Your analogy is pretty good.
The reason I'd never go for it, in spite of enjoying video games, and enjoying the notion of being able to actually beat someone at one of them is this:
Computer games come and go... for the most part rather quickly.
Golf, however, in spite of equipment advances, is basically the same game it always was.
That, and I don't pay for golf lessons either.
They have the brainpower, they have the funding, they have search engines and thus an inexaustible supply of data that they've found some loose relations among. Yet, how much are the boundries computer intelligence being pushed by these companies?
Well the honest answer is, I don't know. Anyways, based on what's visible to Joe public, it doesn't look like much beyond better searching, better spam filtering, and a little bit in the way of better robustness in IT systems... things like that. I mean, nothing even worth a crumby Slashdot headline, what gives guys? Google sets is kind of interesting but it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to do anything with it in a long, long time.
Any of these players could buy pretty much anything they want so there's no need to start at ground zero. Buy out Cyc, rewrite its inference engine to scale massively. Buy out some natural language parsing / translation places. Use some combination of these, wordnet, wikipedia, answers, howstuffworks, and your own maps of the web to do some incredibly cool things.
Yes, they'll also be incredibly hard but if you don't even have the faith to pursue this seriously on the side, how can you really think of yourself as the leading software company in the world?
The sums involved here are so small that it doesn't make any difference in terms of compensating any development effort.
So, the story amounts to somebody wanting to bring attention to Open Source CMSes, and the fact that there's ANY MONEY INVOLVED AT ALL, is enough to attract attention in the Open Source world.
(which it will, due to demand from China/India, though the timescale and severity is a big ?)
What will happen?
In the short term: Traditional cars, but smaller, lighter, and with more efficient drivetrains? Hybrids Diesel in some mix with Biodiesel Gasahol
In the long term: Does anyone honestly really claim to know? There are options, but there are bigger problems with infrastructure, distribution, and Joe the mechanic. That, and people (at least in America) will be very slow to give up the freedom to go anywhere, continuously enclosed, and on there own schedule.
Electric cars are an interesting possibility, I like the idea because of the flexibility it gives to use any means to generate the power. However, this latest announcement doesn't change me from being a skeptic. I suppose battery tech is getting better, but even a 250 mile range is going to limit adoption, heat tolerance and battery disposal are important concerns, and replacement cost on batteries is bad. That, and unless you can just plug your car into a standard outlet, there's a highly distributed infrastructure problem. Another poster made a pretty convincing case that limitations in the supply of lithium are a killer here. Finally, you wonder about the state of the power grids... you probably need to program a scheduler so it only pulls at night.
In the meantime, I'm doing fine in my regular grade sipping Focus. It's only been costing me about 15c a mile and I'm being inclusive (gas, insurance, taxes, depreciation, maintenance, repairs).
-- If the Chinese people don't like the way their government is restricting their access to information then they have a moral obligation to overthrow that government, either peacefully via voting in the next election, or by force using a militia formed from the people. --
I can't claim any special knowledge of Chinese politics, but I'm going to take a wild guess that the Communist party has things pretty well locked down or we wouldn't be talking about these sorts of issues 17 years after the massacre in Tiananmen square.
Leaving... form a militia! That doesn't work against a remotely a modern military... the machinery is orders of magnitude too expensive now, so all you have are terrorist tactics. Please say you don't support those. In any case, I surely don't.
-- By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China. --
There are different ways for governance to change. You alluded to elections and revolution, but the first feels like a joke in this context, and typically the government you get after a revolution is ony occasionally better than the government prior and often worse. There is a more subtle, and more inevitable way for governance to change, and that is a widespread change in the current of thinking. This happens more gradually than one would hope for, but it does happen with more exposure to uncensored information and western attitudes in general. We can see it starting to pick up speed among the middle and upper classes in the major cities.
Not to say this is a reason to sit back complacently either here or in China, but condemning efforts to get information to the Chinese people is really wrong headed. The Soviet Union didn't collapse from independant militia attacking or any really democratic elections, and it seems laughable to suggest in retrospect. The undoing of the Soviet Union were the ideals of freedom wrapped in the glamorous image of American consumer culture. I expect, and I think most rational people with a sense of history expect China to be a more gradual repeat of the same process.
What does it say about your life when the difference between a superior search engine and an inferior search engine registers compared to having legs vs. not having legs?
You can use this, to a lesser extent, back on the car salesmen themselves (they're not remotely as gullible as some of who they sell to, but a sale "today" definitely gets them MUCH more eager to cut you a deal).
Do your homework on vehicle valuation and comparable vehicles for sale in the area before arriving, get a carfax, test drivability and features thoroughly, get it checked out by a mechanic, all that good stuff, or you're just asking to be suckered.
Then... throw out a low number that you're HAPPY with saying that it would get you to buy today, watch them squirm, stay firm when they back and forth, and if they're taking too long say the magic words: let me speak directly to your fleet manager. As long as your low number is remotely reasonable, you'll get it.
