Adjustable AI takes all of the meaning out of structured difficulty levels.
I'd say something more like, self-adjusting AI and structured difficulty levels are oppositional methods. Which is to say, if you had good self-adjusting AI, you wouldn't need "difficulty levels". It would adjust.
Or another possibility: you could have different difficulty levels, the easy levels being self-adjusting, and harder levels that amount to telling the AI, "Eh, do your worst, even if I stink."
Adjustable AI takes all of the meaning out of structured difficulty levels.
But that's more an issue of poor implementation than the idea itself being bad. Any time there's some trick like that, one that *always* fools the AI, it's a problem of poor implementation. In other words: a bug.
There are two reasons why I like the idea of AI that calibrates itself to the skill level you're playing on. First, there is a certain level of realism to it. In real life, if it seems like you stink at something, your competition will underestimate you. They won't try as hard, because they're not expecting a real challenge. If you constantly pull this, though, against the same opponents, they'll eventually catch on. Good AI should mimic this.
Second, there are games where, when I'm playing it, it's like an interactive movie. Sometimes, when I play a game, I'm not that interested in "rising to the challenge". I just want to take control of the main character while he does something cool, and then get on with the story. When playing games like this, "getting stuck" on some stupid boss just isn't fun. It's annoying.
So this is often where people do cheat. They like the game, but they want to get past some stupidly-difficult part. Cheating, however, breaks the illusion. If the game were capable of "helping you out" a little, it would maintain the experience and let you past.
I'm not saying the idea is easy to do well. However, ultimately, when I play a game, I'm not looking to prove myself by being "733t". I just don't care, as long as it's fun. Good AI (in relation to games) is AI that makes playing fun. Whatever that entails.
Well, in a certain sense, "good" AI for games doesn't necessarily mean "harder to beat". Take a fighting game like Tekken as an example. Technically, you could just program the AI opponent to block every time you press the "attack" button, and to attack whenever you can't block. Suddenly you have "unbeatable AI", but it's not really *good* AI.
And I don't just mean "it's not technically impressive". I mean, considering the purpose of in-game AI, it's *bad* AI. Good AI generally simulates more complicated human interactions. Good AI can be tricked or distracted, and can learn so it's not so easily tricked the next time. I really like the idea of AI that will adjust to the player's skill level to always provide gameplay that is exciting and challenging, yet beatable.
In other words, I believe "good" AI in a game is not defined by being hard to beat, but by being fun to play against.
Then again, the fact that divisionbyzero apparently didn't notice the text you're referring to could be interpreted as evidence that Raskin's UI isn't as intuitive as he thinks.
Is it just me, or is this interface a PITA? All the obscurity of a CLI with the directness of a GUI-- yeah, good idea
What? You deleted the period at the end of the sentence? But that was my term paper, zoomed way out!
If you ask me, this guy is a little nutty. I've read things written by him before, and they always seem to be annoyed rants that no one takes his high-minded theories about UI design seriously enough, when in reality, his high-minded theories don't work out. (That's my impression, anyway)
- Yet-to-be-released products with similar BTO pricing coming sooner than Apple originally planned
There are rumors that the Powerbooks are getting a speed bump, and maybe some other upgrades, soon. Well, the Mac mini is basically the same hardware as the powerbook, just minus the screen/keyboard/trackpad. Maybe there's a connection there?
The "storage" version of Moores law may take care of #1. Except for large multimedia, #2 seems to be the bigger problem.
This is pretty much true. I've never had so much data that I couldn't buy enough hard drive space to hold it. However, it can be mighty frustrating to buy new hard drives when you know you don't have enough *useful* information to fill the ones you have.
well, I hope so. Or at least, I hope somebody is working on it. But the question was, what are going to be big IT challenges in the next 20 years. If it's going to take google a "decade-or-so" to figure it out, I would say that it amounts to a rather large challenge. Wouldn't you?
Some of the ideas in your post (such as the adding of the image's resolution) could be automatically added, though of course, others would currently need to be manually added (e.g. whether a song is sad/happy).
Well, in some ways, I can add those sorts of keywords myself, but my entire point was that, as your data set grows, it becomes less and less reasonable to expect people to add their own keywords. What I was suggesting was that we'll need software that can automatically "listen" to a song and figure out whether it's "happy" or "sad". We'll want systems that can interpret a photograph and tell us "what's in it".
