That's an idealistic view. It would be more accurate to say the code gets committed when the more aggressive developer is happy
EXACTLY right! Some programmers like to imagine that there "one true way" of doing things. Just look at the posts in this thread. If you are paired up with such a person, you're going to do it their way. I've pretty much gotten to the point where I don't even argue (most of the time), I just try to figure out what they want, and then do it. Sometimes it's better than what I would have done, sometimes it's just different. But having to battle thru code is not a lot of fun.
The parent summarizes very well what I find problematic with pair programming. I'm a slower "let me walk thru it" kind of guy. I also sometimes need to just dummy up some throwaway code to see how something works. Having me pair program with a faster, "just do it this way" guy drives me nuts, because I feel like I'm being reduced to a typist.
I have had successful "pair programming" sessions at my old job, but that was before I even knew what pair programming was. When someone had a tough nut to crack, we'd sit down together and work thru it... maybe we'd type code, maybe we wouldn't. It wasn't a case of one person directing the other person what to do. And once the need to pair up was done and it was clear what to do, we'd split up. Done *as necessary*, pair programming works fine.
Good sportsmanship is an arbitrary social construct. There is nothing natural about it. It takes an act of self-denial to be a good sport, and to not cheat. Now, this may be ethically and socially superior...it may be the more enlightened path...but it is not natural and as such most people don't walk it.
It's not quite this simple. There have been some studies that show that the "best strategy" is not to cheat all the time. Being a "good sport" isn't just an act of self-denial, it can have very practical benefits. For example, the company that I used to work for was pretty well known (until it was bought out) for honesty and good customer service. Didn't mean everyone loved us, but they trusted that we were telling the truth. Even though in the short term we could have screwed some customers over and made more money, in the long term we did much better by being a "good sport", in terms of customer retention.
I recall reading that there was concern that the first H bomb could ignite the deuterium in the oceans. They ran a calculation and figured out that there was plenty of safety factor. Later on, after the first detonation, they realized that their calculation had been off by a factor of 10 (was 10 times less safety factor than they realized).
The problem is that when you pay real money in an MMO for an item, essentially you are paying someone else to play the game for you. Which is pretty weird... if you don't enjoy playing the game, why not do something else you do enjoy? It's like paying someone to go to the movies for you... what's the point?
And yet, amazingly enough, even though we know that there are lots of people willing to die to bring down aircraft, and even though you say that searches are completely ineffective, aircraft aren't falling from the sky daily.
The solution of making sure that there isn't a single person, anywhere on earth, that doesn't want to blow up an airplane seems a little... unrealistic.
Funny, I live in the US and wonder about how people manage to live in EU countries where extreme right wing parties are on the rise as voters get paranoid about foreigners. Certainly the EU can't make any great claims to tolerance right now. And as far as innocent until proven guilty, I thought French law didn't have that concept?
World of Warcraft and GTA are the two games I play most of the time now, and those both run fine under restricted accounts. Some games (and some other software) do require admin, but that seems pretty rare. Day to day about the only things I run as admin are Quicken and Teamspeak Server.
I believe his son plays games. Everyone knows you need to be an administrator to play games.
Funny, I run a restricted account and most of the games I play I work fine that way. Run a few games and utilities using runas, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
Great, so I have slightly more ways to be pigeonholed. I can be a "healing priest," or a "damage priest," or a highly ineffective combination of the two that will get me killed endless times and put me at a huge disadvantage to specialized priests in PvP.
You only have to be pigeonholed if you want to be pigeonholed. In WoW I've got a "mixed build" for my priest: mostly holy, some shadow and some discipline. When people ask me if I'm holy or shadow I tell them I'm a mix. I don't feel that I'm at a disadvantage or that I "have" to be a particular build.
I spent a lot of time looking at all the talent trees and picking out stuff I can use. For example, I favor talents that are passive over stuff like "gives you a chance to hit better for 15 seconds" because I rarely remember to trigger such talents. As far as I'm concerned, the "optimum" build depends on the player. The key is to find fellow players who want to play with *you*, and don't worry about whether or not you are the "best possible" build.
