What would be the downside of just installing a windows vm on Linux to run games? It would seem to remove most of the barriers, and provide the benefit of isolating the host system from potential intrusion. Many people like to boast about the security benefits of *nixes, but I think that loading a bunch of resource intensive gaming applications would tend to reduce that benefit
Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet (kinda like the human batteries from The Matrix)
I tend to look to the past for what we will find in the future and this immediately brought to mind 'A Modest Proposal' with its suggestion for the proper use of 'excess human population'. Just to save you from doing any research, it is the same that was found in Soylent Green (but much better written, Johnathan Swift possessed wit)
Of course, Spock's Brain comes to mind as our robotic overlords become to advanced to be bothered with tending to the 'plumbing' and outsource the more mundane work to our feeble human brains
The expositions of the future used to envision a world where automation resulted in a life of ease for us mere humans, this could still be the case if the concentration of wealth to the upper echelons can be avoided
I was given morphine for pain in the US after splenectomy due to trauma (mid-70's)
Contracted pneumonia, so they dropped the morphine immediately and started harassing me to walk around (dragging the IV around like a rolling crutch) because the death rate from pneumonia as a complication of pneumonia is pretty damned deadly
Not certain if it was the withdrawal from morphine or moving around with a foot long incision through all of my abdominal muscles that was the biggest bitch, but it left a lasting impression and I have had a deep seeded dislike for any opiates for the past 40 years
Maybe near death and torture-like treatment is an effect means of opiate avoidance
Nope, we worked at a very aggressive civil engineering firm and he made full use of the opportunities. He eventually went back to school and made sewage processing his bread and butter.
Surveying has changed an awful lot in the past 30 years. It used to be that you operated a theodolite, closed out loops and calculated error rates, spun out construction staking, etc... Then everybody started getting HP calculators that would perform all the brain work and uplink to cogo programs on pcs and (apparently) now everything can be performed by one or two man crews using high resolution GPS
I jumped ship in the late 80's and took the GIS train to Unix serverland big Oracle databases, which paid the bills for a good while, 'til I decided to go back to college and (eventually) started working with financial and online commerce systems. I like to think that the disciplines of civil engineering make me better at the job that I do now, but I may be delusional
I've spent a lot of time in big datacenters and cubicle farms fondly remembering the days spent doing boundary surveys on old ranches and outlying areas before they got plowed under for subdivisions, and yes surveyors can be an awfully happy bunch of people, filled with former forward observers and semi-civilized miscreants who dream of weekends spent hunting and prospecting
I usually draw my memories back to the last summer I spent re-staking residential streets in 120+ (official Fahrenheit temp, probably hotter where I was) temps with asphalt layers and heavy equipment rolling past my head, then I am happy with my career choices
In the long term surveyors battle skin cancer and alcoholism, it can be hard to stick with it
I worked with a guy that had a mathematics degree once. He was the most unhappy land surveyor that I ever met. He said that he was faced with teaching high school math because he was not in the upper percentages of his cohort, so he abandoned it entirely and switched to a career that made some tangential use of his education
I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote above, but the word is 'sow', unless you are reaping clothing
Just to digress from humor for a moment, much of the scientific method calls for a person to point out errors, even of those people who they largely agree with.
It is BS playground politics that require that everybody line up and agree 100% with everything that one of their buddies spews. You might feel that they are being assholes, but if you take the time to listen to their criticisms, then you will be the better for it. (and yes, that is a janky sentence structure, feel free to improve on it)
I would probably trust a CS major to compile data that they are presented with and place it into a well formatted, easily accessible structure. I would even grant that they would be able to take the requirements given to them by scientists and build well structured programs to aid in the analysis of that data. I have seen this time and time again with demographic data, financial data, even behavioral data.
However, I would be a fool to leave the definition of those requirements in their hands
FWIW I have a CS major, and went back to gain an MBA in order to better understand the financial data that I work with
Classic, 'I know you are, but what am I' response'
Aside from the well written post above by GP (The Rizz), which outlines how horrible the summary of the article was, I think that the very heart of the matter is that the F- minus crowd relies almost entirely on emotional response and belief when faced with a situation that requires scientific analysis
You are exacerbating the errors of your beliefs by refusing to look into what he actually said (much less the actions that he has demonstrated) and blindly accusing Nye of acting on emotions
If there is a single lesson to the American public it is to adopt scientific methods, turn down the volume on your beliefs when the facts in front of your negate them, and learn to handle your emotions when faced with the possibility that you are wrong
Cognitive dissonance can be a very painful feeling, and learning how to handle it can lead to an increased capability in dealing with the facts that life will present to you
Or at least figure out how to profit from on influx of material Bill it as the next big gold rush and somebody is bound to put some effort into it, kinda like finding gold in the asteroid belt
That is a perfectly reasonable approach and gets faster user buyin than using some dated IEEE standard like, The System shall provide...'
