(Parent had the second post, mods. NOT redundant.)
The OSS thing is something that I hear a lot, and I have a certain amount of sympathy for...I use a lot of OSS myself, and my primary skillz are of the *nix variety. Where it fits, you should absolutely put it in. You might be able to ditch your windows servers, and remove part of your headache at least.
But it's really unlikely you'll be able to convince people to give up their desktop apps, especially once they've had time to learn them. Licenses there will have to be obtained, or not as the case may be.
All you can do is go to the higher ups and lay out the entire situation. If they don't care about the consequences, have them put it in writing to CYA, and then decide whether you want to trust that YA is truly C'd, and whether you want to add "Installer of Illegal Software" on to your CV. That's all you can do.
In my experience, the smaller the company, the more pirated software you find. If it's one guy working out of his house, it'll be lucky if he's actually using his own internet connection, more less software that he actually owns.
Now queue 500 posts saying, "ZOMG, replace it all with OSS."
I did that too (SP Consulting). The problem there was that they'd call me to ask for references about...Me.
Mind you, even a cursory read would have told them that the only person likely to answer that number was me, especially since it was the same number I gave them as my personal number. I was careful to give numbers for places where I'd done work so they could call and confirm my work there, but I don't think anyone ever called those people.
Obviously I agree; lying your way in is fine if all you ever want is that job. But if you ever plan on moving up, you can't move up from that rotten foundation.
Eventually someone will give you a chance, and it's better to wait for that chance, than it is to try and leap ahead.
Yea, it's a lifestyle thing. You have to do a lot of networking, and like moving around a lot, and not mind constantly thinking about the next thing...
I tend to settle. I don't like having to constantly look, and I really don't like having all the shakeups, and different teams. It was a bit worse for me because I specialized in updating code bases where the code was mostly generated by one person, and that person was generally no longer employed by the company. Lot of bad feelings there.
Agreed. I had people look at my freelance experience like it was irrelevant:
HR: "I see here you worked for [company] for only 3 months"
Me: "It was contract work. I was on a team that built an inventory system for them that uses RFID to track over 1,000,000 discrete pieces of inventory, do automatic ordering, etc. We completed it on time, and all got bonuses. The floor guys liked it so much they threw us a barbeque."
HR: "So your work wasn't good enough for them to hire you full time?"
Well, though obviously I can't advocate that approach, it's frankly not a bad idea. Your first hurdle is HR, and HR wants 5 years of this and 6 years of that, and they are going to toss everything that doesn't conform to those standards.
I've seen plenty of incompetent people lie their way through HR, so it definitely works. Now, if you do that, and get hired and it turns out you don't know what you're doing, you can expect your coworkers to turn on you big time. Nothing worse than an incompetent coworker: it's better to have no one at all.
That's what they call "materialistic determinism": basically its whether or not the laws of nature dictate your current and future actions (as opposed to a God, or whatever).
I still think its wanking. Not because it may not be true, but because, true or false, we have no other way of living our lives. We have to live as if our choices are ours.
Free will is an important idea in ethics because it touches on intentionality. If someone points a gun at your family and tells you to shoot someone else, that's generally considered to be an extenuating circumstance.
Philosophical determinism, on the other hand, isn't quite as important. The whole idea of ethics rests on the notion that we are in control of our own actions. If we're not, then there is no ethical angle. Note that this is different from the first case: you still have a choice there.
Do you really walk around thinking you don't have free will?
Intuitively we grasp that our actions have consequences, and that, in order to get the consequences we want, we have to choose the right actions.
We all do stupid things, and a lot of people try to pass off the responsibility for their actions to other people, but as a society we have decided to hold each accountable for their own deeds.
I can't believe he's spending 6 weeks on "If we have free will then so do things that we interact with." I wouldn't think that was meat enough for a good paper, more less six weeks of lectures...Though I guess that's snarky, since I've read innumberable goddamn books about free will, even one's with this guy in 'em (Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennet, had a long bit about the Game o' Life.)
Oh, it's worse than that, though you touched on the actual reasoning.
Free will is one of those damn pseudoproblems that crept into the discourse when we started arguing about religion. Basically belief in God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) opens the door to the problem of evil, and the only way to get out of the problem of evil without removing one of the big three attributes of God is to give people free will: to explain why people do bad things.
So even having to pretend like you have free will is ridiculous. It's a fake problem with no actual solution that gives us nothing.
Even if I did choose to change something about my life, it would have no bearing on free will.
The problem with free will is whether you have it or whether you don't it makes absolutely zero difference in your life (we're talking philosophical free will here, not material, so no one give me the snarky "I'm in jail you insensitive clod" response).
