Under promise and over deliver. How many companies work that way these days?
How many programmers in how many companies have to over work in order to try to achieve what was over-promised and consequently under-delivered by over rated marketing and executive dudes?
I'm not sure I totally subscribe to the idea of staying in beta for that long though... But you have to admit the idea of gmail invites is brilliant. Once gmail leaves the beta stage, its user base will be huge. Anyone has an idea of how big this user base is already?
...in french. But hey, we are taught in North American universities that language is not important, as long as you are good in your specialization; but tell me? How can you articulate your thoughts if you cannot write a sentence correctly? Some of my colleagues can't even spell two consecutive words correctly.
Combine this situation with the fact that so many corporations rely on a bunch of dumb ass corporate culture gurus that once in a while come up with gibberish buzzwordesque inepties like employés chevronnés, meilleure expérience-client qui soit, timely perseverance (can't remember how they translated this in french), département de la qualité totale, and so many other corporate buzzwords that change every 5 years or so and, one realizes we work in a very funny place...
Cell phone companies (and I work for one of them) are desperately trying to make money out of their cellular phone. One of the huge market is teenagers because they tend to want to differentiate themselves and they are willing to pay for that new and cool ring tone or SMS feature, or game, or color and what not.
I personally couldn't have imagined someone paying for a ring tone on his/her cell phone; and the ring tone business is apparently worth billions of dollars these days. Those who saw this coming were quite clever I guess, but isn't it sad that people are spending money on crappy MIDI stuff for their cell phone?
So cell phone companies pack their devices with close-to-useless features like MIDI player for polyphonic ring tones (many people at my work call it polymorphic 'cause that's what they remembered of C++;) ), cameras, pictures, games, and what not.
But seriously, don't you think the majority of people will use those extra features a few times only, mostly to show others how cool and different their new toy is and then they'll forget about them because they are what they are: useless for a cell phone.
I wonder how this confusion will end? The difference between your average PDA and a cell phone is what now? They both play MP3s, take pictures, are organizers, are wireless cell phones, support bluetooth, are WIFI enabled, can act as vibrators; but generally speaking, they do one thing hopefully right: your PDA is probably (hopefully) a better organizer than the organize feature on your cell phone; the rest is useless crap designed to differentiate the device on the market.
When we received our new cell phone at work, everyone, for about a week, was spending countless hours on ring tones, taking pictures, playing that stupid mini putt game, enabling Bluetooth and wandering around for another Bluetooth soul willing to answer, etc., etc.
Now; yeah sure everyone has his/her own "personal" ring tone differentiator, but the damn cell phone is used a cell phone, the extra features are now what they are: useless.
Ask as many questions as you want, on any subject, but pay attention to the body language, the movements of the eyes, the look, the apparent ease or unease of the person, the gesture of the hands, the positions of the legs, etc. Is the person looking at you in the eyes or avoiding eye contact? How are the legs crossed if they are?
From my experience in interviewing people, I found out that the actual answers of the candidate were less revealing (unless of course the candidate was a complete bozo, faking answers and lying like a politician), so the answers were less revealing than the tone, the body language, the general feeling of the interview.
You can somewhat "feel" if a person is lying, nervous, answering what you wanna hear, etc. It could of course be dangerous to only rely on feelings as it is a highly subjective thing, but I suggest you read on the subject of body language and non-verbal communication.
How tempting would it be for an anti-virus software company to "indirectly and anonymously promote" the release of a virus such as W32.MyDoom? Wouldn't such a thing boost AV software sales? That would of course be an awful thing to do, but we've seen worst with highly "creative" corporation such as Enron, didn't we?
In the name of Money and sales boosting, one would be tempted, don't you think?
Similar to Reality TV
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I see Blogs as an extention of reality TV. Your average Joe wants his share of fame while, in some cases, lacking the necessary talent to earn it. So he starts a blog and measures his popularity by the number of hits to his site.
Mind you, unlike reality shows, the blogs are not controlled (yet?) by big production corporations and blog's primary goal isn't to make money, so at least there could be a certain sense of 'integrity' in blogs that's painfully lacking in reality shows.
And you see, there is a direct link with IRAQ here, 'cause back in the dinosaures era, the Australian continent was much closer to what is now the Persian Gulf.
You could be right, who knows, it's definitely a possibility. But since we have no idea of the consequence of such action, I think we should, in doubt, leave things the way they were before we arrived, especially when those things were around a lot longer than us human beings. I mean what's a few million years, the age of the human species (or only ~200K years for the modern human), compared to 4.6 billion of years, the presumed age of our earth and its moon...
