I'd be interested to see it. How do you measure happiness? How can you do a double blind study where people don't know they're smiling? Suffice it to say I'm rather skeptical. Studies done by psychologists are notoriously sloppy (and somehow I'd assume this is a psychology department study, since it sounds like the realm of psychology).
Further, there have been studies that suggest carrying a cheerful disposition "artificially" makes one more likely to make one more cheerful by this act.
I for one can detect a lot of the plastic smilers. It comes off as actually very cold. It's very hard to hide your true emotions, they'll come out eventually despite you. Some people are good at this of course. Some politicians, some sales people (though most are all plastic) but in general most people I've seen try this fail miserably and just look like fakers. But hey, if you really want to come off as a faker to a good percentage of the population, go ahead and put on that artificial smile.
Noone is saying smile when you are at your grandma's funeral, but for everyday stuff it wouldn't hurt to smile more.
How do you know? Maybe if you smile more you'll just ignore real problems in your life. Maybe you'll get some kind of complex about being unhappy. Maybe the bad times will be so much worse because you're so used to smiling all the time. It's a lot of maybe's, but that's kind of the point. It's all a lot of bullshit that sounds good, but has little beyond that. Consequences are not always apparant.
All the world's a stage. Your attitude is really no less plastic, no less a pose, than the one that Carnegie promotes.
I nice bit of sophistry, but you haven't really said anything. How is not posing posing? I guess we can't reflect what we feel anymore.. that's posing.. somehow. Here's a thought: Maybe if you smile more, you'll have more effective or more enjoyable interactions with others. Couldn't that be something to smile about? Perhaps the effect precedes the cause, in this case.
Maybe, or maybe you'll just feel more miserable because you didn't "let your emotions out". I could probbably make up a dozen other good sounding theories as well, but it wouldn't matter. Theories are all great, they can sound good, people can like them but they don't mean squat without evidence to back them up.
For example, one chapter is dedicated to smiling. You should smile often, because it makes you seem happier, more approachable, and a nicer person in general.
God.. smiling more? Think about what you're turning yourself into by smiling all the time. Plastic. We aren't all idiots that can't see through someone that's just smiling because they read it in a book somewhere.
Rather than just putting on a nice mask, maybe you should figure out why you're not happy? If you are happy, hey great, find a way to express that. But simply telling people to bulldoze over true feelings with masks is just terrible advice.
but what are your experiences as geeks in management? For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least.
My experiences have been extremely mixed. My best manager started out as a programmer (and still worked in the trenches from time to time). My worst geek managers have tried to control every last aspect of everything. Personally I think good management is a rare skill. Most people are very bad at it, and I think it takes a lot more work to cultivate being a good manager than most people realize.
I will say this though, even the worst geek manager understood the difficulties of technical problems. That's more than I can say for the worst non-geek manager I've had. What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
I'm not exactly sure, but my guess is resisting the temptation to have the people you manage "do it my way". Obviously that means trusting the people you manage to do things right, which isn't always possible with all employees. I think the other difficult thing is commanding respect from the people you manage. That's probbably related to the trust/non-micro-managing issues. Many people use the tough guy fear+power manager style, using intimidation to gain control. That might work for non-computer related fields, but I've never found it works very well inside IT.
YOU sir have bought into consumerism.. YOU were the one who exhaulted WalMart.
Umm.. no. Read the part where I said no one buys into Walmart helping society. I'm sorry you've come to that assumption. It's completely wrong, but hey.. you're welcome to your own opinions.
Hmm.. how could I _possibly_ come to that conclusion with statements like: The Linux community is ALREADY contributing to the good of society
and To put it a different way... say some people volunteer to paint houses for low income people and do a damn good job at it...
So free software is a public good, and is like people painting houses for low income people. I just don't know where that idea came from at all! Personally speaking you sound a little arrogant..
Possibly. Not that I really care. I'm sick and tired of the hippy-dippy belief among a small percentage of the OSS community that free software is going to save the world and that by writing code you're "doing good". Many "artists" think that art is going to save the world. I bet many poets think the same thing. People tend to overstate the importance of their own talents in the world and forget all we really need is health (mental and physical), food, and shelter. Anything over that is just bonus.
You sir, have completely bought into consumerism. Low prices are a public good? More stuff to own?
To put it a different way... say some people volunteer to paint houses for low income people and do a damn good job at it... You're point of view seems to be, "Hey! The guy that charges me a few thousand dollars to paint my house never gets any sort of recognition, and he does the same thing those volunteers do!"
No, my point of view is simply that software just doesn't rank up there as a big public need. You also miss-represent free software. It isn't some kind of arrangement to help the poor, it just produces free software. If that's what you want, great, but don't get too full of yourself that free software is like free soup kitchens and shelters.