This isn't a new idea, and, in fact, people are working on this problem right now.
I think there's something to this idea, but I think it will ultimately require that files can be search on something other than "keywords".
Of course, many of these proposed filesystems allow for something like, "Give me all my jpg's that are larger than 640x480 and were created later than Jan 1st." So, already, we have more than keywords.
However, I still don't think it's sufficient. If I have thousands of photos, is it really reasonable to expect that I am going to be comprehensive about adding keywords to each? I mean, enough keywords for each photo that I can say, "Find that picture I took of the waterfall and a woman swimming underneath"? GIS can do this somewhat, but only because it's pulling metadata from the pages that link to the photo, and even then, it's not really reliable enough.
Our big hope, I think, is that it will be possible for pictures to be automatically analyzed for content. So, as a simple example, the computer might be able to tell the difference between a portrait and a landscape. Between a child and adult? A man and a woman? How far can we go with this?
Will computers be able to search music by whether it will get you pumped up or whether it will sooth you? Whether it *sounds* fast or slow? Will I be able to set my iTunes smart playlist to find me 50 "sad" songs out of my library?
I think this is the way things need to go, but it's certainly a "grand challenge" to get these sorts of capabilities working properly in consumer-level computers.
In a certain way, I agree. In my earlier post, I wrote that the solution would need to make it so you can:
# keep everything you want
# make it easy to find what you want when you want it
# make it easy to access what you want when you want it
# throw away everything you aren't going to want
Now, if the "everything you want" is a small set of data, and the "everything you don't want" is large, then it becomes relatively quick and easy for users to manually sort their own data. I also agree that the amount of data you *need* is pretty small, but that's [probably] based on some level of agreement between us on what it means to "need" something.
However, many people would disagree on our view of "need". Well, in my particular case, I practice the method you describe, except that a lot of my data makes it to the "cold storage", so maybe we already disagree a bit on the idea of "need". Every photo I take is saved. Everything [serious] I write is saved. I deleted a bunch of stuff once, on the idea that I didn't "need" it, and then I needed it. So, all the work I do, whether it seems worth keeping or not, gets archived somewhere.
However, I'm thinking of all the users out there who, whether we like it or not, are running computers. They're taking pictures. They're writing letters. They're recording music. Some of this data they "need", and some, maybe they don't.
So, I guess the problem is, with all this fresh data being generated every day, how do we develop a solution that ensures, for each person, the data that they feel they *need* is safe, and the data that they *don't want* isn't cluttering up their view of the data they "need"?
-- sure you will want to wrap it into some kind of GUI for you grandma;)
Yeah, but part of my point was, not every grandma has a me to set *anything* up. I don't want to have to build a Unix system and write a custom solution for my grandmother anyway. I am not a one-man full-time tech-support staff for everyone I know. When I talk about a solution, I mean something that comes with the computer or is an easy-to-install add-on that grandma can do herself. I mean something that I can point out to some know-nothing and say "Buy this. It'll take care of your problems."
I suspect that banks will start providing safes for data soon - with some kind access like ssh
For grandma, they'd better have a better interface than CLI SSH. Maybe a program that uses SFTP, but with a nice GUI, but again, I'm not writing my own programs here.
Categories, I put as keys are always fixed for me and I'm getting paths to them immediately without need to make find/grep each time
No offense intended, but you're still spending far more time than I'm talking about. Setting up unix servers with huge raid drives, finding an out-of-state site to stash it, setting up secure data transfers, devising your own method of assigning metadata to files or some kind of personal database file system....
I understand, for a geek, this isn't a rediculous expense of time, since it's also a hobby and a source of fun and entertainment. However, to grandma (and even me) it's just too much.
When I talk about making photos "easy to find", I'm talking "easy" like Apple's iPhoto is still a bit too complicated, in that you have to assign keywords and ratings manually, which many users aren't going to bother with after a certain number of photos.
When I talk about easy to access, I'm talking about the process being relatively transparent, i.e. easier than connecting to an FTP site. Like you wouldn't need to know that it's "not on your computer".