Everyone makes decisions with the implicit belief that their decisions matter. Now, if we have free will, then they actually do. If we don't have free will, then they actually don't. Regardless, you make the same damn decision, and it will have the same consequences.
So why the eternal wanking over whether or not we possess a property that cannot be measured and doesn't effect our lives in any way?
Now all we have to do is prove that people have free will, something people have been trying to do for a thousand years, and then we'll know that particles have free will and by extension, the whole universe!
Jesus Christ what a waste of time. Proving free will is like trying to prove the immortal soul, except, if you proved the immortal soul you get all this interesting life-after-death crap, and if you prove free will you get the comfort of knowing that all your stupid decisions are your stupid decisions.
Yep yep. Buying a new cert for every subdomain is wildly expensive, so these sorts of errors happen reasonably often.
In a lot of cases the subdomain may be separated from the main domain only for possible load balancing issues, so it's doubly not worth getting a specific cert for a subdomain which may never take off.
In the end it's a problem because the consumer gets used to accepting bad certs as a matter of course, and that leads to people accepting "capitolone.com" instead of "capitalone.com". Basically the registrars need to be pimp slapped a bit: certificate registration shouldn't cost anywhere near what it does, certificates should be purchasable for whole domains, etc.
Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system
on
The 100 Degree Data Center
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're like the 5th person I've seen make this point.
If you stuck a thermometer in your mouth and it said 100 degrees, the technical term for that is "fever". If it was a mere 5 degrees higher, it would be a very serious fever.
Given clothing and such, most offices are kept below 80 degrees all the time, to maintain a comfortable working environment. This temperature gradient allows for an effective transition of heat, and keeps most people from breaking a sweat.
To keep your body at a nice 37C it needs to be able to dissipate heat, something it will not be able to do efficiently in a 100 degree room. You will sweat like a pig. God forbid you've got a server open when you're sweating: your whole body becomes a conductor, every drop of sweat would have the potential to cause damage to sensitive equipment. You will tire much faster, with predictable effects on concentration and coordination.
In short, I can't imagine a less hospitable atmosphere for working on computer equipment than a room with a temperature of 100F degrees or higher.
Hell, you're not much safer if you're just driving a rationally sized car. I view that combination at about the same threat level as the redneck with the high powered rifle and the 12 pack of Coors.
Both of them are treating a dangerous weapon with a casual contempt that puts other peoples lives in danger. I find that to be...irritating.
Brown Recluse venom isn't neurotoxic, it's necrotic. If his legs rotted and fell off, I'd think it was possibly due to a bite from a brown recluse. Starting to work again? Doesn't sound likely.
I would think it is equally plausible that he fell and it knocked something back into alignment, or he's been showing a long term improvement that wasn't quite to the detection threshold before.
Attributing the improvement to the spider bite is very thin.
And problem solving ability is more useful when you're young anyway, because there are so many problems that you don't know the solution to. Your brain is working overtime, all the time, trying to process crazy new information.
My first mainframe admin job, I lived in a heightened state of awareness, like a 20 point buck during deer season. Every time the system hiccuped or some COBOL job crapped itself I had this adrenaline response...It was off the charts in my previous experience. That weight of hundreds of people and millions of dollars was terrifying.
Now? It's old hat. Where I would have been running around and wracking my brain, I go get a cup of coffee, check the logs, and fix the problem. There's no panic, there's no high-end problem solving even, because I've already solved those problems in the past, I just need to apply that experience to the current problem.
The thing is, that's life. As you move through life, the ability to react immediately to never-before-experienced situations should decline in favor of the ability to apply experience to a familiar problem.
You see what I'm saying? The sort of problem solving that's declining isn't as useful to an adult as the ability to constructively apply experience. It is pejorative to refer to it as an overall decline in problem solving abilities; it's a decline in a type of problem solving ability.
Bit of a flamebait headline, eh? I know I'm not mentally as fast as my 3-year old (watching his little brain hum is a bit awe-inspiring...hard to believe I ever learned at that pace), but at the same time my actual skills are vastly more advanced.
Likewise, I'm sure I was more mentally agile at 18 than I am now at 30, but I know for a fact at 18 I wasn't even a tenth the coder I am now: some of the things I remember struggling with are trivial now, and my productivity is dramatically higher.
So yea, youth and energy are nice, but they fade as experience comes to the fore, and experience carries you until the real mental infirmities kick in.
Slashdot Mirror
(Parent had the second post, mods. NOT redundant.)
The OSS thing is something that I hear a lot, and I have a certain amount of sympathy for...I use a lot of OSS myself, and my primary skillz are of the *nix variety. Where it fits, you should absolutely put it in. You might be able to ditch your windows servers, and remove part of your headache at least.