I have found that using a facility like Sharepoint Online to build demo/development sites is pretty handy (assuming your devs are trained up on Sharepoint). The expense is covered under MSDN licenses so that you do not bear a cost until you roll it out into production
Similarly we switched to user stories as a method to talk it out with the customer and get them to feel comfortable enough to provide adequate detail. The past year we turned around a successful multi-company collaboration site in 2 months by starting with a simple design and then maturing it with a small target group until we were ready to present an usable site to a large audience
Yes, that is why Agile was invented, in particular part of the Manifesto is, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
In the waterfall methodology I had certainly tried the old 'delivered exactly what the customer asked for', and if you have a solid contract (or mandated methodology) you can certainly get away with that, and if you are on a time and materials contract you may even get paid more money to fix it
However, in the real world you will either no longer continue to get sweet contracts (as a third party provider), or you will 'burn bridges' and have diminished influence of you are a in-house developer
The illogical reality (kills the Vulcan in me) is that many people in leadership rely more on their interpersonal relationships than they do on facts and process. If they feel that you have mistreated or mocked them (by giving them what they asked for, but did not need) they will work against you within their 'circle of friends' and sour the ability for you to do other work within the organization
The truth is that you must build trusting relationships in order to guide these illogical leaders to the best solution and as developers, we need to get over it whether it means changing your world view or silently chewing a hole in your cheek whilst pleasantly helping some emotional ding-dong do their job
On the other hand, the job market has been picking up lately, which may provide temporary relief... at least until you slam a different project on a relationship-based customer at the new employer
Absolutely, my failures certainly played a role and I have worked to overcome them, particularly when it comes to understanding communications and the business function that I am developing against.
To drag this back to the point of the article, it would help if everybody had exposure to the development process, in particular the most common failings (bad requirements, failure to understand risks, inadequate testing, missing or unusable documentation) just as much as it would help for developers to understand the business processes and organizational mindsets that they are working with
The vast canyon the currently lies between IT and HR has a lot to do with different mindsets and different organizational goals and I have rarely seen a non-tech company bridge those gaps
Yup, that is how it is supposed to work. In the best case you work through the roles, use cases, develop screen mockups and a data design (usually don't show that to customer, but it should support the screens and use cases)
However, on more than one occasion I have run into a scenario where the customer will have a single requirement (this would be for an insurance interface) 1. Create insurance interface that meets requirements set by insurco
Then they will include an attachment that demonstrates the line format for the output
The following conversation goes like...
Dev: Let's work on the process flow for adding insurance, dropping insurance, changing insurance tier (add/lose dependent etc)
HR Customer: It's in the attachment
Dev: Can I contact a rep at insurco to find out how they handle these cases?
HR Customer: No, I am the only contact to insurco, everything must go through me
Dev: Okay, but I need to be ready to handle the business cases, so will you please walk me through it?
HR Customer: QA already signed off on my requirement document, so you have to accept it
This continues ad absurdum through an entire dev-test cycle with full customer acceptance testing and the day that it goes into production...
HR Customer: It's broke, you failed because it does not do what we need it to
Eventually we find out that the HR data entry people use multiple different ways to drop coverage, many of which the HR rep was not aware of.
Long story short, I end up learning HR's job better than they do in order to deliver anything, with them complaining about my delivery and demanding that I be removed for insubordination...
This happened years ago in a waterfall based dev shop. I have worked earnestly since then to apply Agile, prototypes, fast turnaround for approval and (usually) taking the time to learn the customer's job because they do not know it themselves
Simply getting the customer to accept logic, admit they do not know everything and get out of my way would help
Sure, right up to the point where the 'customer' feels like you are challenging their status by asking questions that they cannot answer (and should probably know to perform their job)
No matter how good it could code, you could give skynet bad requirements and it would still give you crap
We need to teach people how to use logic, perform analysis and give clear descriptions of what they want to happen
Far too often I have seen 'customers' give an incomplete description, fail to understand what they want to happen and then spew at the developers that they failed
Just teaching them to work with others and stop expecting magic unicorns to appear when they described a turd would remove half of the barriers to delivery
Interesting, the inclusion of the quote from Michael Brown after the third linked article infers that it has some relationship to the subject of the quote (access to private information, which many people could take as a reference to backdoors), when the linked article is not inclusive of Brown's comments
Maybe chicksdaddy just trolled us all, or (at best) simply included the wrong link
Slashdot Mirror
What would be the downside of just installing a windows vm on Linux to run games?
It would seem to remove most of the barriers, and provide the benefit of isolating the host system from potential intrusion.
