"The USA has a big advantage as long as everyone else keeps using the US dollar."
You've basically proven my point. The US dollar has been used world wide for such a long time because it is a relatively stable currency. Yes, the Federal Reserve manipulates the dollar but it does so knowing there are consequences.
Mass change to other currencies would have dire consequences for the US and so there is an incentive or "check" if you will, to behave. You don't recall all the freaking out that was going on a few months ago over the thought that the US might not make payments on its loans?
Theoretically at least, the US Government has to answer to its citizens and there are a couple hundred million of us. Further, even though the US is a "super power", there are still serious consequences for mucking with the dollar too much.
That can be true when they're really young. However, my son is now at an age where we can both learn stuff that will help me in my career and can have fun doing it. Lego Mindstorms or Arduino stuff is a blast.
For that matter things like swimming, sledding, snowball fights, etc are all worthwhile diversions that I can participate in freely as an adult with kids. I don't consider it time lost at all.
A lot of the time, - maybe even most of the time, my personal skill building exercises will benefit my organization as well. I'm OK with that. There are so many posts on slashdot about people finding themselves unemployed or in danger of being unemployed because their skills are out of date. I prefer not to rely on my employer to make sure my skills are relevant.
Fewer regulations mean more innovation, but it also runs the risk of making the race more about the development of the boats than the race itself. There's a line that needs to be walked. Though I miss the classic lines of the traditional 12 meter monohulls they used to race, it's amazing to see what can be done when you open the money spigots. These boats are amazing.
There are plenty of opportunities for people to race sailboats that are less about money. There are small strict one design classes where the boats are relatively inexpensive and from a performance perspective pretty much identical to each other when new or at least well taken care of. Modifications that can be made are severely restricted.
In fact if you just want to crew you can often do it for free if you live somewhere near where they race boats. Depending on the size of the boat and the seriousness of the competition, they will take people with no experience at all.
Microsoft's view was that the iPad and similar Android tablets were fine for media consumption but were really lacking when it came to creating. Having a physical keyboard without adding significant weight or bulk was a killer feature in their mind.
A lot of people felt that Microsoft did an excellent job in designing the keyboard. A key point they missed though is that once you stick a keyboard on a tablet like that there's not much distinction between it and a small laptop. So why not just get a laptop?
One of the nice things about a tablet is that you don't need an flat surface available in order to use it. Microsoft's own Surface commercials show a bunch of people sitting around a table. A tablet that requires a desk in order to take advantage of one its key features isn't going to set the world on fire.
However, there is one major issue with this plan that only a carrier would understand, and I bet a city carrier would more understand. And that's street parking.
You don't give us enough credit. We've had people over, and had someone parked in front of the mail box. That day our mail didn't go out (had the flag up), and no mail came in.
In neighborhoods built before 2 or even 1 car families were common, often the only place to park a vehicle is on the street in front of your house, or your neighbors house. Not being able to deliver the mail would be a daily occurence.
I grew up in a rural area and spent a few years living in the burbs before moving to the city.
I always thought that the delivery to the door we have in the city was an unnecessary (but very nice) throwback that the Post Office just continued to do out of tradition. But you're right, curbside delivery will not work where I live now. Two car garages are rare and some houses in the area have no off-street parking at all. These are neighborhoods built well before we became so dependent on the automobile. Curbside mailboxes will either be blocked by parked cars or there will be inadequate parking.
Cluster boxes will be necessary but sighting them won't be easy and won't happen without a fight in areas that weren't designed for them.
So you sell the RT at $99 or whatever and let's say it works, - RT gains a little traction. How much are customers going to be willing to pay for the next version? I don't think you can keep selling them at $99, and I think you'd see sales drop dramatically if you suddenly start charging enough to cover costs or make a small profit.
Some (a small majority) of tablets are just PCs in a tablet form factor even now.
I kind of doubt that actually. Maybe in terms of models but terms of actual sales I think iPads, Kindle Fires, Galaxy Notes, etc have blown away PC based tablets.