While mathematically these are points, we're doing ourself a great disservice to think of them as such. There is going to be a very large volume of space where the cancellation will be good enough that only ocassional and minor corrections would be necessary, and that's all that really matters. A constrained resource? Yes, but not to the point that it is likely to matter unless you're a population panic monger.
As a former #$HumanCyclist, I can tell you those first two examples are exactly the sort of thing we like to point to.
I was not involved in natural language understanding while I worked there (and that was over 4 years ago now), so I'm in absolutely no position whatsoever to comment on where Cyc is these days. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see what comes with OpenCyc, or if something like what these folks have developed could be supplemented by something that has a way of representing semantics.
Of course, they're trying to sell what they do, so we probably won't ever find out unless they have the insight to look at Cyc (or ~maybe~ another system).
I'm not optimistic.
Fuzzy and not fuzzy systems are intrinsically difficult to make work together, and neither are known for being speedy.
It's also much more comfortable to adopt the mindset that one approach is simply better than the other, than go way offroad trying to reconcile the two, because you know, even if you're a genius, you'll get some really bizarre results until you get a better handle on some of the practicle issues.
No, I don't advocate smoking, but I've found it rewarding to take breaks along with them, and just bring a coke or a mini bottle of OJ.
Why?
Smoke breaks (5-7 minutes) tend to be just about the right length for a solid psychological recharge that lasts an hour or so. I'm sure that's quite intentional on the part of cigarette makers. A little time away from the computer works far better in my experience than flipping over to email, slashdot, whatever. I take these breaks with smokers because if you don't have someone to go out away from the desk with, it can be hard not to feel a little silly.
It's fun hanging around smokers when they're smoking because they're generally relaxed and chatty, and not quite so wound up in work then. You can relax along with them and NOT be killing yourself slowly. (Argue with me if you must... I do know that secondhand smoke is bad for you as well, but if you're outside and not immediately downwind and you're still worried about the risks, I maintain that you're just plain crazy)
Finally, by virtue of smoking becoming somewhat rare in the modern workplace, hanging out with smokers is a way of casting a wider social network. Plus, the people tend to be more fun:-)
Let's be honest... we're not moving 1/1000th of 1 percent of that many people to settle anywhere off earth for a long time. It's more constructive to try and reduce the chances of global catastrophe here, and buy ourselves time (not to say we shouldn't keep working on fusion, we should, but I'm not under the illusion that this is coming soon).
How do we do this?
Most important is developing a foreign policy geared toward a more peaceful, less nuclear and biologically armed world. Kim Jong II scares me more than big rocks from space or yellowstone. Big fill in the gap here... I'm not especially wise in these ways. I do know, however, that there's no indication that's where we're headed, or that the current regimes in the developed world have primarily those goals in mind.
Wry comments about silly movies aside, researching and testing meteor/comet deflection also seems like a good idea. I even (shoot me) enjoyed The Core, though I certainly don't know of anything anyone has ever seriously proposed to deal with plate techtonics. If there is something that makes an iota of sense, research that, too.
There's an interesting contrast between my approach and the one I'm responding to and I think it reflects different underlying values.
You see, I don't care about there being some remnant of humanity in the case of 99.999%+ anihalation. Humanity has a pretty nasty record when you get down to it, and whatever life there is in the universe, if advanced enough to witness us in any detail, is unlikely to find much of worth to take from it.
I care about my life, the life of my family and friends. Because neither I nor they have special connections in the space industry or government, that means preserving life on earth. Anyone else like that idea?
I am in a similar situation... I am 24, and going to be married in a little over a month. I currently work on a moderately large customer specific extension to an already large IT application.
Lots of things don't work as they should. There is not a truly satisfactory workaround every time. I am extremely fortunate that the client is savvy and reasonable, and my manager is likewise.
If that were not the case, I would not just indefinitely and silently tough it out, hoping to be rewarded. Employees that do valuable work need to be kept. What most companies take for granted is that these employees need their current jobs even more. Their insensitivity to employees' lives is a result of that assumption. Corporations are not looking out for you, that's your responsibility.
Always keep current anonymous resumes up on monster, dice, etc... If you have current, marketable skills, a good resume, and a record of success, you will get contacted from time to time, if you're lucky, frequently. Find out more about the positions that look good and interview.
If you get an offer (or I suppose if you're REALLY sure you will, but I'd want to have two other employers REALLY interested before I'd feel safe), you're in a wonderful position. You'll probably notice your stress level going way down, even if things don't slow down at work... feeling trapped affects stress level in a big way.
Now once you're in this position, never try and use quitting as a bluff (threaten to leave if the other job isn't as good or slightly better for you). I wouldn't even play the card if I could avoid it (remember that you want to see whether you want to keep working here, not just whether you're needed).
