Filtering is best done server side. For me the to-do list is:
Flash
Java
Printing
Record video from the camera
I understand these are the features you personally want, but that's a hell of a bad list for most people. In some ways, you may as well be asking for a DOS emulator and a serial port. I mean, yeah, I guess those are useful, but they're ultimately pretty silly things to prioritize getting on a phone.
Speaking of a todo list, how about they give decent support for a todo list that syncs with your computer and MobileMe? I know there are programs that sort of do this (Omnifocus/Things) but they really stink when you get down to it. At least-- the syncing stinks. And how about notes? I can do notes in Mail and on my iPhone, but like todo items, they don't sync in spite of being stored on the mail service that I sync iPhone with. When is that getting addressed?
I know, I'm saying something controversial. Everyone is going to jump on me about how Java is the end-all be-all of programming environments and if they supported Java, you could potentially put every horribly-written Java app ever on the iPhone. I don't mean to troll, but I just can't muster up a single care for the crummy java apps out there. And Flash? Next thing you know, people will complain that Apple isn't supporting.NET on the iPhone.
Yeah, but part of the question, really, is who is this "brilliant programmer". The problem is the "brilliant programmer" you're talking about probably isn't the same guy as one who struts around thinking the rules don't apply to him because he thinks he's such a brilliant programmer.
People who are truly brilliant are invaluable. People who think they're brilliant are a dime a dozen.
It's kind of a pattern when you think about it-- a lot of cable channels started out as simply descriptive. MTV stood for "Music TeleVision", and it was called that because they focused on music. Comedy Central wasn't a clever marketing name-- it was just the comedy channel. The SciFi channel was called that because it was the channel that showed SciFi.
But then, of course, MTV doesn't stand for Music Television anymore. There's no music on it, so now IIRC the name is officially MTV. In case there are people who've forgotten, SpikeTV was originally The Nashville Network.
Yeah, wrestling was a bad sign, and this name change is just confirmation. The people running the SciFi channel apparently don't like SciFi, but rather than trying to start a new channel or something, they've changed the name and they're going to make it into something else. Too bad.
in my experience getting *them* to admit they're wrong is much harder than for employees
I think this is one place where you're missing my point. Who said anything about getting people to admit that they're wrong, or getting them to understand that they're being foolish?
If you look at it in terms of "making happen the things I want to happen" instead of "getting everyone to understand my viewpoint and agree", then dealing with stupid/foolish people isn't quite as awful-- and it's much easier than dealing with other highly intelligent people who simply don't want the same things you do.
Don't get me wrong, I do like to work with intelligent people who disagree with me, so long as they fundamentally want the same things I do and the disagreement is over how to get those things. That sort of thing can be enlightening. But if it's someone who is simply opposing my goals, then it's much easier to deal with someone who isn't as smart as I am.
Never tried to debate with a creationist religious fundamentalist before
Debate with them regarding what? If you're going to debate a creationist religious fundamentalist over creationism or religion, for the sole purpose of getting them to say, "You're right, I'm wrong," then maybe the religious person isn't the fool in the conversation.
well, manipulating your boss' boss into doing what you want is even worse, and the idiocy grows at an exponential level the more you rise on the management hierarchy.
I've been there. I've convinced my boss's boss of things. I've also been the boss who has been convinced of things by an underling. And you know what? It's often not as simple as "stupidity". Sometimes you only think your boss is stupid because he's more concerned about things that you don't know about than he is about the things you do know about.
Then, of course, some bosses are stupid-- I'm not denying that. But I've seen plenty of instances where employees were complaining about their idiot boss only to find out that the employees simply didn't understand how the business worked.
Pro tip: with software, you can *never* trust 100% what you're being told how long a project will take.
Yeah, this isn't unique to software development. Things go wrong. Still, time management (including gauging how long a project will take you) is a useful skill in itself. It includes being able to make good guesses/estimates on how long something will take, and how to appropriately pad your estimate given how likely and extreme the possible setbacks are.
No one can tell me with 100% precision how long a project will take, but I'd rather work with someone who can give me a reasonable estimate 95% of the time than someone who is often slightly faster at doing the work, but whose estimates are way off 70% of the time. I think that preference is reasonable, too.
No thanks on the standard USB charging. I'd rather be able to plug my dock into a stereo and get line-out audio, or have the option to get a dock with a remote, etc.
I don't know what girlintraining was talking about, but I'd love to see the whole thing just opened up in terms of installing applications. Give up control. Let me install things straight from the Internet without the store. Stop restricting what applications people are permitted to write.
