The problem isn't that people who work regular jobs don't have enough money, its that regular jobs require some degree of commitment. You can't up and leave every time you feel like finding yourself.
Sure, some jobs give you a lot of vacation, but most people start up with 2 or 3 weeks. I'm lucky and get 4, counting personal choice holidays. And most employers nowadays don't let you save up vacation, its use it or lose it.
That second option didn't work very well for Ricky Williams.
As mentioned by several others, most people throw a wife and kids in there somewhere. Furthermore, many real jobs require a fairly continuous investment of time; if you take half a year off to play around in the woods you will come back finding you are now treated as an entry level employee because of everything you have since forgotten. So yes, often real jobs do stop you from taking off for half a year.
And you have still failed to account for how you are going to pay for all this. And don't go on about how much money you saved renting instead of buying a house (rent is much more expensive than buying a house) or driving an old car (depending on how often it has to be repaired, they can be very expensive, I know that from experience) or not buying a new TV (that might save you the plane fair), and your plan seems to require a lot of spending with all that travel.
Unfortunately, unlike Thoreau, some of us have real jobs that we can't just up and leave for 6 months or more.
Seriously, how do you guys that do that kind of stuff get that time off? I agree some long vacation separated from society may well be fun, but the most time I can get off is a few weeks around Christmas.
Calm down there. I think his point was more along the lines of "human designers make occasional mistakes" rather than "humans can't do anything right". Its not that something put together by engineers has no chance of succeeding, but rather you cannot completely rule out the possibility that a engineered device (like these plutonium thermal generators) will not work as expected.
And check your facts on the Challenger explosion. The manufacturer chickened out and told NASA the seals would work, even though some of their engineers had their concerns. And the design was supposed to work just in cold temperatures, NASA wasn't contracting them to build something that they could only launch in July. No one saw the problem until after they had been used and nearly failed in previous launches. So the error was in both the design and the communications between NASA and the manufacturer, not in the use.
You can't go back in time and change the spec in order to claim something you built which failed was designed correctly, but operated incorrectly.
Yeah, thats just what the world needs, yet another scripting language influenced by Python.
I think 'conflict' is a bit strong, Bruce merely wished there were more changes in Python 3000. And his biggest problem (the GIL) Guido is actually open to changing, assuming the change wouldn't be murder on performance like the last attempt to remove it.
Its sort of sad that we assume by default what they are engaged in is some sort of flame war...
Your post seems to assume that only students beginning CS 'forget' to indent their code. One of the first things I find myself doing these days when I pick up someone else's code is running a global auto-indent on it (pretty easy in Eclipse). Sometimes they didn't indent at all, other times they apparently came up with their own indentation scheme (in one method I saw it seemed he had done a reverse indentation policy, where inner code blocks get indented less than the outer ones). The latter developers are the ones I really want to strangle...
"You're going to have a very hard time explaining how the latter logically follows from the former (justifying your use of "thus" above)."
Only if the person I am trying to explain it to has trouble differentiating between qualitative and quantitative differences.
And for the record, not every statement made in a discussion on/. has to be a fully formed logical syllogism, so arguing whether or not every statement made "logically follows" from the previous one just demonstrates an inability to apply logical thinking to real world arguments.
"Mass is conceptually understood as the quantity of matter in an object or system. If the prototype kilogram contains less matter now than before, either the kilogram is not a measure of mass, or mass is fundamentally misunderstood."
No, its certainly a measure of mass, just not necessarily as precise of a measure as we previously thought. Just like paces are a measure of distance, but not a very precise one.
And before you go on some mythical "mass is fundamentally misunderstood" argument, remember that the only way we know of this issue is that the weight of the official Kilogram has gone down compared to the average weight of several unofficial Kilogram prototypes. This is not some universal phenomenon we are seeing, it is merely that differences have come up between very similar structures kept under very similar conditions. Strange, yes, but we certainly don't have to rewrite the laws of physics to explain it.
"By the way, in the sense of "taking a measurement", the kilogram does not measure mass. Scales or accelerometers do. This is an important distinction. Don't conflate the notions."
No, scales don't measure mass, the scientists taking the measurements do. Give me a break. Mass is determined by comparing the mass of one object (yes, using a scale or accelerometer) to the official Kilogram. Thus it plays a very important role in the measurement, thus I do and will continue giving it credit for the measurement.
The kilogram doesn't define the concept of mass, it merely measures it (imperfectly). Same with the Newton and the concept of force. Thus the force of the Earth's gravity on the Kilogram is qualitatively different, even if our imperfect measurements are incapable of quantifying it.