However, once you do have this card in hand, you can feel much more free go to exactly the appropriate people within your company, and explain what you like about your situation and what could be improved, and as best as you can, suggest ways to improve matters without complaining. If you get positive feedback AND some action, great, stay.
If not, it's up to you how to handle things... if there was no understanding that came of those conversations, you may wish to simply move on to that next job. If the understanding was there, things were not changing yet, but you thought the chance was pretty good that they could, you might want to let them know that it's very important for you to see these changes starting soon and see if there's any movement then.
If so, great, but if not I'd wait till I had an offer in hand (if I didn't at the beginning of this process!), inform them that you have found another position that you believe is a better match for you (don't say it's a better position, even if it is), but hold off accepting the other offer for a couple days.
You may find out at this point that they're truly desperate to keep you. If they sweeten the deal a whole lot, it ~may~ be worth staying (I'd definitely keep the resumes out there, though... things can turn sour quickly). If they just promise to try and sweeten the deal, or only sweeten it so much, and it's a hard decision at the end of the day, I'd suggest moving on... you only want to stay on if you can be enthusiastic about it (if you're anything less and they fear that, they may look for someone with their sights set lower to replace you).
I definitely prefer informing them that you've found another position that may be better to ultimatums because if they do decide to keep you by sweetening the deal, they don't feel like they're buckling to demands... everything has a much more positive feel to it.
Ah, career decisions and corporate politics! The things they don't teach you in school.
Actually, it would be very interesting to see how far you could go the other way. Make the parts (down to the smallest level of granularity), their dimensions, weight, how they fit together, the tightness to take the bolts to, etc public domain. Have an honest and content rich manual, tutorials, faqs, discussion boards with expert input. Use common, or very easy to manufacture parts wherever possible. You have the ultimate car. Super mod-able, super repairable, yours in every way. The manufacturer can still make money by lower parts transportation and assembly costs. Of course, I'm dreaming, but it's fun.
I believe that there are several important concepts in the piece of software I am writing that legitimately deserve to be called intellectual property. How do you research existing Intellectual Property? I really have no idea, and would currently probably just go down to the local public library, ask and pray.
Any advice on this? Also, does GPLing source code showing an implementation of an idea you'd like to have protected as Intellectual Property constitute abandoning claims to it as property?
Fairly evocative of the stock market, and so why should it be surprising that the corresponding companies act in the same way? Unless the CEO and top management are highly courageous, and actually knows they're doing it's difficult not to buckle to fashion and shareholder fears. Who's to say that they'll survive in their post long enough to be shown correct anyway? (And that assumes they even know what they're doing in the first place) When lacking vision, the mantra is reduce costs at all cost.
For example, shed whole divisions of your company. Layoff experienced workers esp. if they're nearing pension (if that exists), hire young (or just stop hiring). Move operations to India, China, Russia, wherever. Curtail most benefits. Replace offices with cubes, cubes with benches, benches with shared space or work at home. Banish most office supplies and guard the rest jealously.
Sadly, many who rise through the CEO ranks to bigger and bigger companies are the "courageous" ones who slash and burn everything they don't see paying off in 18 months (or 12 or even 6 depending).
It's not that some of these things aren't necessary under certain circumstances, but they are not without negative consequences and huge risks. IMHO, the thing to do here is similar to good investing strategy: play the contrarian. Keep experienced people around, they know things, can do things, and elevate the productivity of those around them. Hire on some of the zillions of unemployed or under-employed techies in the states. You can have your pick at the some of the best, or if you don't need quite that and if you want to do something more short term, you can get good people right now on the very, very cheap. Innovate, release products. Even if the market isn't ready yet, being ahead of the game will pay off later. Having kept good people on board and treated them with respect will pay off when they don't jump ship when things get better.
Don't get me wrong, I like small, light laptops, and LCDs. Attention to form factor makes a lot of sense when you're lugging something around, or you want to have, say, some desk space.
Now, servers are another beast. They sit there and do one thing. It doesn't really matter where they sit, so within reasonable limits, their size doesn't matter. They should also pretty much sit in one place, so why is wireless a selling point?
Power consumption does make a difference cost wise but you're overpaying for this thing so much that you can pretty well throw cost arguments out the window.
That leaves heat and noise as the remaining concerns. For heat, just add some fans, it's not that hard, and you don't even need to do that if you're using the machine so lightly that the a 533 with 128 mb of ram will do ya. Why do you care about noise (within reasonable limits) again? It's a server, you can put it wherever you want! How many times do I have to repeat that?
What is this? It's a gimmick... say it's an affordable server and someone who doesn't know about alternatives will think it is, rather than the old, overpriced laptop without an LCD display that it really is.
