I've never had training for any piece of software I've ever used, but I think I manage all right.
This was something that annoyed me to NO END when I was doing tech support. I could not convince the people in charge to LET me hold monthly training seminars for new hires that explained how to do basic computing tasks. I wanted to do it because about twice a day I would get called to someones workstation with the problem description of "My screen is too big/small/funny looking!" and the problem was that they had changed their screen resolution or something like that. When asked, they all claim they've never touched anything. I would also get calls from people where the description was, "My screen disappeared" and then I would come down and they would have 90+ minimized internet explorer windows or something similar, and they reason they thought it "Disappeared" was because the machine was too overloaded to open thant 91st window after they minized the 90th one. All I wanted was to be able to show everyone these very very basic things so that my time wouldn't get eatten up and they would feel a little more comfortable with their machines. But NO, that would have lowered production by half a unit per person (When we're spewing out 10,000 units per day). Bleh... I hate management. I'm much happier being sysadmin for a small company. I mostly support programmers. Ahhh the bliss of not having to tell someone how to double click for the fourth time.
I had this problem at a previous employer. I would leave 30 minutes early 3 times a week to go to my martial arts classes. I was a salaried employee, so I got paid the same no matter what. My boss, her boss, 3 of the programers, and untold support people took between 5 and 8 smoke breaks, each lasting 15 minutes or more per day. I was asked to stop leaving 30 minutes early, my response, "If I get a crack habit can I keep my current schedule? Because all of you guys are taking half a dozen 15 minute breaks a day while I skip lunch." That didn't go over well. I got lectured so much... That was when I decided to quit. Still took me a couple of months to find a new job and really get ready to leave. But eventually I got out of there. The job was hell... And incidentally I hate smokers. I hate them SOOO much, with their free extra breaktimes.
The last comic book I picked up cost me 3$. It contained 22 pages. Of those 22 pages 6 contained no text. If the 16 pages which did contain text only 3 pages had any text which actually formed a cohesive story. At the end of the comic I still had NO IDEA what was supposedly happening. There was no self contained story whatsoever. Nothing explained anything. In order to grasp this comic, I knew I was going to need to read the ones before it. Easy you say? I say thee nay! I began my quest for the 5 issues which came before the issue in my hand (One X-Men, Gen13 or something like that), in my quest I first searched the comic book store which I was standing in. Back issues? No... They don't carry anything other than this months release. Off to e-bay! Nope, lots of Old X-men stuff, but nothing recent. Well, how about other websites? Thppt, nothing. I can't find a place to order back issues of comics. And without being able to do that I'm stuck with a loosly bound collection of glaring colored pages with large breasted women in spandex. Not that I don't enjoy large breasted women in spandex, but that's not really why I picked up the comic.
Manga on the other hand is either easily accessible within each issue (from the dozen or so I've seen) and/or available in large chunks, and/or easily found on the publishers website or a dozen other sources. I never have any trouble finding back issues of Hikaru No Go or Cooking Master Boy.
I'd say what we should do is get a mile long (Or 3 mile long, or 5 mile long, or however long it takes to get up to speed) linear acceleartor. We use it to launch material capsules into space for essentially nothing after the cost of construction. Then we make some remote controlled robots designed for constructing things in space. We launch them up the same way in big shock resistant containers that burst open and are then also used as building materials. Then we set the robots to work building us a superlight craft in space. Once the construction is complete we launch its payload via the L.A., the payload consistes of all of the equipment we can think of that would be useful for terraforming a small chunk of the moon or mars. Then we send the ship there, also remote controlled. Land it, remotely control the construction of a habitat, populate the habitat, continue to build ships with this method. Once we have 3 or 4 of them they can pretty much ferry back and forth between levels of earth orbit carrying supplies to the moon base. The moon base people work on finding water or raw materials on the moon. If we find water they set up a slow but steady method of converting it into fuel (hydrogen) if we find raw materials then we boost the water or hydrogen and they start setting up manufactoring facilities to create the materials for more ships. At some point we dismantle most of the freight carrying ships and rebuild them into one much larger ship designed to hold 200 or so people. We get those 200 or so people. In the meantime though we are now launching freighters out to mars to drop supplies down to the planet as well as robots, solar factories, anything we can think of that will help make a small piece of mars habitable. Once we've got a couple hundred people, a mars that is covered in supplies, and a very lage ship we set out for Mars establish a colony there and begin the research to make larger sections of it habitable as well as searching it for water/raw materials to use in constructing that habitat. Now we build a few booster heavy tugs in orbit, find a convenient asteroid and pull it into orbit around Mars (or just land some miners on one of the Moons of mars) and start extracting raw materials from that to continue habitat constructions. This plan puts us well on our way to permanent residency on Mars, and I'd say it will take about 75 years to complete. If I were lucky I could see us land on Mars and establish that colony base before I die...
