I think that is why it was appealing and contraversial, it asked (loaded) questions, people on both sides of the gun debate drew thier own conclusions. I think I can understand why you didn't comprehend it properly, the questions didn't sink in because guns are part of your culture. Having grown up in a country where only lunatics wander around with handguns I have a similar problem. I simply don't comprehend the US obsession with gun ownership.
Nearly all the good doco's I can recall are made to fit a one hour TV time slot or are in "parts". Some notable exceptions are F.9/11 and "Born Free" (big hit in the 60's). The Penguin stuff was also covered in David Attenborough's "Life in the Freezer", as is normal for an Attenborough doco, the pictures were unique and awsome. Maybe this mixed with a bit of human emotion is what kindled the public's interest in Penguins.
I find the biggest problem with doco's is that interesting subjects often get treated like they do in the classroom, mono-tone presenters, long rambling scripts and pathetic visual aids. They are great if you want to fall asleep on the couch but absolutely useless for engaging the general public's attention.
Something like this that "humanises" a trully remarkable behaviour is bound to do well with the "family" market. The mega-hit "Lion King" was inspired by a very good doco depicting the rivalry between Lions and Hyeina's[sic]. Unfortunately alot of parents won't take thier kids to see Zebra's getting ripped apart by blood soaked Lion's.
It's not a power station, it is a small reactor used mainly for medical supplies. Currently they are trying to figure out where to burry the waste from the last 30 years of operation. Of course every state and territory does not want it burried in thier desert.
"Interestingly enough, there was an article some time back about turning things invisible by painting them with a black paint that absorbs almost all light. Because the paint does not reflect light for your eyes to see, you effectively cannot see the object."
That explains why the Mafia drive around in black limo's.
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says man, "the bable fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of it like that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. - Douglas Adams, HHGTTG.
DNA can only tell the difference between known species that are very closely related. Many birds have diverse plumage in, what we think, is the same species. Birds pay alot of attention to plumage when picking a mate, the FTA gives an example of how speciation may come about because of UV's role in sexual selection. The research should be followed up to see how large UV's role is. Maybe it will settle some long running Taxonomy disputes but there needs to be more research into the suspect breeding habits, Taxonomy is based on more than just the plumage (think domestic pidgeon).
Nature does not seem to have such precise groupings, it has a huge range of individual organisims with thier own unique DNA. What happens to the "common-sense" notion of species when applied to asexual organisims? In the case of something like a virus we even get confused about how to distinguish between "life" and "non-life".
The bottom line is that the concept of a "species" is a category made up by humans, not a law of nature. Sex, clan and species are human categories that are important because of very deep phycological reasons.
"..the person maintaining the mail server is no more or less important than the person who makes sure the air conditioner is working correctly"
The responsibility for maintaining the "mail server" rests with the CIO who normally sits on the board of directors.
OTOH: The AC is usually the landlord's concern.
Excellent FP! I spent 15 years "digging ditches" before spending another 15 yrs "sipping lattes". I have never written a pearl script but I appreciate the knowlage that my proven ability to "work it out" enables me to swap one well paid job for another whenever I feel like it.
The very first thing that spun me out about "office" bosses as compared to a "dirt" boss was that they said "please" and "thank-you". The idea that a boss would let you manage your time without a clock card was also a new experience.
To All the wasted talent out there:
If you think someone is under-estimating your talent, then quit. If you can't afford to risk quiting because, say, your boss won't stop you, or you will have trouble getting another job. Then it's likely you are full of yourself, and that, rather than the job, is making you miserable.
"I think you misunderstand what CMM et al, are all about."
I think you underestimate my experience in software development.
I belive your bad experiences are due to a common mistake many bussiness make, ie: CMM being enfored from "on high" using a few contractors to "mentor" under-qualified people as the "quality assurance" people, ie: The PHB's want to tack quality on at the end of a project, the rest of the staff can keep churning out code. To you it seems a waste of time because some "quality" person is constantly fussing about style over content (header, footer, etc). The worst example I have encoutered was a 16 page functional spec for a one line config change. When implemented like that CMM is a total waste of effort that does nothing but convert junior staff into senior PHB's.
A crappy CMM implementation does not mean CMM is useless, it simply means the "quality" person has a lot of power but very little insight. The result is everyone else does thier best to ignore or even antagonise them. That kind of implementation does nothing but confuse and frustrate the people doing the "real" work. CMM is about repeatable and consistent process not checklists, the level determines the scope of the consistency (project, dept, enterprise, ect).
