Citation needed. As far as I know there is no place on earth where you can go a few miles without seeing a McDonalds and forgetting about prey animals.
Did I miss a beat, or is this an article about how they can't get people they're paying to do "boring parts" because the management implications won't allow it. The only way they can make a change, exciting or boring, is if someone influential in the industry or within the company identifies a serious problem and forms a top level tiger team, which eventually trickles down to developers. How many companies out there work like this? Virtually all the big ones are like this.
Otherwise they're mostly paying people to keep turning the corporate crank, and work on the hot topic of the day.
Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job
I know, my little company has two such people. They're interesting to work with, they have the free will of contractors, the job satisfaction of doing what they'd be doing anyway, they are untouchable because my company cannot succeed without linux street cred and they're well respected in their communities. They care about our company, to be sure, but when we got our second round of funding, and it came with strings attached and a new set of management hell bent on offshoring design, they told them to fuck off, in those exact words, in front of the entire company. They didn't get fired or forced out, unlike four of the software engineers we have on our proprietary management OS who also refused to cooperate. Those guys lived and died by the idiocy of our suits, they are slaves.
Linux devs who get paid by "the man", who have the community support required to make them influential, but the corporate support required to put the food on the table are in a great position. They do not reflect the majority of engineers working for private industry. Their "boss" is the community of people who contribute, who deal with their patches and understand the quality of their work. The company is simply paying them to influence by design, and they're irreplaceable. This is an example of a model that really works. Free men work harder, smarter and longer than slaves.
Linux however is the exception, not everything can follow this model. As I said, management who can learn from this will be rich. The rest will merely scrape by.
The lesson is a lot deeper, and a lot more pervasive than that. Microsoft is a microcosm of all software and hardware development in the corporate world. There is a fundamental difference that the suits don't understand, and in fact think they are superior to: Linux is developed by people who enjoy what they do, and do it of their own free will and volition, in their own time, in their own way. They are creating something they care about, and invest whatever it takes to make it right. It is scary because they are more or less self managing, it's not always a pretty process, and not always monotonically increasing in quality and value, but the long term trend is positive.
In contrast, employees of a company are doing whatever it takes to make a paycheck, trying to balance the horrors of working for a boss and a program manager for a company they increasingly hate, month by month, for a business unit they probably have hated since they day they were hired, on a goal that they have no investment in (i.e. maximizing shareholder value) in work environments that make insane asylums look like club med. All while being constantly reminded how replaceable they are, frequently while training their overseas replacements or at least being forced to work "along side" them. Then, just when you think it can't be worse, someone in a suit reads a Jack Welch screed and tries some "management technique" he understood poorly and was ill conceived to begin with. If a single employee actually cares at the end of the day, 1) he's being disobedient or is a thief or 2) he's got some good meds.
Good engineers, of any kind, are "applied artists", their medium is physics, computer processors, sheet metal, whatever. We are treated at best like "junior managers", at worst like factory workers. We must eat, so we work in the corporate salt mine but I guarantee you that management is never even seeing a fraction of the potential their dollars are paying for, and honestly it's by their own design. The management that learns how to properly harness that energy (or perhaps rediscovers it), is the one that is going to make millions.
I'd say it's death by a thousand bee stings. There are so many mmogs out there that are close clones of WoW, some which favor some variant of the game a segment of the WoW customer base wants (i.e. more pvp focus, more pve focus, some rule change, etc.). Lots are f2p...
It's a feature. Once they hack it they start using it as cloud storage for their porn. Saves you the effort of finding and catalogueing the porn yourself. Just log in and browse around, every day will be an adventure!
Compared to a communist dictatorship, yes we are. I am free to talk about how much my government sucks, loudly and with great fanfare. It's not that we don't suck, it's that they suck much, much more.
The question is whether we should continue to prop up their mfg industry which seems to be a major attack vector for their espionage activities. Pre-owned cars have a market, pre-ripped jeans have a market, I'm not sure who the market is for pre-rooted machines.
They'd probably rather sell you a new car with fancy new technology than let you upgrade your existing technology.
This, because all I really want is an empty place to mount my iPad in the dash where some cars have their nav/climate control/etc. displays. I'd rather throw that expensive and utterly useless crap out and just plug in an iPad. In fact I'd actually buy an iPad if I could do that.