I suggest again that government economic policies trump disease in terms of keeping an economy down
Possibly, but quite irrelevant to Bill Gates. You can't throw money at a problem like government economic policies. Sure, you could bribe some government officials, but they'd laugh all the way to the bank.
The US became more prosperous than most sub-Saharan African countries are today even when typhus, polio, and other diseases were rampant, not to mention at a time when antibiotics did not exist.
That's mostly due to geography. Sub-Saharan African countries don't have winter, so diseases like Malaria never have a chance to die off with the insects. I'm sure there's other disadvantages to living in the tropics as well.
So anything given away for free is necessarily good? You mention medical help and legal help, services normally very expensive and widely needed. Software is relatively cheap, and not really a dire need. What makes it so good to give it away for free?
I think that was part of the point, but I also think there's this mythos of how free software is somehow saving the world. It's saving some people some money, and freeing them from the will of software company X, but saving the world it is not.
Go and know at least the meeing of digital divide.
And what does that have to do with Linux? If you can't afford $400 for the hardware, an extra $99 for the software isn't going to break the bank. Then there's the monthly costs of internet access... The "free as in beer" aspect of linux isn't really all its cracked up to be. Take recent Tsunamie, do you know how much of fund came through the bits?
And this is all somehow the result of Linux? If the charities in question used linux servers, does that somehow mean linux is responsible for people giving to tsunami relief?
Apples, oranges. The linux community doesn't have to compete with Bill Gates in giving. This isn't a war against Bill Gates. The Linux community is ALREADY contributing to the good of society and doesn't have the means to do it twice over.
It doesn't have anything to do with this discussion, but I'm really tired of this attitude. How does your average Joe benefit from linux? Maybe some lower costs to web hosting? A bit more secure servers? Less vendor lock in? Big deal.. Walmart saves consumers money, but no one argues this somehow benefits society. Don't get me wrong, I think free software benefits me greatly. But I'm a computer professional and software developer. Free tools allow me much greater control over the services I can offer, the software I can develop, etc. Wonderfull, but that's not really a benefit to the society as a whole.
Except Gates has pleged to give away the vast majority of his fortune. As another poster said you don't give away all the money at once to one cause. The world is a complex place and is constantly changing. Better to put money in the places where its used most efficiently for the most gain.
I think this is fine, and we don't need to belittle them for not having grossly wrenched as much money as possible from people's hands which they can now "generously" give back to causes supporting the poor in the third world.
Belittle? Who's belittling anyone? Stating that free software isn't some grand altruistic venture isn't belittling. "grossly wrenched as much money as possible?" This is software, not food or medicine. While Microsoft has a lot of highly questionable anti-competitive products, they're hardly pharmaceutical companies trying to enforce patents in 3rd world countries for AIDS drugs. (An example of an industry with little morals and high greed).
As far as Gate's generosity, he could easily have horded all his money like most billionaires do. No one is forcing him to give it all away. Heard any stories about Richard Bramson of Virgin giving away billions of dollars? How about Larry Ellison of Oracle? I sure haven't.
In the long run, you make the people of the third world healthier by helping them develop a strong economy, not by sending them a shipload of medicine.
You're completely right about the first part, but the second part is a means to accomplish devloping a strong economy. The spread of disease has enormous economic costs. It's very hard to develop a strong economy when people are killed, or crippled by disease. Aside from the awfull human costs, someone crippled by childhood polio isn't very productive to the economy (and is in fact probbably a drain). If you can prevent disease in the first place that's a major step to producing a good economy.
Mr Gates is the head of a company that sells software for a profit, while the 'Linux Community' often gives its software for free to all comers over the Internet. That's one big difference.
I'm not sure I really understand what you're even saying. Is there something wrong with selling software, and something inherently good about giving it away for free? Get a little perspective. It's just bits, not food, medicine, clothing, or shelter. The linux community doesn't help the poor, cure disease or feed the hungry, it only produces software. That's fine, but don't overstate the righteousness of free software. I don't think Mr Gates will have any money problems if he ever gets sick. While Patrick Volkerding -- the maintainer of Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution out there -- who has been sick for several months, is asking people to buy Slackware version 10.1 to help him pay his medical bills...
What does Volkerding have to do with Gates giving money for vaccinations? (that is other than being a completely manipulative "look at the poor sick guy, now look at big evil rich Bill Gates"). That makes that last remark pretty insensitive and gratuitous, IMHO.