Many people like to boast about the security benefits of *nixes, but I think that loading a bunch of resource intensive gaming applications would tend to reduce that benefit
Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet (kinda like the human batteries from The Matrix)
I tend to look to the past for what we will find in the future and this immediately brought to mind 'A Modest Proposal' with its suggestion for the proper use of 'excess human population'. Just to save you from doing any research, it is the same that was found in Soylent Green (but much better written, Johnathan Swift possessed wit)
Of course, Spock's Brain comes to mind as our robotic overlords become to advanced to be bothered with tending to the 'plumbing' and outsource the more mundane work to our feeble human brains
The expositions of the future used to envision a world where automation resulted in a life of ease for us mere humans, this could still be the case if the concentration of wealth to the upper echelons can be avoided
Sounds like Bill Nye needs to lambast Britain and France next since he had so much fun calling out Americans for irrational behavior
I was given morphine for pain in the US after splenectomy due to trauma (mid-70's)
Contracted pneumonia, so they dropped the morphine immediately and started harassing me to walk around (dragging the IV around like a rolling crutch) because the death rate from pneumonia as a complication of pneumonia is pretty damned deadly
Not certain if it was the withdrawal from morphine or moving around with a foot long incision through all of my abdominal muscles that was the biggest bitch, but it left a lasting impression and I have had a deep seeded dislike for any opiates for the past 40 years
Maybe near death and torture-like treatment is an effect means of opiate avoidance
No, no, NO!
If the NSA does it, it is pure fucking evil
If a company does it, then it is the free market and you better suck it up
I feel a strong desire to treat myself as a commodity and gut myself as a cost controlling measure... is that wrong?
Nope, we worked at a very aggressive civil engineering firm and he made full use of the opportunities. He eventually went back to school and made sewage processing his bread and butter.
Surveying has changed an awful lot in the past 30 years. It used to be that you operated a theodolite, closed out loops and calculated error rates, spun out construction staking, etc... Then everybody started getting HP calculators that would perform all the brain work and uplink to cogo programs on pcs and (apparently) now everything can be performed by one or two man crews using high resolution GPS
I jumped ship in the late 80's and took the GIS train to Unix serverland big Oracle databases, which paid the bills for a good while, 'til I decided to go back to college and (eventually) started working with financial and online commerce systems. I like to think that the disciplines of civil engineering make me better at the job that I do now, but I may be delusional
I've spent a lot of time in big datacenters and cubicle farms fondly remembering the days spent doing boundary surveys on old ranches and outlying areas before they got plowed under for subdivisions, and yes surveyors can be an awfully happy bunch of people, filled with former forward observers and semi-civilized miscreants who dream of weekends spent hunting and prospecting
I usually draw my memories back to the last summer I spent re-staking residential streets in 120+ (official Fahrenheit temp, probably hotter where I was) temps with asphalt layers and heavy equipment rolling past my head, then I am happy with my career choices
In the long term surveyors battle skin cancer and alcoholism, it can be hard to stick with it
I worked with a guy that had a mathematics degree once. He was the most unhappy land surveyor that I ever met. He said that he was faced with teaching high school math because he was not in the upper percentages of his cohort, so he abandoned it entirely and switched to a career that made some tangential use of his education
OMG, did this get linked over to breitbart or what?
I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote above, but the word is 'sow', unless you are reaping clothing
Just to digress from humor for a moment, much of the scientific method calls for a person to point out errors, even of those people who they largely agree with.
It is BS playground politics that require that everybody line up and agree 100% with everything that one of their buddies spews. You might feel that they are being assholes, but if you take the time to listen to their criticisms, then you will be the better for it.
(and yes, that is a janky sentence structure, feel free to improve on it)
I would probably trust a CS major to compile data that they are presented with and place it into a well formatted, easily accessible structure. I would even grant that they would be able to take the requirements given to them by scientists and build well structured programs to aid in the analysis of that data. I have seen this time and time again with demographic data, financial data, even behavioral data.
However, I would be a fool to leave the definition of those requirements in their hands
FWIW I have a CS major, and went back to gain an MBA in order to better understand the financial data that I work with
Classic, 'I know you are, but what am I' response'
Aside from the well written post above by GP (The Rizz), which outlines how horrible the summary of the article was, I think that the very heart of the matter is that the F- minus crowd relies almost entirely on emotional response and belief when faced with a situation that requires scientific analysis
You are exacerbating the errors of your beliefs by refusing to look into what he actually said (much less the actions that he has demonstrated) and blindly accusing Nye of acting on emotions
If there is a single lesson to the American public it is to adopt scientific methods, turn down the volume on your beliefs when the facts in front of your negate them, and learn to handle your emotions when faced with the possibility that you are wrong
Cognitive dissonance can be a very painful feeling, and learning how to handle it can lead to an increased capability in dealing with the facts that life will present to you
better be strapped down to something
Or at least figure out how to profit from on influx of material
Bill it as the next big gold rush and somebody is bound to put some effort into it, kinda like finding gold in the asteroid belt
Sharepoint online is available to non-profit companies for a low fee
Document libraries are pretty easy to use and apply their own versioning
That is a perfectly reasonable approach and gets faster user buyin than using some dated IEEE standard like, The System shall provide...'
