If an engineering organization is tossing around "minimum viable product" they are telling you they are not resourced to build the specified product, very loudly, but cannot simply say no. Soft science types should recognize passive aggressive behavior as a sign that something is wrong. Either the engineering management is squandering resources, or, as is my experience post-2001, they are woefully understaffed. Instead they're going to make the sunniest day scenario they are capable of making, while factoring in all the known gotchas that they've compiled in a metrics database. If they factor in what they really think is time, someone will take that manager, grill him and beat him down for exaggeration.
My 2yo got an iPod touch ($300) and still has it 2.5 years later as his most prized possession. We have never had to tell him to keep track of it, he loves it that much. It's not for every kid though.
I would not expect that to happen. Microsoft hasn't managed to be a persistent parasite on the technology world by being that incredibly stupid. They're just stupid enough for most of the planet to hate them and very nearly cause even the government of the United States to break them up, but not quite stupid enough to destroy themselves. Win8 is going to launch, it will be our favorite joke for a few years, then Win9 (which will no doubt have to be rebranded to avoid the stigma of Win8) will be released with a lot of nerfs and changes and the general public will be content again.
Engineering wants to cut support for older products because they had to make compromises, hacks or were compelled to ship before it was ready to meet a deadline. As a result a product is released is difficult to maintain and they want to scrap it and focus on the next product that hasn't yet been ruined by marketing and product management. Naively they assume that they'll actually be able to do a proper job THIS time by getting ahead of the ball, until the deadline approaches, then the cycle repeats. This proceeds forever.
Agreed, unless Windows 8 was designed around tablets and Angry Birds rather than desktops and laptops. MS would never consider taking their (inexplicably) successful desktop OS and dumbing it down to work on devices where they have nearly 0% market share and have the status of has-been, or never-were. That'd be an unmitigated disaster, no company would be so foolish.
This is good advice imo. Better than you having to use Windows, which you clearly don't want to do, make sure he can. Unless he's really lucky, his career (or at least academic life) will force him to use Windows anyway.
He said his son is going to play WoW. That means visiting WoW sites, and possibly WoW guilds. This means he'll be exposed to keyloggers, malware and other crap. While I agree it's better to avoid the whore than to wear the condom, but if you know you're going to visit the whore anyway better suit up. Also, and I know many parents particularly on slashdot don't agree with me and that's fine, but my children get privacy once they reach majority and move out and establish financial independence. Until then their lives are my business.
If your son is going to play wow, make sure he has two factor authentication enabled. Especially important is to make sure he sets his email password differently than his game password (or better yet, you sign up for his account with one of your disposable email accounts, and let him create the battlenet account).
Yeah I think I said that, less pedantically. I never said anything about freedom, freedom to take someones money or freedom to keep it. The only disagreement we have regards ideological indoctrination's permanence. I argue that the "generation gap" is an example of how transitory it really is.
Perfect individualism ("the idea that you can be rich and left alone") does not exist. I wish it did, but it never will until there is exactly 1 living sentient being on the planet and no means to come or go.
The same people as when democracy was first tried out, your neighbor. Before that it was your lord. Before that it was the biggest thug near you. The idea that you can be rich and be left alone really has never existed, this is a very liberal agenda you're pushing. There's always a been a balance between greed and self preservation, the current system seems a bit better than most since we're having an argument about how much of your money to take from you. It beats some of the past experiments in taxation that involved sharp objects, or men storming your house in the middle of the night.
The tea partier will hit you over the head with a pound of sacred dead tree matter, while explaining why corporate interests trump all else. Libertarians will just quote Ayn Rand instead.
Every paper is a stunning breakthrough? Every paper is the one that gets your name in the history books? I don't think so, I recall grads doing a lot of bullshit papers for completely non-technical reasons (quotas, resume count, etc.). Drugs are not the only commodity in which addiction is bad for you, and in which you develop a broken frame of mind in order to get the next fix.