Then again, we calculated the age of the human species and that of the Earth and moon by using our only tool of observation, the brain. We could be completely wrong since we don't even understand how the brain really works... And how would you understand the brain if your only tool of observation is the brain itself? Paradox of self-reference will make my brain hurt!
So yes it is immoral to mess around with something we don't understand and we have no idea of the true consequences of your foolish acts in the long term
The Anthropic principle. We humans can't think out the box. For example, we would never meet a true alien creature because it would biologically be too different from the way we define a living creature. According to the same princile, our universe was created the way we see it simply because if it wasn't, we probably wouldn't be there to observe it in the first place.
But that does not mean there's nothing else surrounding us that we don't see because we are not designed to see it... So who the f-word are we to think we know the consequences of your acts?
We have a very biased definition of what is a living creature, very human-centric; not too different from the old folks who thought the Earth was the center of the universe...
Who said the moon is not a living creature? How do we know? Are we so omnipotent as to think that the whole universe is the way we are able to observe it; not to mention that our only tool of observation is our brain?
Come on, go back and read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it'll help you put things in total perspective...
In doubt, don't mess around with things we only think we understand... So yes it is immoral to mess around with something we don't understand and we have no idea of the true consequences of your foolish acts in the long term; more importantly when there is no other purpose to the messing around than a very despicable and short term objective of making money; especially when we know zillions of ways to do a more useful thing with all that money...
We'll soon see labels like: "Spyware-free Gator, included free with Kazaa!". Or even better, "Ad-free USB cable, buy it now!". Ever saw in your convenient store the "Margarine with no cholesterol"?
...was the worst I ever worked for. Company 'X' was pretending to build 64-nodes parallel computers.
Company X had 7 Vice Presidents for 31 employees...
I was asked once to go through all doc, source code and binaries of a software to replace the name of the company that actually did the work by the name of company X. I said 'allez vous faire voir!'.
I was later asked to show how parallel povray (a// version of the free rendering software) behaved and scaled on our X parallel machine. After showing the boss that the performance dropped dramatically after 16 nodes (too much node to node communication) and that actually a bunch of SUN IPX machines on a regular LAN would do the job faster!!!), they asked me to stop the graph at 15 nodes and tell the customer that the performance was scaling linearly up to 64 nodes!!!
I said fuck you and luckily found another job short after. The Company filed for bankruptcy 2 years after.
...a scheme that races through oodles of data to figure out if people are connected with unsavory characters. And it does all this in mere seconds. The casinos were delighted. "The record speaks for itself," says Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman. "We have zero problems.
Zero problems, but how many innocent people wrongly flagged as being unsavory?
How does this SRD system measure the accuracy of its conclusions?
If an infinite number of paper clips started giving advice on what to write on an infinite number of MS-Word instances, would we eventually end up with the complete Windoze source code? Would it be open source?
We are expected to deliver faster because in many cases technology improves by allowing us to do the same task faster and faster or in a more efficient manner (think of micro-waves, dish washers, GHz processors, High RPMs hard disks, etc.). In turn, it is supposed to give us more time. But what do we do, or rather what are we expected to do with that extra time?
How come we are working over time when technology allows us today to print/write/code/format/spellcheck/indent/syntaxhi ghlight/etc. much faster than before?
I have that awkward impression that I'm expected not only to be quicker, but to produce a lot more than before simply because my printer is faster, my cell phone sends me bigger SMS messages, my CPU is idle waiting for me, telling me that I'm too slow... The human brain's clock speed hasn't improved for a little while, but, mind you, I'm not up to date with the latest e-news on the subject...
A human body is designed to sustain a high level of stress only for a short period of time. In a stressful situation, our blood pressure and adrenaline level rises, and we are ready to either fight or escape the source of stress. In many technology related work environments, workers undergo such a level of stress almost every day and, if not dealt with properly, can lead to the equivalent of a MechWarrior's thermal shutdown; your body says "Sorry boss, I know they're shootin' their lasers at ya, but I give up".
I remember before online-banking I didn't mind waiting in line at the bank. Now, it is somehow less conceivable to wait for 15mn, when you can do the same transaction in 30 seconds from a web browser. Did that buy me 14:30 mn of free, relaxing time? Somehow, I'm not sure... Since I didn't spend 15mn meditating, relaxing, looking around, standing up, while waiting in line at the bank, I can instead continue my coding... In the long run, which alternative is more desirable for a human being?