CMM is designed so that third parties can determine what standards (if any) have been applied to the project or organisation as a whole. It does not mandate that you create a gazillion checklists, it asks for proof that you have done what you said you were planning to do.
CMM is an extremely simple concept, just look at the bullet points for the five levels and that's pretty much all the meat there is. However, implementing the concept is much more difficult than it appears, mainly because "mentoring" software engineers is akin to hearding cats. If the "cats" are not seeing benifits after a year, then it is not thier fault or the fault of CMM. The blame rests with management and thier inability to see the inherent difficulty of imposing a proffesional engineering process onto people with years of experience doing it "the old way", (The old way: Ironically this sort of thing was already mature in the mainframe practices of the 60's). Also many times consultants are brought in for a short time, they have no time to pick out the good bits from the "old way" so they attempt to force a "template solution".
BTW: If you don't use CMM "et al", how can your prospective customer's gauge your ability to do the job on time and on budget? OTOH: If you do use CMM "et al", how do you convince them you have stuck to the standards without the use of independent quality audits?
From a personal perspective, I like to imagine software has been tested to death by totally anal people with checklists before I find my life depends on it.
A common political wisdom is the story of the two ice-cream sellers (political parties) that start selling ice-cream at opposite ends of the beach. The theory goes that after a while both sellers will have moved to the same spot in the middle of the beach in an attempt to get the majority of people to walk to thier stand to buy ice-cream.
What seperates theory from fact is motivation, agression, deception, cultral-reflexes and all the other things that make real people more than "consumers".
You make excellent points about the universal connection most of us have as regards to the pleasures of sex. It should be celebrated, enjoyed and shared. What you have failed to adress is the universal taboo most of us have with regards to adults having sex with pre-pubecent childeren. Children can grasp the notion of sex early, (as long as they don't think you are fighting), like everything that is presented as normal they will simply accept it as "common-sense". But that does not mean they understand or experience the same emotions as someone who is sexually mature. Yes, I think our culture should do a 180 degree turn on it's attitude to sex and violence in the media. But...
As someone who was married for 20years to a victim of drunken incest and violence for the first 16yrs of her life. I support a tax on sexual media that will assist in hunting down "rock spiders". These people are sick and there sickness can spread a cancer onto the "souls" of thier victims that lasts a lifetime.
Children should learn sex from playing "mum & dad" and asking questions not from a 200lb drunken slob drooling all over them. The internet has done more than anything else to flush out people who participate in this activity for profit or any other motive (eg:Demark, France). I say the taxation should stay and the "verifying of identity" crap should cease. Most of all, society needs to look deep into the motives behind those pushing and preserving "shameful-sex" attitudes toward humans, that IN THIER OWN MINDS AND BODY, are ready, willing and able to bonk thier brains out.
Summary: Search is what google does, data is what they are collecting, picking winners will never be perfected.
I belive there is a difference between the person who discovered, say the shell sort algorithim, and the many others who have used it as part of less general algorithims (ie: an application). To me it is like the distinction between pure and applied math.
To be good at one of the branches does not automatically mean you are good at the other. There seems to be less pure programmers than there are applied, but the rarest beastie is one that excells at both.
Having a string of letters behind your name is no gaurentee that you are any good at anything other than studying and getting published in obscure journals, OTOH: In some cases years of experience amount to squat because the industry has moved faster than thier specialised corner of it. A genius scale concept can pop up in almost anyone, anywhere at anytime, but to be able to recognise the value or even the novelty of an algorithim, say efficient error correction, you need at least some formal trainning in maths and science. This is not my personal bias, large bussiness and institutions demand a related degree or substantial experience (preferably both), some will mix in a few biolgist and other completely unrelated degrees. The ones that land in the guts of a large research or development project are almost exclusively BSc's or higher and often the token biologist is also a competent programmer.
If google is able to recognise the best people in all 4 possible categories of pure and applied programers then it should be a snap for a company built on search algorithims to interview as many people as they can and keep skiming the cream via natural turnover. From personal experience at interviewing I know it is hard to judge someones potential when they are obviously competent and experienced, but each interview is also an opportunity to refine your selection and interview techniques by tracking who goes where and contributes what. Theoretically the more you interview the better you should become at picking winners, but as they say, "everything works perfectly in the theory department".
"The only problem I ever ran into with it was to do with 3.x's horrendous multi-tasking."
Win3.x did not have multitasking, it had a message driven GUI that, (if used properly), gave the illusion of multi-tasking. You could get exclusive control of the machine by simply not returning from the message loop.