Hah! Don't be silly! Two Towers appealed to people who like Medieval Fantasy, while Nemesis appealed to people who like science fiction. Those are quite obviously two distinct and seperate groups of people, thus the Nemesis release shouldn't be affected by the Two Towers release!
Of course, the exec that took that line of thought and went through with it is probably already standing in the unemployment line...
I find it odd for people not to have a goal they are working towards. I'm sure we were all asked the "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" question as a response to "What job should I get?" well my answer was study Martial Arts, it still is. I was originally going to be a business major in college, but found out that my computer related hobby could make me lots of money. So I did that instead. But I never lost sight of my goal. I want to open my own martial arts school. I'm hoping to do so about the time I hit 30, maybe a little later. In the mean time I'm a system administrator for a company I really like. I like the job, I like the people. But I don't stress over the work. I automate where I can, do the work as it needs to be done, and go home at 6 most of the time. I'm relaxed because I have a goal. I know I won't be doing this forever.
Wasn't that the name of the guy from "Carter Beats the Devil" I think that's the name, that was a book about a magician and television and stuff...? Interesting book. I'm pretty sure the kid who invented television in that buck was named Philo Farnsworth. I have no idea of the historical accuracy of that, but it was a damn fine book.
Heh, I don't recognize any of those songs or artists. I haven't listened to the radio in months and months. I've been browsing mp3.com looking for the handful of kickass bands in every genre and found quite a few. I just don't NEED the commercial pop bands to find music I enjoy.
Kintanon
Re:A true sesquipedalian
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
Obfustication? Might you perhaps mean Obfuscation?
You RTFA jackass. The cops have done experiments showing that cement filled objects are more dangerous (No shit?) but as of yet none of the kids have fired anything heftier than fruit.
The germans JUST NOW discovered potato guns? Damn, get with the program people! Just wait until they figure that if you fill a tin can with cement you can put a hole through a car, not just a big dent in the side.
Not to mention Heaven Help You if the task requires more than 20 seconds of downtime on a production server. Apparently admins are supposed to work the normal 9-5 hours just in case something goes wrong, and then come in after hours to do any actual maintenance. Drives me insane. People act like I don't have a life outside of work...
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report"
What do you do if there is more than one sales report? What if there are 2500 sales reports from 30 different companies from a 3 year span? You could ask a human to retrive "The sales report" and they wouldn't have any fucking idea what you were talking about either. If you can't tell the computer what you're looking for you can't expect the computer to find it. Just like a human.
Sooo.... you're saying I should probably stop trying to get my neighbors dog to fuck my cat? I was really looking forward to having the first pupkitten on my block...
That was a remarkably stoic cat. With my cat, if you are holding food above the level of his head he will leap upon it and devour it. If it is too high for him to leap to he will climb you until he is high enough to leap upon it and devour it. If you are so discourteous as to attempt to EAT the food he is after he will bite your face in an attempt to liberate his unjustly imprisoned food from you.
So I dunno where this guy got a cat that would just sit there when the food was nearby, But I wanna trade!
How have people in the community treated you since your release? Have people been reluctanct to associate with you too closely? Have you had a hard time rebuilding your contacts? Just in general has the response from the community been a positive one for you?
Hrm, neither I, nor the people around me have ever noticed any mental deterioration during my sleepless long weekends. I don't think that the barrier for that is the same on everyone. I know someone who regularly goes 4 days without sleep with only mild affects toward the end of the period. But I know another person who can't go 16 hours without sleep. And of course, no one ever said his code was quality, or commented... He could have just churned it out in one mass of creative orgasm and have no idea what it really does.... Or he could have reused 70% of the code from other places.