In my present employment I can and do work over 80 hours a week and I'm happy as a clam, since it isn't 80 hours of corporate bullshit, it's 80 hours of engineering. The problem is not what I want or what the boss wants, it's what my family wants. When I was a college kid I could have logged those hours if I enjoyed it w/o a problem. But now, even though I actually have no problem with doing what I'm assigned to do, for as long as it takes to do it, I simply must not.
No one should be in a position where anyone is expecting 80 hours a week from them, whether they do so voluntarily or under duress. It's not in the best interests of the individual, his family, or the society which has to tolerate the issues that come from such single dimensional pursuits. Work hard, play hard, but balance the two or else bad things will happen.
My 4yo has been playing these games for years and he loves them. Most of them are child safe, start with something like Milk Quest. I'm for video games (if the child wants to), I believe my son learned to read just because he wanted to play the games he saw me playing. Of course I don't let him play those games for a variety of reasons, but he's happy to play more sterile games where no one dies and there's no interaction with internet creeps (read: most of my friends).
Also don't neglect minecraft. It's probably difficult for a young child to physically play, but at least mine will watch me play as long as I'm making interesting things. The good side (and possibly bad side) is that he may start turning your HOUSE into a minecraft. Mine would go around positioning boxes and furniture so that he could navigate barriers similar to how you might drop cubes in minecraft to make ladders.
That's true, but I don't know to what degree I want to support it. I am all for using the social good on provable facts. I don't feel that anything in the soft sciences should ever be used as justification for anything, nor do I consider their data to be proof of anything except that they wasted their education on false science. In short I don't trust that these doctors know what is good for kids when it doesn't involve broken bones and viruses.
We supervise our children carefully, and honestly Nick Jr., Sesame Street and many of the iPhone games out there have been the best form of education that I think can be offered to the 2-4yo crowd. Their tolerance for parenting is as minimal as a kid of any other age, but they will watch tv and they will keep messing with that phone until it stops working. If you can make sure the TV is playing something reasonable educational, you trick them in to learning. I'm not saying it doesn't also go along with OTHER good parenting steps (like reading to your child every night, or sitting down with him and trying to play, or basic interaction, etc.), but there's nothing evil about the boob tube itself. It's abandoning your child to the tube, not monitoring what is on it (or expecting that TV will conform to anyones idea of a social norm and play appropriate content for your child all the time) and general neglect that is bad for kids.
I'm fairly certain TV and video games have taught my oldest child how to read, write and do basic arithmetic before he turned 4, because I don't think anything my wife or I have tried to do had anything to do with it. When we play with him, it's boring. When he sees it on a video game (often with bouncing furry creatures), it's awesome. Minecraft was probably better than legos in encouraging him to come up with creative solutions to problems.
The government can just stay the hell out of my home, if I want a doctor's opinion I will seek it.
Which is why it needs to be done slowly, preferably by directing market forces rather than fiat. If the government said "patents do not exist, copyright" does not exist, the economy would explode, at least in the short run (where short may be 5 years). But if the government simply took wind out of the sails over a period of years, the economy wouldn't necessarily tank.
Economics is mostly a fraud, appearances matter more than business fundamentals (at least in the short term). You can't SAY you're devaluing IP, people would freak, you simply let it devalue.
Just because it upsets a business model, does not make it bad for the economy or the citizens of the country. It makes it bad for those whose business models it upsets, but they also have the choice to change with the times or lose their money.
There are a few places where we desperately need some business models being upset, curtailed or destroyed for the benefit of the citzens: telecom carriers, cable carriers, IP holders in general and a few overgrown gorillas who have become oppressive. It's best that the government itself stays out of this as much as possible, or at least just acts as a facilitator (i.e. pork money thrown to enemies of these beasts).
An example of something that worked well: for a few years the government gave independent service providers cheap access to "the last mile" customers. Consumers got cheap, highly functioning, unlimited broadband, with excellent service and a selection of options that served our needs. For a few years our telecom system wasn't an embarrassment. Unfortunately, the government reversed itself, and those advantages have been slowly sucked away, or "unlimited" redefined to mean something that doesn't mean unlimited, virtually no competition and basically a selection of the same shitty service served the same way. I can't argue that what the government did isn't a little scary and vaguely communist, but it absolutely was positive change while it lasted.