The 3.x application I was working on was the client end for a large telco's job dispatch system (I also worked on the middleware that ran on a hanfull of NT3.51 boxes, the server end was HPUX). The application ran on tablet PC's and laptops using wireless ip comms (yes way back in '95), it even had an auto update feature (saved the Telco $2M in labour costs per client upgrade). We had 8000 captive users in all corners of Australia that connected via GSM, Sattelite, PSTN or Radio. It was replaced after 7 years of service by handhelds and a web application that ironically took a coule of years to become as stable as the 3.1 client. The real reason the PHB's spent $100M on hardware and software was so that they could franchise the repair/intsall work and recoup $600M from the sale of the redundant depots (real estate).
The strangest production bug I came across was X++ incremented a counter by 3!!! I never found the root cause for that one (I could see it in the disassembled code of the binary but a recompile produced the correct instructions). To see an example of how much MS have improved, try doing anything to a 100+ page document via word on 3.x
"I guess the key to Win9x stability is to not run any software"
A stand alone anything with a low workload is great for stability but is only usefull in limited situations.
"Would end users choose unix based systems over windows based systems given the full freedom of choice and knowledge that applications could run on either?"
Writing commercial grade applications that use a single code base for both *nix and Windows is not that difficult, simply avoid platform specific API's such as MFC. If you cannot avoid them then seperate that part of the code from the rest of the application and you will still end up with ~80% common code.
The expensive (and boring) part is comprehensive testing of the application on multiple versions of multiple platforms.
Bussiness is by definition about people cooperating with each other to make a living, it is normally considered bad bussiness to cooperate with one's competitors. In some cases (eg:price fixing), it is actually illegal.
I'm sure that if you cooperated with MS, (ie:paid them $hitloads), they in turn would cooperate with you.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't believe your own hype."
Good advice.
"The only reason Moore joined the NRA was because he wanted to run for the NRA presidency and force it to support gun control."
An NRA member, BOY SCOUT and meglomaniac all at the same time huh? Had you bothered to watch BfC you would have known this.
I think that is why it was appealing and contraversial, it asked (loaded) questions, people on both sides of the gun debate drew thier own conclusions. I think I can understand why you didn't comprehend it properly, the questions didn't sink in because guns are part of your culture. Having grown up in a country where only lunatics wander around with handguns I have a similar problem. I simply don't comprehend the US obsession with gun ownership.
Nearly all the good doco's I can recall are made to fit a one hour TV time slot or are in "parts". Some notable exceptions are F.9/11 and "Born Free" (big hit in the 60's). The Penguin stuff was also covered in David Attenborough's "Life in the Freezer", as is normal for an Attenborough doco, the pictures were unique and awsome. Maybe this mixed with a bit of human emotion is what kindled the public's interest in Penguins.
I find the biggest problem with doco's is that interesting subjects often get treated like they do in the classroom, mono-tone presenters, long rambling scripts and pathetic visual aids. They are great if you want to fall asleep on the couch but absolutely useless for engaging the general public's attention.
Something like this that "humanises" a trully remarkable behaviour is bound to do well with the "family" market. The mega-hit "Lion King" was inspired by a very good doco depicting the rivalry between Lions and Hyeina's[sic]. Unfortunately alot of parents won't take thier kids to see Zebra's getting ripped apart by blood soaked Lion's.
"And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time..."
Please give credit to Grandpa Simpson when you quote him.
"....their one and only power plant...."
It's not a power station, it is a small reactor used mainly for medical supplies. Currently they are trying to figure out where to burry the waste from the last 30 years of operation. Of course every state and territory does not want it burried in thier desert.
"Interestingly enough, there was an article some time back about turning things invisible by painting them with a black paint that absorbs almost all light. Because the paint does not reflect light for your eyes to see, you effectively cannot see the object."
That explains why the Mafia drive around in black limo's.
Your thinking of patents.
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says man, "the bable fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of it like that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. - Douglas Adams, HHGTTG.
DNA can only tell the difference between known species that are very closely related. Many birds have diverse plumage in, what we think, is the same species. Birds pay alot of attention to plumage when picking a mate, the FTA gives an example of how speciation may come about because of UV's role in sexual selection. The research should be followed up to see how large UV's role is. Maybe it will settle some long running Taxonomy disputes but there needs to be more research into the suspect breeding habits, Taxonomy is based on more than just the plumage (think domestic pidgeon).