The PC is doomed, blah blah blah. All the grandma's are buying tablets. Anyone who does any real work are buying PC's or already have what they need. Nothing to see here.
What's funny about this is that 20 years ago my boss was saying the same thing. Just replace "PC" with mini or mainframe computer. The lines between PC and mini-computer got blurred and I don't know if there really is such a beast as a modern mini computer. It would just be called a server. The thing is that there are far more servers than there every were mini-computers. While the PC won't meet exactly the same fate, I think the number of devices that get referred to as "PCs" will continue to decline. Most "personal" computing will occur on much smaller devices.
In our office today we have more laptops than PCs and a large chunk of electronic communication now occurs on smartphones. Tablets are starting to get used in the field where laptops never quite worked as well as hoped. PCs (workstations really) are reserved for people that need more computational power. Folks who don't need much computing power and don't need a computer outside the office get terminals.
It's probably been about 5 years since I've had a PC or Mac desktop at home.
Which is fine if the two slots for bikes aren't already taken and if you don't forget to grab your bike off the front of the bus when you get off.;)
And of course in between the time of riding some where and getting on the bus you have keep your bike someplace. With the bike share system, that's a non issue. You slide it into a stall at the station and then you're done with it.
Though this doesn't always apply, I got a coupon book with my subscription that I had a bunch of coupons I could actually use. I got my first subscription cheap because I signed up at the end of the season. Since a lot of the coupons were set to expire, they gave me another book at the start of the next season. The net cost for me was less than $0 when all was said and done.
I don't live in NYC but we do have a bike share system in Minneapolis. I ride my own bike every day to work and felt much the same way as you did but I've since realized there are some significant advantages to using a bike share system.
The biggest for me is that I can get around town without having to lock up my own bike somewhere and risk getting it stolen or damaged.
Another is cost. An annual subscription to the bike share system is $60 or so but if you're savvy you can get them for $45 or less. My subscription this year cost me $20. That's far less than what an annual bike tuneup would cost IF you don't need any parts.
Then there is the space saving thing you alluded to. Though you may be fine with a bike taking up space on a wall in your apartment, not everyone is. Depending on what floor you live on, getting the bike into your apartment may not be at all convenient even if you have the space. And while yes, you could lock it up outside, again it is at greater risk of getting stolen or damaged.
Agile places a high value communication, especially face to face communication. You can pick up things face to face that you can't in an email.
And yet, somehow, projects like, oh, the Linux kernel, the Apache HTTPD server, and just about every other open-source project out there seem to be able to muddle along without face-to-face communication.
Besides projects are supposed to be a team effort and as a member of the team you should care what other people are doing and what issues they may be running into.
That's your job as project lead.
... and no need to put added pressure on any dev by suddenly making daily inquiries about their progress.
Then you explain to them why you are making such inquiries and, if they'd like them to stop, what they should do about it.
Open source projects are a different beast that don't operate under the same constraints that a commercial project does. You lose some efficiencies in terms of communication but for projects like the Linux kernel or Apache you have potentially an unlimited pool of developers and much more flexibility as to what gets delivered when. It should also be pointed out that for every open source success story like Apache or Linux there's lots of stuff that dies on the vine or never gets off the ground.
Look, it's clear that you're not happy with an Agile approach and some people just don't work well in that environment. It seems to me though that people who only give a crap about their part of the project and resist any face to face communication in favor of email are limited in the sorts of projects they can work on successfully.
If they've spent 2 days on something that should have taken a few hours, you as the project lead know there's trouble.
Then why can't people instead send a daily e-mail to you alone as the project manager. Why force everybody together and hear about stuff about which they couldn't care less?
Just the fact that a developer on a daily basis has to stand up in front of their peers identify what they did and what they are currently working on helps them stay on task...
In other words, it's a way to keep people from slacking off. Surely as a project lead, you know who your good, self-motivated developers are and who your slackers (or potential slackers) are. If that's the case, then simply fire the slackers or, slightly less drastic, require daily e-mails from only the slackers and leave the better developers alone.
