The most effective, amazing developer I know gets his shit done in 40 hours a week. But sometimes when things go off the rails, he puts in the extra hours needed to get everything back on track. When the need arises, he puts in the extra work. My issue isn't with effective 40hr/wk developers, my issue is with any worker who hits 40 hours and won't go an inch beyond.
To be honest - most developers are salaried and exempt from overtime, so by putting in the extra hours to get everything back on track they are literally taking a voluntary paycut in order to fix someone else's (generally management, IME) mistakes. Now, there may be compensation later, in the form of bonuses or extra time off, but that sort of thing is never guaranteed.
Can you see how, in those conditions, people might draw the line at forty hours per week? They are, after all, working for a business and not a charity. Why is it that the workers are always the ones who are expected to sacrifice for the business, and not the other way around?
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
Hooray! You have just taken the first step in apologetics: God is omnipotent, except for when He isn't - like when it comes to evil and sin. Next step is God is all-loving, except for when He isn't (lake of fire for Gandhi, anyone?), followed closely by God answers all prayers, except for when He doesn't. The list just gets more detailed from there, like zooming in on a fractal image.
Eventually, you end up with a God defined by a few absolutes and a long list of exceptions, to the point where you are effectively an atheist - we say "God does not exist", you say "God exists, except He is constrained in such a way that the universe we observe is equivalent to one in which He does not exist".
So yeah. You just keep on working that apologetics mojo and figuring things out in your head (e.g, why does God hate amputees?), I'll just take the shortcut to rationality.
Yet in that time, there's been 2 entire DLC's. It's called chasing the easy money. That's fine. But *my* money isn't easy, so they won't be getting any more of it.
There's been two DLCs? I thought it was just the Magicka: Vietnam DLC? Unless you're counting the Wizard's Starter Kit, which barely even counts - it's just a different hat, sword and staff. And if you're counting that, then there's been three DLCs - there was also the buggy release DLC, which includes a tattered robe, a broken sword, and a staff that summons bugs.
This, good sir, is the essence of much excellent engineering. The solution, once discovered, is obvious.
Finding the obvious is all the work.
Did you even read the parent post? That's orthogonal to what he's saying; the obviousness test should be applied the solution, not to the problem. Yes, many good solutions are obvious once they've been explained; but many good solutions are also obvious once the problem has been explained, and those solutions should not be patentable.
If the solution to a given problem is obvious a priori, you should not be awarded a patent simply for thinking of the problem first!
So why do we help people who are not related to us?
Compassion and caring is not bounded by family boundaries, so it seems to me that the evolutionary advantage behind altruism is still questionable.
I forget what the exact statistic is, but humans are not as genetically diverse as you might think. A completely random stranger shares 1/64th of your genes (that is, by the same metric that states your children share 1/2 of your genes); therefore, by helping them, you are still achieving an evolutionary advantage, though of course not as much as if you helped a direct relative.
There is another option for the rich - the $6000 43" ultra-widescreen curved monitor with a 2880x900 resolution.
By 900? What the fuck? Even if I had the disposable income to blow $6000 on something like that, I would not buy any desktop monitor with a mere 900 pixels of vertical resolution! That's just crap! I don't even think my laptop has that little vertical space.
What's really funny is that this whole fiasco would have never happened if Sony hadn't decided to disable the OtherOS function on existing PS3s. This led to hackers breaking open the PS3, which hadn't happened so far because the people who were capable of such feats were happy with OtherOS - and then, it seems that with hacked PS3s, the Sony Online servers were hacked relatively quickly.
Just imagine - if they hadn't pulled that crap with OtherOS, the PS3 could probably have gone unhacked until it was retired and replaced with the next generation Sony console.
It means the USA can credibly claim "mission accomplished" and get the hell out of Afghanistan. As long as he was still breathing, there was simply no politically viable exit strategy.
This makes me laugh really hard, because Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.
If this accomplishes our mission, wtf are we doing in Afghanistan in the first place?
At Fog Creek (Joel's company), I believe they have catered lunches every day. He's not the sort of manager who orders people to have lunch together, he's the sort of manager who provides lunch for everyone who wants it in order to encourage people to have lunch together.
It's very much a matter of carrots and sticks, which the Slashdot summary doesn't clarify at all.
As reported Google did try hard to win this deal too, all up to the end, the reasons Nokia have given for their choice was that they saw greater opportunity to differentiate with the Microsoft partnership, and saw a greater value and role for Nokia than in the Android ecosystem. Only time will tell what that means, nobody here knows.
A Canadian citizen, Elop is the first non-Finn to be named CEO of Nokia. He replaced Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in this position on September 21, 2010....
Before starting at Nokia, Elop worked for Microsoft from January 2008 to September 2010 as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team.
On 11 February 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft which will mean most future Nokia smart phones will be powered by the Windows Phone 7 operating system.
I'm pretty sure that even if Google had offered free blowjobs and an all-you-can-eat heroin buffet, they would not have been able to win this deal.
Finally, arbiters are usually paid either 50/50 by both parties or by the 'loser' of a decision rather than 100% by one party.
