If the programmers' job is heads down coding without any interaction with anyone else in the office I would agree that the policy is dumb. But I suspect there's another side to this story.
Is this office supposed to be something like an Agile environment where the programmers should be interacting with sales and customer support? Are the programmers using their music as an excuse to ignore questions? Are the programmers spending a significant part of their day discussing and swapping music files?
I suspect that the answer to at least some of these questions is yes.
There was an interesting research paper in which conservatives were given a news article which outlined a study with evidence for humans being responsible for global warming. At the end of the article they either appended a paragraph explaining possible regulation and taxation solutions or a paragraph suggesting that we needed increased Nuclear Power to solve the problem.
Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes but instead read about Nuclear power.
I suggest what they observed is a response to "We want to raise taxes and increase government regulation, and here's why". Which will always bring on a negative response from people who opposed tax increases and government regulation.
Well, it would be reasonable for the staff to only review high ranked apps for the Staff Favorites list. If the ColorMagic app doesn't suck too much it could be a legitimate selection.
Coding style is a no brainer for most languages: Use the default that your IDE provides. Or lacking that, whatever the "prittyprinter" program produces. If someone violates the style convention, the IDE or pretty printer will clean it up.
Design reviews, code reviews, and updated documentation are unquestionably good ideas but they have to be budgeted in at the start. A project manager who's afraid of missing a delivery will treat them as slack in the schedule and let them go even faster than they will squeeze the testing schedule (but that's another story).
The most important task of the US military today is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of someone who would use one. Scoff if you will, but Iraq probably would've had them if not for a few well placed bombs back in 1981. North Korea and Pakistan already have them, Iran will soon. I doubt any of the leaders of those governments are crazy enough to actually use one, but there's always the chance of one being "stolen".
A system like this, which can go anywhere in the world and hit a target with perfect precision within hours isn't a deterrent to someone with a nuke, but it might help find or eliminate a threat.
If anything, the CPB via PBS stations has funded some of the toughest critics...
...of the Bush administration, which is why the Republican controlled government tried to reign NPR in, and which is why the Democratic controlled Congress immediately turned NPR loose again in 2006.
For some large government projects, it gets to the point that it would be cheaper to simply hire 10 different companies to all produce the software product that you wanted, and then simply pick the best one.
Bingo. You have just pointed out why capitalism beats socialism. Nine private companies fail, one emerges as the industry leader.
But it has to look pretty, or the folks with access to the bank account will never buy it! It also needs animated sliding panels, customizable positions for all controls, and must fit the graphical style of Windows, so the office staff don't get confused. When the programmers are done with those important goals, then they can work on the petty stuff like speed and usability.
Murdoch is a master salesman, he'll continue to milk this to generate interest for as long as he can.
A more interesting scenario would be if Google started paying for the wire feeds instead of linking to the biased rewrites of them from CNN, Fox, NYT, MSNBC, etc. But I doubt we'll see that either because the newspapers know it would hurt them even more than Google aggregating the stories.
Google left the "miserable failure" link to Bush's official bio at whitehouse.gov intact for years. When Obama took office they realized the link pointed to the new president's bio. After years of it being okay to link to Bush the google bomb was disabled within a matter of days.
So don't be surprised now when a fake picture of Michelle Obama is taken down within days, but fake pictures of Sarah Palin still make the top of the list.
Is seems nobody RTFA (no surprise). The problem they're having is network outages at branch offices. I assume they're using DSL or such, with no way to connect if/when it goes down. Any one office probably has >99% up time, but when you have hundreds of offices and the remnants of a hurricane come through you can expect several of them to go offline, which is what's happening.
Now compare that to the quality of education in the state of New york where I first lived and they did have teacher unions...
Compare what to what? You're saying that the same teacher in New York provides better eduction then he or she would in North Carolina because the salary is higher. I don't see how you reached that conclusion.