I don't know if Apple is allowed to do that because of some deal with AT&T. Maybe they're required to take measures to restrict certain kinds of functionality. Still, it's something I'd like to see.
The problem is that smart people get very irritated working with fools
Of course, really extremely smart people can outsmart fools into getting them to do what they want. Really smart people get more irritated working with other smart people who have opposing agendas.
There are fewer and fewer jobs for smart developers. Corporations prefer predictable pleasant programmers over brilliant good programmers. They would prefer that a project *definately* take 16 weeks instead of taking 2 to 9 weeks.
I don't do software development, but as a manager, yeah, I'd generally rather work with pleasant people who do their jobs "slow and steady" rather than the "brilliant" but unreliable guy. The real issue is often not the uncertainty about exactly how long a project will take, but uncertainty about whether you can trust what you're being told how long a project will take.
What I mean is, yes, I'd rather have someone working for me who says, "I can get this project done in 2-9 weeks" and gets it done in <9 weeks then someone who says, "I can get it done in 16 weeks" and gets it done in 16 weeks exactly. 9 weeks is shorter, that's an easy call.
The problem is dealing with someone who says, "I can get it done in under 9 weeks," and then sometimes it takes 2 weeks, sometimes it take 9 weeks, sometimes it takes 23 weeks, and sometimes it never gets done. I'd generally rather take the steady 16 weeks over that sort of thing. A steady-16-weeks allows me to make other plans, make promises to other people, and set other deadlines. With the theoretically-9-weeks-but-who-knows answer, everyone would actually be better off being told, "I have no clue how long it will take," because at least then there would be no false expectations.
All of this is just to say, I'd rather have people that I can rely on than theoretically brilliant people who are just going to do whatever the hell they feel like.
Now try that with every battery off your line, and you have the minimum that you'll advertise. 6 months after selling those machines, the minimum will be even lower because batteries degrade. So maybe you advertise that figure?
And of course, that figure will be something like 10 minutes, which still doesn't give you any kind of an idea of how much time I can reasonably expect my laptop to work off of battery power doing reasonable things.
To be honest, I think they key thing should be that it's standardize. I would think most of the point is being able to compare when you're shopping. If one laptop is offering 2 hours of life and another is offering 4, I think it's fine if it's not exactly 2 and 4 hours, respectively, when you put it to a test. But ideally the "4 hour" laptop battery should give you twice the life of a "2 hour".
I'm not convinced there's a point anyway, since it seems like people tend to prefer the sound they're used to. Audiophiles may have some need for precision and accuracy, but I just need to enjoy the music I listen to.
Right. What is FFMPEG? It's basically a package that allows you to convert from almost any audio or video file format to almost any audio or video file format. Not only that, but it's the audio/video converter that pretty much every other (excluding in-house proprietary) converters and players are based on. It's important.
As to why we care about a 0.5 release, FFMPEG has been around for years, but to my knowledge has not had "releases". There is the latest build, and that's it. The idea of having a stable "release" build is news in itself, whatever number you associate to it.
Yes, there's still a lot to do, so the 0.5 version number is probably warranted. For one thing, there are still a few formats out there that FFMPEG doesn't fully support, and not all of those that they support seem to have been optimized well enough for output quality IMO. However, it's amazing how much they've accomplished already. Life would be so much harder if not for these guys' work.
Yeah, I knew most of that (though you added a few interesting points which I thank you for, so I don't mean to be dismissive), but it'd still be interesting to see some sign of real civilian life.
DS9 was the only series that came close. I remember them having a civilian freighter run by a human, and the Captain's son (Jake) talked about wanting to be a writer. But it was still sort of strange (I thought) how the civilian ships and bars and shops were all run by aliens, while the humans were all in Starfleet. And then how when humans decided not to be in Starfleet, it was to be writers or artists or chefs. It was never like, "I'm going to work for [some civilian company] back on Earth running a factory that manufactures tricorders."
I mean, yeah, I know they don't have money, and they do have replicators, so the idea of having a manufacturing company doesn't quite fit. Still, the apparent lack of in-universe concern seems like bad writing. I can't imagine everyone would be satisfied with all economic and political power, as well as all scientific research, being consolidated into a military organization which doesn't even have a defined overall mission.
I mean, when they -needed- a military (say, with the Klingons or Romulans) Starfleet seemed to double for that, but otherwise it seemed like their was really no civilian/scientists/military officer separation.