But it's really unlikely you'll be able to convince people to give up their desktop apps, especially once they've had time to learn them. Licenses there will have to be obtained, or not as the case may be.
Flamebait? Oh come on, that's a Funny for sure.
All you can do is go to the higher ups and lay out the entire situation. If they don't care about the consequences, have them put it in writing to CYA, and then decide whether you want to trust that YA is truly C'd, and whether you want to add "Installer of Illegal Software" on to your CV. That's all you can do.
In my experience, the smaller the company, the more pirated software you find. If it's one guy working out of his house, it'll be lucky if he's actually using his own internet connection, more less software that he actually owns.
Now queue 500 posts saying, "ZOMG, replace it all with OSS."
I did that too (SP Consulting). The problem there was that they'd call me to ask for references about...Me.
Mind you, even a cursory read would have told them that the only person likely to answer that number was me, especially since it was the same number I gave them as my personal number. I was careful to give numbers for places where I'd done work so they could call and confirm my work there, but I don't think anyone ever called those people.
Obviously I agree; lying your way in is fine if all you ever want is that job. But if you ever plan on moving up, you can't move up from that rotten foundation.
Eventually someone will give you a chance, and it's better to wait for that chance, than it is to try and leap ahead.
Yea, it's a lifestyle thing. You have to do a lot of networking, and like moving around a lot, and not mind constantly thinking about the next thing...
I tend to settle. I don't like having to constantly look, and I really don't like having all the shakeups, and different teams. It was a bit worse for me because I specialized in updating code bases where the code was mostly generated by one person, and that person was generally no longer employed by the company. Lot of bad feelings there.
Agreed. I had people look at my freelance experience like it was irrelevant:
HR: "I see here you worked for [company] for only 3 months"
Me: "It was contract work. I was on a team that built an inventory system for them that uses RFID to track over 1,000,000 discrete pieces of inventory, do automatic ordering, etc. We completed it on time, and all got bonuses. The floor guys liked it so much they threw us a barbeque."
HR: "So your work wasn't good enough for them to hire you full time?"
Me: "...It was a contract job."
HR: "I'll just put, 'No' how about that?"
Well, though obviously I can't advocate that approach, it's frankly not a bad idea. Your first hurdle is HR, and HR wants 5 years of this and 6 years of that, and they are going to toss everything that doesn't conform to those standards.
I've seen plenty of incompetent people lie their way through HR, so it definitely works. Now, if you do that, and get hired and it turns out you don't know what you're doing, you can expect your coworkers to turn on you big time. Nothing worse than an incompetent coworker: it's better to have no one at all.
That's what they call "materialistic determinism": basically its whether or not the laws of nature dictate your current and future actions (as opposed to a God, or whatever).
I still think its wanking. Not because it may not be true, but because, true or false, we have no other way of living our lives. We have to live as if our choices are ours.
Please, I could have gotten that conclusion from Sartre in the 1930's. There's nothing new in this paper.
Free will is an important idea in ethics because it touches on intentionality. If someone points a gun at your family and tells you to shoot someone else, that's generally considered to be an extenuating circumstance.
Philosophical determinism, on the other hand, isn't quite as important. The whole idea of ethics rests on the notion that we are in control of our own actions. If we're not, then there is no ethical angle. Note that this is different from the first case: you still have a choice there.
...
Do you really walk around thinking you don't have free will?
Intuitively we grasp that our actions have consequences, and that, in order to get the consequences we want, we have to choose the right actions.
We all do stupid things, and a lot of people try to pass off the responsibility for their actions to other people, but as a society we have decided to hold each accountable for their own deeds.
I can't believe he's spending 6 weeks on "If we have free will then so do things that we interact with." I wouldn't think that was meat enough for a good paper, more less six weeks of lectures...Though I guess that's snarky, since I've read innumberable goddamn books about free will, even one's with this guy in 'em (Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennet, had a long bit about the Game o' Life.)
Oh, it's worse than that, though you touched on the actual reasoning.
Free will is one of those damn pseudoproblems that crept into the discourse when we started arguing about religion. Basically belief in God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) opens the door to the problem of evil, and the only way to get out of the problem of evil without removing one of the big three attributes of God is to give people free will: to explain why people do bad things.
So even having to pretend like you have free will is ridiculous. It's a fake problem with no actual solution that gives us nothing.
Even if I did choose to change something about my life, it would have no bearing on free will.
The problem with free will is whether you have it or whether you don't it makes absolutely zero difference in your life (we're talking philosophical free will here, not material, so no one give me the snarky "I'm in jail you insensitive clod" response).