Why would it be rare for/.ers to not read a crappy pop culture magazine (even if long ago it supposedly did have decent coverage of technology-related issues)?
It doesn't weigh fewer kilograms, that is certainly true. But the force of the Earth's gravity on the object (what most people refer to as 'weight') appears to have changed. Which most likely is because of reduction in the mass of the object. So it is lighter.
Yeah, it changed some time ago. The new definition was adopted in 1889. Hence the line in the summary "Ran across a story on CNN that says the '118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass...'"
Well it also has code which redirects you if it detects your javascript DOM doesn't support special IE add ons (one more reason we need a standard browser scripting language, not this browser dependent crap).
What I would like would be a plugin that would just ask me before it redirects me somewhere. That would be useful in many other situations (yes, I can block redirects entirely, but I would prefer it to simply open a dialog like it does for cookies).
So you honestly believe that the off-chance that you, Cro Magnon, might see an occasional ad on a recorded TV show makes up for the thousands other people with DVRs who would have instead watched TV live (and who, apparently unlike you, are technologically competent enough to skip through commercials)?
Well, lets try using our brains and thinking about this for a second. TV stations do get paid for having people watch their program, but that is contingent on those people also watching ads during the commercial break. When the show is recorded, the viewer is able to skip the ads entirely. So what motivation is supposed to exist to get the media companies to publish their TV listings in a format that can be read by applications like MythTV?
Here is what appears to be a slightly more reliable source. Though considering the lack of search results (the first five consisted of nothing but results from that antipolygraph.com site, the wikipedia, and/.), I'm still far from convinced of the accuracy of this story. This still could be one of those rumors that started on out a message board (in this case on a site whose sole purpose is to disparage polygraphs) and grew into a news story. Please, editors, verify that the submissions you get are not complete crap before posting them.
Anyways, according to that source, this case (if it ever existed) was a sexual assault case in which the defendant (who was essentially facing a "he said, she said" case over whether or not the sex was consensual) convinced the judge to admit a polygraph result which showed his innocence. So it was clearly not a case of someone being jailed because of a polygraph result, it was a case of a most likely innocent man being acquitted because of it (again, assuming this case ever existed in the first place). Generally speaking, our justice system is designed to be more likely to let an innocent man go than to convict a guilty man, so this shouldn't be too surprising. And as far as polygraphs being inaccurate, well so is eyewitness testimony, yet many cases are built solely because of that.
A project I was working on earlier tried to create a development wiki which would magically allow people to share information. The end result was a fragmented, unreliable, outdated, mess of 'information'. Many people assumed that since it was a wiki, other people who do their job and update the pages for them. Other people assumed that since it was a wiki, they could just post whatever they want, even when they didn't know what they were talking about. And other people used it for things it was never meant for such as status reports, which did nothing but clutter it with information no one outside of the individual and their manager would ever want to see.
No, wikis are not some sort of magical device that will instantly transform your department's information needs into a well organized library like the wikipedia. They do have certain situations where they can be useful, but in general they have become nothing more than another modern cargo cult.
"
Let me quote myself...
Researchers have usually spent many years in university, and that's how they often relate to the world - the mere generation of good ideas is sufficient and praise worthy.
And the very next sentence I say...
In a business setting it doesn't work that way."
And you think that defends my accusation that you think a thesis just involves thinking up ideas? Or is your short term memory so bad you forgot what you were arguing about again?
"What nonsense about getting access to customers. I've done it many times. It usually involves working with marketing, who often are delighted to have closer ties with researchers. So long as what you are doing is reasonable, few managers are going to object. "
Even on/., I've seen few better examples of someone completely missing the point... I'm not saying researchers can't get access to customers, I'm saying they can't do it without the help of the business people. Again, your claims that you are going out on your own and chatting with customers are nothing more than disingenuous attempts to take credit for something you had marketing arrange for you.
"When it comes to the customer, of course you go through the normal channels of communication. So what? A researcher talking to the final end users is not going to create a rent in space-time. "
...
Ok, let me tell you a little story and see if it helps you understand the flaw in your "argument". There are two college kids named Mike and Joe. Mike has a car, but Joe doesn't, and as a result he always has to bum rids off of his friends like Mike. One day Mike gets angry at Joe for asking him for a ride and tells him he has to become more independent, and stop relying on others for his rides. Joe responds by reminding Mike that he doesn't have enough money for a car and that he is on financial aid and the little money he makes around campus goes to his room and board. Mike just rolls his eyes and says to Joe "Well just get your parents to buy you a car like I did!"