Agile places a high value communication, especially face to face communication. You can pick up things face to face that you can't in an email. Besides projects are supposed to be a team effort and as a member of the team you should care what other people are doing and what issues they may be running into. You may be able to help or learn from them. That won't happen if all you're doing is staying holed up in your cube sending a daily status email.
As a project lead I'm not just concerned about keeping the slackers honest. Sometimes very dedicated, very good, but also very prideful developers can be reluctant to volunteer that they're struggling with something. Sometimes the road blocks aren't technical but political. If the meetings are regular, then there's no need to single anybody out (which can have bad consequences) and no need to put added pressure on any dev by suddenly making daily inquiries about their progress.
I should also stress that in my view, agile works best in fairly small teams. I'd never have a standup meeting with 15 or 20 people. It's going to be detrimental rather than helpful if they are anything but brief.
You're doing it wrong. The daily standups should be about 5 minutes and are mainly for communicating problems encountered, if any.
As I understand it, in a stand-up, one is supposed to say what one did yesterday (I don't care), what one is going to do today (again, I don't care), and what road-blocks, if any, you have (and, unless your problems affect me doing my work, I still don't care). And it never takes 5 minutes. You also have to factor in the time of just getting everybody in the same place at the same time.
If you discover a road-block at, say, 2pm, what do you do? Just sit there twiddling your thumbs for the rest of the day because the next stand-up at which you can bring this to anybody's attention isn't until tomorrow? You should just either walk over to me or e-mail me now. If you do that, then maybe we can solve the problem by, say, 3pm. Why wait until the next stand-up? If everybody did this with problems, your claimed reason for needing stand-ups evaporates.
Stand-ups are both annoying and pointless. Agile is nothing more than modern-day snake-oil.
As a project lead I found a lot of value in stand up meetings. Not all devs like them, that is for sure. The thing to remember though is just because an individual developer may find little value in it for them personally, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the success of the project as a whole.
If you encounter a road block at 2:00 by all means, try to resolve it, but the truth is not all developers will and often they don't have to, it can wait and they move on to something else. Then there are developers who will naturally put things off anyway (sometimes too long) or will bang away at a problem forever when they could simply ask someone else. The beauty of the stand up meeting is that problems are quickly identified even if the dev doesn't specifically mention them. If they've spent 2 days on something that should have taken a few hours, you as the project lead know there's trouble.
Just the fact that a developer on a daily basis has to stand up in front of their peers identify what they did and what they are currently working on helps them stay on task and helps you as the project lead nip problems in the bud. It also keeps everyone involved informed as to who is doing what and the current state of things as a whole. All by holding one short meeting. And if you're really doing agile, the developers are located in the same area and assembling them shouldn't take anytime at all.
The only thing that makes it not a sailing boat is that I happened to use land to make the engineering easier to describe. We can trivially change it back into a sailing boat by saying "it's a really really wide catamaran, and the mast is attached to a travelling base.
Even if you could build such a thing that would actually strong enough and flexible enough to deal with all the forces involved while still being able to float and steer, it would no longer be fast enough to accomplish the goal. Imagine what it would take just to have a mast mounted to a moveable base which would have to have a keel whose angle could be set independently of the direction of the boat.
I'd argue that you can't call it a sailboat unless it uses sails.;-)
I still think the blackbird is unique because it's not using a wind turbine to drive the wheels. It's using the wheels to spin the propeller, - which spin the wheels.
This machine can head straight downwind and exceed the speed of the wind itself. A sailboat can't do that unless it's using some method other than a sail for propulsion.
A sailboat can reach a point downwind faster than the wind speed by traveling at angles to the wind but that is different.The blackbird is doing something else.
Sailboats only go faster than the wind on a reach, not directly downwind. Eventually the apparent wind goes down to zero so there's no more (forward pushing) force acting on the sail. When sailing across the wind on a reach, the force on the sail remains even as the boat accelerates.
That's what makes this thing unique, it can go downwind faster than the wind itself is going.
