Your time is valuable, that's why they pay you handsomely, but, make sure your #1 priority is YOUR private time to do what you wish (travel, chase women, have kids, spend quality time with friends and family).
What he wishes to do with his private time is just to code more. During his honeymoon (it's amazing he found someone, but she is as crazy and as great as he is), he kept mailing us about stuff, and when he returned, he knew everything about GWT.
So it may be that he was exactly right? What a downside to have...
Usually, yes. But he was still an asshole about it, and sometimes had trouble communicating his ideas to the less nerdy members of our team (I've done some translations to help things along), and could generally be a pain to work with.
And then next monday you come in the office, and he's rewritten the entire application, fixing a fundamental problem, and identifying 2 new ones.
If I were an employer, I'd hire him at any price, but not every employer would be able to deal with someone like him.
Bullshit. The only reason they can get away with acting like "keepers of the secret flame" is because "outsiders" don't have the tools to adequately measure productivity. Nobody ever told me to take 10 off for every 20; if I did that I would have flunked out. If you can't hack more than 20 minutes of work at a time you're either lazy or stupid.
Or your doing something really hard. Don't forget that option.
Of course when I spend the day in some coffee shop working on my own projects, I find myself to be much more focused and productive. Probably because it feels a lot more like "getting something done" and less like "putting in my hours against a charge number."
You're more productive when you're working on something you care about. Which is also a valuable lesson for companies: they need to make their employers care about the project they're working on. They need to feel involved, and not just cogs in a machine. Make their input count. That sort of stuff.
A co-worker at my previous job said his work there felt like free time. He happily worked nights and weekends, because he cared about it and he got to make a lot of decisions on how it should be done. It felt like it was his private project. That kind of feeling is what management should try to instill in their employees. (There's a downside of course: he frequently ignored the CEO because something else was more important right now, and besides, he knew a better way to do it. He could be a real bastard about that too, but he delivered the goods, so nobody complained.)
I believe that developers are most productive when working about 30 hours a week.
That's why I want to work only 4 days a week. Gives me one workday to handle private stuff and hang with my son. It's amazing how many companies still object to someone working 4 days. They save 20% on my salary, and I really think they get more than 80% of a full week's productivity.
With EA holding the exclusive license for both NFL and FIFA, I guess you're just asking the world to do without football video games. Do I understand you correctly?
Only without officially trademark-licensed football video games. You're still free to make games that don't use the names NFL and FIFA, and don't contain players whose names are owned by those organisations.
But seriously, when will they realize they're competing with free, and that means added value, not subtracted?
Exactly. The only way to compete with free, is to offer better value and better service. Lots of people are willing to pay for that. Not nearly as many people are willing to pay for less value and less service.
Not even "dumb" phones. The average cell phone has more computing power than the world's most powerful computer did in 1972.
True, but dumb phones still have really dumb interfaces for doing anything other than making a phone call. They might technically be able to do spectacular things, but I can never figure out how.
How much power and control the UI and OS give you is more important than the mere processing power.
Why aren't they using sloped lenses and hoods for these? Essentially putting blinders on them with no bottom so that snow isn't allowed to collect inside the enclosure?
Exactly what I was thinking. The design of the hoods around these lights looks very odd. Give them much more hood on top, open at the bottom, and if that's not enough, have the light lean forward a bit. And if you've got really super-sticky snow that even sticks to the bottom of stuff, add an extra slippery dirt/water/snow repellant layer.
Deep, deep down, the iPhone runs a heavily modified BSD. Android is based on Linux, but Maemo (on the N900) is a real, full-fledged Linux distro (Debian based). If you can get it working on Ubuntu, you've got a good chance of getting it working on the N900.
It's easily the coolest smart phone out there, but I still hope we're not going to see a new slashdot article for every Linux application that also happens to work on Maemo.
By the way, "phone" really doesn't do the current generation of high-end smartphones justice anymore. My iPhone was already more pocket computer than phone, and so's my current Milestone. But Nokia is the first company to acknowledge this, and market the N900 as a pocket computer that can also make phone calls, instead of the other way around.
I can understand an invesment site appreciating a company who's skyrocketing stock prices are a result of the popularity of something the company actually makes and sells. Selling air and derivitives seems to be the trend these days - less overhead costs equals more profit!
Are you saying investors are more interested in substance than profit?
Some countries use their military in police actions around their nations. They are trained for it, and have long term experience in it. Our troops unfortunately don't. I won't say all would treat American streets as a war zone if so ordered, but a number greater than 0 could.