See the flaw in Mike's argument? He is trying to get Joe to become more independent, but his "solution" requires him depending on someone else, his parents. See how that relates to what you are arguing? You are saying R&D employees need to take the initiative get out and get more exposure to their customers instead of leaving that to management. But when reminded that most people in R&D are not usually allowed to directly contact customers, you tell them of course they should go through the proper channels (which generally involves management to some degree). Your claim that you just spontaneously leave your desk and go out and spend the day with the customers is disingenuous at best, and only serves to hide the fact that your plan is contingent on management's actions, not your own.
"Never said it and don't believe it. In fact, I say the opposite. Haven't a clue where you misread that. "
You must have a bad short term memory, let me remind you. In the last paragraph of this post, you state:
Researchers have usually spent many years in university, and that's how they often relate to the world - the mere generation of good ideas is sufficient and praise worthy.
And in most shops you would be fired for going outside the normal channel of communications with the customer. Either that or you are only telling half the story.
And again, the fact that you think writing a thesis only involves thinking up an idea and not doing anything to implement tells me how deep your experience really is in research and development.
Aside from the fact that the article isn't comparing the two (rather its an introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio developers), it wasn't written by IBM in the first place. It is merely hosted on IBM's developerworks site, whose contributions come from across the industry.
You are right in that this article is an introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio users, but wrong over whether or not Eclipse is a C++ IDE. In fact, their CDT suite has gained a lot of ground in that area, and I've heard from many in the embedded world who state that Eclipse CDT has become the standard IDE in that arena.
I imagine a lot of it probably depends on how big the project is. I don't know what the exact architecture is, but I'm sure a lot of information about the project has to be kept in memory for things like code completion. If I'm working on a large project, I can see Eclipse's memory run up there (though not to 4 gigs). You can also adjust the settings to increase or decrease the heap size. So if you have enough RAM, you can bump up the heap size and almost eliminate lags.
"So in your world, management should stop worrying about all those unimportant things and come running down to the lab to see your Greatest Invention Ever."
No, simply allocating some additional funds towards research so employees could pursue their ideas and develop them while on the job instead of on their own time would be sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't that people who work regular jobs don't have enough money, its that regular jobs require some degree of commitment. You can't up and leave every time you feel like finding yourself.
Sure, some jobs give you a lot of vacation, but most people start up with 2 or 3 weeks. I'm lucky and get 4, counting personal choice holidays. And most employers nowadays don't let you save up vacation, its use it or lose it.
That second option didn't work very well for Ricky Williams.
As mentioned by several others, most people throw a wife and kids in there somewhere. Furthermore, many real jobs require a fairly continuous investment of time; if you take half a year off to play around in the woods you will come back finding you are now treated as an entry level employee because of everything you have since forgotten. So yes, often real jobs do stop you from taking off for half a year.
And you have still failed to account for how you are going to pay for all this. And don't go on about how much money you saved renting instead of buying a house (rent is much more expensive than buying a house) or driving an old car (depending on how often it has to be repaired, they can be very expensive, I know that from experience) or not buying a new TV (that might save you the plane fair), and your plan seems to require a lot of spending with all that travel.
Unfortunately, unlike Thoreau, some of us have real jobs that we can't just up and leave for 6 months or more.
Seriously, how do you guys that do that kind of stuff get that time off? I agree some long vacation separated from society may well be fun, but the most time I can get off is a few weeks around Christmas.
Calm down there. I think his point was more along the lines of "human designers make occasional mistakes" rather than "humans can't do anything right". Its not that something put together by engineers has no chance of succeeding, but rather you cannot completely rule out the possibility that a engineered device (like these plutonium thermal generators) will not work as expected.
And check your facts on the Challenger explosion. The manufacturer chickened out and told NASA the seals would work, even though some of their engineers had their concerns. And the design was supposed to work just in cold temperatures, NASA wasn't contracting them to build something that they could only launch in July. No one saw the problem until after they had been used and nearly failed in previous launches. So the error was in both the design and the communications between NASA and the manufacturer, not in the use.
You can't go back in time and change the spec in order to claim something you built which failed was designed correctly, but operated incorrectly.
Yeah, thats just what the world needs, yet another scripting language influenced by Python.
I think 'conflict' is a bit strong, Bruce merely wished there were more changes in Python 3000. And his biggest problem (the GIL) Guido is actually open to changing, assuming the change wouldn't be murder on performance like the last attempt to remove it.