Yeah, and that's kind of my point. Even when it's not explicitly military, and they're saying their mission is about science and exploration, it's still paramilitary with heavily armed vessels and a well defined command structure. Even in TOS, I never got a sense for what else Kirk could have been doing if he weren't in Starfleet.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really?
One thing that no Star Trek series has gotten much into is the interaction between military and civilian life. It's really strange if you think much about it. You have this huge fascist/communist state with a seemingly pervasive military presence. They have tons of military vessels just patrolling around the galaxy in seemingly random ways, under the excuse of scientific research and exploration, but constantly poking their noses in everyone's business. They're using their military might to cause outcomes favorable to themselves on a regular basis.
And then when you see civilian life, everyone seems to just be hanging around in restaurants and bars or running vineyards. It's a very pastoral but irrelevant civilian life.
Or they're both a ruse because they're going to stick with the current IE engine. There are always rumors that Microsoft is going to do something cool and/or open, and sometimes they even announce that they're going to do something big. It never happens. A couple years later, they release the new miracle product, and it's a slightly tweaked version of the old one.
Yeah, that was my reaction. It's one thing if all the information being displayed would be a standard default, but as soon as you customize what data to show you, you're already displaying private information about yourself whenever using this. It'd be much better if it was displayed in a format that was private, that only you could see.
Beyond that, if it's something mounted in your glasses, it seems like it opens the potential (perhaps) to track eye movement and therefore guess at what you're looking at. That might open the door to have it make more intelligent guesses as to what kind of information you're looking for, instead of just displaying information about whatever happens to be in front of you.
But I gather from the video that this was all just supposed to be a starting point or proof of concept rather than an actual product. Maybe given an investment, building it into glasses would be more feasible.
I think I must have missed the part when he condemned others' use of English.
Either way, having less than stellar command of your second or third or fifth language, whichever English is for geekymachoman, is not necessarily a sign of a poor eduction. I'm fairly educated, but I'm a bit rusty in my second language. Even though I'm sure I could ask where the bathroom is, I doubt I could make an intelligible point in a forum of native speakers of that language.
I've read about a couple people trying to do this in some form (basic idea of "like guitar hero but using a real guitar") but personally I'm waiting to see someone go the opposite direction: turing the guitar hero guitar into a real musical instrument.
I know that probably sounds silly, but between all of the buttons, the strumming switch, and an analog wammy bar, it seems like there should be enough different controls to do something. I bet you could feed the input into a computer and have some of the controls act as modifiers to produce a bunch of different notes. It wouldn't have to play like a guitar.
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1
it boggles the mind how so many people are upset the movie isn't "family friendly"
It's just that some people are of the misconception that comicbook+superheroes="entertainment for kids". It doesn't matter how many times you tell people that this isn't the case.
That's a good point, but drugs aren't the only things that can cause a change in neurological state. In my experience, people who feel isolated, rejected, depressed, and --what's the opposite of empowered?-- are less likely to want to feel motivated to work. I bet some of those feelings have corresponding neurological states.
There are plenty of questions here, in terms of what the ultimate cause is of these feelings and the physical state of the brain, how much positive/negative enforcement of behavior is capable of changing the state, and also what kind of actions we, as a society, want to do about these problems.
I'm just not comfortable jumping straight to calling people "lazy", writing them off as "bad people", and hoping they disappear.
I was in a program in high school where we did very menial scientific research for a local company. It was basically collecting data, plugging it to spreadsheets, and the teacher helped us to some very basic analysis. Our work may not have been helpful to anyone-- hell, they might have simply thrown it in the trash, but the idea that we were trying to come up with answers that someone else didn't already have was a outstanding experience.
And it wasn't that the work was all that flashy and interesting. The research was on a topic that I didn't care about, and an awful lot of my work was reading numbers out of one program and plugging them into another. And I wasn't getting paid. Still, the work had a completely different feel, just to have it in the back of my head that it was possible, just possible, that the work I was doing might be helpful to someone.
I think sometimes the problem is that we underestimate our teenagers. We treat them like they have nothing to contribute and we tell them that nothing that they do really matters. No wonder that they get bored and tend to struggle emotionally.
Slashdot Mirror
Filtering is best done server side. For me the to-do list is: Flash Java Printing Record video from the camera
I understand these are the features you personally want, but that's a hell of a bad list for most people. In some ways, you may as well be asking for a DOS emulator and a serial port. I mean, yeah, I guess those are useful, but they're ultimately pretty silly things to prioritize getting on a phone.