I haven't seen one of these things in person, but the tradeoffs seem fairly bad. They're directing light from alternating columns pixels to each eye. OK, but the separation between your eyes is not really that big... so presumably you couldn't really have this effect working if you moved 3" to the side. Presumably it also degrades noticeably along the way to that 3" of displacement. Maybe I'm overestimating the size of this problem for most people (I am a little fidgety), but this seems pretty restrictive.
Also, a question: what's the overal view angle becoming with this directing of column light? I for one thought LCDs with a wide view angle were nice. It doesn't seem to me like the view angle on this one could be very good (while 3d), unless I'm mistaken about how this works. Speaking of which, how does it work? The stuff on Sharp's site is useless.
It also seems to me that the image would have to dim, unles somehow their "separation device" is refracting, rather than just blocking light. I don't know anything about LCDs, but gut instinct tells me it's probably just blocking.
Assuming I'm right on the last two, that's 3 strikes against the technology. If I'm not, the first one alone seems somewhat awful anyway. Will this really go anywhere? I'd be somewhat surprised.
People are naturally scared about their jobs, but this is not a particularly good reason to be scared (at least in semi-rational organizations (maybe we should be scared, but the problem still requires a closer look)).
Simply, if you are not one of these incompetents yourself, you will not be able to put even 1% down because you know too much and a large fraction of what you know will be less explicit than is reasonably easy to put to coherent, flowing prose. Furthermore, hopefully you'll be learning new stuff at some clip, so they'll constantly be a gap. However, this isn't the major reason not to fear the incompetent, the major reason not to fear the incompetent is that he is incompetent.
Such an incompetent reading your how tos, handy tips, cautionary notes, etc... will not be anything near a replacement of you because he lacks the implicit and/or foundational knowledge and the intelligence to make much sense of what you put out there except in the same context.
The two greater threats are your competant coworkers in combination with downsizing, and bright, but less experienced entry level folks. The degree of a threat they pose is related to how close they are to your level in other ways... sorry but you do have to differentiate yourself somehow. That really doesn't seem too harsh to me.
Further, if you like actually doing things, maybe even something new from time to time, it is far, far more enjoyable to work in an environment where necessary information is fairly easy to get at. I personally wouldn't trade that for a fiefdom, however secure, and I say this even though I am not in a stable work situation myself. I don't know, but certainly suspect that some of the more vocal people about this issue are incompetents themselves... they ARE replaceable with a couple dozen howtos so naturally don't want to write them.
Were this a just world where I was running things, I would want to take into acccount additions to the corporate knowledge base. It is productive work, and it does matter. OK, so you can only change future pay, and you can only do it on past information. So what? That's always the case. Past experience isn't a perfect predictor of the future, but it's not so bad, and I'd be just fine with compensating people partially in relation to how much information they made available to their peers and how useful it was to them. Granted, that's hard to determine, but it's worth trying.
You are right of course, and this comes out in countless other ways.
In the work I recently did at an unnamed very large software company for which I was fairly nicely paid I was on a box that didn't match the specs of the box I bought for myself, in 2000! When it had hardware problems I was given a noticeably slower machine, something more of the '98 vintage. That one died very suddenly, and I lost some work as a result. And then? Lots of cycles spent trying to fix a machine that you couldn't put on ebay because nobody would want to pay the shipping, and I was left in limbo. Finally I was permitted to go back onto my old machine, even though it was something that was really intended to be used as a server. Oh, and then another lower grade machine became available, so it was back to the '98 vintage again. Did I mention that I changed offices and assignments within 3 months, and these two things did not happen at the same time because of a shortage of CUBES? And what happened to basic office supplies? Why did they change the door code on the duplex printer and not tell anyone what the new code was, for fear that people would keep using ink and (less)paper? The first team I worked on had to coordinate server usage very carefully, not because servers were scarce, even though they weren't exactly top end (as you might've guessed by my 2000 vintage machine being among them). Oh, and they didn't have enough CD-Rs and couldn't get more. I found this out when asked to set up three identical boxes and was strongly advised not to burn a third install CD with one of the few remaining CD-Rs. (I did anyway and brought in more CD-Rs to replace them the next day).
My productivity could have been 1.5 - 2.5+X higher if resources hadn't have been viewed through a pinch the last penny funhouse mirror.
On a previous job I worked in a shared office where the AC cut in and out and the blinds were somewhat defunct so the afternoon sun came streaming into my eyes and sweat came streaming down my neck as the office temperatures climbed above 87 F.
In both cases, trying to get underneath this uncovered heinously factored and brutally rigid resource planning (becoming more so over time), politically funnelled funny money, and a lot of finger pointing. Sure recipies for success if I ever heard them.
I'm sure it's quite a point of pride for the engineers who worked on those marvelous spacecraft... it would be for me. Bravo.
That said, this is a story for two reasons. First and foremost, it is cute... a valient satellite greatly exceeds its creators expectations. Second, it reflects how impressive NASA used to be.