Slashdot Mirror
"The USA has a big advantage as long as everyone else keeps using the US dollar."
You've basically proven my point. The US dollar has been used world wide for such a long time because it is a relatively stable currency. Yes, the Federal Reserve manipulates the dollar but it does so knowing there are consequences.
Mass change to other currencies would have dire consequences for the US and so there is an incentive or "check" if you will, to behave. You don't recall all the freaking out that was going on a few months ago over the thought that the US might not make payments on its loans?
So again, I ask what keeps GHash.IO in line?
Theoretically at least, the US Government has to answer to its citizens and there are a couple hundred million of us. Further, even though the US is a "super power", there are still serious consequences for mucking with the dollar too much.
Who does GHash.IO answer to?
Yes, I am over 40 but it's January in Minnesota. It's not that unusual.
It was -21 when I hopped on my bike to ride to work this morning. It's been about 4 years since it's been this cold but it's hardly historic.
That can be true when they're really young. However, my son is now at an age where we can both learn stuff that will help me in my career and can have fun doing it. Lego Mindstorms or Arduino stuff is a blast.
For that matter things like swimming, sledding, snowball fights, etc are all worthwhile diversions that I can participate in freely as an adult with kids. I don't consider it time lost at all.
A lot of the time, - maybe even most of the time, my personal skill building exercises will benefit my organization as well. I'm OK with that. There are so many posts on slashdot about people finding themselves unemployed or in danger of being unemployed because their skills are out of date. I prefer not to rely on my employer to make sure my skills are relevant.
Plus, it's fun.
Fewer regulations mean more innovation, but it also runs the risk of making the race more about the development of the boats than the race itself. There's a line that needs to be walked. Though I miss the classic lines of the traditional 12 meter monohulls they used to race, it's amazing to see what can be done when you open the money spigots. These boats are amazing.
There are plenty of opportunities for people to race sailboats that are less about money. There are small strict one design classes where the boats are relatively inexpensive and from a performance perspective pretty much identical to each other when new or at least well taken care of. Modifications that can be made are severely restricted.
In fact if you just want to crew you can often do it for free if you live somewhere near where they race boats. Depending on the size of the boat and the seriousness of the competition, they will take people with no experience at all.
Microsoft's view was that the iPad and similar Android tablets were fine for media consumption but were really lacking when it came to creating. Having a physical keyboard without adding significant weight or bulk was a killer feature in their mind.
A lot of people felt that Microsoft did an excellent job in designing the keyboard. A key point they missed though is that once you stick a keyboard on a tablet like that there's not much distinction between it and a small laptop. So why not just get a laptop?
One of the nice things about a tablet is that you don't need an flat surface available in order to use it. Microsoft's own Surface commercials show a bunch of people sitting around a table. A tablet that requires a desk in order to take advantage of one its key features isn't going to set the world on fire.
However, there is one major issue with this plan that only a carrier would understand, and I bet a city carrier would more understand. And that's street parking.
You don't give us enough credit. We've had people over, and had someone parked in front of the mail box. That day our mail didn't go out (had the flag up), and no mail came in.
In neighborhoods built before 2 or even 1 car families were common, often the only place to park a vehicle is on the street in front of your house, or your neighbors house. Not being able to deliver the mail would be a daily occurence.
I grew up in a rural area and spent a few years living in the burbs before moving to the city.
I always thought that the delivery to the door we have in the city was an unnecessary (but very nice) throwback that the Post Office just continued to do out of tradition. But you're right, curbside delivery will not work where I live now. Two car garages are rare and some houses in the area have no off-street parking at all. These are neighborhoods built well before we became so dependent on the automobile. Curbside mailboxes will either be blocked by parked cars or there will be inadequate parking.
Cluster boxes will be necessary but sighting them won't be easy and won't happen without a fight in areas that weren't designed for them.
So you sell the RT at $99 or whatever and let's say it works, - RT gains a little traction. How much are customers going to be willing to pay for the next version? I don't think you can keep selling them at $99, and I think you'd see sales drop dramatically if you suddenly start charging enough to cover costs or make a small profit.