Speaking of a todo list, how about they give decent support for a todo list that syncs with your computer and MobileMe? I know there are programs that sort of do this (Omnifocus/Things) but they really stink when you get down to it. At least-- the syncing stinks. And how about notes? I can do notes in Mail and on my iPhone, but like todo items, they don't sync in spite of being stored on the mail service that I sync iPhone with. When is that getting addressed?
I know, I'm saying something controversial. Everyone is going to jump on me about how Java is the end-all be-all of programming environments and if they supported Java, you could potentially put every horribly-written Java app ever on the iPhone. I don't mean to troll, but I just can't muster up a single care for the crummy java apps out there. And Flash? Next thing you know, people will complain that Apple isn't supporting .NET on the iPhone.
Yeah, but part of the question, really, is who is this "brilliant programmer". The problem is the "brilliant programmer" you're talking about probably isn't the same guy as one who struts around thinking the rules don't apply to him because he thinks he's such a brilliant programmer.
People who are truly brilliant are invaluable. People who think they're brilliant are a dime a dozen.
Right. Even AMC is showing more than American Movie Classics, but I won't complain as long as it's Mad Men.
It's kind of a pattern when you think about it-- a lot of cable channels started out as simply descriptive. MTV stood for "Music TeleVision", and it was called that because they focused on music. Comedy Central wasn't a clever marketing name-- it was just the comedy channel. The SciFi channel was called that because it was the channel that showed SciFi.
But then, of course, MTV doesn't stand for Music Television anymore. There's no music on it, so now IIRC the name is officially MTV. In case there are people who've forgotten, SpikeTV was originally The Nashville Network.
Yeah, wrestling was a bad sign, and this name change is just confirmation. The people running the SciFi channel apparently don't like SciFi, but rather than trying to start a new channel or something, they've changed the name and they're going to make it into something else. Too bad.
Debating them over the inherent foolishness of
and
in my experience getting *them* to admit they're wrong is much harder than for employees
I think this is one place where you're missing my point. Who said anything about getting people to admit that they're wrong, or getting them to understand that they're being foolish?
If you look at it in terms of "making happen the things I want to happen" instead of "getting everyone to understand my viewpoint and agree", then dealing with stupid/foolish people isn't quite as awful-- and it's much easier than dealing with other highly intelligent people who simply don't want the same things you do.
Don't get me wrong, I do like to work with intelligent people who disagree with me, so long as they fundamentally want the same things I do and the disagreement is over how to get those things. That sort of thing can be enlightening. But if it's someone who is simply opposing my goals, then it's much easier to deal with someone who isn't as smart as I am.
Never tried to debate with a creationist religious fundamentalist before
Debate with them regarding what? If you're going to debate a creationist religious fundamentalist over creationism or religion, for the sole purpose of getting them to say, "You're right, I'm wrong," then maybe the religious person isn't the fool in the conversation.
well, manipulating your boss' boss into doing what you want is even worse, and the idiocy grows at an exponential level the more you rise on the management hierarchy.
I've been there. I've convinced my boss's boss of things. I've also been the boss who has been convinced of things by an underling. And you know what? It's often not as simple as "stupidity". Sometimes you only think your boss is stupid because he's more concerned about things that you don't know about than he is about the things you do know about.
Then, of course, some bosses are stupid-- I'm not denying that. But I've seen plenty of instances where employees were complaining about their idiot boss only to find out that the employees simply didn't understand how the business worked.
Pro tip: with software, you can *never* trust 100% what you're being told how long a project will take.
Yeah, this isn't unique to software development. Things go wrong. Still, time management (including gauging how long a project will take you) is a useful skill in itself. It includes being able to make good guesses/estimates on how long something will take, and how to appropriately pad your estimate given how likely and extreme the possible setbacks are.
No one can tell me with 100% precision how long a project will take, but I'd rather work with someone who can give me a reasonable estimate 95% of the time than someone who is often slightly faster at doing the work, but whose estimates are way off 70% of the time. I think that preference is reasonable, too.
Can I ask what problems you have with the Exchange support? I don't really have any problems, but maybe there's something I haven't really tried?
No thanks on the standard USB charging. I'd rather be able to plug my dock into a stereo and get line-out audio, or have the option to get a dock with a remote, etc.
I don't know what girlintraining was talking about, but I'd love to see the whole thing just opened up in terms of installing applications. Give up control. Let me install things straight from the Internet without the store. Stop restricting what applications people are permitted to write.
