you ever thought of what would happen without government?
Lessee...
The government runs the vast majority of water and sewer plants. No clean water to drink. Raw sewage in our rivers and lakes.
The government controls the airways. Do you really want anarchy in the skies when you fly?
The government builds virtually all of the roads in the US. Want to go back to the days of the toll roads of the last century? (Do some historical research first.)
The government mandates most of the safety features on cars. Want to go back to the death traps of 1950s cars?
The government provides fire fighting, EMS, and police protection. Read up on what used to happen when firefighters were private.
So please, think before you drink any more Rush koolaid, OK? "Starving the beast" makes great rhetoric, but it's downright dumb as an idea and a way to live.
Broader point: I'm sick and tired of these language designers not giving us enough features. For the last 20 years I've been waiting for a language that will allow me to redefine keywords. If that too much to ask? What if I don't happen to like "for", or "while", or "return"?
Unless my memory fails me, SNOBOL4 could do this 30 years ago.
A company is not a real person. It cannot be harmed in any direct way (you can't beat it up, burn it, shoot it.)
Crime should be a crime against persons, not against companies. Companies are "persons" by a particular perversion of the law (at least in the US).
[quote]âoePiracy, counterfeiting and other intellectual property rights violations not only cost U.S. businesses jobs and billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, they can also pose significant health and safety risks to consumers,â[/quote]
Right. A kid in his basement modifies a Wii and this poses "a significant health and safety risk"??? WTF?
Piracy like this is mostly a victimless crime. It's a crime created artificially by a corporate culture. Crimes are supposed to be something that hurts real people directly. Piracy doesn't do that.
You must not have seen heavy makeup.... Try any of Avril Lavigne's followers.
Anyway, that's obviously a staged shot, so the makeup was applied by the photographer's studio. Not surprising. Heck, I've had more than that pancaked on my face - when they were doing marketing shots for a control panel I built. (And, yes, I'm a middle aged guy.)
I see... So all that texting and high school girls jabbering away is critical thinking, eh?
Cripes, I bet 99.999% of cell conversations in high school revolve around boy/girlfriends, getting high/drunk/laid, and assorted other fantasies.
Cell phones are a huge distraction and should be banned in schools. I think there should be a ceremonial anvil in front of school and the principal should, every week, smash all the confiscated cell phones during school assembly.
Heck, the school could probably auction off the whacks and raise money...
Further, many of the companies engaged in this practice are shells; they are incorporated, do the work, and promptly go bankrupt leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.
Road failure is sort-of binary - everything is fine until the failure, at which point all goes to hell pretty quickly. Not quite that simple, but pretty close - soil has a failure point which is sudden and catastrophic. The pavement will hold together for a while after the base and subbase have failed, but not long.
Now to your other point:
Americans in particular are willing to accept almost any amount of destruction as long as it happens someplace else. Rip the top off of a mountain in Apalachia and poison the river - that's OK as I can't see it from my house.
But god help you if you block the interstate that I drive for a few hours.
What "new tech"? So far I haven't seen anything in Vista or 7 that would make me say, "I gotta have that tech!"
To be fair, I haven't seen much in linux lately that would make me say that, either.
let's be honest: OS "tech" has hit maturity for most users. There really isn't anything truly exciting coming out - because there really isn't anything exciting left to be done unless the whole OS/UI undergoes a severe paradigm shift.
Unfortunately that's not going to happen because there's too much invested in the current tech.
I'm going to see how the adoption rates are for 7. I see a rocky road for MS; people are happy with XP, it's stable, and for most of us it's a f*cking desk. No amount of hype is going to convince me that I have to get a shinier pressboard and formica office desk; the one I have works just fine.
Heh. The first car I owned had carburators, a distributor with mechanical points, and all that jazz. You don't know Old School until you've had to deal with a crudded up carb!
I remember in the early days when they went to electronic ignition the spark plug wires couldn't take it either and would fail quickly - they'd get brittle, crack, and lose the ability to conduct. After a while, spark plug wires got better; I don't know anyone who actually replaces them unless it's a high-mileage vehicle (like my 1989 Trooper, about due for another set at 224K miles....)
As you say, the engineers will work this out, but not before some pain....
We're not talking gigahertz, 0.00001% error rate stuff. We're talking honking big pipe firing a few hundred times a second.
My first thought was, 20% loss? Who cares!??? Just stick a bigger laser on the other end!
Seriously, this is one of those things where power is good, and more power is better. Early ignition was pretty pitiful. Now electronic ignition is pretty much bullet proof.
I expect this to be like fuel injection, going from expensive trouble prone disaster to rock reliable. Once they figure it out, it'l be like injectors - maybe 200,000 mile service.