Campaign finance reform IS needed though. Personally I think no funds outside of an allowed "Election Fund" should be used for elections. And third parties should not be able to air political commercials. The "Election Fund" can be paid into by anyone who wants, as well as a portion of tax proceeds being put into it. The money from that fund is then divided equally amongst ALL of the candidates for the office it is for. People may end up with $100K as their election budget and no more. It means they have 30 seconds informative commercials and lots of pamphlets. Sounds good to me. Not saying this is the obvious best solution, but it would allow for auditting of each candidates campaign since you know how much they can spend so you just track their receipts and it's easy to find out who is cheating most of the time.
Heh, you assume a drastically inflated amount of sleep. If I can go for 4 days on about 4 hours of sleep for DragonCON I'm sure some of the more hardcore programmers can do it for a codeing binge. Assume average of 1.5hrs of sleep per day across the week. With.5 hrs for eatting and using the bathroom. Leaves us a massive 22hrs worth of codeing time per day. 4,500 lines isn't that implausible now.
As a sidenote, for people who do find themselves in Jersey, do not EVER EVER EVER pull up to a gas station and yell, "Hey Gas Monkey! Fill it up!" they don't like that...
I can reliably beat moo2 on impossible every time. No cheating. Of course, I've been playing it semi-regularly since it was released. And will probably play it some more now in preperation for Moo3.
A friend of mine has been producing professional quality art using Corel Draw of all things since 1997. Some of his stuff is AMAZING. He's got a website around somewhere, if I can find it I'll post it to the thread and some of you can see what can really be done on a computer by someone who is willing to work hard on it.
I've never understood the faith people have in pepper spray. At least, not since I was working security for a widespread Panic concert and a biker did a cool trick with one of the security guards pepper spray... He grabbed the pepper spray and sprayed it into his mouth, then chased it with a beer and belched.... You shoulda seen the security guards eyes...
Slashdot Mirror
I've never had training for any piece of software I've ever used, but I think I manage all right.
This was something that annoyed me to NO END when I was doing tech support. I could not convince the people in charge to LET me hold monthly training seminars for new hires that explained how to do basic computing tasks. I wanted to do it because about twice a day I would get called to someones workstation with the problem description of "My screen is too big/small/funny looking!" and the problem was that they had changed their screen resolution or something like that. When asked, they all claim they've never touched anything. I would also get calls from people where the description was, "My screen disappeared" and then I would come down and they would have 90+ minimized internet explorer windows or something similar, and they reason they thought it "Disappeared" was because the machine was too overloaded to open thant 91st window after they minized the 90th one. All I wanted was to be able to show everyone these very very basic things so that my time wouldn't get eatten up and they would feel a little more comfortable with their machines. But NO, that would have lowered production by half a unit per person (When we're spewing out 10,000 units per day). Bleh... I hate management. I'm much happier being sysadmin for a small company. I mostly support programmers. Ahhh the bliss of not having to tell someone how to double click for the fourth time.
Kintanon
I had this problem at a previous employer.
I would leave 30 minutes early 3 times a week to go to my martial arts classes.
I was a salaried employee, so I got paid the same no matter what.
My boss, her boss, 3 of the programers, and untold support people took between 5 and 8 smoke breaks, each lasting 15 minutes or more per day.
I was asked to stop leaving 30 minutes early, my response, "If I get a crack habit can I keep my current schedule? Because all of you guys are taking half a dozen 15 minute breaks a day while I skip lunch."
That didn't go over well. I got lectured so much... That was when I decided to quit. Still took me a couple of months to find a new job and really get ready to leave. But eventually I got out of there. The job was hell...
And incidentally I hate smokers. I hate them SOOO much, with their free extra breaktimes.
Kintanon
Yes, as loudly proclaimed by myself outside of the sluggy freelance booth at DragonCon, "I AM A LOONY FANBOY! I WORSHIP THE COMIC!" >:)
I proclaim the same about Hikaru No Go.
Kintanon
I've started to hate comics.