This also explains why the US army has such problems with some of their peacekeeping/rebuilding missions abroad. Moreso than the militaries of other nations. The US army is trained to win, not to help.
Well, the poll was by an investment site. I can imagine them appreciating someone who sends stock prices into the stratosphere more than someone who sunk the economy.
Do you really want experience the joys of spending your remaining days without the use of your limbs and your very survival dependent on those maintaining your life support?
Depends on how interesting the challenges in that part of the game are. I don't think I've ever seen anything remotely like that done right, but I'm always open to surprises.
The only meaningful distinction I've seen after spending time investigating the two and why some choose one over the other, is the underlying philosophy of each. With Python, there's almost always a "right" way to do a particular thing, an attitude of choosing the best practice summed up in the adjective "pythonic". Ruby follows Perl's TIMTOWTDI line, with a very flexible syntax that allows for a variety of ways to accomplish a particular end. So mainly, it's a temperament thing: coders who like a flexible tool that allows them to find 'clever' solutions prefer Ruby; coders (like me) who like for there to be a best practice, and don't break the rules without a decent reason to do so, prefer python.
This is a very good point. This also shines through in the culture of the communities. I've read from several people that they got annoyed by the Python community's rigid stance. Often someone would find an odd quirk (arguably even a bug) in Python and ask why it was like that. Instead of responding with possible fixes, the responses often amounted to "that's the only right way to do it, and if you disagree, you're wrong" (though probably phrased more diplomatically). In many other communities (including Ruby), the response is more likely to be something like "yeah, we need to fix that some day", "there's a plugin/gem for that" or "here's how you can fix that yourself".
A good snapshot of the difference was in Zed Shaw's now disappeared rant about Ruby, where what set him off was finding a bunch of hacks injected into a logging library he was using, and realizing that he was not only going to have to inject his own, but that this was expected and commended in the community. The idea that there should be a stable API forming the basis of a contract with the programmer was looked down upon by Rubyists, causing Shaw to dismiss them as cowboys and amateurs.
Valid criticism. Ruby is often more hacky, and there are a lot of issues that do need to get fixed some day. Then again, people generally do recognise them as broken and do plan to fix them, rather than claiming it's the way God intended it.
I don't know. I like Groovy a lot. It's basically Java but flexible and with most of the cool Rubyisms added in, but it doesn't quite have that Ruby feel to me. I think I like Ruby's metaprogramming more.
Or maybe it's not Groovy, but Grails. I expected it to be a Rails rip-off, but it turns out Grails is built on top of Spring, which means I have to deal with all that Spring configuration below the surface. I'm not the biggest fan of Rails, but Rails definitely looks a lot cleaner than Grails. And Ruby is still my favourite syntax. Too bad it's so slow. I'm very much looking forward to Rails 2, which will hopefully be a lot faster, support threads properly, and maybe even fix that last metaprogramming hole.
Or maybe with every new language I learn, I pine for the previous language I worked in. No, that's not true. I didn't miss Java when I switched to Ruby. Maybe Ruby feels better because it was such a revelation after Java, whereas Groovy is just more of the same after Ruby and Java.
Say you shoot someone in the general torso area, you obviously miss the spine since he doesn't ragdoll and you take cover as he returns fire. When you pop out of cover the target is nowhere to be seen. When you find him he's on the ground aspirating blood and generally bleeding out. Or when you finish a firefight there is not silence but lots of poor fuckers screaming from their pain as they bleed out. If nothing else that might make you want to take the more stealthy route or make sure you aim better.
This would be awesome. It might almost get me to try a FPS for once.
Harder is not the same as more realistic injuries. America's Army has reasonably realistic injuries. A single bullet can kill or cripple you. Yet the game is pretty easy to play. I found it a lot easier than Counter Strike, where everybody's insane running speed made it hard to figure out what the hell was going on. That kind of speed is probably fun if you're a master FPSer with lightning reflexes, but for a newbie it's not.
If I'm going to play a game, I want fun and excitement without any real threat of getting killed or suffering pain.
Ah, but what counts as "fun and excitement" for you? For me, the risk of failure is part of the excitement. The challenge of minimizing that risk is part of the fun.
When I play a game, I want to suffer. Real life is easy and pleasant enough already.
Slashdot Mirror
Your time is valuable, that's why they pay you handsomely, but, make sure your #1 priority is YOUR private time to do what you wish (travel, chase women, have kids, spend quality time with friends and family).
What he wishes to do with his private time is just to code more. During his honeymoon (it's amazing he found someone, but she is as crazy and as great as he is), he kept mailing us about stuff, and when he returned, he knew everything about GWT.