Oh quit your over-sensitive blubbering. No one asked Volkerding specifically to contribute. The comment in the article was simply a call to compete with Gates in giving. While it's silly that the "linux community" has to compete with Gates at _everything_ (what next, Gates is good at darts and someone in the "linux community" has to challenge him?). But it's not an insentive remark at all (that is until you start manipulating the situation by throwing in totally irrelevant sympathetic sick people).
You can blame ISPs all you want, but it ignores the fact that Spam is a worldwide problem because the internet is worldwide. If some miracle happens and all US and European ISPs start shaping up, there's nothing stopping Chinese ISPs from offering a spammers paradise. If your money is green they'll certainly take it and let you spam. Think China is going to outlaw ISPs from taking spammers? I highly doubt it when there's money to be made and little to lose. Even if they do there's plenty of other countries that'd gladly act as safe spam havens for a few greenbacks.
I just find the whole article to read like a "why can't we just love each other?" response to war. The world isn't going to change just because you wish it would.
astronaut
coined 1929 (but popularized 1961) from astro-, comb. form of Gk. astron "star" + nautes "sailor." Fr. astronautique (adj.) had been coined 1927 by "J.H. Rosny."
Perhaps its popularization had something to do with the fact that Russians were the first to reach space?
I seriously doubt it. The US reached space very shortly after the Russians did. I'd also guess the word Astronaut pre-dates any actual launch of Americans/Russians into space. The press obviously needs a word for the "profession" before they actually accomplish the feat.
It all depends on what you're trying to secure. All data isn't equal. My shopping list I couldn't care less about securing. I would go to great lengths to protect trade secrets worth millions of dollars though.
This seems to escape a lot of people, but really it's just like physical security. Do you keep all your books in locked safes surrounded by armed guards? You would probbably do that with a million dollars worth of diamonds or gold bricks though.
Get physical access to a computer, and all bets are off. Unless you're doing encryption on a filesystem level you'll always be able to take out the harddrive and put it in a machine you can read every single bit from. Even if you're doing filesystem encryption you can always install keyloggers on the keyboard and snarf the password.
I tried a few days ago, but couldn't find much information on the design of the Huygens probe. One thing I don't quite understand is why they only planned to transmit the data once, then leave Huygens for dead? Is it because of the extreme cold of the planet and they couldn't prove enough heating + insulation, or were there other factors involved? The vaccum of space is rather cold too, but electronics seem to work OK.
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Wrong and wrong. I manage no one but myself and I'm actually quite poor. I care little about money. Sorry, but all your assumptions are dead wrong.
I'd be interested to see it. How do you measure happiness? How can you do a double blind study where people don't know they're smiling? Suffice it to say I'm rather skeptical. Studies done by psychologists are notoriously sloppy (and somehow I'd assume this is a psychology department study, since it sounds like the realm of psychology).
Smile != Plastic Smile.
Further, there have been studies that suggest carrying a cheerful disposition "artificially" makes one more likely to make one more cheerful by this act.
I for one can detect a lot of the plastic smilers. It comes off as actually very cold. It's very hard to hide your true emotions, they'll come out eventually despite you. Some people are good at this of course. Some politicians, some sales people (though most are all plastic) but in general most people I've seen try this fail miserably and just look like fakers. But hey, if you really want to come off as a faker to a good percentage of the population, go ahead and put on that artificial smile.
Noone is saying smile when you are at your grandma's funeral, but for everyday stuff it wouldn't hurt to smile more.
How do you know? Maybe if you smile more you'll just ignore real problems in your life. Maybe you'll get some kind of complex about being unhappy. Maybe the bad times will be so much worse because you're so used to smiling all the time. It's a lot of maybe's, but that's kind of the point. It's all a lot of bullshit that sounds good, but has little beyond that. Consequences are not always apparant.
All the world's a stage. Your attitude is really no less plastic, no less a pose, than the one that Carnegie promotes.
I nice bit of sophistry, but you haven't really said anything. How is not posing posing? I guess we can't reflect what we feel anymore.. that's posing.. somehow.
Here's a thought: Maybe if you smile more, you'll have more effective or more enjoyable interactions with others. Couldn't that be something to smile about? Perhaps the effect precedes the cause, in this case.
Maybe, or maybe you'll just feel more miserable because you didn't "let your emotions out". I could probbably make up a dozen other good sounding theories as well, but it wouldn't matter. Theories are all great, they can sound good, people can like them but they don't mean squat without evidence to back them up.
For example, one chapter is dedicated to smiling. You should smile often, because it makes you seem happier, more approachable, and a nicer person in general.
God.. smiling more? Think about what you're turning yourself into by smiling all the time. Plastic. We aren't all idiots that can't see through someone that's just smiling because they read it in a book somewhere.