Bonus points if they would work with Apple and add some USB devices such that the iPad could monitor some aspects of the car (speed, fuel level, climate control, etc.).
Is 3/3 =1, or.99999999 repeating? Is 1/infinity=0, or an infinitesimally small number that's >0? What's the difference? (answer: infinitesimally small and indistinguishable from 0!)
The only thing i will give you on this is 1/0 can be plus or minus infinity and if you're doing a calculation you'd better not forget it. But calling it "Does Not Compute" is being a robot, the real world is based around assuming value(s) for 1/0.
In this case infinity is a valid answer as you can't really have "negative engineering" expense, and if you work in a technology company you have to argue that the engineering expense can only ever be as the expense approaches 0 from the positive side. Tech companies with $0 engineering expense don't last long.
If you have hardware engineers, you don't spend $0 on non-labor expenses. In fact the non-labor expenses will radically dwarf the labor expenses. The tools for some areas can cost as much as a headcount, in others it's a significant fraction of a headcount (and more fun, these are the ones where you need nearly 1:1 license seats/headcount). Then there's jobs you subcontract (backend/layout, custom components, tooling).
And all that is cheap compared to factory NRE & manufacturing costs. I easily spend twice my salary per year in protoype hardware alone. When we go to production, a small run costs more than the entire labor cost of engineering in several years. Hopefully we sell and that money gets earned back of course, but the initial outlay is huge.
Marketing can spend money like nobodies business, even excluding travel. It's amazing how much they spend considering how little it clearly does. But unless you're doing software I would be very surprised if you compared department budgets and Marketing spent more than Engineering (counting MFG as part of engineering, as some companies do).
My experience is that corporations are top to bottom insanity. Progress happens only because one or two dedicated people care enough to create something on their own time, at their own risk and deliver it.
If you're expecting marketing, management or quorum, you're lost.
At worst, well, there's all sorts of possibilities for that.
I'm not sure exactly what my parents would have done, it would have ranged anywhere from calling the cops ("No mom, I just deal, I don't use this shit, are you serious?") to throwing me in rehab ("So what? Everyone's doing it!"), to throwing me in some touchy feely program designed to get kids back from the brink ("No, it was just a joke OK? Some guy on the internet said we should text our parents and I did!").
Honestly the police option seems the least disgusting, I'd rather risk prison rape than people talking to me in soft voices about how I feel. I might be tempted to kill them, and I might lack the impulse control to stop myself after a few days in the program. Certainly if I didn't have the impulse control to stop myself texting them in the first place, this is a real risk.
Anyway, this seems like an incredibly unfunny sort of joke that could go horribly wrong.
Exactly. If someone asks me for an impossible prediction, I will give them what they asked for with unyielding confidence. When faced with the inaccuracy of my prediction, I will continue, with confidence, in giving equally inaccurate predictions in the future.
My real algorithm is as follows: Is it fun/interesting to do? If yes, feel the room and give an estimate that will keep the project from being killed. Else, give a long enough estimate that can withstand cross examination that hopefully will kill the project. Regardless of what I answer, management will cross examine my estimate using their own equally inaccurate measurements and assessments, if I deliver with anything less than absolute confidence I will be smashed. You see, the bullshit is layered upon the bullshit, then convoluted by management bullshit, into spectral bullshit that makes for a great power-point.
If you want an accurate assessment of how long something that has never been done will take, you're asking for the impossible. If you want an accurate assessment of how long something that has been done before many, many times will take, either a) you're not in technology in the US, we don't do "competition" here, or b) I'll tell you 75 years because I really don't want to do that anyway.
Can you loan me you $5B post it note? If you do I'll give you a post-it note for $10B in return. Your investment genius will double your worth and we both report billions in profit!
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed. As far as I know there is no place on earth where you can go a few miles without seeing a McDonalds and forgetting about prey animals.
With 3D printed surface to air missiles, every day!
Klingon grammar warriors slay the dangling participle, derail the run-on sentence, and annihilate the subject-verb disagreement!
The notion that McDonalds cheeseburgers are delicious is offensive to cheeseburgers everywhere.
So don't do this in Germany.
I'd still wait for Windows 8.11 for workgroups. Maybe they'll add a proper command line and support x forwarding natively.
He believes that Wall St. is ruining his company, and I agree with him, having worked there.