So it may be that he was exactly right? What a downside to have...
Usually, yes. But he was still an asshole about it, and sometimes had trouble communicating his ideas to the less nerdy members of our team (I've done some translations to help things along), and could generally be a pain to work with.
And then next monday you come in the office, and he's rewritten the entire application, fixing a fundamental problem, and identifying 2 new ones.
If I were an employer, I'd hire him at any price, but not every employer would be able to deal with someone like him.
Bullshit. The only reason they can get away with acting like "keepers of the secret flame" is because "outsiders" don't have the tools to adequately measure productivity. Nobody ever told me to take 10 off for every 20; if I did that I would have flunked out. If you can't hack more than 20 minutes of work at a time you're either lazy or stupid.
Or your doing something really hard. Don't forget that option.
Of course when I spend the day in some coffee shop working on my own projects, I find myself to be much more focused and productive. Probably because it feels a lot more like "getting something done" and less like "putting in my hours against a charge number."
You're more productive when you're working on something you care about. Which is also a valuable lesson for companies: they need to make their employers care about the project they're working on. They need to feel involved, and not just cogs in a machine. Make their input count. That sort of stuff.
A co-worker at my previous job said his work there felt like free time. He happily worked nights and weekends, because he cared about it and he got to make a lot of decisions on how it should be done. It felt like it was his private project. That kind of feeling is what management should try to instill in their employees. (There's a downside of course: he frequently ignored the CEO because something else was more important right now, and besides, he knew a better way to do it. He could be a real bastard about that too, but he delivered the goods, so nobody complained.)
I believe that developers are most productive when working about 30 hours a week.
That's why I want to work only 4 days a week. Gives me one workday to handle private stuff and hang with my son. It's amazing how many companies still object to someone working 4 days. They save 20% on my salary, and I really think they get more than 80% of a full week's productivity.
With EA holding the exclusive license for both NFL and FIFA, I guess you're just asking the world to do without football video games. Do I understand you correctly?
Only without officially trademark-licensed football video games. You're still free to make games that don't use the names NFL and FIFA, and don't contain players whose names are owned by those organisations.
If you buy their games you deserve nothing less.
No, you still deserve better. However, you should also have known better.
But seriously, when will they realize they're competing with free, and that means added value, not subtracted?
Exactly. The only way to compete with free, is to offer better value and better service. Lots of people are willing to pay for that. Not nearly as many people are willing to pay for less value and less service.
Not even "dumb" phones. The average cell phone has more computing power than the world's most powerful computer did in 1972.
True, but dumb phones still have really dumb interfaces for doing anything other than making a phone call. They might technically be able to do spectacular things, but I can never figure out how.
How much power and control the UI and OS give you is more important than the mere processing power.
Why aren't they using sloped lenses and hoods for these? Essentially putting blinders on them with no bottom so that snow isn't allowed to collect inside the enclosure?
Exactly what I was thinking. The design of the hoods around these lights looks very odd. Give them much more hood on top, open at the bottom, and if that's not enough, have the light lean forward a bit. And if you've got really super-sticky snow that even sticks to the bottom of stuff, add an extra slippery dirt/water/snow repellant layer.
Only in the long run. Many investors don't think that far ahead.
Deep, deep down, the iPhone runs a heavily modified BSD. Android is based on Linux, but Maemo (on the N900) is a real, full-fledged Linux distro (Debian based). If you can get it working on Ubuntu, you've got a good chance of getting it working on the N900.
It's easily the coolest smart phone out there, but I still hope we're not going to see a new slashdot article for every Linux application that also happens to work on Maemo.
By the way, "phone" really doesn't do the current generation of high-end smartphones justice anymore. My iPhone was already more pocket computer than phone, and so's my current Milestone. But Nokia is the first company to acknowledge this, and market the N900 as a pocket computer that can also make phone calls, instead of the other way around.
I can understand an invesment site appreciating a company who's skyrocketing stock prices are a result of the popularity of something the company actually makes and sells. Selling air and derivitives seems to be the trend these days - less overhead costs equals more profit!
Are you saying investors are more interested in substance than profit?
Some countries use their military in police actions around their nations. They are trained for it, and have long term experience in it. Our troops unfortunately don't. I won't say all would treat American streets as a war zone if so ordered, but a number greater than 0 could.
This also explains why the US army has such problems with some of their peacekeeping/rebuilding missions abroad. Moreso than the militaries of other nations. The US army is trained to win, not to help.
I was just trying to be funny.