Now I don't doubt that there are many very smart people working there nowadays, but if nothing else, I can't imagine there being the enthusiam there once was and that inevitably effects the quality of work.
I really do want NASA to continue, provided that it pushes boundries. Keeping a satellite alive and kicking is neat, but it, or more satellites for a different purpose in earth orbit should not be all NASA has to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is pretty good. The reason I'd never go for it, in spite of enjoying video games, and enjoying the notion of being able to actually beat someone at one of them is this: Computer games come and go... for the most part rather quickly. Golf, however, in spite of equipment advances, is basically the same game it always was. That, and I don't pay for golf lessons either.
They have the brainpower, they have the funding, they have search engines and thus an inexaustible supply of data that they've found some loose relations among. Yet, how much are the boundries computer intelligence being pushed by these companies? Well the honest answer is, I don't know. Anyways, based on what's visible to Joe public, it doesn't look like much beyond better searching, better spam filtering, and a little bit in the way of better robustness in IT systems... things like that. I mean, nothing even worth a crumby Slashdot headline, what gives guys? Google sets is kind of interesting but it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to do anything with it in a long, long time. Any of these players could buy pretty much anything they want so there's no need to start at ground zero. Buy out Cyc, rewrite its inference engine to scale massively. Buy out some natural language parsing / translation places. Use some combination of these, wordnet, wikipedia, answers, howstuffworks, and your own maps of the web to do some incredibly cool things. Yes, they'll also be incredibly hard but if you don't even have the faith to pursue this seriously on the side, how can you really think of yourself as the leading software company in the world?
The sums involved here are so small that it doesn't make any difference in terms of compensating any development effort.
So, the story amounts to somebody wanting to bring attention to Open Source CMSes, and the fact that there's ANY MONEY INVOLVED AT ALL, is enough to attract attention in the Open Source world.
Doesn't this seem sad to anyone else?
(which it will, due to demand from China/India, though the timescale and severity is a big ?)
What will happen?
In the short term:
Traditional cars, but smaller, lighter, and with more efficient drivetrains?
Hybrids
Diesel in some mix with Biodiesel
Gasahol
In the long term:
Does anyone honestly really claim to know?
There are options, but there are bigger problems with infrastructure, distribution, and Joe the mechanic. That, and people (at least in America) will be very slow to give up the freedom to go anywhere, continuously enclosed, and on there own schedule.
Electric cars are an interesting possibility, I like the idea because of the flexibility it gives to use any means to generate the power. However, this latest announcement doesn't change me from being a skeptic. I suppose battery tech is getting better, but even a 250 mile range is going to limit adoption, heat tolerance and battery disposal are important concerns, and replacement cost on batteries is bad. That, and unless you can just plug your car into a standard outlet, there's a highly distributed infrastructure problem. Another poster made a pretty convincing case that limitations in the supply of lithium are a killer here. Finally, you wonder about the state of the power grids... you probably need to program a scheduler so it only pulls at night.
In the meantime, I'm doing fine in my regular grade sipping Focus.
It's only been costing me about 15c a mile and I'm being inclusive (gas, insurance, taxes, depreciation, maintenance, repairs).
I couldn't disagree more.
In detail:
--
If the Chinese people don't like the way their government is restricting their access to information then they have a moral obligation to overthrow that government, either peacefully via voting in the next election, or by force using a militia formed from the people.
--
I can't claim any special knowledge of Chinese politics, but I'm going to take a wild guess that the Communist party has things pretty well locked down or we wouldn't be talking about these sorts of issues 17 years after the massacre in Tiananmen square.
Leaving... form a militia! That doesn't work against a remotely a modern military... the machinery is orders of magnitude too expensive now, so all you have are terrorist tactics. Please say you don't support those. In any case, I surely don't.
--
By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China.
--
There are different ways for governance to change. You alluded to elections and revolution, but the first feels like a joke in this context, and typically the government you get after a revolution is ony occasionally better than the government prior and often worse. There is a more subtle, and more inevitable way for governance to change, and that is a widespread change in the current of thinking. This happens more gradually than one would hope for, but it does happen with more exposure to uncensored information and western attitudes in general. We can see it starting to pick up speed among the middle and upper classes in the major cities.
Not to say this is a reason to sit back complacently either here or in China, but condemning efforts to get information to the Chinese people is really wrong headed. The Soviet Union didn't collapse from independant militia attacking or any really democratic elections, and it seems laughable to suggest in retrospect. The undoing of the Soviet Union were the ideals of freedom wrapped in the glamorous image of American consumer culture. I expect, and I think most rational people with a sense of history expect China to be a more gradual repeat of the same process.
What does it say about your life when the difference between a superior search engine and an inferior search engine registers compared to having legs vs. not having legs?
I'm asking for help here, people.