Everyone makes decisions with the implicit belief that their decisions matter. Now, if we have free will, then they actually do. If we don't have free will, then they actually don't. Regardless, you make the same damn decision, and it will have the same consequences.
So why the eternal wanking over whether or not we possess a property that cannot be measured and doesn't effect our lives in any way?
Now all we have to do is prove that people have free will, something people have been trying to do for a thousand years, and then we'll know that particles have free will and by extension, the whole universe!
Jesus Christ what a waste of time. Proving free will is like trying to prove the immortal soul, except, if you proved the immortal soul you get all this interesting life-after-death crap, and if you prove free will you get the comfort of knowing that all your stupid decisions are your stupid decisions.
Well there you have it. A new breakthrough in the area of free will and our lives are...exactly the same.
Yep yep. Buying a new cert for every subdomain is wildly expensive, so these sorts of errors happen reasonably often.
In a lot of cases the subdomain may be separated from the main domain only for possible load balancing issues, so it's doubly not worth getting a specific cert for a subdomain which may never take off.
In the end it's a problem because the consumer gets used to accepting bad certs as a matter of course, and that leads to people accepting "capitolone.com" instead of "capitalone.com". Basically the registrars need to be pimp slapped a bit: certificate registration shouldn't cost anywhere near what it does, certificates should be purchasable for whole domains, etc.
You're like the 5th person I've seen make this point.
If you stuck a thermometer in your mouth and it said 100 degrees, the technical term for that is "fever". If it was a mere 5 degrees higher, it would be a very serious fever.
Given clothing and such, most offices are kept below 80 degrees all the time, to maintain a comfortable working environment. This temperature gradient allows for an effective transition of heat, and keeps most people from breaking a sweat.
To keep your body at a nice 37C it needs to be able to dissipate heat, something it will not be able to do efficiently in a 100 degree room. You will sweat like a pig. God forbid you've got a server open when you're sweating: your whole body becomes a conductor, every drop of sweat would have the potential to cause damage to sensitive equipment. You will tire much faster, with predictable effects on concentration and coordination.
In short, I can't imagine a less hospitable atmosphere for working on computer equipment than a room with a temperature of 100F degrees or higher.
You know who I block? Doubleclick. Adserv. Realmedia. All those shit-eaters.
If you sell an ad for your own site, I'll see it just fine and you can keep more of the profit.
I'd far rather have someone from another country here doing the work here than just having the work go to another country.
Don't think it can't happen.
Hell, you're not much safer if you're just driving a rationally sized car. I view that combination at about the same threat level as the redneck with the high powered rifle and the 12 pack of Coors.
Both of them are treating a dangerous weapon with a casual contempt that puts other peoples lives in danger. I find that to be...irritating.
Brown Recluse venom isn't neurotoxic, it's necrotic. If his legs rotted and fell off, I'd think it was possibly due to a bite from a brown recluse. Starting to work again? Doesn't sound likely.
I would think it is equally plausible that he fell and it knocked something back into alignment, or he's been showing a long term improvement that wasn't quite to the detection threshold before.
Attributing the improvement to the spider bite is very thin.
So the BBC can't do flamebait? Come on.
And problem solving ability is more useful when you're young anyway, because there are so many problems that you don't know the solution to. Your brain is working overtime, all the time, trying to process crazy new information.
My first mainframe admin job, I lived in a heightened state of awareness, like a 20 point buck during deer season. Every time the system hiccuped or some COBOL job crapped itself I had this adrenaline response...It was off the charts in my previous experience. That weight of hundreds of people and millions of dollars was terrifying.
Now? It's old hat. Where I would have been running around and wracking my brain, I go get a cup of coffee, check the logs, and fix the problem. There's no panic, there's no high-end problem solving even, because I've already solved those problems in the past, I just need to apply that experience to the current problem.
The thing is, that's life. As you move through life, the ability to react immediately to never-before-experienced situations should decline in favor of the ability to apply experience to a familiar problem.
You see what I'm saying? The sort of problem solving that's declining isn't as useful to an adult as the ability to constructively apply experience. It is pejorative to refer to it as an overall decline in problem solving abilities; it's a decline in a type of problem solving ability.
Bit of a flamebait headline, eh? I know I'm not mentally as fast as my 3-year old (watching his little brain hum is a bit awe-inspiring...hard to believe I ever learned at that pace), but at the same time my actual skills are vastly more advanced.
Likewise, I'm sure I was more mentally agile at 18 than I am now at 30, but I know for a fact at 18 I wasn't even a tenth the coder I am now: some of the things I remember struggling with are trivial now, and my productivity is dramatically higher.
So yea, youth and energy are nice, but they fade as experience comes to the fore, and experience carries you until the real mental infirmities kick in.