When I talk about affordable, I'm talking about something like $100 total, or a $10 a month service (for personal use).
In case I'm not being clear, I'm not asking, "What's a good, cheap backup solution, available today?" I'm saying, the state of data management technologies is not currently sufficient for our ever-expanding set of data. We need better search methods for all sorts of data (not just text). We need transparent backup and archival methods (transparent both in the backup and the restore). We need more than solutions for businesses who can employ a big staff and thousands in hardware, and more than solutions for geeks who can roll their own. We need solutions so that Joe Schmoe can take digital photos to his heart's content, can create a digital music library as large as he wants, and not need to worry about sorting through the data or losing it.
I'll agree with this one. I look at my company's servers, and it seems like we just keep having to add more hard drives. Some of it's because people are disorganized, but sometimes people are disorganized because of the massive amounts of data that they're dealing with.
I have users with multi-GB mailboxes that can't quite be deleted, but archiving it doesn't really solve the problem either, it just makes it harder for the user to find what he's looking for.
So, it's a basic problem. Every day, we're generating more data. The amount of data (in bytes) is going up every day, as computers are more easily able to deal with higher resolution pictures and movies. But what do we do with all this data? Just keep writing it to tape and storing it in bunkers? After we accrue enough data, what's the point of keeping it?-- you won't be able to find anything anymore.
It's a real problem for me, both as an IT pro and personally. When dealing with so much data, how do you:
keep everything you want
make it easy to find what you want when you want it
make it easy to access what you want when you want it
throw away everything you aren't going to want
And how do you do all that with:
a solution a non-techie can deal with (grandma needs her data safe, too)
security from unauthorized access
security from data loss (off-site backups?)
an affordable price (both corporate and personal solutions)
without spending the amount of time on this that only an obsessive compulsive would consider acceptable
I haven't seen an acceptable solution yet.
Re:Best management advice I ever heard
on
Geeks in Management?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As a manager, you cannot succeed without your employees succeeding....You are there to facilitate their performance as someone who works for them.
This get's really close to an issue that seems to me to be a defining difference between a good manager and a bad manager. (In my experience, anyway)
A bad manager tends to see himself as the real actor in the business. What I mean by that is, he thinks it's he who is doing the job, and his subordinates are merely "tools" that allow him to complete his tasks. Managers like this tend to micromanage, annoy their subordinates, and generally suffer from minor uprisings.
Good managers tend to see their subordinates as the real actors in the business. They do all the work, and all the manager really does is help organize. Someone has to deal with the execs and customers. Someone has to resolve internal conflicts, and someone has to be the final word when the group needs to make a decision. Someone needs to set schedules and make sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing. But in this sense, the role of "manager" isn't far different from that of an outstanding "executive assistant" (i.e. personal secretary): Their job is to remove the obstacles that keep you from focusing on your work.
It's true that it's easier to gain insight into the troubles your subordinates are facing if you can do their jobs, but it is not necessary. You do not need to be able to do everything to be a good manager-- you certainly don't need to be better at doing your subordinates' jobs than your subordinates.
What you do need is the ability to trust your subordinates. This requires, to some extent, that first you weed out the dead wood. It requires that you are a good judge of character, and that you know when someone is lying, and you know when someone is overestimating or underestimating themselves.
However, my point is that a manager has a different job than his subordinates. If you are going to manage programmers, it certainly helps if you know something about programming, but ultimately, it isn't your job to program. Your job is to attract good programmers, keep your programmers happy and productive, and to remove the obstacles that keep your programmers from completing their programming. But leave the programming to them.
I myself have a 15 year old who I'm trying to convince. But, along with everything else, there's a strange paradox:
You're trying to convince a teenager that it's ok to make mistakes at their age, but the reason we all know it is, when we were teenagers, we made the mistake of thinking it was not ok to make mistakes. You're telling a teenager they'll learn from experience, but the reason you know is that you've had experience learning from experience.
It's all kind of a catch 22, and they won't believe you until they're old enough that they already know it for themselves.
That comment wasn't meant to say that simulations are inherently bad, but that wholesale replacement of real-world experience by computer games and TV isn't such a good thing. It isn't a sufficient replacement for having friends to have "Friends". Being good at Tony Hawk is not the same as being a good skateboarder. That sort of thing.