You can use this, to a lesser extent, back on the car salesmen themselves (they're not remotely as gullible as some of who they sell to, but a sale "today" definitely gets them MUCH more eager to cut you a deal).
Do your homework on vehicle valuation and comparable vehicles for sale in the area before arriving, get a carfax, test drivability and features thoroughly, get it checked out by a mechanic, all that good stuff, or you're just asking to be suckered.
Then... throw out a low number that you're HAPPY with saying that it would get you to buy today, watch them squirm, stay firm when they back and forth, and if they're taking too long say the magic words: let me speak directly to your fleet manager. As long as your low number is remotely reasonable, you'll get it.
While mathematically these are points, we're doing ourself a great disservice to think of them as such. There is going to be a very large volume of space where the cancellation will be good enough that only ocassional and minor corrections would be necessary, and that's all that really matters. A constrained resource? Yes, but not to the point that it is likely to matter unless you're a population panic monger.
No, I don't advocate smoking, but I've found it rewarding to take breaks along with them, and just bring a coke or a mini bottle of OJ. Why? Smoke breaks (5-7 minutes) tend to be just about the right length for a solid psychological recharge that lasts an hour or so. I'm sure that's quite intentional on the part of cigarette makers. A little time away from the computer works far better in my experience than flipping over to email, slashdot, whatever. I take these breaks with smokers because if you don't have someone to go out away from the desk with, it can be hard not to feel a little silly. It's fun hanging around smokers when they're smoking because they're generally relaxed and chatty, and not quite so wound up in work then. You can relax along with them and NOT be killing yourself slowly. (Argue with me if you must... I do know that secondhand smoke is bad for you as well, but if you're outside and not immediately downwind and you're still worried about the risks, I maintain that you're just plain crazy) Finally, by virtue of smoking becoming somewhat rare in the modern workplace, hanging out with smokers is a way of casting a wider social network. Plus, the people tend to be more fun :-)
Let's be honest... we're not moving 1/1000th of 1 percent of that many people to settle anywhere off earth for a long time. It's more constructive to try and reduce the chances of global catastrophe here, and buy ourselves time (not to say we shouldn't keep working on fusion, we should, but I'm not under the illusion that this is coming soon).
How do we do this?
Most important is developing a foreign policy geared toward a more peaceful, less nuclear and biologically armed world. Kim Jong II scares me more than big rocks from space or yellowstone. Big fill in the gap here... I'm not especially wise in these ways. I do know, however, that there's no indication that's where we're headed, or that the current regimes in the developed world have primarily those goals in mind.
Wry comments about silly movies aside, researching and testing meteor/comet deflection also seems like a good idea. I even (shoot me) enjoyed The Core, though I certainly don't know of anything anyone has ever seriously proposed to deal with plate techtonics. If there is something that makes an iota of sense, research that, too.
There's an interesting contrast between my approach and the one I'm responding to and I think it reflects different underlying values.
You see, I don't care about there being some remnant of humanity in the case of 99.999%+ anihalation. Humanity has a pretty nasty record when you get down to it, and whatever life there is in the universe, if advanced enough to witness us in any detail, is unlikely to find much of worth to take from it.
I care about my life, the life of my family and friends. Because neither I nor they have special connections in the space industry or government, that means preserving life on earth. Anyone else like that idea?
I am in a similar situation... I am 24, and going to be married in a little over a month. I currently work on a moderately large customer specific extension to an already large IT application. Lots of things don't work as they should. There is not a truly satisfactory workaround every time. I am extremely fortunate that the client is savvy and reasonable, and my manager is likewise. If that were not the case, I would not just indefinitely and silently tough it out, hoping to be rewarded. Employees that do valuable work need to be kept. What most companies take for granted is that these employees need their current jobs even more. Their insensitivity to employees' lives is a result of that assumption. Corporations are not looking out for you, that's your responsibility. Always keep current anonymous resumes up on monster, dice, etc... If you have current, marketable skills, a good resume, and a record of success, you will get contacted from time to time, if you're lucky, frequently. Find out more about the positions that look good and interview. If you get an offer (or I suppose if you're REALLY sure you will, but I'd want to have two other employers REALLY interested before I'd feel safe), you're in a wonderful position. You'll probably notice your stress level going way down, even if things don't slow down at work... feeling trapped affects stress level in a big way. Now once you're in this position, never try and use quitting as a bluff (threaten to leave if the other job isn't as good or slightly better for you). I wouldn't even play the card if I could avoid it (remember that you want to see whether you want to keep working here, not just whether you're needed). However, once you do have this card in hand, you can feel much more free go to exactly the appropriate people within your company, and explain what you like about your situation and what could be improved, and as best as you can, suggest ways to improve matters without complaining. If you get positive feedback AND some action, great, stay. If not, it's up to you how to handle things... if there was no understanding that came of those conversations, you may wish to simply move on to that next job. If the understanding was there, things were not changing yet, but you thought the chance was pretty good that they could, you might want to let them know that it's very important for you to see these changes starting soon and see if there's any movement then. If so, great, but if not I'd wait till I had an offer in hand (if I didn't at the beginning of this process!), inform them that you have found another position that you believe is a better match for you (don't say it's a better position, even if it is), but hold off accepting the other offer for a couple days. You may find out at this point that they're truly desperate to keep you. If they sweeten the deal a whole lot, it ~may~ be worth staying (I'd definitely keep the resumes out there, though... things can turn sour quickly). If they just promise to try and sweeten the deal, or only sweeten it so much, and it's a hard decision at the end of the day, I'd suggest moving on... you only want to stay on if you can be enthusiastic about it (if you're anything less and they fear that, they may look for someone with their sights set lower to replace you). I definitely prefer informing them that you've found another position that may be better to ultimatums because if they do decide to keep you by sweetening the deal, they don't feel like they're buckling to demands... everything has a much more positive feel to it. Ah, career decisions and corporate politics! The things they don't teach you in school.