While I really liked Heinlein's older novels, his more recent output failed to impress me. The depth and suspense were simply not there anymore, at least not in the degree I was used from Heinlein.
I'd go even farther and say that Heinlein's last few novels were awful. As he went further along the protagonist became an older and older man who was having sex with younger and younger women. In my (humble) opinion he peaked at around "The Moon is Harsh Mistress".
I loved Heinlein as a kid, but re-reading him as an adult, he's just too absolute, too certain... "this is the way things are, anyone who disagrees with me is a fool". If I want to see that, I can read slashdot.
Ever walk out with a pen from your company? Ever print personal documents on their printers? That is stealing. You know that pens cost money. You should probably know that laser printers cost about $.10 per page (maybe less these days). That is stealing. Maybe nobody cares because the relative value is so small, but it is still stealing.
Ever read slashdot at work? By your definition, you are stealing. Except, guess what, most companies accept that their employees take breaks, occasionally send personal email, etc etc. I don't pay for those services, because there's no expectation that I will pay for them.
However, if someone is providing bagels, and there's an expectation that I'll pay, I pay. If the company started charging for water, I'd either pay, or bring in my own.
Some people do not feel any moral obligation to pay. And certainly the execs of my former company would fall into that class. Given the opportunity to steal, they steal, without any moral qualms. I agree, generalizing to all execs is excessive... I'm sure there's a counter example somewhere.
If your company started asking for $.10 for a drink from the water cooler, would you bother putting in that dime? Would you put in $1? (assuming they had no way of knowing who did and did not pay for water)
I'd put $1 in once in a while, on the theory that it was evening out for the times that I didn't pay anything. And it would probably work out that I would pay too much, to avoid paying too little.
As others have said, it's not that the amount is trivial to the execs - after all, they probably do stop at Starbucks and pick up a bagel and latte, so they understand that bagels cost money. It's that they feel entitled to steal. Some people don't have the same sense of guilt and fair play that other people have.
The parent is absolutely true. My previous company was bought out by a dot com that was trying to build a monopoly in our industry. Within two years they went public with an absolutely disasterous IPO (stock dropped from $10 to $1 very quickly). They lost an incredible amount of money, eventually got bought out by another company... and the execs were rewarded with good positions and bonuses in the new company (and continue to be well rewarded).
Any rational person, looking at the results, would have fired these guys. I can only attribute it to the fact that the execs knew the folks buying them out (in fact, had set up the buyout) so they were all buddies, and you don't fire your buddy, do you?
Let's see what actually happens in 3 years before we announce the coming of the FOSS millenium. Evangelist shows up, gov/company declares new policy, people get excited... happens all the time. And what also happens all the time is that reality sets in, in various forms, and the policy doesn't go thru, or is watered down.
That was just a speculation on the part of the clinical psychologist interviewed in the article. She does not appear to have any data to support that figure.
Quite true. The actual quote from the article is:
RW: According to your research, and your experience with patients, how many addicted gamers are there today?
Orzack: Well, let's take World of Warcraft as an example. Let's say there are around 6 million subscribers for the game. I'd say that 40 percent of the players are addicted.
So the "expert" does't even claim that 40% is based on any hard numbers... it's just a random guess.
No, he's not trolling, he's making a valid point. In general, there's NOTHING that I'm aware of in open source / free software licenses that requires that you "contribute" any changes back to the original project. In fact, as I recall there's been quite a bit of criticism of companies that have semi-open licenses that require that changes be passed back to and vetted by the originator. If a company takes open source, modifies it, uses it, and redistributes it, they are following both the letter AND the spirit of open source / free software movement.
I'd love to know how, in a discussion of whether an attack is part of a war or not, my parent post about the role of Hezbollah was considered "off-topic".
Oh yeah, this is slashdot. Check your rationality at the door.
And that the horrors of the attack on Lebanon (it's not a war, because Lebanon hasn't any significant military forces) are being downplayed?
Hezbollah, which is part of the Lebanese government, launched crossborder raids and fairly advanced rockets on civilian targets many miles inside Israel. Israel has a right, and in fact a duty, to prevent its civilians from being attacked. Given that Israel's enemies are eager to "wipe Israel from the map" I suppose the other choice is for Israel to go quietly in the night, but that isn't really an option, is it?