Its sort of sad that we assume by default what they are engaged in is some sort of flame war...
Your post seems to assume that only students beginning CS 'forget' to indent their code. One of the first things I find myself doing these days when I pick up someone else's code is running a global auto-indent on it (pretty easy in Eclipse). Sometimes they didn't indent at all, other times they apparently came up with their own indentation scheme (in one method I saw it seemed he had done a reverse indentation policy, where inner code blocks get indented less than the outer ones). The latter developers are the ones I really want to strangle...
"You're going to have a very hard time explaining how the latter logically follows from the former (justifying your use of "thus" above)."
Only if the person I am trying to explain it to has trouble differentiating between qualitative and quantitative differences.
And for the record, not every statement made in a discussion on /. has to be a fully formed logical syllogism, so arguing whether or not every statement made "logically follows" from the previous one just demonstrates an inability to apply logical thinking to real world arguments.
"Mass is conceptually understood as the quantity of matter in an object or system. If the prototype kilogram contains less matter now than before, either the kilogram is not a measure of mass, or mass is fundamentally misunderstood."
No, its certainly a measure of mass, just not necessarily as precise of a measure as we previously thought. Just like paces are a measure of distance, but not a very precise one.
And before you go on some mythical "mass is fundamentally misunderstood" argument, remember that the only way we know of this issue is that the weight of the official Kilogram has gone down compared to the average weight of several unofficial Kilogram prototypes. This is not some universal phenomenon we are seeing, it is merely that differences have come up between very similar structures kept under very similar conditions. Strange, yes, but we certainly don't have to rewrite the laws of physics to explain it.
"By the way, in the sense of "taking a measurement", the kilogram does not measure mass. Scales or accelerometers do. This is an important distinction. Don't conflate the notions."
No, scales don't measure mass, the scientists taking the measurements do. Give me a break. Mass is determined by comparing the mass of one object (yes, using a scale or accelerometer) to the official Kilogram. Thus it plays a very important role in the measurement, thus I do and will continue giving it credit for the measurement.
The kilogram doesn't define the concept of mass, it merely measures it (imperfectly). Same with the Newton and the concept of force. Thus the force of the Earth's gravity on the Kilogram is qualitatively different, even if our imperfect measurements are incapable of quantifying it.
Why would it be rare for /.ers to not read a crappy pop culture magazine (even if long ago it supposedly did have decent coverage of technology-related issues)?
It doesn't weigh fewer kilograms, that is certainly true. But the force of the Earth's gravity on the object (what most people refer to as 'weight') appears to have changed. Which most likely is because of reduction in the mass of the object. So it is lighter.
Yeah, it changed some time ago. The new definition was adopted in 1889. Hence the line in the summary "Ran across a story on CNN that says the '118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass...'"
Well it also has code which redirects you if it detects your javascript DOM doesn't support special IE add ons (one more reason we need a standard browser scripting language, not this browser dependent crap).
What I would like would be a plugin that would just ask me before it redirects me somewhere. That would be useful in many other situations (yes, I can block redirects entirely, but I would prefer it to simply open a dialog like it does for cookies).
So you honestly believe that the off-chance that you, Cro Magnon, might see an occasional ad on a recorded TV show makes up for the thousands other people with DVRs who would have instead watched TV live (and who, apparently unlike you, are technologically competent enough to skip through commercials)?
Well, lets try using our brains and thinking about this for a second. TV stations do get paid for having people watch their program, but that is contingent on those people also watching ads during the commercial break. When the show is recorded, the viewer is able to skip the ads entirely. So what motivation is supposed to exist to get the media companies to publish their TV listings in a format that can be read by applications like MythTV?
Here is what appears to be a slightly more reliable source. Though considering the lack of search results (the first five consisted of nothing but results from that antipolygraph.com site, the wikipedia, and /.), I'm still far from convinced of the accuracy of this story. This still could be one of those rumors that started on out a message board (in this case on a site whose sole purpose is to disparage polygraphs) and grew into a news story. Please, editors, verify that the submissions you get are not complete crap before posting them.
Anyways, according to that source, this case (if it ever existed) was a sexual assault case in which the defendant (who was essentially facing a "he said, she said" case over whether or not the sex was consensual) convinced the judge to admit a polygraph result which showed his innocence. So it was clearly not a case of someone being jailed because of a polygraph result, it was a case of a most likely innocent man being acquitted because of it (again, assuming this case ever existed in the first place). Generally speaking, our justice system is designed to be more likely to let an innocent man go than to convict a guilty man, so this shouldn't be too surprising. And as far as polygraphs being inaccurate, well so is eyewitness testimony, yet many cases are built solely because of that.