The last comic book I picked up cost me 3$. It contained 22 pages. Of those 22 pages 6 contained no text. If the 16 pages which did contain text only 3 pages had any text which actually formed a cohesive story. At the end of the comic I still had NO IDEA what was supposedly happening. There was no self contained story whatsoever. Nothing explained anything. In order to grasp this comic, I knew I was going to need to read the ones before it. Easy you say? I say thee nay! I began my quest for the 5 issues which came before the issue in my hand (One X-Men, Gen13 or something like that), in my quest I first searched the comic book store which I was standing in. Back issues? No... They don't carry anything other than this months release. Off to e-bay! Nope, lots of Old X-men stuff, but nothing recent. Well, how about other websites? Thppt, nothing. I can't find a place to order back issues of comics. And without being able to do that I'm stuck with a loosly bound collection of glaring colored pages with large breasted women in spandex. Not that I don't enjoy large breasted women in spandex, but that's not really why I picked up the comic.
Manga on the other hand is either easily accessible within each issue (from the dozen or so I've seen) and/or available in large chunks, and/or easily found on the publishers website or a dozen other sources. I never have any trouble finding back issues of Hikaru No Go or Cooking Master Boy.
Kintanon
I'd say what we should do is get a mile long (Or 3 mile long, or 5 mile long, or however long it takes to get up to speed) linear acceleartor. We use it to launch material capsules into space for essentially nothing after the cost of construction. Then we make some remote controlled robots designed for constructing things in space. We launch them up the same way in big shock resistant containers that burst open and are then also used as building materials. Then we set the robots to work building us a superlight craft in space. Once the construction is complete we launch its payload via the L.A., the payload consistes of all of the equipment we can think of that would be useful for terraforming a small chunk of the moon or mars. Then we send the ship there, also remote controlled. Land it, remotely control the construction of a habitat, populate the habitat, continue to build ships with this method. Once we have 3 or 4 of them they can pretty much ferry back and forth between levels of earth orbit carrying supplies to the moon base. The moon base people work on finding water or raw materials on the moon. If we find water they set up a slow but steady method of converting it into fuel (hydrogen) if we find raw materials then we boost the water or hydrogen and they start setting up manufactoring facilities to create the materials for more ships. At some point we dismantle most of the freight carrying ships and rebuild them into one much larger ship designed to hold 200 or so people. We get those 200 or so people. In the meantime though we are now launching freighters out to mars to drop supplies down to the planet as well as robots, solar factories, anything we can think of that will help make a small piece of mars habitable. Once we've got a couple hundred people, a mars that is covered in supplies, and a very lage ship we set out for Mars establish a colony there and begin the research to make larger sections of it habitable as well as searching it for water/raw materials to use in constructing that habitat.
Now we build a few booster heavy tugs in orbit, find a convenient asteroid and pull it into orbit around Mars (or just land some miners on one of the Moons of mars) and start extracting raw materials from that to continue habitat constructions. This plan puts us well on our way to permanent residency on Mars, and I'd say it will take about 75 years to complete. If I were lucky I could see us land on Mars and establish that colony base before I die...
Kintanon
Hah! Don't be silly! Two Towers appealed to people who like Medieval Fantasy, while Nemesis appealed to people who like science fiction. Those are quite obviously two distinct and seperate groups of people, thus the Nemesis release shouldn't be affected by the Two Towers release!
Of course, the exec that took that line of thought and went through with it is probably already standing in the unemployment line...
Kintanon
I find it odd for people not to have a goal they are working towards. I'm sure we were all asked the "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" question as a response to "What job should I get?" well my answer was study Martial Arts, it still is. I was originally going to be a business major in college, but found out that my computer related hobby could make me lots of money. So I did that instead. But I never lost sight of my goal. I want to open my own martial arts school. I'm hoping to do so about the time I hit 30, maybe a little later. In the mean time I'm a system administrator for a company I really like. I like the job, I like the people. But I don't stress over the work. I automate where I can, do the work as it needs to be done, and go home at 6 most of the time. I'm relaxed because I have a goal. I know I won't be doing this forever.
Everyone needs a goal.
Kintanon
Wasn't that the name of the guy from "Carter Beats the Devil" I think that's the name, that was a book about a magician and television and stuff...? Interesting book. I'm pretty sure the kid who invented television in that buck was named Philo Farnsworth. I have no idea of the historical accuracy of that, but it was a damn fine book.
Kintanon
Heh, I don't recognize any of those songs or artists. I haven't listened to the radio in months and months. I've been browsing mp3.com looking for the handful of kickass bands in every genre and found quite a few. I just don't NEED the commercial pop bands to find music I enjoy.
Kintanon
Obfustication?
Might you perhaps mean Obfuscation?