I don't know if Apple is allowed to do that because of some deal with AT&T. Maybe they're required to take measures to restrict certain kinds of functionality. Still, it's something I'd like to see.
The problem is that smart people get very irritated working with fools
Of course, really extremely smart people can outsmart fools into getting them to do what they want. Really smart people get more irritated working with other smart people who have opposing agendas.
There are fewer and fewer jobs for smart developers. Corporations prefer predictable pleasant programmers over brilliant good programmers. They would prefer that a project *definately* take 16 weeks instead of taking 2 to 9 weeks.
I don't do software development, but as a manager, yeah, I'd generally rather work with pleasant people who do their jobs "slow and steady" rather than the "brilliant" but unreliable guy. The real issue is often not the uncertainty about exactly how long a project will take, but uncertainty about whether you can trust what you're being told how long a project will take.
What I mean is, yes, I'd rather have someone working for me who says, "I can get this project done in 2-9 weeks" and gets it done in <9 weeks then someone who says, "I can get it done in 16 weeks" and gets it done in 16 weeks exactly. 9 weeks is shorter, that's an easy call.
The problem is dealing with someone who says, "I can get it done in under 9 weeks," and then sometimes it takes 2 weeks, sometimes it take 9 weeks, sometimes it takes 23 weeks, and sometimes it never gets done. I'd generally rather take the steady 16 weeks over that sort of thing. A steady-16-weeks allows me to make other plans, make promises to other people, and set other deadlines. With the theoretically-9-weeks-but-who-knows answer, everyone would actually be better off being told, "I have no clue how long it will take," because at least then there would be no false expectations.
All of this is just to say, I'd rather have people that I can rely on than theoretically brilliant people who are just going to do whatever the hell they feel like.
Now try that with every battery off your line, and you have the minimum that you'll advertise. 6 months after selling those machines, the minimum will be even lower because batteries degrade. So maybe you advertise that figure?
And of course, that figure will be something like 10 minutes, which still doesn't give you any kind of an idea of how much time I can reasonably expect my laptop to work off of battery power doing reasonable things.
To be honest, I think they key thing should be that it's standardize. I would think most of the point is being able to compare when you're shopping. If one laptop is offering 2 hours of life and another is offering 4, I think it's fine if it's not exactly 2 and 4 hours, respectively, when you put it to a test. But ideally the "4 hour" laptop battery should give you twice the life of a "2 hour".
I'm not convinced there's a point anyway, since it seems like people tend to prefer the sound they're used to. Audiophiles may have some need for precision and accuracy, but I just need to enjoy the music I listen to.
Right. What is FFMPEG? It's basically a package that allows you to convert from almost any audio or video file format to almost any audio or video file format. Not only that, but it's the audio/video converter that pretty much every other (excluding in-house proprietary) converters and players are based on. It's important.
As to why we care about a 0.5 release, FFMPEG has been around for years, but to my knowledge has not had "releases". There is the latest build, and that's it. The idea of having a stable "release" build is news in itself, whatever number you associate to it.
Yes, there's still a lot to do, so the 0.5 version number is probably warranted. For one thing, there are still a few formats out there that FFMPEG doesn't fully support, and not all of those that they support seem to have been optimized well enough for output quality IMO. However, it's amazing how much they've accomplished already. Life would be so much harder if not for these guys' work.
Yeah, I knew most of that (though you added a few interesting points which I thank you for, so I don't mean to be dismissive), but it'd still be interesting to see some sign of real civilian life.
DS9 was the only series that came close. I remember them having a civilian freighter run by a human, and the Captain's son (Jake) talked about wanting to be a writer. But it was still sort of strange (I thought) how the civilian ships and bars and shops were all run by aliens, while the humans were all in Starfleet. And then how when humans decided not to be in Starfleet, it was to be writers or artists or chefs. It was never like, "I'm going to work for [some civilian company] back on Earth running a factory that manufactures tricorders."
I mean, yeah, I know they don't have money, and they do have replicators, so the idea of having a manufacturing company doesn't quite fit. Still, the apparent lack of in-universe concern seems like bad writing. I can't imagine everyone would be satisfied with all economic and political power, as well as all scientific research, being consolidated into a military organization which doesn't even have a defined overall mission.
I mean, when they -needed- a military (say, with the Klingons or Romulans) Starfleet seemed to double for that, but otherwise it seemed like their was really no civilian/scientists/military officer separation.