I would say that GTA actually has way more "plot" that HL2. HL2's plot consists of "make your way to point y to meet person x, killing lots of zombies along the way". It's fun stuff, but it's not exactly an involved plot. Although I'm only a small bit of the way thru GTA, it actually seems to build a bit of a plot line with some questions about the various characters (e.g. Smoke seems awfully chummy with the cops).
I clicked on the link to http://www.youos.com/, watched as Firefox sat there for about 15 seconds with a blank page... then realized that I had already seen enough.
Most traffic laws are stupid limit everybody to the abilities of the least competent style laws.
And of course, YOU know how competent you are. YOU are a supremely good driver, capable of going 75 after 5 beers. It's all the other fools who should be limited.
Slashdot Mirror
EXACTLY right! Some programmers like to imagine that there "one true way" of doing things. Just look at the posts in this thread. If you are paired up with such a person, you're going to do it their way. I've pretty much gotten to the point where I don't even argue (most of the time), I just try to figure out what they want, and then do it. Sometimes it's better than what I would have done, sometimes it's just different. But having to battle thru code is not a lot of fun.
The parent summarizes very well what I find problematic with pair programming. I'm a slower "let me walk thru it" kind of guy. I also sometimes need to just dummy up some throwaway code to see how something works. Having me pair program with a faster, "just do it this way" guy drives me nuts, because I feel like I'm being reduced to a typist.
I have had successful "pair programming" sessions at my old job, but that was before I even knew what pair programming was. When someone had a tough nut to crack, we'd sit down together and work thru it... maybe we'd type code, maybe we wouldn't. It wasn't a case of one person directing the other person what to do. And once the need to pair up was done and it was clear what to do, we'd split up. Done *as necessary*, pair programming works fine.
It's not quite this simple. There have been some studies that show that the "best strategy" is not to cheat all the time. Being a "good sport" isn't just an act of self-denial, it can have very practical benefits. For example, the company that I used to work for was pretty well known (until it was bought out) for honesty and good customer service. Didn't mean everyone loved us, but they trusted that we were telling the truth. Even though in the short term we could have screwed some customers over and made more money, in the long term we did much better by being a "good sport", in terms of customer retention.
Would somebody with points mind modding the parent as flamebait?
I recall reading that there was concern that the first H bomb could ignite the deuterium in the oceans. They ran a calculation and figured out that there was plenty of safety factor. Later on, after the first detonation, they realized that their calculation had been off by a factor of 10 (was 10 times less safety factor than they realized).
That's exactly my point. You might want to reread my post.
The problem is that when you pay real money in an MMO for an item, essentially you are paying someone else to play the game for you. Which is pretty weird... if you don't enjoy playing the game, why not do something else you do enjoy? It's like paying someone to go to the movies for you... what's the point?
And yet, amazingly enough, even though we know that there are lots of people willing to die to bring down aircraft, and even though you say that searches are completely ineffective, aircraft aren't falling from the sky daily.
The solution of making sure that there isn't a single person, anywhere on earth, that doesn't want to blow up an airplane seems a little... unrealistic.
Funny, I live in the US and wonder about how people manage to live in EU countries where extreme right wing parties are on the rise as voters get paranoid about foreigners. Certainly the EU can't make any great claims to tolerance right now. And as far as innocent until proven guilty, I thought French law didn't have that concept?
World of Warcraft and GTA are the two games I play most of the time now, and those both run fine under restricted accounts. Some games (and some other software) do require admin, but that seems pretty rare. Day to day about the only things I run as admin are Quicken and Teamspeak Server.
Funny, I run a restricted account and most of the games I play I work fine that way. Run a few games and utilities using runas, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
You only have to be pigeonholed if you want to be pigeonholed. In WoW I've got a "mixed build" for my priest: mostly holy, some shadow and some discipline. When people ask me if I'm holy or shadow I tell them I'm a mix. I don't feel that I'm at a disadvantage or that I "have" to be a particular build.