If the same scenarios can be created without government involvement (i.e. a new, natural competitor that disrupts the status quo), we have the actual ideal of a capitalist economy that works. Unfortunately IP law being what it is, does not allow competition by definition. The purpose of the law makes sense, but the government needs to spend less time and energy policing it. Basically if you are a pirate, you could go to jail if the government chases you. But the government won't be funded to chase all but the worst offenders. The way to regulate this is market based pricing: as long as media companies can get away with charging us $20 for what costs $1 in China, we are overpolicing our IP. As long as region locks exists, we are overpolicing our IP.
I guess I don't see the potential loss of casual sex due to women having been just pitiably bored as a huge social dilemma to solve. Personally, having grown up in the pre-smart phone world, I never had a lack of things to do. Books, projects, etc. always used up my free time. I'm not sure how you get so bored that it's either watch paint dry, or have sex with a stranger. Don't get me wrong, I'd take sex with random hot girls over all of those things, but it seems like an unusual scenario. Particularly in college, where there is usually more work to do than available hours.
Now if the argument was that long term stable relationships weren't forming because people would rather play angry birds than seek meaningful relationships, I think I would be alarmed. I just don't think that's a problem, I'd be far more concerned about more consuming activities (like careers, or serious obsessive gaming) than smartphones.
I assure you this was the case long before smartphones, if you lived in a sufficiently urban area. As a child in the 80s, the key message was "Don't talk to strangers".
Slashdot Mirror
Why should the Chinese trust Chinese equipment, it's all copies of western stuff anyway!
If an engineering organization is tossing around "minimum viable product" they are telling you they are not resourced to build the specified product, very loudly, but cannot simply say no. Soft science types should recognize passive aggressive behavior as a sign that something is wrong. Either the engineering management is squandering resources, or, as is my experience post-2001, they are woefully understaffed. Instead they're going to make the sunniest day scenario they are capable of making, while factoring in all the known gotchas that they've compiled in a metrics database. If they factor in what they really think is time, someone will take that manager, grill him and beat him down for exaggeration.
And yes, this is part of the never-ending cycle.
My 2yo got an iPod touch ($300) and still has it 2.5 years later as his most prized possession. We have never had to tell him to keep track of it, he loves it that much. It's not for every kid though.
I would not expect that to happen. Microsoft hasn't managed to be a persistent parasite on the technology world by being that incredibly stupid. They're just stupid enough for most of the planet to hate them and very nearly cause even the government of the United States to break them up, but not quite stupid enough to destroy themselves. Win8 is going to launch, it will be our favorite joke for a few years, then Win9 (which will no doubt have to be rebranded to avoid the stigma of Win8) will be released with a lot of nerfs and changes and the general public will be content again.
Engineering wants to cut support for older products because they had to make compromises, hacks or were compelled to ship before it was ready to meet a deadline. As a result a product is released is difficult to maintain and they want to scrap it and focus on the next product that hasn't yet been ruined by marketing and product management. Naively they assume that they'll actually be able to do a proper job THIS time by getting ahead of the ball, until the deadline approaches, then the cycle repeats. This proceeds forever.
Agreed, unless Windows 8 was designed around tablets and Angry Birds rather than desktops and laptops. MS would never consider taking their (inexplicably) successful desktop OS and dumbing it down to work on devices where they have nearly 0% market share and have the status of has-been, or never-were. That'd be an unmitigated disaster, no company would be so foolish.
This is good advice imo. Better than you having to use Windows, which you clearly don't want to do, make sure he can. Unless he's really lucky, his career (or at least academic life) will force him to use Windows anyway.
He said his son is going to play WoW. That means visiting WoW sites, and possibly WoW guilds. This means he'll be exposed to keyloggers, malware and other crap. While I agree it's better to avoid the whore than to wear the condom, but if you know you're going to visit the whore anyway better suit up. Also, and I know many parents particularly on slashdot don't agree with me and that's fine, but my children get privacy once they reach majority and move out and establish financial independence. Until then their lives are my business.