Slashdot Mirror
Under promise and over deliver. How many companies work that way these days?
How many programmers in how many companies have to over work in order to try to achieve what was over-promised and consequently under-delivered by over rated marketing and executive dudes?
I'm not sure I totally subscribe to the idea of staying in beta for that long though... But you have to admit the idea of gmail invites is brilliant. Once gmail leaves the beta stage, its user base will be huge. Anyone has an idea of how big this user base is already?
...in french. But hey, we are taught in North American universities that language is not important, as long as you are good in your specialization; but tell me? How can you articulate your thoughts if you cannot write a sentence correctly? Some of my colleagues can't even spell two consecutive words correctly.
Combine this situation with the fact that so many corporations rely on a bunch of dumb ass corporate culture gurus that once in a while come up with gibberish buzzwordesque inepties like employés chevronnés, meilleure expérience-client qui soit, timely perseverance (can't remember how they translated this in french), département de la qualité totale, and so many other corporate buzzwords that change every 5 years or so and, one realizes we work in a very funny place...
I guess, for PDAs, it's only a question of form factor ;)
Cell phone companies (and I work for one of them) are desperately trying to make money out of their cellular phone. One of the huge market is teenagers because they tend to want to differentiate themselves and they are willing to pay for that new and cool ring tone or SMS feature, or game, or color and what not.
;) ), cameras, pictures, games, and what not.
I personally couldn't have imagined someone paying for a ring tone on his/her cell phone; and the ring tone business is apparently worth billions of dollars these days. Those who saw this coming were quite clever I guess, but isn't it sad that people are spending money on crappy MIDI stuff for their cell phone?
So cell phone companies pack their devices with close-to-useless features like MIDI player for polyphonic ring tones (many people at my work call it polymorphic 'cause that's what they remembered of C++
But seriously, don't you think the majority of people will use those extra features a few times only, mostly to show others how cool and different their new toy is and then they'll forget about them because they are what they are: useless for a cell phone.
I wonder how this confusion will end? The difference between your average PDA and a cell phone is what now? They both play MP3s, take pictures, are organizers, are wireless cell phones, support bluetooth, are WIFI enabled, can act as vibrators; but generally speaking, they do one thing hopefully right: your PDA is probably (hopefully) a better organizer than the organize feature on your cell phone; the rest is useless crap designed to differentiate the device on the market.
When we received our new cell phone at work, everyone, for about a week, was spending countless hours on ring tones, taking pictures, playing that stupid mini putt game, enabling Bluetooth and wandering around for another Bluetooth soul willing to answer, etc., etc.
Now; yeah sure everyone has his/her own "personal" ring tone differentiator, but the damn cell phone is used a cell phone, the extra features are now what they are: useless.
Ask as many questions as you want, on any subject, but pay attention to the body language, the movements of the eyes, the look, the apparent ease or unease of the person, the gesture of the hands, the positions of the legs, etc. Is the person looking at you in the eyes or avoiding eye contact? How are the legs crossed if they are? From my experience in interviewing people, I found out that the actual answers of the candidate were less revealing (unless of course the candidate was a complete bozo, faking answers and lying like a politician), so the answers were less revealing than the tone, the body language, the general feeling of the interview. You can somewhat "feel" if a person is lying, nervous, answering what you wanna hear, etc. It could of course be dangerous to only rely on feelings as it is a highly subjective thing, but I suggest you read on the subject of body language and non-verbal communication.
Lesson 202:
How tempting would it be for an anti-virus software company to "indirectly and anonymously promote" the release of a virus such as W32.MyDoom? Wouldn't such a thing boost AV software sales? That would of course be an awful thing to do, but we've seen worst with highly "creative" corporation such as Enron, didn't we?
In the name of Money and sales boosting, one would be tempted, don't you think?
I see Blogs as an extention of reality TV. Your average Joe wants his share of fame while, in some cases, lacking the necessary talent to earn it. So he starts a blog and measures his popularity by the number of hits to his site.
Mind you, unlike reality shows, the blogs are not controlled (yet?) by big production corporations and blog's primary goal isn't to make money, so at least there could be a certain sense of 'integrity' in blogs that's painfully lacking in reality shows.
And you see, there is a direct link with IRAQ here, 'cause back in the dinosaures era, the Australian continent was much closer to what is now the Persian Gulf.
You mean the PigeonRank(tm) technology is a hoax?