(I'm exaggerating, of course, but I do think it's an issue to keep in mind)
Yeah, but that's part of what I had in mind. When I say, "don't worry about what people think of you, in fact, embarrass yourself," I guess I mean, "don't be shy". And I say this particularly because high school is a good time to be experimenting with your social skills in a low-risk environment. Worst case scenario: if you mess up and make a fool of yourself, it'll just be a funny story about a stupid thing you did in high school.
Most of the people you graduate with, no matter how popular/smart/wonderful they were in high-school will probably be completely worthless in college. Some will likely come home to be with their group of friends from high-school again and may not even finish college. They will be happy in their small group of friends forever, which is fine, but certainly don't believe that you need to limit yourself to that.
There's also an important corollary to this: The opinion of high-school classmates doesn't really matter. Knowing this would have done me a lot of good. Don't bother trying to impress your peers in high school. In fact, go ahead and embarrass yourself. It won't be the end of the world. A year after graduation, no one will remember or care. If anyone does remember and care, those are the weirdos whose entire life will be spent obsessing on high school, the people who never move on with their lives, and so their opinion isn't worth much worry.
Games may be better at teaching certain things than books...
The first thing that popped into my mind when reading this story: "better at teaching what?"
For example, Halo might be better at teaching combat skills than a book about combat skills. That is to say, when it comes to learning *how* to do something, it's often better to learn by doing than to learn by reading about it. Insofar as playing the games are activities themselves, you're learning by doing. Insofar as games are simulations, you're learning by simulated-doing. Then you just have to hope the simulation is sufficiently realistic.
However, learning how to do things is not the only kind of learning, and so we shouldn't be looking to replace books with video games. But then, I also don't believe we should be looking to replace real-life experience with video games, either.
yeah, I know. I'm just saying it's an example of how Warty, while definitely good, still lacks a certain sort of polish that some other distros (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake) have. But, all those distros have been around for years, while Warty was Ubuntu's first public release, so I find it pretty forgivable.
And if it is our goal to stop aging, then stopping the changes in our brains would be a part of that. And I don't think that is an unreasonable goal, either.
But you get my point, right? That part of this idea of immortality being terrific is, the old wise man doesn't die, and gets to continue being wise, right? Learning gets to continue on without the impediment of needing to pass on the knowledge to following generations? Like, maybe if Einstein were alive, we'd have the TOE by now-- that's the idea, right?
Well, imagine wisdom (and some levels of complex thinking) as a side-affect of an aging brain. You "stop the changes in our brains", thereby freezing people's mental-development at "teenager", and you remove from humanity a certain sort of wisdom and complexity. Perhaps that's not unreasonable, but perhaps it's also not good.
If you noticed, I never claimed to have the authority to make the decision for anyone other than myself. However, I am entitled to my opinion, I believe, and to voice it. And yes, it's possible that I'm wrong, or it's possible that I really do know what's best for everyone, but merely lack the authority (moral, legal, metaphysical, or otherwise) to force it upon them. So...er... what's your point?
Now I have to say that your comment is rather insulting, as it seems to imply that only people who are mentally deficient would consider extending their lifespan by so long.
Funny, seeing as I found your comment rather insulting, as it seems to imply that only the utterly-selfish could conceive of there being a problem with everyone living "forever".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say something more like, self-adjusting AI and structured difficulty levels are oppositional methods. Which is to say, if you had good self-adjusting AI, you wouldn't need "difficulty levels". It would adjust.
Or another possibility: you could have different difficulty levels, the easy levels being self-adjusting, and harder levels that amount to telling the AI, "Eh, do your worst, even if I stink."
Adjustable AI takes all of the meaning out of structured difficulty levels.
But that's more an issue of poor implementation than the idea itself being bad. Any time there's some trick like that, one that *always* fools the AI, it's a problem of poor implementation. In other words: a bug.
There are two reasons why I like the idea of AI that calibrates itself to the skill level you're playing on. First, there is a certain level of realism to it. In real life, if it seems like you stink at something, your competition will underestimate you. They won't try as hard, because they're not expecting a real challenge. If you constantly pull this, though, against the same opponents, they'll eventually catch on. Good AI should mimic this.