Yeah, and that's kind of my point. Even when it's not explicitly military, and they're saying their mission is about science and exploration, it's still paramilitary with heavily armed vessels and a well defined command structure. Even in TOS, I never got a sense for what else Kirk could have been doing if he weren't in Starfleet.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really?
One thing that no Star Trek series has gotten much into is the interaction between military and civilian life. It's really strange if you think much about it. You have this huge fascist/communist state with a seemingly pervasive military presence. They have tons of military vessels just patrolling around the galaxy in seemingly random ways, under the excuse of scientific research and exploration, but constantly poking their noses in everyone's business. They're using their military might to cause outcomes favorable to themselves on a regular basis.
And then when you see civilian life, everyone seems to just be hanging around in restaurants and bars or running vineyards. It's a very pastoral but irrelevant civilian life.
And for some reason, no one is disturbed by it.
The longest running sci-fi show in history, Stargate:SG1, spent most of it's life (if not all) on Friday nights.
Well it spent at least a few seasons on Wednesday nights on Showtime, IIRC.
Or they're both a ruse because they're going to stick with the current IE engine. There are always rumors that Microsoft is going to do something cool and/or open, and sometimes they even announce that they're going to do something big. It never happens. A couple years later, they release the new miracle product, and it's a slightly tweaked version of the old one.
Yeah, that was my reaction. It's one thing if all the information being displayed would be a standard default, but as soon as you customize what data to show you, you're already displaying private information about yourself whenever using this. It'd be much better if it was displayed in a format that was private, that only you could see.
Beyond that, if it's something mounted in your glasses, it seems like it opens the potential (perhaps) to track eye movement and therefore guess at what you're looking at. That might open the door to have it make more intelligent guesses as to what kind of information you're looking for, instead of just displaying information about whatever happens to be in front of you.
But I gather from the video that this was all just supposed to be a starting point or proof of concept rather than an actual product. Maybe given an investment, building it into glasses would be more feasible.
I think I must have missed the part when he condemned others' use of English.
Either way, having less than stellar command of your second or third or fifth language, whichever English is for geekymachoman, is not necessarily a sign of a poor eduction. I'm fairly educated, but I'm a bit rusty in my second language. Even though I'm sure I could ask where the bathroom is, I doubt I could make an intelligible point in a forum of native speakers of that language.
I've read about a couple people trying to do this in some form (basic idea of "like guitar hero but using a real guitar") but personally I'm waiting to see someone go the opposite direction: turing the guitar hero guitar into a real musical instrument.
I know that probably sounds silly, but between all of the buttons, the strumming switch, and an analog wammy bar, it seems like there should be enough different controls to do something. I bet you could feed the input into a computer and have some of the controls act as modifiers to produce a bunch of different notes. It wouldn't have to play like a guitar.
it boggles the mind how so many people are upset the movie isn't "family friendly"
It's just that some people are of the misconception that comicbook+superheroes="entertainment for kids". It doesn't matter how many times you tell people that this isn't the case.
we have an inherent fear of diesel, thanks to the loud, smoky GM diesels of the 1980s.
Also there are lots of gas stations that don't sell diesel. At least there were back when I used to drive a lot.
That's a good point, but drugs aren't the only things that can cause a change in neurological state. In my experience, people who feel isolated, rejected, depressed, and --what's the opposite of empowered?-- are less likely to want to feel motivated to work. I bet some of those feelings have corresponding neurological states.
There are plenty of questions here, in terms of what the ultimate cause is of these feelings and the physical state of the brain, how much positive/negative enforcement of behavior is capable of changing the state, and also what kind of actions we, as a society, want to do about these problems.
I'm just not comfortable jumping straight to calling people "lazy", writing them off as "bad people", and hoping they disappear.
I was in a program in high school where we did very menial scientific research for a local company. It was basically collecting data, plugging it to spreadsheets, and the teacher helped us to some very basic analysis. Our work may not have been helpful to anyone-- hell, they might have simply thrown it in the trash, but the idea that we were trying to come up with answers that someone else didn't already have was a outstanding experience.
And it wasn't that the work was all that flashy and interesting. The research was on a topic that I didn't care about, and an awful lot of my work was reading numbers out of one program and plugging them into another. And I wasn't getting paid. Still, the work had a completely different feel, just to have it in the back of my head that it was possible, just possible, that the work I was doing might be helpful to someone.
I think sometimes the problem is that we underestimate our teenagers. We treat them like they have nothing to contribute and we tell them that nothing that they do really matters. No wonder that they get bored and tend to struggle emotionally.