Kintanon
You RTFA jackass. The cops have done experiments showing that cement filled objects are more dangerous (No shit?) but as of yet none of the kids have fired anything heftier than fruit.
Kintanon
The germans JUST NOW discovered potato guns? Damn, get with the program people!
Just wait until they figure that if you fill a tin can with cement you can put a hole through a car, not just a big dent in the side.
Kintanon
Not to mention Heaven Help You if the task requires more than 20 seconds of downtime on a production server. Apparently admins are supposed to work the normal 9-5 hours just in case something goes wrong, and then come in after hours to do any actual maintenance. Drives me insane. People act like I don't have a life outside of work...
Kintanon
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report"
What do you do if there is more than one sales report? What if there are 2500 sales reports from 30 different companies from a 3 year span? You could ask a human to retrive "The sales report" and they wouldn't have any fucking idea what you were talking about either.
If you can't tell the computer what you're looking for you can't expect the computer to find it. Just like a human.
Kintanon
Sooo.... you're saying I should probably stop trying to get my neighbors dog to fuck my cat?
I was really looking forward to having the first pupkitten on my block...
Kintanon
That was a remarkably stoic cat. With my cat, if you are holding food above the level of his head he will leap upon it and devour it. If it is too high for him to leap to he will climb you until he is high enough to leap upon it and devour it. If you are so discourteous as to attempt to EAT the food he is after he will bite your face in an attempt to liberate his unjustly imprisoned food from you.
So I dunno where this guy got a cat that would just sit there when the food was nearby, But I wanna trade!
Kintanon
How have people in the community treated you since your release? Have people been reluctanct to associate with you too closely? Have you had a hard time rebuilding your contacts?
Just in general has the response from the community been a positive one for you?
Kintanon
Hrm, neither I, nor the people around me have ever noticed any mental deterioration during my sleepless long weekends. I don't think that the barrier for that is the same on everyone. I know someone who regularly goes 4 days without sleep with only mild affects toward the end of the period. But I know another person who can't go 16 hours without sleep.
And of course, no one ever said his code was quality, or commented... He could have just churned it out in one mass of creative orgasm and have no idea what it really does....
Or he could have reused 70% of the code from other places.
Kintanon
Campaign finance reform IS needed though. Personally I think no funds outside of an allowed "Election Fund" should be used for elections. And third parties should not be able to air political commercials. The "Election Fund" can be paid into by anyone who wants, as well as a portion of tax proceeds being put into it. The money from that fund is then divided equally amongst ALL of the candidates for the office it is for. People may end up with $100K as their election budget and no more. It means they have 30 seconds informative commercials and lots of pamphlets. Sounds good to me. Not saying this is the obvious best solution, but it would allow for auditting of each candidates campaign since you know how much they can spend so you just track their receipts and it's easy to find out who is cheating most of the time.
Kintanon
Heh, you assume a drastically inflated amount of sleep. If I can go for 4 days on about 4 hours of sleep for DragonCON I'm sure some of the more hardcore programmers can do it for a codeing binge. .5 hrs for eatting and using the bathroom. Leaves us a massive 22hrs worth of codeing time per day. 4,500 lines isn't that implausible now.
Assume average of 1.5hrs of sleep per day across the week. With
Kintanon
As a sidenote, for people who do find themselves in Jersey, do not EVER EVER EVER pull up to a gas station and yell, "Hey Gas Monkey! Fill it up!" they don't like that...
Kintanon
I can reliably beat moo2 on impossible every time. No cheating. Of course, I've been playing it semi-regularly since it was released. And will probably play it some more now in preperation for Moo3.
Kintanon
400? That assumes you only put 1 converter per ship. Bollucks! I recall doing over 10k damage with stellarconverters...
Though gauss cannons were always my favorite weapon...
Kintanon
A friend of mine has been producing professional quality art using Corel Draw of all things since 1997. Some of his stuff is AMAZING. He's got a website around somewhere, if I can find it I'll post it to the thread and some of you can see what can really be done on a computer by someone who is willing to work hard on it.
Kintanon
I've never understood the faith people have in pepper spray. At least, not since I was working security for a widespread Panic concert and a biker did a cool trick with one of the security guards pepper spray... He grabbed the pepper spray and sprayed it into his mouth, then chased it with a beer and belched.... You shoulda seen the security guards eyes...
Kintanon