Second, there are games where, when I'm playing it, it's like an interactive movie. Sometimes, when I play a game, I'm not that interested in "rising to the challenge". I just want to take control of the main character while he does something cool, and then get on with the story. When playing games like this, "getting stuck" on some stupid boss just isn't fun. It's annoying.
So this is often where people do cheat. They like the game, but they want to get past some stupidly-difficult part. Cheating, however, breaks the illusion. If the game were capable of "helping you out" a little, it would maintain the experience and let you past.
I'm not saying the idea is easy to do well. However, ultimately, when I play a game, I'm not looking to prove myself by being "733t". I just don't care, as long as it's fun. Good AI (in relation to games) is AI that makes playing fun. Whatever that entails.
And I don't just mean "it's not technically impressive". I mean, considering the purpose of in-game AI, it's *bad* AI. Good AI generally simulates more complicated human interactions. Good AI can be tricked or distracted, and can learn so it's not so easily tricked the next time. I really like the idea of AI that will adjust to the player's skill level to always provide gameplay that is exciting and challenging, yet beatable.
In other words, I believe "good" AI in a game is not defined by being hard to beat, but by being fun to play against.
Then again, the fact that divisionbyzero apparently didn't notice the text you're referring to could be interpreted as evidence that Raskin's UI isn't as intuitive as he thinks.
What? You deleted the period at the end of the sentence? But that was my term paper, zoomed way out!
If you ask me, this guy is a little nutty. I've read things written by him before, and they always seem to be annoyed rants that no one takes his high-minded theories about UI design seriously enough, when in reality, his high-minded theories don't work out. (That's my impression, anyway)
There are rumors that the Powerbooks are getting a speed bump, and maybe some other upgrades, soon. Well, the Mac mini is basically the same hardware as the powerbook, just minus the screen/keyboard/trackpad. Maybe there's a connection there?
This is pretty much true. I've never had so much data that I couldn't buy enough hard drive space to hold it. However, it can be mighty frustrating to buy new hard drives when you know you don't have enough *useful* information to fill the ones you have.
well, I hope so. Or at least, I hope somebody is working on it. But the question was, what are going to be big IT challenges in the next 20 years. If it's going to take google a "decade-or-so" to figure it out, I would say that it amounts to a rather large challenge. Wouldn't you?
Well, in some ways, I can add those sorts of keywords myself, but my entire point was that, as your data set grows, it becomes less and less reasonable to expect people to add their own keywords. What I was suggesting was that we'll need software that can automatically "listen" to a song and figure out whether it's "happy" or "sad". We'll want systems that can interpret a photograph and tell us "what's in it".
This isn't a new idea, and, in fact, people are working on this problem right now.
Yes, I am familiar (and I do have OSX), but I'm talking about automated backup systems here.
Of course, many of these proposed filesystems allow for something like, "Give me all my jpg's that are larger than 640x480 and were created later than Jan 1st." So, already, we have more than keywords.
However, I still don't think it's sufficient. If I have thousands of photos, is it really reasonable to expect that I am going to be comprehensive about adding keywords to each? I mean, enough keywords for each photo that I can say, "Find that picture I took of the waterfall and a woman swimming underneath"? GIS can do this somewhat, but only because it's pulling metadata from the pages that link to the photo, and even then, it's not really reliable enough.
Our big hope, I think, is that it will be possible for pictures to be automatically analyzed for content. So, as a simple example, the computer might be able to tell the difference between a portrait and a landscape. Between a child and adult? A man and a woman? How far can we go with this?
Will computers be able to search music by whether it will get you pumped up or whether it will sooth you? Whether it *sounds* fast or slow? Will I be able to set my iTunes smart playlist to find me 50 "sad" songs out of my library?
I think this is the way things need to go, but it's certainly a "grand challenge" to get these sorts of capabilities working properly in consumer-level computers.
Now, if the "everything you want" is a small set of data, and the "everything you don't want" is large, then it becomes relatively quick and easy for users to manually sort their own data. I also agree that the amount of data you *need* is pretty small, but that's [probably] based on some level of agreement between us on what it means to "need" something.