In the middle of a pedant thread? Lost cause, I'd say.
(Yeah, sorry for starting it, but somebody had to do it.)
Isn't any sequence of 10 years a decade? So who was the person of 1997-2006?
And I think my comment was the cause for your down-moderation. My bad!
Thanks a lot for that!
(No problem really. I still have plenty of karma left.)
Is this the right place to point out that the first decade of this century and millenium has one more year to go?
Any sequence of 10 years is a decade, I guess. So who was last year's person of the decade?
Well, the poll was by an investment site. I can imagine them appreciating someone who sends stock prices into the stratosphere more than someone who sunk the economy.
Do you really want experience the joys of spending your remaining days without the use of your limbs and your very survival dependent on those maintaining your life support?
Depends on how interesting the challenges in that part of the game are. I don't think I've ever seen anything remotely like that done right, but I'm always open to surprises.
The only meaningful distinction I've seen after spending time investigating the two and why some choose one over the other, is the underlying philosophy of each. With Python, there's almost always a "right" way to do a particular thing, an attitude of choosing the best practice summed up in the adjective "pythonic". Ruby follows Perl's TIMTOWTDI line, with a very flexible syntax that allows for a variety of ways to accomplish a particular end. So mainly, it's a temperament thing: coders who like a flexible tool that allows them to find 'clever' solutions prefer Ruby; coders (like me) who like for there to be a best practice, and don't break the rules without a decent reason to do so, prefer python.
This is a very good point. This also shines through in the culture of the communities. I've read from several people that they got annoyed by the Python community's rigid stance. Often someone would find an odd quirk (arguably even a bug) in Python and ask why it was like that. Instead of responding with possible fixes, the responses often amounted to "that's the only right way to do it, and if you disagree, you're wrong" (though probably phrased more diplomatically). In many other communities (including Ruby), the response is more likely to be something like "yeah, we need to fix that some day", "there's a plugin/gem for that" or "here's how you can fix that yourself".
A good snapshot of the difference was in Zed Shaw's now disappeared rant about Ruby, where what set him off was finding a bunch of hacks injected into a logging library he was using, and realizing that he was not only going to have to inject his own, but that this was expected and commended in the community. The idea that there should be a stable API forming the basis of a contract with the programmer was looked down upon by Rubyists, causing Shaw to dismiss them as cowboys and amateurs.
Valid criticism. Ruby is often more hacky, and there are a lot of issues that do need to get fixed some day. Then again, people generally do recognise them as broken and do plan to fix them, rather than claiming it's the way God intended it.
I don't know. I like Groovy a lot. It's basically Java but flexible and with most of the cool Rubyisms added in, but it doesn't quite have that Ruby feel to me. I think I like Ruby's metaprogramming more.
Or maybe it's not Groovy, but Grails. I expected it to be a Rails rip-off, but it turns out Grails is built on top of Spring, which means I have to deal with all that Spring configuration below the surface. I'm not the biggest fan of Rails, but Rails definitely looks a lot cleaner than Grails. And Ruby is still my favourite syntax. Too bad it's so slow. I'm very much looking forward to Rails 2, which will hopefully be a lot faster, support threads properly, and maybe even fix that last metaprogramming hole.
Or maybe with every new language I learn, I pine for the previous language I worked in. No, that's not true. I didn't miss Java when I switched to Ruby. Maybe Ruby feels better because it was such a revelation after Java, whereas Groovy is just more of the same after Ruby and Java.
Say you shoot someone in the general torso area, you obviously miss the spine since he doesn't ragdoll and you take cover as he returns fire. When you pop out of cover the target is nowhere to be seen. When you find him he's on the ground aspirating blood and generally bleeding out. Or when you finish a firefight there is not silence but lots of poor fuckers screaming from their pain as they bleed out. If nothing else that might make you want to take the more stealthy route or make sure you aim better.
This would be awesome. It might almost get me to try a FPS for once.
Harder is not the same as more realistic injuries. America's Army has reasonably realistic injuries. A single bullet can kill or cripple you. Yet the game is pretty easy to play. I found it a lot easier than Counter Strike, where everybody's insane running speed made it hard to figure out what the hell was going on. That kind of speed is probably fun if you're a master FPSer with lightning reflexes, but for a newbie it's not.
If I'm going to play a game, I want fun and excitement without any real threat of getting killed or suffering pain.
Ah, but what counts as "fun and excitement" for you? For me, the risk of failure is part of the excitement. The challenge of minimizing that risk is part of the fun.
When I play a game, I want to suffer. Real life is easy and pleasant enough already.