Honestly, I can't wait. I expect reciprocating engines will be with us a long, long time, burning some sort of liquid fuel.
Actually the law does hold them responsible. However, Law enforcement will go after big fish rather than little ones, knowing that the number of minimum wage workers in this economy is well-nigh infinite. You could put a thousand in jail, and all you'd do is destroy a bunch of families, but you wouldn't stop the criminal activity.
So it's much more cost effective to kill the company, put the execs in jail, and let the drones go.
Not many minimun wage earners have the resources to sit on their butt while their labor complaint winds through the courts for a dozen years.
Get out there in the dirt, show them worms. Put an apple on the sill and watch it rot. Boil an egg until it explodes. Shake a soda can and watch it blow up into a ball.
Science is all around you, it's active, it's alive, it's fun! They don't want to sit in front of the TV.
Your 5 year old may be old enough for Grossology, but whatever, Take them fishing, Watch birds. Climb a tree. Look at stuff with one eye closed.
You know, when I went to school they absolutely drilled us in bleeding edge techniques of the time. On graduating, I found that it took fully 15 years for the commercial world to catch up to my progamming style. (And, no the language is utterly irrelevant.)
Once OOP became common, I had to go and learn new concepts, only to find that they're really the old concepts.
There's only so many ways to do something. How you express it is really a matter of choice and toolkit available.
Learn the concepts; forget the language. Drill the theory, the ideas, the process, and allow the expression to come forth using whatever toolkit is current.
Management techniques change over time to relfect changing workforce and (hopefully) learning how to do things better.
Traditionally, management was a top-down, authority stays at the top and responsibility gets pushed down. Everything has to be approved at the highest levels of management, in the interest of "cost savings". Very 1980s approach to things.
There are still managers mired in this style, but it's ultimately less productive than hiring good people, training them, and then giving them the resources to do their job.
Managers must learn new techniques; management is not all about people management. It's also about using tools to plan work, to track work, and to present the results of that work. So you learn various ways to track the work. CPM is just a tiny part of that; there are other tools that can be used that do as good a job. For larger projects there are serious tools that track resources - projects that take thousands of tasks to accomplish.
So yes, managers (good ones) have to stay on top of the tools available, the techniques available, and figure out what they want to apply to the problems at hand.
I disagree with this very strongly. Ask anyone in the military; the best offices are those who came up through the ranks. They understand what the average mudfoot/swabbie/wingnut/jarhead has been through, and, frankly, have the balls to stand up to upper management.
Example: We were in Saudi, in the desert, in August. If you're not keeping up with geography, it's hot enough to melt a typical outside thermometer. My guys were doing heavy manual labor - building stuff. They all got camelbacks so they could drink on the job. Word came down that they could not wear the camelbacks as they did not match the uniform. I very politely ignored this and told my guys to keep using them. No one in upper mgt pushed it. Safety first.
Now a typical newbie officer would probably have followed this nonsense order. Me, I spent 10 years humping steel and dirt in all kinds of weather before getting commissioned, and I know what these guys go through, and I have enough common sense to say; "It's 140 degrees, these guys are doing heavy construction, and you want them to do what????"
The older managers also have a really good idea of what's possible and what isn't, and typically have the knowledge and the balls and the support of their people to stand up to PHBs up the line.
Back to the OP, ask the people you work with - would you make a good manager? Would they work for you? If not, what can you improve?
Well, it's much like tech. (As someone who has made the transition from tech to mgt to tech to mgt...)
It's easy to get stale in management and keep doing the same thing. The world changes, your employees change, technology changes. A manager has 2 roles: internal and external. Internally, you are looking to motivate your people, keep them on your team, keep them productive, keep them at the top of their game. Much like a football coach. Externally, you are the public face of your team; you act on their behalf, protect them as best as you can from the bad things that happen, get good assignments for them, and take the heat when things go down the crapper.
So as a manager, you have to understand the tech, the capabilities of your team, the problems they are dealing with enough to make a cogent case to upper management/clients/etc for reasonable goals, money, and time.
All this needs a skillset that's just as broad as the average techie, and it needs constant training. Too many managers fail at one or both of these roles, just as too many techies fail at their goals. Sure, the work still gets done but a lot more painfully.
That was my thought. Put a mag trainer in the cube/center/whatever, stick a bike on it, and pedal. You can still watch your monitors. You're right there. Heck, get a mag trainer that hooks up to your PC and get some visuals. Get it to lock up if any alarms go off. The possibilities of a computer controlled mag trainer in a NOC are endless!