And teachers in North Carolina have the North Carolina Educators Association. Their top agenda item is "Move teacher salaries beyond the national average". Think about what would happen if the NEA tried to push that agenda in every state...
If Microsoft is serious about this, why haven't they "deindexed" MSNBC from Google? The internet would be a better place if that site disappeared anyway..
by threatening to send his wife (a six-time Finnish national karate champion) in to beat the stuffing out of any of the Peace Prize committee members who vote against him.
As I read it they don't predict anything. They sample the output of several wind farms across the country and adjust other power generation to compensate. The hidden cost of wind generation is the backup capacity required.
No, as opposed to swarming for some other reason such as protection from predators, attacking Japanese fishermen, or as part of their agile software development process.
The US ranks 37th in *reported* infant mortality. The main difference is what is considered a live birth vs. still birth. Most countries don't count it as an infant death if the baby dies within 24 hours of birth, and in countries with less capable neonatal intensive care that happens a lot. Premies simply die and don't get counted, except in the US.
This process depends on evaporation to concentrate the brine. Can someone more familiar with the process costs explain why it's cheaper to use ion exchange rather than distilling the water that was evaporated?
The source of the energy to evaporate the water is irrelevant, solar works just as well for either process. Assuming an essentially unlimited supply of seawater for cooling to the distillation step, I don't see how they can make enough concentrated brine to filter the seawater more cheaply.
A modern diesel tractor burns very little fuel (we're talking many acres/gallon), so whatever stays in the soil with this process is not going to replace the hundreds of pounds of fertilizer he was applying before.
Slashdot Mirror
If the programmers' job is heads down coding without any interaction with anyone else in the office I would agree that the policy is dumb. But I suspect there's another side to this story.
Is this office supposed to be something like an Agile environment where the programmers should be interacting with sales and customer support? Are the programmers using their music as an excuse to ignore questions? Are the programmers spending a significant part of their day discussing and swapping music files?
I suspect that the answer to at least some of these questions is yes.
Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass.
I thought e=mc2, or did I miss a memo somewhere?
There was an interesting research paper in which conservatives were given a news article which outlined a study with evidence for humans being responsible for global warming. At the end of the article they either appended a paragraph explaining possible regulation and taxation solutions or a paragraph suggesting that we needed increased Nuclear Power to solve the problem.
Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes but instead read about Nuclear power.
I suggest what they observed is a response to "We want to raise taxes and increase government regulation, and here's why". Which will always bring on a negative response from people who opposed tax increases and government regulation.
Well, it would be reasonable for the staff to only review high ranked apps for the Staff Favorites list. If the ColorMagic app doesn't suck too much it could be a legitimate selection.
Coding style is a no brainer for most languages: Use the default that your IDE provides. Or lacking that, whatever the "prittyprinter" program produces. If someone violates the style convention, the IDE or pretty printer will clean it up. Design reviews, code reviews, and updated documentation are unquestionably good ideas but they have to be budgeted in at the start. A project manager who's afraid of missing a delivery will treat them as slack in the schedule and let them go even faster than they will squeeze the testing schedule (but that's another story).
Would be designed around a Higgs Boson which would know when to come back from the future and switch with no gate delay...
The most important task of the US military today is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of someone who would use one. Scoff if you will, but Iraq probably would've had them if not for a few well placed bombs back in 1981. North Korea and Pakistan already have them, Iran will soon. I doubt any of the leaders of those governments are crazy enough to actually use one, but there's always the chance of one being "stolen".
A system like this, which can go anywhere in the world and hit a target with perfect precision within hours isn't a deterrent to someone with a nuke, but it might help find or eliminate a threat.
If anything, the CPB via PBS stations has funded some of the toughest critics...
...of the Bush administration, which is why the Republican controlled government tried to reign NPR in, and which is why the Democratic controlled Congress immediately turned NPR loose again in 2006.
Just like the BBC, that depraved pit of corruption and bias. Err, wait: I misspelled FOX.
For every one government owned media outlet that's even-handed I can name ten that are tools of the state, but that's not important.