The USPS example makes a pretty good case actually. A British study found that the U.S. postal service is the most efficient in the world.
The problem is that snail mail is dated technology and our reliance on it is waning.
Some (a small majority) of tablets are just PCs in a tablet form factor even now.
I kind of doubt that actually. Maybe in terms of models but terms of actual sales I think iPads, Kindle Fires, Galaxy Notes, etc have blown away PC based tablets.
The PC is doomed, blah blah blah. All the grandma's are buying tablets. Anyone who does any real work are buying PC's or already have what they need. Nothing to see here.
What's funny about this is that 20 years ago my boss was saying the same thing. Just replace "PC" with mini or mainframe computer. The lines between PC and mini-computer got blurred and I don't know if there really is such a beast as a modern mini computer. It would just be called a server. The thing is that there are far more servers than there every were mini-computers. While the PC won't meet exactly the same fate, I think the number of devices that get referred to as "PCs" will continue to decline. Most "personal" computing will occur on much smaller devices.
In our office today we have more laptops than PCs and a large chunk of electronic communication now occurs on smartphones. Tablets are starting to get used in the field where laptops never quite worked as well as hoped. PCs (workstations really) are reserved for people that need more computational power. Folks who don't need much computing power and don't need a computer outside the office get terminals.
It's probably been about 5 years since I've had a PC or Mac desktop at home.
Which is fine if the two slots for bikes aren't already taken and if you don't forget to grab your bike off the front of the bus when you get off. ;)
And of course in between the time of riding some where and getting on the bus you have keep your bike someplace. With the bike share system, that's a non issue. You slide it into a stall at the station and then you're done with it.
Though this doesn't always apply, I got a coupon book with my subscription that I had a bunch of coupons I could actually use. I got my first subscription cheap because I signed up at the end of the season. Since a lot of the coupons were set to expire, they gave me another book at the start of the next season. The net cost for me was less than $0 when all was said and done.
I don't live in NYC but we do have a bike share system in Minneapolis. I ride my own bike every day to work and felt much the same way as you did but I've since realized there are some significant advantages to using a bike share system.
The biggest for me is that I can get around town without having to lock up my own bike somewhere and risk getting it stolen or damaged.
Another is cost. An annual subscription to the bike share system is $60 or so but if you're savvy you can get them for $45 or less. My subscription this year cost me $20. That's far less than what an annual bike tuneup would cost IF you don't need any parts.
Then there is the space saving thing you alluded to. Though you may be fine with a bike taking up space on a wall in your apartment, not everyone is. Depending on what floor you live on, getting the bike into your apartment may not be at all convenient even if you have the space. And while yes, you could lock it up outside, again it is at greater risk of getting stolen or damaged.
And yet, somehow, projects like, oh, the Linux kernel, the Apache HTTPD server, and just about every other open-source project out there seem to be able to muddle along without face-to-face communication.
That's your job as project lead.
Then you explain to them why you are making such inquiries and, if they'd like them to stop, what they should do about it.
Open source projects are a different beast that don't operate under the same constraints that a commercial project does. You lose some efficiencies in terms of communication but for projects like the Linux kernel or Apache you have potentially an unlimited pool of developers and much more flexibility as to what gets delivered when. It should also be pointed out that for every open source success story like Apache or Linux there's lots of stuff that dies on the vine or never gets off the ground.
Look, it's clear that you're not happy with an Agile approach and some people just don't work well in that environment. It seems to me though that people who only give a crap about their part of the project and resist any face to face communication in favor of email are limited in the sorts of projects they can work on successfully.
Then why can't people instead send a daily e-mail to you alone as the project manager. Why force everybody together and hear about stuff about which they couldn't care less?
In other words, it's a way to keep people from slacking off. Surely as a project lead, you know who your good, self-motivated developers are and who your slackers (or potential slackers) are. If that's the case, then simply fire the slackers or, slightly less drastic, require daily e-mails from only the slackers and leave the better developers alone.
