5 domains) at ZoneEdit would be helpful in conjuction with this strategy. I've been using the service for a while now and though the site isn't much to look at, I've never had a DNS outage with them.
From the Dacal website FAQ:
The rest of the web site seems to have quite a bit of translation humor in it as well.
You're saying a man who invented complex ficticious languages and cultures for his own personal amusement is incapable of creating extra complexity in a written work just for the sake of it?
Do you think there is a neccessary deep hidden meaning in every detail of his writing, or is it possible that Tolkien wrote so much because it amused him to do so? I think the complexity of Tolkien's work speaks more to his interest in his own imaginings than any sort of literary high-ground.
I'm upset that us yanks are still using Imperial Elk instead of Metric.
You can probably get it down to a single line of perl, tho the terminal may wrap a few times.
After a period of time the regex parasite eventually wraps its tentacles around your brain stem, bending you to its will. This has the superficial appearance of understanding, but it's actually just shooting your brain full of mind altering substances to keep you docile. Regexes are something that you're infected with or not. Most of the people who are (like myself) wouldn't try to parse text without the nifty shortcuts it provides. The occasional squirt of dopamine is nice, too.
Nice argument, but do you really think that third parties have to justify the means others took to get a benefit? Your tidy little example doesn't address the fact that the bad action that spawned the secondary benefit was going to happen regardless. If you live life adhering to an ethics textbook examples, you're in for a rude awakening on the greyness that is real life.
Are we not supposed to use the eugenics information the Nazis collected toward any sort of benefit, simply because the means by which they were collected was attrocious? The attrocities have already occurred. You cannot reasonably construe usage of the information as condoning attrocities. It is not the most human and humane thing to do to turn bad into good when possible?
The DNS issue is out of my hands currently... does that make the information I can collect from Verisign's expoitation useless? No. I'm going to make something of it.
You laugh, but can you think of a system that is better poised to process the wealth of human information into self-realization? Think about it, they've created a system that weighs useful information against useless and makes assertions as to its qualitative value. Since there are only a handful of humans involved, the only way to approach the problem is to automate it. This means giving a machine the ability to have some sort of persistent context to processing information. Isn't being self-aware just having a persistent context that includes yourself and your place in the world? Heck, for all we know Google just may be thinking for itself.
I have found a couple common misspellings of my domain that are still available. By looking at the contents of the sessions on my site I see that the users who come in on certain misspellings actually stick around a bit. Either they ended up on my site by accident and liked it, or sitefinder actually helped me (and them) out by pointing them to the correct site. I don't currently have enough visitors from those misspellings to justify purchasing them, but Verisign has just given me a free service that is of at least some value.
I agree that it breaks DNS, and that it is an unfair use of their position (just imagine when they start removing non-Verisign registered domains from the list of suggestions!). Generating lists of domain misspellings in referer logs is certainly in Verisign's best interest, since some users will want to scoop them up.
But it's not all bad, just mostly bad.
Java is just a knife. Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw.
If it's "it is", it's "it's" not "its". I used to confuse them as well, but I couldn't resist commenting on the comment complaining about apostrophe's.
Yes, that last apostrophe was meant to fuck with you.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. By the description of how the system works, there is a resistive force applied when you fly toward / against one of the soft walls, and the last thing you need is an additional factor to contend with while landing on a particularly short strip like SAN. Fortunately, none of our high-rises are anywhere near as impressive as massive as other cities, so maybe it won't be as attractive of a target.
Actually, I'm mistaken... I saw a screen pop up, and after checking the FAQ it appears I could have refused the update. I was in the middle of playing one of the games they ripped from me and I was maddly clicking the wheel at the time, so I inadvertently (sp?) accepted.
The updates are automatic and don't bother you for any user input. I thought this was a feature until last night.
I purchased a B&W sidekick in November of last year, and all of the puzzle games were marginally playable due to the underpowered processor of the SK (or the inefficiency of the game depending on your perspective). But I loved the SK, having all of your stuff synced to the network was great and it was a handy gadget. On wednesday of this week my local T-Mobile store finally had the Color SK in. Wow. It looks great and the web and the camera functions are both much more usable now.
Last night, I was playing Rat Maze at the very time they performed the update. I hated the game up until that point, and I actually discovered I liked it with the new speed. Likewise, the Shuffle game was mediocre on the B&W but the Color was much snappier. 4 games on it, and now I had only one... well, one and a quarter. The 'Snobored' easter egg game they consoled me with in the notification email was essentially the same thing as one I'd programmed in AppleSoft Basic on my Franklin Ace 1200 back in the day. Grrrr.
Inexplicably, my old B&W SK still has the games.
I sent them a couple of emails chewing them out for removing them.
sh-2.05a$ perl -ce 'print ($a + $c)'
-e syntax OK
This is old news... to check compatibility between Outlook and the USPS, Microsoft started beta testing sending virii through snail mail a short while back.
Since mules are a cross between a donkey and a horse, would this also be the first half-ass cloning?
Firstly, take any advice from me with a grain of salt, I'm not a successful indie artist... I'm just an indie artist. Firstly, you've done something good. You're on slashdot. You have managed to get free marketing in a venue where people "get" the idea of sampling a product before purchasing it, and many see the value in paying for a product they already have for free. This is a good thing.
However, for a pre-order scenario to work you really need to add value to pre-ordering it. You can do this by giving it away before selling, but the only ones who will bite are the ones who only want to listen to your music on a manufactured CD delivered at some point in the future, or wish to contribute based solely on the music they already have for free. So far, from your account of the situation, this number is zero. Now, if you relase a few of the tracks and make it so the rest aren't made available until a certain number of pre-sales are placed, then you're getting somewhere. Put some documentation on the web as far as how close you are to your goals. If you make it less expensive to purchase the CD on a pre-order, that helps too. I have 2 CD singles with mixes completed, the current plan is to release one outright and not release the second until sales of the first and pre-sales from the second will cover my costs.
Another plan for my music is to see if there's any chance in hell I can get it covered on slashdot. Perhaps your $4000 wasn't wasted, it just got funneled into sales in a way contrary to your expectations.