If your son is going to play wow, make sure he has two factor authentication enabled. Especially important is to make sure he sets his email password differently than his game password (or better yet, you sign up for his account with one of your disposable email accounts, and let him create the battlenet account).
Yeah I think I said that, less pedantically. I never said anything about freedom, freedom to take someones money or freedom to keep it. The only disagreement we have regards ideological indoctrination's permanence. I argue that the "generation gap" is an example of how transitory it really is.
Perfect individualism ("the idea that you can be rich and left alone") does not exist. I wish it did, but it never will until there is exactly 1 living sentient being on the planet and no means to come or go.
The same people as when democracy was first tried out, your neighbor. Before that it was your lord. Before that it was the biggest thug near you. The idea that you can be rich and be left alone really has never existed, this is a very liberal agenda you're pushing. There's always a been a balance between greed and self preservation, the current system seems a bit better than most since we're having an argument about how much of your money to take from you. It beats some of the past experiments in taxation that involved sharp objects, or men storming your house in the middle of the night.
The tea partier will hit you over the head with a pound of sacred dead tree matter, while explaining why corporate interests trump all else. Libertarians will just quote Ayn Rand instead.
Public speaking + Lisp:
(YOU'RE GONNA LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!)
Yes, i'm yelling on purpose. Thank you slashdot.
Every paper is a stunning breakthrough? Every paper is the one that gets your name in the history books? I don't think so, I recall grads doing a lot of bullshit papers for completely non-technical reasons (quotas, resume count, etc.). Drugs are not the only commodity in which addiction is bad for you, and in which you develop a broken frame of mind in order to get the next fix.
In my present employment I can and do work over 80 hours a week and I'm happy as a clam, since it isn't 80 hours of corporate bullshit, it's 80 hours of engineering. The problem is not what I want or what the boss wants, it's what my family wants. When I was a college kid I could have logged those hours if I enjoyed it w/o a problem. But now, even though I actually have no problem with doing what I'm assigned to do, for as long as it takes to do it, I simply must not.
No one should be in a position where anyone is expecting 80 hours a week from them, whether they do so voluntarily or under duress. It's not in the best interests of the individual, his family, or the society which has to tolerate the issues that come from such single dimensional pursuits. Work hard, play hard, but balance the two or else bad things will happen.
yepi.com, kizi.com have tons of games
My 4yo has been playing these games for years and he loves them. Most of them are child safe, start with something like Milk Quest. I'm for video games (if the child wants to), I believe my son learned to read just because he wanted to play the games he saw me playing. Of course I don't let him play those games for a variety of reasons, but he's happy to play more sterile games where no one dies and there's no interaction with internet creeps (read: most of my friends).
Also don't neglect minecraft. It's probably difficult for a young child to physically play, but at least mine will watch me play as long as I'm making interesting things. The good side (and possibly bad side) is that he may start turning your HOUSE into a minecraft. Mine would go around positioning boxes and furniture so that he could navigate barriers similar to how you might drop cubes in minecraft to make ladders.
In space, George Lucas can help us all hear you *whoosh*
That's true, but I don't know to what degree I want to support it. I am all for using the social good on provable facts. I don't feel that anything in the soft sciences should ever be used as justification for anything, nor do I consider their data to be proof of anything except that they wasted their education on false science. In short I don't trust that these doctors know what is good for kids when it doesn't involve broken bones and viruses.
We supervise our children carefully, and honestly Nick Jr., Sesame Street and many of the iPhone games out there have been the best form of education that I think can be offered to the 2-4yo crowd. Their tolerance for parenting is as minimal as a kid of any other age, but they will watch tv and they will keep messing with that phone until it stops working. If you can make sure the TV is playing something reasonable educational, you trick them in to learning. I'm not saying it doesn't also go along with OTHER good parenting steps (like reading to your child every night, or sitting down with him and trying to play, or basic interaction, etc.), but there's nothing evil about the boob tube itself. It's abandoning your child to the tube, not monitoring what is on it (or expecting that TV will conform to anyones idea of a social norm and play appropriate content for your child all the time) and general neglect that is bad for kids.