Agile places a high value communication, especially face to face communication. You can pick up things face to face that you can't in an email. Besides projects are supposed to be a team effort and as a member of the team you should care what other people are doing and what issues they may be running into. You may be able to help or learn from them. That won't happen if all you're doing is staying holed up in your cube sending a daily status email.
As a project lead I'm not just concerned about keeping the slackers honest. Sometimes very dedicated, very good, but also very prideful developers can be reluctant to volunteer that they're struggling with something. Sometimes the road blocks aren't technical but political. If the meetings are regular, then there's no need to single anybody out (which can have bad consequences) and no need to put added pressure on any dev by suddenly making daily inquiries about their progress.
I should also stress that in my view, agile works best in fairly small teams. I'd never have a standup meeting with 15 or 20 people. It's going to be detrimental rather than helpful if they are anything but brief.
As I understand it, in a stand-up, one is supposed to say what one did yesterday (I don't care), what one is going to do today (again, I don't care), and what road-blocks, if any, you have (and, unless your problems affect me doing my work, I still don't care). And it never takes 5 minutes. You also have to factor in the time of just getting everybody in the same place at the same time.
If you discover a road-block at, say, 2pm, what do you do? Just sit there twiddling your thumbs for the rest of the day because the next stand-up at which you can bring this to anybody's attention isn't until tomorrow? You should just either walk over to me or e-mail me now. If you do that, then maybe we can solve the problem by, say, 3pm. Why wait until the next stand-up? If everybody did this with problems, your claimed reason for needing stand-ups evaporates.
Stand-ups are both annoying and pointless. Agile is nothing more than modern-day snake-oil.
As a project lead I found a lot of value in stand up meetings. Not all devs like them, that is for sure. The thing to remember though is just because an individual developer may find little value in it for them personally, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the success of the project as a whole.
If you encounter a road block at 2:00 by all means, try to resolve it, but the truth is not all developers will and often they don't have to, it can wait and they move on to something else. Then there are developers who will naturally put things off anyway (sometimes too long) or will bang away at a problem forever when they could simply ask someone else. The beauty of the stand up meeting is that problems are quickly identified even if the dev doesn't specifically mention them. If they've spent 2 days on something that should have taken a few hours, you as the project lead know there's trouble.
Just the fact that a developer on a daily basis has to stand up in front of their peers identify what they did and what they are currently working on helps them stay on task and helps you as the project lead nip problems in the bud. It also keeps everyone involved informed as to who is doing what and the current state of things as a whole. All by holding one short meeting. And if you're really doing agile, the developers are located in the same area and assembling them shouldn't take anytime at all.
Other than a startup, I think it's rare for any innovation to come from the executives.
The only thing that makes it not a sailing boat is that I happened to use land to make the engineering easier to describe. We can trivially change it back into a sailing boat by saying "it's a really really wide catamaran, and the mast is attached to a travelling base.
Even if you could build such a thing that would actually strong enough and flexible enough to deal with all the forces involved while still being able to float and steer, it would no longer be fast enough to accomplish the goal. Imagine what it would take just to have a mast mounted to a moveable base which would have to have a keel whose angle could be set independently of the direction of the boat.
What you're describing is not a sailboat, and I think you'd have some serious engineering problems to tackle in order to make a working example. ;-)
I'd argue that you can't call it a sailboat unless it uses sails. ;-)
I still think the blackbird is unique because it's not using a wind turbine to drive the wheels. It's using the wheels to spin the propeller, - which spin the wheels.
This machine can head straight downwind and exceed the speed of the wind itself. A sailboat can't do that unless it's using some method other than a sail for propulsion.
A sailboat can reach a point downwind faster than the wind speed by traveling at angles to the wind but that is different.The blackbird is doing something else.
Sailboats only go faster than the wind on a reach, not directly downwind. Eventually the apparent wind goes down to zero so there's no more (forward pushing) force acting on the sail. When sailing across the wind on a reach, the force on the sail remains even as the boat accelerates.
That's what makes this thing unique, it can go downwind faster than the wind itself is going.