However, many people would disagree on our view of "need". Well, in my particular case, I practice the method you describe, except that a lot of my data makes it to the "cold storage", so maybe we already disagree a bit on the idea of "need". Every photo I take is saved. Everything [serious] I write is saved. I deleted a bunch of stuff once, on the idea that I didn't "need" it, and then I needed it. So, all the work I do, whether it seems worth keeping or not, gets archived somewhere.
However, I'm thinking of all the users out there who, whether we like it or not, are running computers. They're taking pictures. They're writing letters. They're recording music. Some of this data they "need", and some, maybe they don't.
So, I guess the problem is, with all this fresh data being generated every day, how do we develop a solution that ensures, for each person, the data that they feel they *need* is safe, and the data that they *don't want* isn't cluttering up their view of the data they "need"?
It's a problem, and not easily solved.
Yeah, but part of my point was, not every grandma has a me to set *anything* up. I don't want to have to build a Unix system and write a custom solution for my grandmother anyway. I am not a one-man full-time tech-support staff for everyone I know. When I talk about a solution, I mean something that comes with the computer or is an easy-to-install add-on that grandma can do herself. I mean something that I can point out to some know-nothing and say "Buy this. It'll take care of your problems."
I suspect that banks will start providing safes for data soon - with some kind access like ssh
For grandma, they'd better have a better interface than CLI SSH. Maybe a program that uses SFTP, but with a nice GUI, but again, I'm not writing my own programs here.
Categories, I put as keys are always fixed for me and I'm getting paths to them immediately without need to make find/grep each time
No offense intended, but you're still spending far more time than I'm talking about. Setting up unix servers with huge raid drives, finding an out-of-state site to stash it, setting up secure data transfers, devising your own method of assigning metadata to files or some kind of personal database file system....
I understand, for a geek, this isn't a rediculous expense of time, since it's also a hobby and a source of fun and entertainment. However, to grandma (and even me) it's just too much.
When I talk about making photos "easy to find", I'm talking "easy" like Apple's iPhoto is still a bit too complicated, in that you have to assign keywords and ratings manually, which many users aren't going to bother with after a certain number of photos.
When I talk about easy to access, I'm talking about the process being relatively transparent, i.e. easier than connecting to an FTP site. Like you wouldn't need to know that it's "not on your computer".
When I talk about affordable, I'm talking about something like $100 total, or a $10 a month service (for personal use).
In case I'm not being clear, I'm not asking, "What's a good, cheap backup solution, available today?" I'm saying, the state of data management technologies is not currently sufficient for our ever-expanding set of data. We need better search methods for all sorts of data (not just text). We need transparent backup and archival methods (transparent both in the backup and the restore). We need more than solutions for businesses who can employ a big staff and thousands in hardware, and more than solutions for geeks who can roll their own. We need solutions so that Joe Schmoe can take digital photos to his heart's content, can create a digital music library as large as he wants, and not need to worry about sorting through the data or losing it.
I have users with multi-GB mailboxes that can't quite be deleted, but archiving it doesn't really solve the problem either, it just makes it harder for the user to find what he's looking for.
So, it's a basic problem. Every day, we're generating more data. The amount of data (in bytes) is going up every day, as computers are more easily able to deal with higher resolution pictures and movies. But what do we do with all this data? Just keep writing it to tape and storing it in bunkers? After we accrue enough data, what's the point of keeping it?-- you won't be able to find anything anymore.
It's a real problem for me, both as an IT pro and personally. When dealing with so much data, how do you:
- keep everything you want
- make it easy to find what you want when you want it
- make it easy to access what you want when you want it
- throw away everything you aren't going to want
And how do you do all that with:- a solution a non-techie can deal with (grandma needs her data safe, too)
- security from unauthorized access
- security from data loss (off-site backups?)
- an affordable price (both corporate and personal solutions)
- without spending the amount of time on this that only an obsessive compulsive would consider acceptable
I haven't seen an acceptable solution yet.This get's really close to an issue that seems to me to be a defining difference between a good manager and a bad manager. (In my experience, anyway)
A bad manager tends to see himself as the real actor in the business. What I mean by that is, he thinks it's he who is doing the job, and his subordinates are merely "tools" that allow him to complete his tasks. Managers like this tend to micromanage, annoy their subordinates, and generally suffer from minor uprisings.