I have found that using a facility like Sharepoint Online to build demo/development sites is pretty handy (assuming your devs are trained up on Sharepoint). The expense is covered under MSDN licenses so that you do not bear a cost until you roll it out into production
Similarly we switched to user stories as a method to talk it out with the customer and get them to feel comfortable enough to provide adequate detail. The past year we turned around a successful multi-company collaboration site in 2 months by starting with a simple design and then maturing it with a small target group until we were ready to present an usable site to a large audience
Yes, that is why Agile was invented, in particular part of the Manifesto is, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
In the waterfall methodology I had certainly tried the old 'delivered exactly what the customer asked for', and if you have a solid contract (or mandated methodology) you can certainly get away with that, and if you are on a time and materials contract you may even get paid more money to fix it
However, in the real world you will either no longer continue to get sweet contracts (as a third party provider), or you will 'burn bridges' and have diminished influence of you are a in-house developer
The illogical reality (kills the Vulcan in me) is that many people in leadership rely more on their interpersonal relationships than they do on facts and process. If they feel that you have mistreated or mocked them (by giving them what they asked for, but did not need) they will work against you within their 'circle of friends' and sour the ability for you to do other work within the organization
The truth is that you must build trusting relationships in order to guide these illogical leaders to the best solution and as developers, we need to get over it whether it means changing your world view or silently chewing a hole in your cheek whilst pleasantly helping some emotional ding-dong do their job
On the other hand, the job market has been picking up lately, which may provide temporary relief... at least until you slam a different project on a relationship-based customer at the new employer
Absolutely, my failures certainly played a role and I have worked to overcome them, particularly when it comes to understanding communications and the business function that I am developing against.
To drag this back to the point of the article, it would help if everybody had exposure to the development process, in particular the most common failings (bad requirements, failure to understand risks, inadequate testing, missing or unusable documentation) just as much as it would help for developers to understand the business processes and organizational mindsets that they are working with
The vast canyon the currently lies between IT and HR has a lot to do with different mindsets and different organizational goals and I have rarely seen a non-tech company bridge those gaps
Yup, that is how it is supposed to work. In the best case you work through the roles, use cases, develop screen mockups and a data design (usually don't show that to customer, but it should support the screens and use cases)
However, on more than one occasion I have run into a scenario where the customer will have a single requirement (this would be for an insurance interface)
1. Create insurance interface that meets requirements set by insurco
Then they will include an attachment that demonstrates the line format for the output
The following conversation goes like...
Dev: Let's work on the process flow for adding insurance, dropping insurance, changing insurance tier (add/lose dependent etc)
HR Customer: It's in the attachment
Dev: Can I contact a rep at insurco to find out how they handle these cases?
HR Customer: No, I am the only contact to insurco, everything must go through me
Dev: Okay, but I need to be ready to handle the business cases, so will you please walk me through it?
HR Customer: QA already signed off on my requirement document, so you have to accept it
This continues ad absurdum through an entire dev-test cycle with full customer acceptance testing and the day that it goes into production...
HR Customer: It's broke, you failed because it does not do what we need it to
Eventually we find out that the HR data entry people use multiple different ways to drop coverage, many of which the HR rep was not aware of.
Long story short, I end up learning HR's job better than they do in order to deliver anything, with them complaining about my delivery and demanding that I be removed for insubordination...
This happened years ago in a waterfall based dev shop. I have worked earnestly since then to apply Agile, prototypes, fast turnaround for approval and (usually) taking the time to learn the customer's job because they do not know it themselves
Simply getting the customer to accept logic, admit they do not know everything and get out of my way would help
Unfortunately, many 'successful' business-people are only adept at rhetoric
Sure, right up to the point where the 'customer' feels like you are challenging their status by asking questions that they cannot answer (and should probably know to perform their job)
Far too many people have built-in barriers to performing these steps
Belief in magical entities that change the world at will, or belief in absolute rules have to be the biggest barriers
No matter how good it could code, you could give skynet bad requirements and it would still give you crap
We need to teach people how to use logic, perform analysis and give clear descriptions of what they want to happen
Far too often I have seen 'customers' give an incomplete description, fail to understand what they want to happen and then spew at the developers that they failed
Just teaching them to work with others and stop expecting magic unicorns to appear when they described a turd would remove half of the barriers to delivery
Interesting, the inclusion of the quote from Michael Brown after the third linked article infers that it has some relationship to the subject of the quote (access to private information, which many people could take as a reference to backdoors), when the linked article is not inclusive of Brown's comments
Maybe chicksdaddy just trolled us all, or (at best) simply included the wrong link