I'm fairly certain TV and video games have taught my oldest child how to read, write and do basic arithmetic before he turned 4, because I don't think anything my wife or I have tried to do had anything to do with it. When we play with him, it's boring. When he sees it on a video game (often with bouncing furry creatures), it's awesome. Minecraft was probably better than legos in encouraging him to come up with creative solutions to problems.
The government can just stay the hell out of my home, if I want a doctor's opinion I will seek it.
A cat in a box is always bloody furious, that's what quantum physicists failed to account for.
Which is why it needs to be done slowly, preferably by directing market forces rather than fiat. If the government said "patents do not exist, copyright" does not exist, the economy would explode, at least in the short run (where short may be 5 years). But if the government simply took wind out of the sails over a period of years, the economy wouldn't necessarily tank.
Economics is mostly a fraud, appearances matter more than business fundamentals (at least in the short term). You can't SAY you're devaluing IP, people would freak, you simply let it devalue.
Just because it upsets a business model, does not make it bad for the economy or the citizens of the country. It makes it bad for those whose business models it upsets, but they also have the choice to change with the times or lose their money.
There are a few places where we desperately need some business models being upset, curtailed or destroyed for the benefit of the citzens: telecom carriers, cable carriers, IP holders in general and a few overgrown gorillas who have become oppressive. It's best that the government itself stays out of this as much as possible, or at least just acts as a facilitator (i.e. pork money thrown to enemies of these beasts).
An example of something that worked well: for a few years the government gave independent service providers cheap access to "the last mile" customers. Consumers got cheap, highly functioning, unlimited broadband, with excellent service and a selection of options that served our needs. For a few years our telecom system wasn't an embarrassment. Unfortunately, the government reversed itself, and those advantages have been slowly sucked away, or "unlimited" redefined to mean something that doesn't mean unlimited, virtually no competition and basically a selection of the same shitty service served the same way. I can't argue that what the government did isn't a little scary and vaguely communist, but it absolutely was positive change while it lasted.
If the same scenarios can be created without government involvement (i.e. a new, natural competitor that disrupts the status quo), we have the actual ideal of a capitalist economy that works. Unfortunately IP law being what it is, does not allow competition by definition. The purpose of the law makes sense, but the government needs to spend less time and energy policing it. Basically if you are a pirate, you could go to jail if the government chases you. But the government won't be funded to chase all but the worst offenders. The way to regulate this is market based pricing: as long as media companies can get away with charging us $20 for what costs $1 in China, we are overpolicing our IP. As long as region locks exists, we are overpolicing our IP.
I guess I don't see the potential loss of casual sex due to women having been just pitiably bored as a huge social dilemma to solve. Personally, having grown up in the pre-smart phone world, I never had a lack of things to do. Books, projects, etc. always used up my free time. I'm not sure how you get so bored that it's either watch paint dry, or have sex with a stranger. Don't get me wrong, I'd take sex with random hot girls over all of those things, but it seems like an unusual scenario. Particularly in college, where there is usually more work to do than available hours.
Now if the argument was that long term stable relationships weren't forming because people would rather play angry birds than seek meaningful relationships, I think I would be alarmed. I just don't think that's a problem, I'd be far more concerned about more consuming activities (like careers, or serious obsessive gaming) than smartphones.
War on christianity? How could this not apply to any religion: muslim, jewish, crackpot pedophile posing as church leader?
This person has issues with religion, and he basically calls himself an idiot in his first sentence, but proceeds unabashed.
The problem is that sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
I assure you this was the case long before smartphones, if you lived in a sufficiently urban area. As a child in the 80s, the key message was "Don't talk to strangers".
I'm going to say that sedentary jobs have far more to do with that for adults than angry birds.