Of course I'm not sure he can turn it around, he's a bit too far up the MBA rectum I think to turn a technology company around.
Did I miss a beat, or is this an article about how they can't get people they're paying to do "boring parts" because the management implications won't allow it. The only way they can make a change, exciting or boring, is if someone influential in the industry or within the company identifies a serious problem and forms a top level tiger team, which eventually trickles down to developers. How many companies out there work like this? Virtually all the big ones are like this.
Otherwise they're mostly paying people to keep turning the corporate crank, and work on the hot topic of the day.
Great rant, except that over 75% of the Linux code contributed is contributed by paid corporate employees that are simply doing their job
I know, my little company has two such people. They're interesting to work with, they have the free will of contractors, the job satisfaction of doing what they'd be doing anyway, they are untouchable because my company cannot succeed without linux street cred and they're well respected in their communities. They care about our company, to be sure, but when we got our second round of funding, and it came with strings attached and a new set of management hell bent on offshoring design, they told them to fuck off, in those exact words, in front of the entire company. They didn't get fired or forced out, unlike four of the software engineers we have on our proprietary management OS who also refused to cooperate. Those guys lived and died by the idiocy of our suits, they are slaves.
Linux devs who get paid by "the man", who have the community support required to make them influential, but the corporate support required to put the food on the table are in a great position. They do not reflect the majority of engineers working for private industry. Their "boss" is the community of people who contribute, who deal with their patches and understand the quality of their work. The company is simply paying them to influence by design, and they're irreplaceable. This is an example of a model that really works. Free men work harder, smarter and longer than slaves.
Linux however is the exception, not everything can follow this model. As I said, management who can learn from this will be rich. The rest will merely scrape by.
People at M$ only innit for the money.
The lesson is a lot deeper, and a lot more pervasive than that. Microsoft is a microcosm of all software and hardware development in the corporate world. There is a fundamental difference that the suits don't understand, and in fact think they are superior to: Linux is developed by people who enjoy what they do, and do it of their own free will and volition, in their own time, in their own way. They are creating something they care about, and invest whatever it takes to make it right. It is scary because they are more or less self managing, it's not always a pretty process, and not always monotonically increasing in quality and value, but the long term trend is positive.
In contrast, employees of a company are doing whatever it takes to make a paycheck, trying to balance the horrors of working for a boss and a program manager for a company they increasingly hate, month by month, for a business unit they probably have hated since they day they were hired, on a goal that they have no investment in (i.e. maximizing shareholder value) in work environments that make insane asylums look like club med. All while being constantly reminded how replaceable they are, frequently while training their overseas replacements or at least being forced to work "along side" them. Then, just when you think it can't be worse, someone in a suit reads a Jack Welch screed and tries some "management technique" he understood poorly and was ill conceived to begin with. If a single employee actually cares at the end of the day, 1) he's being disobedient or is a thief or 2) he's got some good meds.
Good engineers, of any kind, are "applied artists", their medium is physics, computer processors, sheet metal, whatever. We are treated at best like "junior managers", at worst like factory workers. We must eat, so we work in the corporate salt mine but I guarantee you that management is never even seeing a fraction of the potential their dollars are paying for, and honestly it's by their own design. The management that learns how to properly harness that energy (or perhaps rediscovers it), is the one that is going to make millions.
I call it "profiling".
I'd say it's death by a thousand bee stings. There are so many mmogs out there that are close clones of WoW, some which favor some variant of the game a segment of the WoW customer base wants (i.e. more pvp focus, more pve focus, some rule change, etc.). Lots are f2p...
It's a feature. Once they hack it they start using it as cloud storage for their porn. Saves you the effort of finding and catalogueing the porn yourself. Just log in and browse around, every day will be an adventure!
So, what have we learned?
Gamers gonna game, and real money auction houses are a bad idea...
Compared to a communist dictatorship, yes we are. I am free to talk about how much my government sucks, loudly and with great fanfare. It's not that we don't suck, it's that they suck much, much more.
The question is whether we should continue to prop up their mfg industry which seems to be a major attack vector for their espionage activities. Pre-owned cars have a market, pre-ripped jeans have a market, I'm not sure who the market is for pre-rooted machines.
They'd probably rather sell you a new car with fancy new technology than let you upgrade your existing technology.