You could be right, who knows, it's definitely a possibility. But since we have no idea of the consequence of such action, I think we should, in doubt, leave things the way they were before we arrived, especially when those things were around a lot longer than us human beings. I mean what's a few million years, the age of the human species (or only ~200K years for the modern human), compared to 4.6 billion of years, the presumed age of our earth and its moon...
Then again, we calculated the age of the human species and that of the Earth and moon by using our only tool of observation, the brain. We could be completely wrong since we don't even understand how the brain really works... And how would you understand the brain if your only tool of observation is the brain itself? Paradox of self-reference will make my brain hurt!
Cheers!
Oups, I meant our not your...
The Anthropic principle. We humans can't think out the box. For example, we would never meet a true alien creature because it would biologically be too different from the way we define a living creature. According to the same princile, our universe was created the way we see it simply because if it wasn't, we probably wouldn't be there to observe it in the first place.
But that does not mean there's nothing else surrounding us that we don't see because we are not designed to see it... So who the f-word are we to think we know the consequences of your acts?
We have a very biased definition of what is a living creature, very human-centric; not too different from the old folks who thought the Earth was the center of the universe...
Who said the moon is not a living creature? How do we know? Are we so omnipotent as to think that the whole universe is the way we are able to observe it; not to mention that our only tool of observation is our brain?
Come on, go back and read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it'll help you put things in total perspective...
In doubt, don't mess around with things we only think we understand... So yes it is immoral to mess around with something we don't understand and we have no idea of the true consequences of your foolish acts in the long term; more importantly when there is no other purpose to the messing around than a very despicable and short term objective of making money; especially when we know zillions of ways to do a more useful thing with all that money...
We'll soon see labels like: "Spyware-free Gator, included free with Kazaa!". Or even better, "Ad-free USB cable, buy it now!". Ever saw in your convenient store the "Margarine with no cholesterol"?
...was the worst I ever worked for. Company 'X' was pretending to build 64-nodes parallel computers.
// version of the free rendering software) behaved and scaled on our X parallel machine. After showing the boss that the performance dropped dramatically after 16 nodes (too much node to node communication) and that actually a bunch of SUN IPX machines on a regular LAN would do the job faster!!!), they asked me to stop the graph at 15 nodes and tell the customer that the performance was scaling linearly up to 64 nodes!!!
Company X had 7 Vice Presidents for 31 employees...
I was asked once to go through all doc, source code and binaries of a software to replace the name of the company that actually did the work by the name of company X. I said 'allez vous faire voir!'.
I was later asked to show how parallel povray (a
I said fuck you and luckily found another job short after. The Company filed for bankruptcy 2 years after.
Zero problems, but how many innocent people wrongly flagged as being unsavory?
How does this SRD system measure the accuracy of its conclusions?
If an infinite number of paper clips started giving advice on what to write on an infinite number of MS-Word instances, would we eventually end up with the complete Windoze source code? Would it be open source?
We are expected to deliver faster because in many cases technology improves by allowing us to do the same task faster and faster or in a more efficient manner (think of micro-waves, dish washers, GHz processors, High RPMs hard disks, etc.). In turn, it is supposed to give us more time. But what do we do, or rather what are we expected to do with that extra time?
How come we are working over time when technology allows us today to print/write/code/format/spellcheck/indent/syntaxhi ghlight/etc. much faster than before?
I have that awkward impression that I'm expected not only to be quicker, but to produce a lot more than before simply because my printer is faster, my cell phone sends me bigger SMS messages, my CPU is idle waiting for me, telling me that I'm too slow... The human brain's clock speed hasn't improved for a little while, but, mind you, I'm not up to date with the latest e-news on the subject...
A human body is designed to sustain a high level of stress only for a short period of time. In a stressful situation, our blood pressure and adrenaline level rises, and we are ready to either fight or escape the source of stress. In many technology related work environments, workers undergo such a level of stress almost every day and, if not dealt with properly, can lead to the equivalent of a MechWarrior's thermal shutdown; your body says "Sorry boss, I know they're shootin' their lasers at ya, but I give up".
I remember before online-banking I didn't mind waiting in line at the bank. Now, it is somehow less conceivable to wait for 15mn, when you can do the same transaction in 30 seconds from a web browser. Did that buy me 14:30 mn of free, relaxing time? Somehow, I'm not sure... Since I didn't spend 15mn meditating, relaxing, looking around, standing up, while waiting in line at the bank, I can instead continue my coding... In the long run, which alternative is more desirable for a human being?