Rather than just putting on a nice mask, maybe you should figure out why you're not happy? If you are happy, hey great, find a way to express that. But simply telling people to bulldoze over true feelings with masks is just terrible advice.
but what are your experiences as geeks in management? For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least.
My experiences have been extremely mixed. My best manager started out as a programmer (and still worked in the trenches from time to time). My worst geek managers have tried to control every last aspect of everything. Personally I think good management is a rare skill. Most people are very bad at it, and I think it takes a lot more work to cultivate being a good manager than most people realize.
I will say this though, even the worst geek manager understood the difficulties of technical problems. That's more than I can say for the worst non-geek manager I've had.
What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
I'm not exactly sure, but my guess is resisting the temptation to have the people you manage "do it my way". Obviously that means trusting the people you manage to do things right, which isn't always possible with all employees. I think the other difficult thing is commanding respect from the people you manage. That's probbably related to the trust/non-micro-managing issues. Many people use the tough guy fear+power manager style, using intimidation to gain control. That might work for non-computer related fields, but I've never found it works very well inside IT.
YOU sir have bought into consumerism.. YOU were the one who exhaulted WalMart.
Umm.. no. Read the part where I said no one buys into Walmart helping society.
I'm sorry you've come to that assumption. It's completely wrong, but hey.. you're welcome to your own opinions.
Hmm.. how could I _possibly_ come to that conclusion with statements like:
The Linux community is ALREADY contributing to the good of society
and
To put it a different way... say some people volunteer to paint houses for low income people and do a damn good job at it...
So free software is a public good, and is like people painting houses for low income people. I just don't know where that idea came from at all!
Personally speaking you sound a little arrogant..
Possibly. Not that I really care. I'm sick and tired of the hippy-dippy belief among a small percentage of the OSS community that free software is going to save the world and that by writing code you're "doing good". Many "artists" think that art is going to save the world. I bet many poets think the same thing. People tend to overstate the importance of their own talents in the world and forget all we really need is health (mental and physical), food, and shelter. Anything over that is just bonus.
You sir, have completely bought into consumerism. Low prices are a public good? More stuff to own?
To put it a different way... say some people volunteer to paint houses for low income people and do a damn good job at it... You're point of view seems to be, "Hey! The guy that charges me a few thousand dollars to paint my house never gets any sort of recognition, and he does the same thing those volunteers do!"
No, my point of view is simply that software just doesn't rank up there as a big public need. You also miss-represent free software. It isn't some kind of arrangement to help the poor, it just produces free software. If that's what you want, great, but don't get too full of yourself that free software is like free soup kitchens and shelters.
I suggest again that government economic policies trump disease in terms of keeping an economy down
Possibly, but quite irrelevant to Bill Gates. You can't throw money at a problem like government economic policies. Sure, you could bribe some government officials, but they'd laugh all the way to the bank.
The US became more prosperous than most sub-Saharan African countries are today even when typhus, polio, and other diseases were rampant, not to mention at a time when antibiotics did not exist.
That's mostly due to geography. Sub-Saharan African countries don't have winter, so diseases like Malaria never have a chance to die off with the insects. I'm sure there's other disadvantages to living in the tropics as well.
So anything given away for free is necessarily good? You mention medical help and legal help, services normally very expensive and widely needed. Software is relatively cheap, and not really a dire need. What makes it so good to give it away for free?
I think that was part of the point, but I also think there's this mythos of how free software is somehow saving the world. It's saving some people some money, and freeing them from the will of software company X, but saving the world it is not.
Go and know at least the meeing of digital divide.
And what does that have to do with Linux? If you can't afford $400 for the hardware, an extra $99 for the software isn't going to break the bank. Then there's the monthly costs of internet access... The "free as in beer" aspect of linux isn't really all its cracked up to be.
Take recent Tsunamie, do you know how much of fund came through the bits?
And this is all somehow the result of Linux? If the charities in question used linux servers, does that somehow mean linux is responsible for people giving to tsunami relief?
Apples, oranges. The linux community doesn't have to compete with Bill Gates in giving. This isn't a war against Bill Gates.
The Linux community is ALREADY contributing to the good of society and doesn't have the means to do it twice over.
It doesn't have anything to do with this discussion, but I'm really tired of this attitude. How does your average Joe benefit from linux? Maybe some lower costs to web hosting? A bit more secure servers? Less vendor lock in? Big deal.. Walmart saves consumers money, but no one argues this somehow benefits society. Don't get me wrong, I think free software benefits me greatly. But I'm a computer professional and software developer. Free tools allow me much greater control over the services I can offer, the software I can develop, etc. Wonderfull, but that's not really a benefit to the society as a whole.