Good managers tend to see their subordinates as the real actors in the business. They do all the work, and all the manager really does is help organize. Someone has to deal with the execs and customers. Someone has to resolve internal conflicts, and someone has to be the final word when the group needs to make a decision. Someone needs to set schedules and make sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing. But in this sense, the role of "manager" isn't far different from that of an outstanding "executive assistant" (i.e. personal secretary): Their job is to remove the obstacles that keep you from focusing on your work.
What you do need is the ability to trust your subordinates. This requires, to some extent, that first you weed out the dead wood. It requires that you are a good judge of character, and that you know when someone is lying, and you know when someone is overestimating or underestimating themselves.
However, my point is that a manager has a different job than his subordinates. If you are going to manage programmers, it certainly helps if you know something about programming, but ultimately, it isn't your job to program. Your job is to attract good programmers, keep your programmers happy and productive, and to remove the obstacles that keep your programmers from completing their programming. But leave the programming to them.
You're trying to convince a teenager that it's ok to make mistakes at their age, but the reason we all know it is, when we were teenagers, we made the mistake of thinking it was not ok to make mistakes. You're telling a teenager they'll learn from experience, but the reason you know is that you've had experience learning from experience.
It's all kind of a catch 22, and they won't believe you until they're old enough that they already know it for themselves.
(I'm exaggerating, of course, but I do think it's an issue to keep in mind)
Yeah, but that's part of what I had in mind. When I say, "don't worry about what people think of you, in fact, embarrass yourself," I guess I mean, "don't be shy". And I say this particularly because high school is a good time to be experimenting with your social skills in a low-risk environment. Worst case scenario: if you mess up and make a fool of yourself, it'll just be a funny story about a stupid thing you did in high school.
There's also an important corollary to this: The opinion of high-school classmates doesn't really matter. Knowing this would have done me a lot of good. Don't bother trying to impress your peers in high school. In fact, go ahead and embarrass yourself. It won't be the end of the world. A year after graduation, no one will remember or care. If anyone does remember and care, those are the weirdos whose entire life will be spent obsessing on high school, the people who never move on with their lives, and so their opinion isn't worth much worry.
The first thing that popped into my mind when reading this story: "better at teaching what?"
For example, Halo might be better at teaching combat skills than a book about combat skills. That is to say, when it comes to learning *how* to do something, it's often better to learn by doing than to learn by reading about it. Insofar as playing the games are activities themselves, you're learning by doing. Insofar as games are simulations, you're learning by simulated-doing. Then you just have to hope the simulation is sufficiently realistic.
However, learning how to do things is not the only kind of learning, and so we shouldn't be looking to replace books with video games. But then, I also don't believe we should be looking to replace real-life experience with video games, either.
yeah, I know. I'm just saying it's an example of how Warty, while definitely good, still lacks a certain sort of polish that some other distros (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake) have. But, all those distros have been around for years, while Warty was Ubuntu's first public release, so I find it pretty forgivable.
And how unfortunate that will be. The selfish, emotionally stunted, intellectually handicapped, and spiritually crippled shall inherit the earth.
But you get my point, right? That part of this idea of immortality being terrific is, the old wise man doesn't die, and gets to continue being wise, right? Learning gets to continue on without the impediment of needing to pass on the knowledge to following generations? Like, maybe if Einstein were alive, we'd have the TOE by now-- that's the idea, right?
Well, imagine wisdom (and some levels of complex thinking) as a side-affect of an aging brain. You "stop the changes in our brains", thereby freezing people's mental-development at "teenager", and you remove from humanity a certain sort of wisdom and complexity. Perhaps that's not unreasonable, but perhaps it's also not good.
If you noticed, I never claimed to have the authority to make the decision for anyone other than myself. However, I am entitled to my opinion, I believe, and to voice it. And yes, it's possible that I'm wrong, or it's possible that I really do know what's best for everyone, but merely lack the authority (moral, legal, metaphysical, or otherwise) to force it upon them. So...er... what's your point?
Funny, seeing as I found your comment rather insulting, as it seems to imply that only the utterly-selfish could conceive of there being a problem with everyone living "forever".