Wouldn't fly. That would be a windows slash. More slashdotters have strong feelings about that than politics.
Actually, it would be very interesting to see how far you could go the other way. Make the parts (down to the smallest level of granularity), their dimensions, weight, how they fit together, the tightness to take the bolts to, etc public domain. Have an honest and content rich manual, tutorials, faqs, discussion boards with expert input. Use common, or very easy to manufacture parts wherever possible. You have the ultimate car. Super mod-able, super repairable, yours in every way. The manufacturer can still make money by lower parts transportation and assembly costs. Of course, I'm dreaming, but it's fun.
I believe that there are several important concepts in the piece of software I am writing that legitimately deserve to be called intellectual property. How do you research existing Intellectual Property? I really have no idea, and would currently probably just go down to the local public library, ask and pray. Any advice on this? Also, does GPLing source code showing an implementation of an idea you'd like to have protected as Intellectual Property constitute abandoning claims to it as property?
Fairly evocative of the stock market, and so why should it be surprising that the corresponding companies act in the same way? Unless the CEO and top management are highly courageous, and actually knows they're doing it's difficult not to buckle to fashion and shareholder fears. Who's to say that they'll survive in their post long enough to be shown correct anyway? (And that assumes they even know what they're doing in the first place) When lacking vision, the mantra is reduce costs at all cost.
For example, shed whole divisions of your company. Layoff experienced workers esp. if they're nearing pension (if that exists), hire young (or just stop hiring). Move operations to India, China, Russia, wherever. Curtail most benefits. Replace offices with cubes, cubes with benches, benches with shared space or work at home. Banish most office supplies and guard the rest jealously.
Sadly, many who rise through the CEO ranks to bigger and bigger companies are the "courageous" ones who slash and burn everything they don't see paying off in 18 months (or 12 or even 6 depending).
It's not that some of these things aren't necessary under certain circumstances, but they are not without negative consequences and huge risks. IMHO, the thing to do here is similar to good investing strategy: play the contrarian. Keep experienced people around, they know things, can do things, and elevate the productivity of those around them. Hire on some of the zillions of unemployed or under-employed techies in the states. You can have your pick at the some of the best, or if you don't need quite that and if you want to do something more short term, you can get good people right now on the very, very cheap. Innovate, release products. Even if the market isn't ready yet, being ahead of the game will pay off later. Having kept good people on board and treated them with respect will pay off when they don't jump ship when things get better.
Now, how many companies are actually doing this?
Don't get me wrong, I like small, light laptops, and LCDs. Attention to form factor makes a lot of sense when you're lugging something around, or you want to have, say, some desk space.
Now, servers are another beast. They sit there and do one thing. It doesn't really matter where they sit, so within reasonable limits, their size doesn't matter. They should also pretty much sit in one place, so why is wireless a selling point?
Power consumption does make a difference cost wise but you're overpaying for this thing so much that you can pretty well throw cost arguments out the window.
That leaves heat and noise as the remaining concerns. For heat, just add some fans, it's not that hard, and you don't even need to do that if you're using the machine so lightly that the a 533 with 128 mb of ram will do ya. Why do you care about noise (within reasonable limits) again? It's a server, you can put it wherever you want! How many times do I have to repeat that?
What is this? It's a gimmick... say it's an affordable server and someone who doesn't know about alternatives will think it is, rather than the old, overpriced laptop without an LCD display that it really is.
My 2c anyways.