This, because all I really want is an empty place to mount my iPad in the dash where some cars have their nav/climate control/etc. displays. I'd rather throw that expensive and utterly useless crap out and just plug in an iPad. In fact I'd actually buy an iPad if I could do that.
Bonus points if they would work with Apple and add some USB devices such that the iPad could monitor some aspects of the car (speed, fuel level, climate control, etc.).
Is 3/3 =1, or .99999999 repeating? Is 1/infinity=0, or an infinitesimally small number that's >0? What's the difference? (answer: infinitesimally small and indistinguishable from 0!)
The only thing i will give you on this is 1/0 can be plus or minus infinity and if you're doing a calculation you'd better not forget it. But calling it "Does Not Compute" is being a robot, the real world is based around assuming value(s) for 1/0.
In this case infinity is a valid answer as you can't really have "negative engineering" expense, and if you work in a technology company you have to argue that the engineering expense can only ever be as the expense approaches 0 from the positive side. Tech companies with $0 engineering expense don't last long.
If you have hardware engineers, you don't spend $0 on non-labor expenses. In fact the non-labor expenses will radically dwarf the labor expenses. The tools for some areas can cost as much as a headcount, in others it's a significant fraction of a headcount (and more fun, these are the ones where you need nearly 1:1 license seats/headcount). Then there's jobs you subcontract (backend/layout, custom components, tooling).
And all that is cheap compared to factory NRE & manufacturing costs. I easily spend twice my salary per year in protoype hardware alone. When we go to production, a small run costs more than the entire labor cost of engineering in several years. Hopefully we sell and that money gets earned back of course, but the initial outlay is huge.
Marketing can spend money like nobodies business, even excluding travel. It's amazing how much they spend considering how little it clearly does. But unless you're doing software I would be very surprised if you compared department budgets and Marketing spent more than Engineering (counting MFG as part of engineering, as some companies do).
almost coincidental
In fact accidental. It was a growing pain on the road to becoming a big business, but is now vestigial.
latency, throughput
My experience is that corporations are top to bottom insanity. Progress happens only because one or two dedicated people care enough to create something on their own time, at their own risk and deliver it.
If you're expecting marketing, management or quorum, you're lost.
At worst, well, there's all sorts of possibilities for that.
I'm not sure exactly what my parents would have done, it would have ranged anywhere from calling the cops ("No mom, I just deal, I don't use this shit, are you serious?") to throwing me in rehab ("So what? Everyone's doing it!"), to throwing me in some touchy feely program designed to get kids back from the brink ("No, it was just a joke OK? Some guy on the internet said we should text our parents and I did!").
Honestly the police option seems the least disgusting, I'd rather risk prison rape than people talking to me in soft voices about how I feel. I might be tempted to kill them, and I might lack the impulse control to stop myself after a few days in the program. Certainly if I didn't have the impulse control to stop myself texting them in the first place, this is a real risk.
Anyway, this seems like an incredibly unfunny sort of joke that could go horribly wrong.
Exactly. If someone asks me for an impossible prediction, I will give them what they asked for with unyielding confidence. When faced with the inaccuracy of my prediction, I will continue, with confidence, in giving equally inaccurate predictions in the future.
My real algorithm is as follows:
Is it fun/interesting to do? If yes, feel the room and give an estimate that will keep the project from being killed. Else, give a long enough estimate that can withstand cross examination that hopefully will kill the project. Regardless of what I answer, management will cross examine my estimate using their own equally inaccurate measurements and assessments, if I deliver with anything less than absolute confidence I will be smashed. You see, the bullshit is layered upon the bullshit, then convoluted by management bullshit, into spectral bullshit that makes for a great power-point.
If you want an accurate assessment of how long something that has never been done will take, you're asking for the impossible. If you want an accurate assessment of how long something that has been done before many, many times will take, either a) you're not in technology in the US, we don't do "competition" here, or b) I'll tell you 75 years because I really don't want to do that anyway.
If it has "socio" in it, it's bullshit. It doesn't matter who says it. It's "science" for people who don't know what real science is about.
Can you loan me you $5B post it note? If you do I'll give you a post-it note for $10B in return. Your investment genius will double your worth and we both report billions in profit!
I think cell phone jamming should be legal. Companies should be allowed to apply for permits to have them and use them reasonably
As long as I get to decide what's reasonable.