Nature does not seem to have such precise groupings, it has a huge range of individual organisims with thier own unique DNA. What happens to the "common-sense" notion of species when applied to asexual organisims? In the case of something like a virus we even get confused about how to distinguish between "life" and "non-life".
The bottom line is that the concept of a "species" is a category made up by humans, not a law of nature. Sex, clan and species are human categories that are important because of very deep phycological reasons.
Employed.
"It's the other 10% I (sometimes) worry about..."
Honest and dumb make up 10% of the population? Obviously evolution is a factor here.
"When I was 18 my dad was so out of touch, but over the last 3 years he has really wised-up alot!" - Unknown.
"..the person maintaining the mail server is no more or less important than the person who makes sure the air conditioner is working correctly"
The responsibility for maintaining the "mail server" rests with the CIO who normally sits on the board of directors.
OTOH: The AC is usually the landlord's concern.
"Sometimes as I sit in my cramped cubicle ... I think of what it would be like to herd sheep in New Zealand."
Huh? You want to be a sheep dog?
Excellent FP! I spent 15 years "digging ditches" before spending another 15 yrs "sipping lattes". I have never written a pearl script but I appreciate the knowlage that my proven ability to "work it out" enables me to swap one well paid job for another whenever I feel like it.
The very first thing that spun me out about "office" bosses as compared to a "dirt" boss was that they said "please" and "thank-you". The idea that a boss would let you manage your time without a clock card was also a new experience.
To All the wasted talent out there:
If you think someone is under-estimating your talent, then quit. If you can't afford to risk quiting because, say, your boss won't stop you, or you will have trouble getting another job. Then it's likely you are full of yourself, and that, rather than the job, is making you miserable.
"I think you misunderstand what CMM et al, are all about."
I think you underestimate my experience in software development.
I belive your bad experiences are due to a common mistake many bussiness make, ie: CMM being enfored from "on high" using a few contractors to "mentor" under-qualified people as the "quality assurance" people, ie: The PHB's want to tack quality on at the end of a project, the rest of the staff can keep churning out code. To you it seems a waste of time because some "quality" person is constantly fussing about style over content (header, footer, etc). The worst example I have encoutered was a 16 page functional spec for a one line config change. When implemented like that CMM is a total waste of effort that does nothing but convert junior staff into senior PHB's.
A crappy CMM implementation does not mean CMM is useless, it simply means the "quality" person has a lot of power but very little insight. The result is everyone else does thier best to ignore or even antagonise them. That kind of implementation does nothing but confuse and frustrate the people doing the "real" work. CMM is about repeatable and consistent process not checklists, the level determines the scope of the consistency (project, dept, enterprise, ect).
CMM is designed so that third parties can determine what standards (if any) have been applied to the project or organisation as a whole. It does not mandate that you create a gazillion checklists, it asks for proof that you have done what you said you were planning to do.
CMM is an extremely simple concept, just look at the bullet points for the five levels and that's pretty much all the meat there is. However, implementing the concept is much more difficult than it appears, mainly because "mentoring" software engineers is akin to hearding cats. If the "cats" are not seeing benifits after a year, then it is not thier fault or the fault of CMM. The blame rests with management and thier inability to see the inherent difficulty of imposing a proffesional engineering process onto people with years of experience doing it "the old way", (The old way: Ironically this sort of thing was already mature in the mainframe practices of the 60's). Also many times consultants are brought in for a short time, they have no time to pick out the good bits from the "old way" so they attempt to force a "template solution".
BTW: If you don't use CMM "et al", how can your prospective customer's gauge your ability to do the job on time and on budget? OTOH: If you do use CMM "et al", how do you convince them you have stuck to the standards without the use of independent quality audits?
From a personal perspective, I like to imagine software has been tested to death by totally anal people with checklists before I find my life depends on it.
A common political wisdom is the story of the two ice-cream sellers (political parties) that start selling ice-cream at opposite ends of the beach. The theory goes that after a while both sellers will have moved to the same spot in the middle of the beach in an attempt to get the majority of people to walk to thier stand to buy ice-cream.
What seperates theory from fact is motivation, agression, deception, cultral-reflexes and all the other things that make real people more than "consumers".
You make excellent points about the universal connection most of us have as regards to the pleasures of sex. It should be celebrated, enjoyed and shared. What you have failed to adress is the universal taboo most of us have with regards to adults having sex with pre-pubecent childeren. Children can grasp the notion of sex early, (as long as they don't think you are fighting), like everything that is presented as normal they will simply accept it as "common-sense". But that does not mean they understand or experience the same emotions as someone who is sexually mature. Yes, I think our culture should do a 180 degree turn on it's attitude to sex and violence in the media. But...