Slashdot Mirror
you ever thought of what would happen without government? Lessee... The government runs the vast majority of water and sewer plants. No clean water to drink. Raw sewage in our rivers and lakes. The government controls the airways. Do you really want anarchy in the skies when you fly? The government builds virtually all of the roads in the US. Want to go back to the days of the toll roads of the last century? (Do some historical research first.) The government mandates most of the safety features on cars. Want to go back to the death traps of 1950s cars? The government provides fire fighting, EMS, and police protection. Read up on what used to happen when firefighters were private. So please, think before you drink any more Rush koolaid, OK? "Starving the beast" makes great rhetoric, but it's downright dumb as an idea and a way to live.
Broader point: I'm sick and tired of these language designers not giving us enough features. For the last 20 years I've been waiting for a language that will allow me to redefine keywords. If that too much to ask? What if I don't happen to like "for", or "while", or "return"?
Unless my memory fails me, SNOBOL4 could do this 30 years ago.
A company is not a real person. It cannot be harmed in any direct way (you can't beat it up, burn it, shoot it.) Crime should be a crime against persons, not against companies. Companies are "persons" by a particular perversion of the law (at least in the US).
[quote]âoePiracy, counterfeiting and other intellectual property rights violations not only cost U.S. businesses jobs and billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, they can also pose significant health and safety risks to consumers,â[/quote] Right. A kid in his basement modifies a Wii and this poses "a significant health and safety risk"??? WTF? Piracy like this is mostly a victimless crime. It's a crime created artificially by a corporate culture. Crimes are supposed to be something that hurts real people directly. Piracy doesn't do that.
You must not have seen heavy makeup.... Try any of Avril Lavigne's followers.
Anyway, that's obviously a staged shot, so the makeup was applied by the photographer's studio. Not surprising. Heck, I've had more than that pancaked on my face - when they were doing marketing shots for a control panel I built. (And, yes, I'm a middle aged guy.)
What does that have to do with the ipod?
I see... So all that texting and high school girls jabbering away is critical thinking, eh?
Cripes, I bet 99.999% of cell conversations in high school revolve around boy/girlfriends, getting high/drunk/laid, and assorted other fantasies.
Cell phones are a huge distraction and should be banned in schools. I think there should be a ceremonial anvil in front of school and the principal should, every week, smash all the confiscated cell phones during school assembly.
Heck, the school could probably auction off the whacks and raise money...
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/multimedia/2007/09/gallery_mountaintop_mining
Further, many of the companies engaged in this practice are shells; they are incorporated, do the work, and promptly go bankrupt leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.
Road failure is sort-of binary - everything is fine until the failure, at which point all goes to hell pretty quickly. Not quite that simple, but pretty close - soil has a failure point which is sudden and catastrophic. The pavement will hold together for a while after the base and subbase have failed, but not long.
Now to your other point:
Americans in particular are willing to accept almost any amount of destruction as long as it happens someplace else. Rip the top off of a mountain in Apalachia and poison the river - that's OK as I can't see it from my house.
But god help you if you block the interstate that I drive for a few hours.
What "new tech"? So far I haven't seen anything in Vista or 7 that would make me say, "I gotta have that tech!"
To be fair, I haven't seen much in linux lately that would make me say that, either.
let's be honest: OS "tech" has hit maturity for most users. There really isn't anything truly exciting coming out - because there really isn't anything exciting left to be done unless the whole OS/UI undergoes a severe paradigm shift.
Unfortunately that's not going to happen because there's too much invested in the current tech.
I'm going to see how the adoption rates are for 7. I see a rocky road for MS; people are happy with XP, it's stable, and for most of us it's a f*cking desk. No amount of hype is going to convince me that I have to get a shinier pressboard and formica office desk; the one I have works just fine.
Heh. The first car I owned had carburators, a distributor with mechanical points, and all that jazz. You don't know Old School until you've had to deal with a crudded up carb!
I remember in the early days when they went to electronic ignition the spark plug wires couldn't take it either and would fail quickly - they'd get brittle, crack, and lose the ability to conduct. After a while, spark plug wires got better; I don't know anyone who actually replaces them unless it's a high-mileage vehicle (like my 1989 Trooper, about due for another set at 224K miles....)
As you say, the engineers will work this out, but not before some pain....
We're not talking gigahertz, 0.00001% error rate stuff. We're talking honking big pipe firing a few hundred times a second.
My first thought was, 20% loss? Who cares!??? Just stick a bigger laser on the other end!
Seriously, this is one of those things where power is good, and more power is better. Early ignition was pretty pitiful. Now electronic ignition is pretty much bullet proof.
I expect this to be like fuel injection, going from expensive trouble prone disaster to rock reliable. Once they figure it out, it'l be like injectors - maybe 200,000 mile service.
Honestly, I can't wait. I expect reciprocating engines will be with us a long, long time, burning some sort of liquid fuel.