I haven't seen one of these things in person, but the tradeoffs seem fairly bad. They're directing light from alternating columns pixels to each eye. OK, but the separation between your eyes is not really that big... so presumably you couldn't really have this effect working if you moved 3" to the side. Presumably it also degrades noticeably along the way to that 3" of displacement. Maybe I'm overestimating the size of this problem for most people (I am a little fidgety), but this seems pretty restrictive. Also, a question: what's the overal view angle becoming with this directing of column light? I for one thought LCDs with a wide view angle were nice. It doesn't seem to me like the view angle on this one could be very good (while 3d), unless I'm mistaken about how this works. Speaking of which, how does it work? The stuff on Sharp's site is useless. It also seems to me that the image would have to dim, unles somehow their "separation device" is refracting, rather than just blocking light. I don't know anything about LCDs, but gut instinct tells me it's probably just blocking. Assuming I'm right on the last two, that's 3 strikes against the technology. If I'm not, the first one alone seems somewhat awful anyway. Will this really go anywhere? I'd be somewhat surprised.
People are naturally scared about their jobs, but this is not a particularly good reason to be scared (at least in semi-rational organizations (maybe we should be scared, but the problem still requires a closer look)).
Simply, if you are not one of these incompetents yourself, you will not be able to put even 1% down because you know too much and a large fraction of what you know will be less explicit than is reasonably easy to put to coherent, flowing prose. Furthermore, hopefully you'll be learning new stuff at some clip, so they'll constantly be a gap. However, this isn't the major reason not to fear the incompetent, the major reason not to fear the incompetent is that he is incompetent.
Such an incompetent reading your how tos, handy tips, cautionary notes, etc... will not be anything near a replacement of you because he lacks the implicit and/or foundational knowledge and the intelligence to make much sense of what you put out there except in the same context.
The two greater threats are your competant coworkers in combination with downsizing, and bright, but less experienced entry level folks. The degree of a threat they pose is related to how close they are to your level in other ways... sorry but you do have to differentiate yourself somehow. That really doesn't seem too harsh to me.
Further, if you like actually doing things, maybe even something new from time to time, it is far, far more enjoyable to work in an environment where necessary information is fairly easy to get at. I personally wouldn't trade that for a fiefdom, however secure, and I say this even though I am not in a stable work situation myself. I don't know, but certainly suspect that some of the more vocal people about this issue are incompetents themselves... they ARE replaceable with a couple dozen howtos so naturally don't want to write them.
Were this a just world where I was running things, I would want to take into acccount additions to the corporate knowledge base. It is productive work, and it does matter. OK, so you can only change future pay, and you can only do it on past information. So what? That's always the case. Past experience isn't a perfect predictor of the future, but it's not so bad, and I'd be just fine with compensating people partially in relation to how much information they made available to their peers and how useful it was to them. Granted, that's hard to determine, but it's worth trying.
You are right of course, and this comes out in countless other ways. In the work I recently did at an unnamed very large software company for which I was fairly nicely paid I was on a box that didn't match the specs of the box I bought for myself, in 2000! When it had hardware problems I was given a noticeably slower machine, something more of the '98 vintage. That one died very suddenly, and I lost some work as a result. And then? Lots of cycles spent trying to fix a machine that you couldn't put on ebay because nobody would want to pay the shipping, and I was left in limbo. Finally I was permitted to go back onto my old machine, even though it was something that was really intended to be used as a server. Oh, and then another lower grade machine became available, so it was back to the '98 vintage again. Did I mention that I changed offices and assignments within 3 months, and these two things did not happen at the same time because of a shortage of CUBES? And what happened to basic office supplies? Why did they change the door code on the duplex printer and not tell anyone what the new code was, for fear that people would keep using ink and (less)paper? The first team I worked on had to coordinate server usage very carefully, not because servers were scarce, even though they weren't exactly top end (as you might've guessed by my 2000 vintage machine being among them). Oh, and they didn't have enough CD-Rs and couldn't get more. I found this out when asked to set up three identical boxes and was strongly advised not to burn a third install CD with one of the few remaining CD-Rs. (I did anyway and brought in more CD-Rs to replace them the next day). My productivity could have been 1.5 - 2.5+X higher if resources hadn't have been viewed through a pinch the last penny funhouse mirror. On a previous job I worked in a shared office where the AC cut in and out and the blinds were somewhat defunct so the afternoon sun came streaming into my eyes and sweat came streaming down my neck as the office temperatures climbed above 87 F. In both cases, trying to get underneath this uncovered heinously factored and brutally rigid resource planning (becoming more so over time), politically funnelled funny money, and a lot of finger pointing. Sure recipies for success if I ever heard them.
I'm sure it's quite a point of pride for the engineers who worked on those marvelous spacecraft... it would be for me. Bravo. That said, this is a story for two reasons. First and foremost, it is cute... a valient satellite greatly exceeds its creators expectations. Second, it reflects how impressive NASA used to be. Now I don't doubt that there are many very smart people working there nowadays, but if nothing else, I can't imagine there being the enthusiam there once was and that inevitably effects the quality of work. I really do want NASA to continue, provided that it pushes boundries. Keeping a satellite alive and kicking is neat, but it, or more satellites for a different purpose in earth orbit should not be all NASA has to offer.