I spent a lot of time looking at all the talent trees and picking out stuff I can use. For example, I favor talents that are passive over stuff like "gives you a chance to hit better for 15 seconds" because I rarely remember to trigger such talents. As far as I'm concerned, the "optimum" build depends on the player. The key is to find fellow players who want to play with *you*, and don't worry about whether or not you are the "best possible" build.
I'd go even farther and say that Heinlein's last few novels were awful. As he went further along the protagonist became an older and older man who was having sex with younger and younger women. In my (humble) opinion he peaked at around "The Moon is Harsh Mistress".
I loved Heinlein as a kid, but re-reading him as an adult, he's just too absolute, too certain... "this is the way things are, anyone who disagrees with me is a fool". If I want to see that, I can read slashdot.
Ever read slashdot at work? By your definition, you are stealing. Except, guess what, most companies accept that their employees take breaks, occasionally send personal email, etc etc. I don't pay for those services, because there's no expectation that I will pay for them.
However, if someone is providing bagels, and there's an expectation that I'll pay, I pay. If the company started charging for water, I'd either pay, or bring in my own.
Some people do not feel any moral obligation to pay. And certainly the execs of my former company would fall into that class. Given the opportunity to steal, they steal, without any moral qualms. I agree, generalizing to all execs is excessive... I'm sure there's a counter example somewhere.
I'd put $1 in once in a while, on the theory that it was evening out for the times that I didn't pay anything. And it would probably work out that I would pay too much, to avoid paying too little.
As others have said, it's not that the amount is trivial to the execs - after all, they probably do stop at Starbucks and pick up a bagel and latte, so they understand that bagels cost money. It's that they feel entitled to steal. Some people don't have the same sense of guilt and fair play that other people have.
The parent is absolutely true. My previous company was bought out by a dot com that was trying to build a monopoly in our industry. Within two years they went public with an absolutely disasterous IPO (stock dropped from $10 to $1 very quickly). They lost an incredible amount of money, eventually got bought out by another company... and the execs were rewarded with good positions and bonuses in the new company (and continue to be well rewarded).
Any rational person, looking at the results, would have fired these guys. I can only attribute it to the fact that the execs knew the folks buying them out (in fact, had set up the buyout) so they were all buddies, and you don't fire your buddy, do you?
Let's see what actually happens in 3 years before we announce the coming of the FOSS millenium. Evangelist shows up, gov/company declares new policy, people get excited... happens all the time. And what also happens all the time is that reality sets in, in various forms, and the policy doesn't go thru, or is watered down.
Quite true. The actual quote from the article is:
So the "expert" does't even claim that 40% is based on any hard numbers... it's just a random guess.
No, he's not trolling, he's making a valid point. In general, there's NOTHING that I'm aware of in open source / free software licenses that requires that you "contribute" any changes back to the original project. In fact, as I recall there's been quite a bit of criticism of companies that have semi-open licenses that require that changes be passed back to and vetted by the originator. If a company takes open source, modifies it, uses it, and redistributes it, they are following both the letter AND the spirit of open source / free software movement.
I'd love to know how, in a discussion of whether an attack is part of a war or not, my parent post about the role of Hezbollah was considered "off-topic".
Oh yeah, this is slashdot. Check your rationality at the door.
and feel free to mod this one "off-topic"
Hezbollah, which is part of the Lebanese government, launched crossborder raids and fairly advanced rockets on civilian targets many miles inside Israel. Israel has a right, and in fact a duty, to prevent its civilians from being attacked. Given that Israel's enemies are eager to "wipe Israel from the map" I suppose the other choice is for Israel to go quietly in the night, but that isn't really an option, is it?
I so wish I had mod points to mod this "funny"
I would say that GTA actually has way more "plot" that HL2. HL2's plot consists of "make your way to point y to meet person x, killing lots of zombies along the way". It's fun stuff, but it's not exactly an involved plot. Although I'm only a small bit of the way thru GTA, it actually seems to build a bit of a plot line with some questions about the various characters (e.g. Smoke seems awfully chummy with the cops).
I clicked on the link to http://www.youos.com/, watched as Firefox sat there for about 15 seconds with a blank page... then realized that I had already seen enough.
And of course, YOU know how competent you are. YOU are a supremely good driver, capable of going 75 after 5 beers. It's all the other fools who should be limited.