Actually the law does hold them responsible. However, Law enforcement will go after big fish rather than little ones, knowing that the number of minimum wage workers in this economy is well-nigh infinite. You could put a thousand in jail, and all you'd do is destroy a bunch of families, but you wouldn't stop the criminal activity.
So it's much more cost effective to kill the company, put the execs in jail, and let the drones go.
Not many minimun wage earners have the resources to sit on their butt while their labor complaint winds through the courts for a dozen years.
Get out there in the dirt, show them worms. Put an apple on the sill and watch it rot. Boil an egg until it explodes. Shake a soda can and watch it blow up into a ball.
Science is all around you, it's active, it's alive, it's fun! They don't want to sit in front of the TV.
Your 5 year old may be old enough for Grossology, but whatever, Take them fishing, Watch birds. Climb a tree. Look at stuff with one eye closed.
You know, when I went to school they absolutely drilled us in bleeding edge techniques of the time. On graduating, I found that it took fully 15 years for the commercial world to catch up to my progamming style. (And, no the language is utterly irrelevant.)
Once OOP became common, I had to go and learn new concepts, only to find that they're really the old concepts.
There's only so many ways to do something. How you express it is really a matter of choice and toolkit available.
Learn the concepts; forget the language. Drill the theory, the ideas, the process, and allow the expression to come forth using whatever toolkit is current.
Like I really my phone to tell me my wife is bitching at me, or the kids are whining...
http://elks.sourceforge.net/
Management techniques change over time to relfect changing workforce and (hopefully) learning how to do things better.
Traditionally, management was a top-down, authority stays at the top and responsibility gets pushed down. Everything has to be approved at the highest levels of management, in the interest of "cost savings". Very 1980s approach to things.
There are still managers mired in this style, but it's ultimately less productive than hiring good people, training them, and then giving them the resources to do their job.
Managers must learn new techniques; management is not all about people management. It's also about using tools to plan work, to track work, and to present the results of that work. So you learn various ways to track the work. CPM is just a tiny part of that; there are other tools that can be used that do as good a job. For larger projects there are serious tools that track resources - projects that take thousands of tasks to accomplish.
So yes, managers (good ones) have to stay on top of the tools available, the techniques available, and figure out what they want to apply to the problems at hand.
I disagree with this very strongly. Ask anyone in the military; the best offices are those who came up through the ranks. They understand what the average mudfoot/swabbie/wingnut/jarhead has been through, and, frankly, have the balls to stand up to upper management.
Example: We were in Saudi, in the desert, in August. If you're not keeping up with geography, it's hot enough to melt a typical outside thermometer. My guys were doing heavy manual labor - building stuff. They all got camelbacks so they could drink on the job. Word came down that they could not wear the camelbacks as they did not match the uniform. I very politely ignored this and told my guys to keep using them. No one in upper mgt pushed it. Safety first.
Now a typical newbie officer would probably have followed this nonsense order. Me, I spent 10 years humping steel and dirt in all kinds of weather before getting commissioned, and I know what these guys go through, and I have enough common sense to say; "It's 140 degrees, these guys are doing heavy construction, and you want them to do what????"
The older managers also have a really good idea of what's possible and what isn't, and typically have the knowledge and the balls and the support of their people to stand up to PHBs up the line.
Back to the OP, ask the people you work with - would you make a good manager? Would they work for you? If not, what can you improve?
Well, it's much like tech. (As someone who has made the transition from tech to mgt to tech to mgt...)
It's easy to get stale in management and keep doing the same thing. The world changes, your employees change, technology changes. A manager has 2 roles: internal and external. Internally, you are looking to motivate your people, keep them on your team, keep them productive, keep them at the top of their game. Much like a football coach. Externally, you are the public face of your team; you act on their behalf, protect them as best as you can from the bad things that happen, get good assignments for them, and take the heat when things go down the crapper.
So as a manager, you have to understand the tech, the capabilities of your team, the problems they are dealing with enough to make a cogent case to upper management/clients/etc for reasonable goals, money, and time.
All this needs a skillset that's just as broad as the average techie, and it needs constant training. Too many managers fail at one or both of these roles, just as too many techies fail at their goals. Sure, the work still gets done but a lot more painfully.
And then we can just GPL the whole thing....
A Beowulf cluster of these.... In tabs on your browser.
The government can't send you a 'check' unless they take the money from you first.
Sure they can. It's called deficit spending. They take it from your kids and give it to you.
That was my thought. Put a mag trainer in the cube/center/whatever, stick a bike on it, and pedal. You can still watch your monitors. You're right there. Heck, get a mag trainer that hooks up to your PC and get some visuals. Get it to lock up if any alarms go off. The possibilities of a computer controlled mag trainer in a NOC are endless!
You're absolutely right... In the industry, we call them PECs. In the regulatory world, they call them EPOCs. Go figure.