A project I was working on earlier tried to create a development wiki which would magically allow people to share information. The end result was a fragmented, unreliable, outdated, mess of 'information'. Many people assumed that since it was a wiki, other people who do their job and update the pages for them. Other people assumed that since it was a wiki, they could just post whatever they want, even when they didn't know what they were talking about. And other people used it for things it was never meant for such as status reports, which did nothing but clutter it with information no one outside of the individual and their manager would ever want to see.
No, wikis are not some sort of magical device that will instantly transform your department's information needs into a well organized library like the wikipedia. They do have certain situations where they can be useful, but in general they have become nothing more than another modern cargo cult.
"Taking credit has nothing to do with it"
With whether or not your company brings in a profit? No. But with the validity of your 'argument'? Yes, it was an integral part.
" Let me quote myself...
Researchers have usually spent many years in university, and that's how they often relate to the world - the mere generation of good ideas is sufficient and praise worthy.
And the very next sentence I say...
In a business setting it doesn't work that way."
And you think that defends my accusation that you think a thesis just involves thinking up ideas? Or is your short term memory so bad you forgot what you were arguing about again?
"What nonsense about getting access to customers. I've done it many times. It usually involves working with marketing, who often are delighted to have closer ties with researchers. So long as what you are doing is reasonable, few managers are going to object. "
Even on /., I've seen few better examples of someone completely missing the point... I'm not saying researchers can't get access to customers, I'm saying they can't do it without the help of the business people. Again, your claims that you are going out on your own and chatting with customers are nothing more than disingenuous attempts to take credit for something you had marketing arrange for you.
"When it comes to the customer, of course you go through the normal channels of communication. So what? A researcher talking to the final end users is not going to create a rent in space-time. "
Ok, let me tell you a little story and see if it helps you understand the flaw in your "argument". There are two college kids named Mike and Joe. Mike has a car, but Joe doesn't, and as a result he always has to bum rids off of his friends like Mike. One day Mike gets angry at Joe for asking him for a ride and tells him he has to become more independent, and stop relying on others for his rides. Joe responds by reminding Mike that he doesn't have enough money for a car and that he is on financial aid and the little money he makes around campus goes to his room and board. Mike just rolls his eyes and says to Joe "Well just get your parents to buy you a car like I did!"
See the flaw in Mike's argument? He is trying to get Joe to become more independent, but his "solution" requires him depending on someone else, his parents. See how that relates to what you are arguing? You are saying R&D employees need to take the initiative get out and get more exposure to their customers instead of leaving that to management. But when reminded that most people in R&D are not usually allowed to directly contact customers, you tell them of course they should go through the proper channels (which generally involves management to some degree). Your claim that you just spontaneously leave your desk and go out and spend the day with the customers is disingenuous at best, and only serves to hide the fact that your plan is contingent on management's actions, not your own.
"Never said it and don't believe it. In fact, I say the opposite. Haven't a clue where you misread that. "
You must have a bad short term memory, let me remind you. In the last paragraph of this post, you state:
And in most shops you would be fired for going outside the normal channel of communications with the customer. Either that or you are only telling half the story.
And again, the fact that you think writing a thesis only involves thinking up an idea and not doing anything to implement tells me how deep your experience really is in research and development.
Aside from the fact that the article isn't comparing the two (rather its an introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio developers), it wasn't written by IBM in the first place. It is merely hosted on IBM's developerworks site, whose contributions come from across the industry.
You are right in that this article is an introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio users, but wrong over whether or not Eclipse is a C++ IDE. In fact, their CDT suite has gained a lot of ground in that area, and I've heard from many in the embedded world who state that Eclipse CDT has become the standard IDE in that arena.
I imagine a lot of it probably depends on how big the project is. I don't know what the exact architecture is, but I'm sure a lot of information about the project has to be kept in memory for things like code completion. If I'm working on a large project, I can see Eclipse's memory run up there (though not to 4 gigs). You can also adjust the settings to increase or decrease the heap size. So if you have enough RAM, you can bump up the heap size and almost eliminate lags.
"So in your world, management should stop worrying about all those unimportant things and come running down to the lab to see your Greatest Invention Ever."
No, simply allocating some additional funds towards research so employees could pursue their ideas and develop them while on the job instead of on their own time would be sufficient.