What is important is the fact that biased news outlets such as Fox or CNN can exist in the private sector.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
For some large government projects, it gets to the point that it would be cheaper to simply hire 10 different companies to all produce the software product that you wanted, and then simply pick the best one.
Bingo. You have just pointed out why capitalism beats socialism. Nine private companies fail, one emerges as the industry leader.
But it has to look pretty, or the folks with access to the bank account will never buy it! It also needs animated sliding panels, customizable positions for all controls, and must fit the graphical style of Windows, so the office staff don't get confused. When the programmers are done with those important goals, then they can work on the petty stuff like speed and usability.
Oh, don't worry about that part, the system Smith and Feied are talking about is their own product, that they sold to Microsoft.
Murdoch is a master salesman, he'll continue to milk this to generate interest for as long as he can.
A more interesting scenario would be if Google started paying for the wire feeds instead of linking to the biased rewrites of them from CNN, Fox, NYT, MSNBC, etc. But I doubt we'll see that either because the newspapers know it would hurt them even more than Google aggregating the stories.
Google left the "miserable failure" link to Bush's official bio at whitehouse.gov intact for years. When Obama took office they realized the link pointed to the new president's bio. After years of it being okay to link to Bush the google bomb was disabled within a matter of days.
This shouldn't come as a surprise considering Eric Schmidt is a big supporter of Obama.
So don't be surprised now when a fake picture of Michelle Obama is taken down within days, but fake pictures of Sarah Palin still make the top of the list.
DNA evidence would make no difference
Unless the politician lies to a Grand Jury about an encounter with an intern...
Is seems nobody RTFA (no surprise). The problem they're having is network outages at branch offices. I assume they're using DSL or such, with no way to connect if/when it goes down. Any one office probably has >99% up time, but when you have hundreds of offices and the remnants of a hurricane come through you can expect several of them to go offline, which is what's happening.
Now compare that to the quality of education in the state of New york where I first lived and they did have teacher unions...
Compare what to what? You're saying that the same teacher in New York provides better eduction then he or she would in North Carolina because the salary is higher. I don't see how you reached that conclusion.
And teachers in North Carolina have the North Carolina Educators Association. Their top agenda item is "Move teacher salaries beyond the national average". Think about what would happen if the NEA tried to push that agenda in every state...
If Microsoft is serious about this, why haven't they "deindexed" MSNBC from Google? The internet would be a better place if that site disappeared anyway..
by threatening to send his wife (a six-time Finnish national karate champion) in to beat the stuffing out of any of the Peace Prize committee members who vote against him.
But if you don't like Dr. Dittmar's numbers it's not hard to find another estimate which state's there's at least a 100 year supply.
IBM's design goal for an exascale system is to limit it to 20 megawatts of power ,,,
Just keeping that sucker cooled will contribute to global warming. I hope they're going to use all that waste heat for something.
does that wind prediction system use?
As I read it they don't predict anything. They sample the output of several wind farms across the country and adjust other power generation to compensate. The hidden cost of wind generation is the backup capacity required.
As opposed to what? Cloning?
No, as opposed to swarming for some other reason such as protection from predators, attacking Japanese fishermen, or as part of their agile software development process.
We rank 37th in infant mortality
The US ranks 37th in *reported* infant mortality. The main difference is what is considered a live birth vs. still birth. Most countries don't count it as an infant death if the baby dies within 24 hours of birth, and in countries with less capable neonatal intensive care that happens a lot. Premies simply die and don't get counted, except in the US.
The source of the energy to evaporate the water is irrelevant, solar works just as well for either process. Assuming an essentially unlimited supply of seawater for cooling to the distillation step, I don't see how they can make enough concentrated brine to filter the seawater more cheaply.
A modern diesel tractor burns very little fuel (we're talking many acres/gallon), so whatever stays in the soil with this process is not going to replace the hundreds of pounds of fertilizer he was applying before.