Except Gates has pleged to give away the vast majority of his fortune. As another poster said you don't give away all the money at once to one cause. The world is a complex place and is constantly changing. Better to put money in the places where its used most efficiently for the most gain.
I think this is fine, and we don't need to belittle them for not having grossly wrenched as much money as possible from people's hands which they can now "generously" give back to causes supporting the poor in the third world.
Belittle? Who's belittling anyone? Stating that free software isn't some grand altruistic venture isn't belittling. "grossly wrenched as much money as possible?" This is software, not food or medicine. While Microsoft has a lot of highly questionable anti-competitive products, they're hardly pharmaceutical companies trying to enforce patents in 3rd world countries for AIDS drugs. (An example of an industry with little morals and high greed).
As far as Gate's generosity, he could easily have horded all his money like most billionaires do. No one is forcing him to give it all away. Heard any stories about Richard Bramson of Virgin giving away billions of dollars? How about Larry Ellison of Oracle? I sure haven't.
In the long run, you make the people of the third world healthier by helping them develop a strong economy, not by sending them a shipload of medicine.
You're completely right about the first part, but the second part is a means to accomplish devloping a strong economy. The spread of disease has enormous economic costs. It's very hard to develop a strong economy when people are killed, or crippled by disease. Aside from the awfull human costs, someone crippled by childhood polio isn't very productive to the economy (and is in fact probbably a drain). If you can prevent disease in the first place that's a major step to producing a good economy.
Mr Gates is the head of a company that sells software for a profit, while the 'Linux Community' often gives its software for free to all comers over the Internet. That's one big difference.
I'm not sure I really understand what you're even saying. Is there something wrong with selling software, and something inherently good about giving it away for free? Get a little perspective. It's just bits, not food, medicine, clothing, or shelter. The linux community doesn't help the poor, cure disease or feed the hungry, it only produces software. That's fine, but don't overstate the righteousness of free software.
I don't think Mr Gates will have any money problems if he ever gets sick. While Patrick Volkerding -- the maintainer of Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution out there -- who has been sick for several months, is asking people to buy Slackware version 10.1 to help him pay his medical bills...
What does Volkerding have to do with Gates giving money for vaccinations? (that is other than being a completely manipulative "look at the poor sick guy, now look at big evil rich Bill Gates").
That makes that last remark pretty insensitive and gratuitous, IMHO.
Oh quit your over-sensitive blubbering. No one asked Volkerding specifically to contribute. The comment in the article was simply a call to compete with Gates in giving. While it's silly that the "linux community" has to compete with Gates at _everything_ (what next, Gates is good at darts and someone in the "linux community" has to challenge him?). But it's not an insentive remark at all (that is until you start manipulating the situation by throwing in totally irrelevant sympathetic sick people).
You can blame ISPs all you want, but it ignores the fact that Spam is a worldwide problem because the internet is worldwide. If some miracle happens and all US and European ISPs start shaping up, there's nothing stopping Chinese ISPs from offering a spammers paradise. If your money is green they'll certainly take it and let you spam. Think China is going to outlaw ISPs from taking spammers? I highly doubt it when there's money to be made and little to lose. Even if they do there's plenty of other countries that'd gladly act as safe spam havens for a few greenbacks.
I just find the whole article to read like a "why can't we just love each other?" response to war. The world isn't going to change just because you wish it would.
Perhaps its popularization had something to do with the fact that Russians were the first to reach space?
I seriously doubt it. The US reached space very shortly after the Russians did. I'd also guess the word Astronaut pre-dates any actual launch of Americans/Russians into space. The press obviously needs a word for the "profession" before they actually accomplish the feat.
It all depends on what you're trying to secure. All data isn't equal. My shopping list I couldn't care less about securing. I would go to great lengths to protect trade secrets worth millions of dollars though.
This seems to escape a lot of people, but really it's just like physical security. Do you keep all your books in locked safes surrounded by armed guards? You would probbably do that with a million dollars worth of diamonds or gold bricks though.
Get physical access to a computer, and all bets are off. Unless you're doing encryption on a filesystem level you'll always be able to take out the harddrive and put it in a machine you can read every single bit from. Even if you're doing filesystem encryption you can always install keyloggers on the keyboard and snarf the password.
I tried a few days ago, but couldn't find much information on the design of the Huygens probe. One thing I don't quite understand is why they only planned to transmit the data once, then leave Huygens for dead? Is it because of the extreme cold of the planet and they couldn't prove enough heating + insulation, or were there other factors involved? The vaccum of space is rather cold too, but electronics seem to work OK.