You say that as if it matters. It's not the person who actually hands you the money that's important, it's who brings you business. In the case of private arbitration companies, regardless of who ends up paying the fees it's the large corporation that brings them business, and to whom they are indebted.
Can I make a deal with the state? You don't help me through college and I don't have to pay any extra taxes for my increased salary afterwards.
How about that?
Okay, but we'll still charge you for the education the engineer who designed that bridge you drive over every day received, and all the people with a BS in chemistry who make sure your water is potable and your food isn't contaminated, and all the civil engineers who try to keep traffic in your area from getting too bad by messing around with traffic light timings.
You benefit far more from being surrounded by an educated populace than just by having a higher salary.
Consider the alternative (usually unexpressed) "The money is the No. 1 perk at FooCo", Awad said during a break from filling out his TPS report. "It's the main reason I will work for FooCo until it someone else offers me more of it".
There, fixed that for you. Presumably some other company could offer Awad a welding kit and time during work to use it, but I kinda think that's much rarer than just offering people more money.
I'm a postal subcontractor making $10 an hour 4 hours a day, and none of my friends from the major have ever made more than $40,000, and we graduated almost a decade ago.
So uh - why did you get that degree in the first place? Sounds like you could have gone into the job without it, and then just audited the classes at UCSC for cheap.
I guess you're just not one of those people who realized that the Literature-type majors are really so rich kids can have fun for four years and then come work at Daddy's company with an HR-required Bachelors degree in something. People who actually want to, you know, make a decent amount of money some day simply can't afford to major in Literature.
If their online systems' security depends on all clients playing by a specific set of rules, it is Broken.(even barring custom firmware, PS3s communicate over the internet via reasonably normal protocols, so it isn't as though the public-facing infrastructure was ever invisible to PCs running whatever people wanted them to run).
Exactly! There have been Wiis and Xboxes with custom firmwares for years now, and nobody has managed to leverage that into a full-scale breach of their respective online systems.
This is no more or less than pure and absolute incompetence and overconfidence on Sony's part.
I have no idea. It might be that the DVD drives are failing - my wife got a penny in the DVD drive on her MacBook, and the MythTV box is using one that's been recycled through several other computers.
I hear they're considering video games as well. It's credit card only though.
Not just considering it - in my area, they already have video games.
It's kinda funny really; the first time I saw one of those in an Albertsons, I immediately thought "oh man, Blockbuster is doomed". When someone comes up with a vending machine that basically does what you do except completely automated and without having to rely on minimum wage workers, you're doomed.
Will they mail physical copies of movies that aren't available for streaming to my mailbox within 24-hours?
We have a Netflix subscription, the cheapest one, and we've just kept the most recent disk without returning it for a couple of months - there's nothing in our subscription queue that's worth the trip to the mailbox.
However, we watch things on Netflix Instant all the time; it's much more convenient than having to deal with physical disks (which occasionally just don't work in my wife's MacBook or the MythTV computer, but work fine on my Windows computers for some reason).
Read Descartes sometime, he only invented algebra.
Which is why the name is derived from the Arabic term "al-jabr", which means "restoration" - because a French guy invented it. Right. Makes perfect sense.
Let's assume video games are to blame for all of the anger issues young people exhibit today; why aren't the shop keepers, parents and other such "guardians of merchandise" to blame for essentially enabling the behavior?
What anger issues are you talking about? The ones that aren't reflected in crime rates, maybe? In the USA, at least, crime rates have either dropped or remained more or less stable over the last few decades.
People seem to be stuck with this idea that crime is on the rise, but it's really not.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone has to dictate how musicians are paid. Currently, it's the RIAA and what they say is "Musicians aren't paid; we are".
I'm pretty sure almost anything would be better than that.
I realized at some point that the username I've had since I was ten or so can be interpreted as the name of some French car.
I don't even remember how I came up with this name, I think I just mashed letters into the keyboard.
To be honest - most developers are salaried and exempt from overtime, so by putting in the extra hours to get everything back on track they are literally taking a voluntary paycut in order to fix someone else's (generally management, IME) mistakes. Now, there may be compensation later, in the form of bonuses or extra time off, but that sort of thing is never guaranteed.
Can you see how, in those conditions, people might draw the line at forty hours per week? They are, after all, working for a business and not a charity. Why is it that the workers are always the ones who are expected to sacrifice for the business, and not the other way around?
Hooray! You have just taken the first step in apologetics: God is omnipotent, except for when He isn't - like when it comes to evil and sin. Next step is God is all-loving, except for when He isn't (lake of fire for Gandhi, anyone?), followed closely by God answers all prayers, except for when He doesn't. The list just gets more detailed from there, like zooming in on a fractal image.
Eventually, you end up with a God defined by a few absolutes and a long list of exceptions, to the point where you are effectively an atheist - we say "God does not exist", you say "God exists, except He is constrained in such a way that the universe we observe is equivalent to one in which He does not exist".
So yeah. You just keep on working that apologetics mojo and figuring things out in your head (e.g, why does God hate amputees?), I'll just take the shortcut to rationality.