As someone who was married for 20years to a victim of drunken incest and violence for the first 16yrs of her life. I support a tax on sexual media that will assist in hunting down "rock spiders". These people are sick and there sickness can spread a cancer onto the "souls" of thier victims that lasts a lifetime.
Children should learn sex from playing "mum & dad" and asking questions not from a 200lb drunken slob drooling all over them. The internet has done more than anything else to flush out people who participate in this activity for profit or any other motive (eg:Demark, France). I say the taxation should stay and the "verifying of identity" crap should cease. Most of all, society needs to look deep into the motives behind those pushing and preserving "shameful-sex" attitudes toward humans, that IN THIER OWN MINDS AND BODY, are ready, willing and able to bonk thier brains out.
Summary: Search is what google does, data is what they are collecting, picking winners will never be perfected.
I belive there is a difference between the person who discovered, say the shell sort algorithim, and the many others who have used it as part of less general algorithims (ie: an application). To me it is like the distinction between pure and applied math.
To be good at one of the branches does not automatically mean you are good at the other. There seems to be less pure programmers than there are applied, but the rarest beastie is one that excells at both.
Having a string of letters behind your name is no gaurentee that you are any good at anything other than studying and getting published in obscure journals, OTOH: In some cases years of experience amount to squat because the industry has moved faster than thier specialised corner of it. A genius scale concept can pop up in almost anyone, anywhere at anytime, but to be able to recognise the value or even the novelty of an algorithim, say efficient error correction, you need at least some formal trainning in maths and science. This is not my personal bias, large bussiness and institutions demand a related degree or substantial experience (preferably both), some will mix in a few biolgist and other completely unrelated degrees. The ones that land in the guts of a large research or development project are almost exclusively BSc's or higher and often the token biologist is also a competent programmer.
If google is able to recognise the best people in all 4 possible categories of pure and applied programers then it should be a snap for a company built on search algorithims to interview as many people as they can and keep skiming the cream via natural turnover. From personal experience at interviewing I know it is hard to judge someones potential when they are obviously competent and experienced, but each interview is also an opportunity to refine your selection and interview techniques by tracking who goes where and contributes what. Theoretically the more you interview the better you should become at picking winners, but as they say, "everything works perfectly in the theory department".
Hey, stop poaching my puns..
"The only problem I ever ran into with it was to do with 3.x's horrendous multi-tasking."
Win3.x did not have multitasking, it had a message driven GUI that, (if used properly), gave the illusion of multi-tasking. You could get exclusive control of the machine by simply not returning from the message loop.
The 3.x application I was working on was the client end for a large telco's job dispatch system (I also worked on the middleware that ran on a hanfull of NT3.51 boxes, the server end was HPUX). The application ran on tablet PC's and laptops using wireless ip comms (yes way back in '95), it even had an auto update feature (saved the Telco $2M in labour costs per client upgrade). We had 8000 captive users in all corners of Australia that connected via GSM, Sattelite, PSTN or Radio. It was replaced after 7 years of service by handhelds and a web application that ironically took a coule of years to become as stable as the 3.1 client. The real reason the PHB's spent $100M on hardware and software was so that they could franchise the repair/intsall work and recoup $600M from the sale of the redundant depots (real estate).
The strangest production bug I came across was X++ incremented a counter by 3!!! I never found the root cause for that one (I could see it in the disassembled code of the binary but a recompile produced the correct instructions). To see an example of how much MS have improved, try doing anything to a 100+ page document via word on 3.x
"I guess the key to Win9x stability is to not run any software"
A stand alone anything with a low workload is great for stability but is only usefull in limited situations.
...they have cracked the mystery of Dinosaur development.
"Would end users choose unix based systems over windows based systems given the full freedom of choice and knowledge that applications could run on either?"
Writing commercial grade applications that use a single code base for both *nix and Windows is not that difficult, simply avoid platform specific API's such as MFC. If you cannot avoid them then seperate that part of the code from the rest of the application and you will still end up with ~80% common code.
The expensive (and boring) part is comprehensive testing of the application on multiple versions of multiple platforms.
Bussiness is by definition about people cooperating with each other to make a living, it is normally considered bad bussiness to cooperate with one's competitors. In some cases (eg:price fixing), it is actually illegal.
I'm sure that if you cooperated with MS, (ie:paid them $hitloads), they in turn would cooperate with you.