Let me know when it's as ubiquitous as bash or csh. As far as I know, it's only pre-installed on Windows Server 2008 or greater.
Sweet! I didn't know that was out already!
There's been two DLCs? I thought it was just the Magicka: Vietnam DLC? Unless you're counting the Wizard's Starter Kit, which barely even counts - it's just a different hat, sword and staff. And if you're counting that, then there's been three DLCs - there was also the buggy release DLC, which includes a tattered robe, a broken sword, and a staff that summons bugs.
Did you even read the parent post? That's orthogonal to what he's saying; the obviousness test should be applied the solution, not to the problem. Yes, many good solutions are obvious once they've been explained; but many good solutions are also obvious once the problem has been explained, and those solutions should not be patentable.
If the solution to a given problem is obvious a priori, you should not be awarded a patent simply for thinking of the problem first!
I forget what the exact statistic is, but humans are not as genetically diverse as you might think. A completely random stranger shares 1/64th of your genes (that is, by the same metric that states your children share 1/2 of your genes); therefore, by helping them, you are still achieving an evolutionary advantage, though of course not as much as if you helped a direct relative.
By 900? What the fuck? Even if I had the disposable income to blow $6000 on something like that, I would not buy any desktop monitor with a mere 900 pixels of vertical resolution! That's just crap! I don't even think my laptop has that little vertical space.
What's really funny is that this whole fiasco would have never happened if Sony hadn't decided to disable the OtherOS function on existing PS3s. This led to hackers breaking open the PS3, which hadn't happened so far because the people who were capable of such feats were happy with OtherOS - and then, it seems that with hacked PS3s, the Sony Online servers were hacked relatively quickly.
Just imagine - if they hadn't pulled that crap with OtherOS, the PS3 could probably have gone unhacked until it was retired and replaced with the next generation Sony console.
I think you mean "the once and future Sarah Palin" - he's been around spreading the crazy since before the Republican party went nuts.
This makes me laugh really hard, because Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.
If this accomplishes our mission, wtf are we doing in Afghanistan in the first place?
At Fog Creek (Joel's company), I believe they have catered lunches every day. He's not the sort of manager who orders people to have lunch together, he's the sort of manager who provides lunch for everyone who wants it in order to encourage people to have lunch together.
It's very much a matter of carrots and sticks, which the Slashdot summary doesn't clarify at all.
From Wikipedia:
From Wikipedia:
I'm pretty sure that even if Google had offered free blowjobs and an all-you-can-eat heroin buffet, they would not have been able to win this deal.
You say that as if it matters. It's not the person who actually hands you the money that's important, it's who brings you business. In the case of private arbitration companies, regardless of who ends up paying the fees it's the large corporation that brings them business, and to whom they are indebted.
Okay, but we'll still charge you for the education the engineer who designed that bridge you drive over every day received, and all the people with a BS in chemistry who make sure your water is potable and your food isn't contaminated, and all the civil engineers who try to keep traffic in your area from getting too bad by messing around with traffic light timings.
You benefit far more from being surrounded by an educated populace than just by having a higher salary.
There, fixed that for you. Presumably some other company could offer Awad a welding kit and time during work to use it, but I kinda think that's much rarer than just offering people more money.
So uh - why did you get that degree in the first place? Sounds like you could have gone into the job without it, and then just audited the classes at UCSC for cheap.
I guess you're just not one of those people who realized that the Literature-type majors are really so rich kids can have fun for four years and then come work at Daddy's company with an HR-required Bachelors degree in something. People who actually want to, you know, make a decent amount of money some day simply can't afford to major in Literature.
Exactly! There have been Wiis and Xboxes with custom firmwares for years now, and nobody has managed to leverage that into a full-scale breach of their respective online systems.
This is no more or less than pure and absolute incompetence and overconfidence on Sony's part.
I have no idea. It might be that the DVD drives are failing - my wife got a penny in the DVD drive on her MacBook, and the MythTV box is using one that's been recycled through several other computers.
Not just considering it - in my area, they already have video games.
It's kinda funny really; the first time I saw one of those in an Albertsons, I immediately thought "oh man, Blockbuster is doomed". When someone comes up with a vending machine that basically does what you do except completely automated and without having to rely on minimum wage workers, you're doomed.
We have a Netflix subscription, the cheapest one, and we've just kept the most recent disk without returning it for a couple of months - there's nothing in our subscription queue that's worth the trip to the mailbox.
However, we watch things on Netflix Instant all the time; it's much more convenient than having to deal with physical disks (which occasionally just don't work in my wife's MacBook or the MythTV computer, but work fine on my Windows computers for some reason).
Which is why the name is derived from the Arabic term "al-jabr", which means "restoration" - because a French guy invented it. Right. Makes perfect sense.
What anger issues are you talking about? The ones that aren't reflected in crime rates, maybe? In the USA, at least, crime rates have either dropped or remained more or less stable over the last few decades.
People seem to be stuck with this idea that crime is on the rise, but it's really not.