It's not even just plasma. The xfce4 panel is the only thing I've ever found to sanely handle my multi-monitor setup, and even then only just. I currently run it with openbox, and that's been my basic setup for the last several years. At the insistence of a few people, I recently gave plasma a try (within the last month), and yeah, while much better than KDE4, it's still not there. I think I'm ready to accept a well integrated desktop environment into my life and wouldn't mind changing my workflow a little if everything mostly just work and I could tweak the little things that I really care about. Despite giving it a few weeks however, I just couldn't warm up to it. No one big thing, just a lot of little things that made the experience feel like it was still an unpolished pre-release.
Someone already said it above, but this too was my reaction (I mean, after "the hell was he thinking"). This would have been far worse had he been some poor sap 3 days from retirement with his cottage already picked out and his grand kids excited to spend more time with him.
In today's age if you're in the black at 30, you're pretty far ahead of most. If he was able to squirrel away 400k at this point in his life, we'll probably be fine.
At least from the tone of the article, it doesn't sound like he is playing the pity card or blaming anyone but himself, so I'll give him credit for that.
There are much safer while still being cheaper ways of exchanging money using securities, usually using dual listed ETFs like DLR(.TO). Maybe not as cheap as this scheme, but the only real risk is if the exchange rate goes to shit during the week or so this all takes, compared to the colossal risk associated with anything crypto related.
Right. I mean people having strong preferences is fair. The web browser gets a lot of use, and minor things can make a big difference in experience. But who cares what everyone else is using. We're (at least mostly) past the point where it really matters. As long as no one gets enough market share where they can just start making shit up again like in the good ol' ie6 days, it shouldn't matter.
This one totally caught me off guard. I watched it out of morbid curiosity thinking it was going to be terrible and ended up being probably the best new thing I've seen this year.
It's like John Wick mixed with an old Disney movie. Not just because of the gimmick either, it has that weird childlike morality undertone while still managing to get progressively darker _and_ maintain a sense of whimsy and humour.
Dunno about fedex, but with UPS you can sign up for "MyChoice", and then tell them to hold it for pickup (this is also how you pre-emptively sign for the package).
It works pretty well. When you sign up they mail you a pin number that you have to enter (to prove you actually live there), then from that point any package destined for you shows up on the website right away, so no need to wait for a door sticker. You can also apparently pay COD in advance as well, but I haven't had to do that yet.
Shipping companies did the math, and determined that under a certain value it's cheaper to just leave the package and pay for the occasional stolen one than it is to attempt re-delivery.
The shipper can stipulate that someone must sign for the package and that the carrier can't just leave it. As the receiver you can waive this in advance, but then you assume the liability of the package getting stolen.
I read your explanation and while I found it interesting, I did not however find it exciting. I suspect this reaction is probably common among most of the geek audience here.
A small subset of readers (and people within the general population) who deal with precise measurement and may be directly or indirectly effected by this may have become excited, but to most the reality that what we refer to as a kilogram is ultimately derived from a brick locked up in a vault somewhere in France is at most a neat bit of trivia.
This seems like a nice solution to a problem I was only mildly aware of and not at all concerned about, but exciting to most, nope.
All that said, who cares. Great bit of news and great article.
While I'll definitely agree that a lot of his predictions come true, I feel like many of them arn't exactly revolutionary nor surprising. A lot of us see the way things are playing out and are going to play out in the future.. but simply screaming about it does nothing.
Whether we like to admit it or not, a lot of technology (particularly hardware and infrastructure) often needs big business and government really driving it. What we are seeing is huge ongoing improvements in technology that is bringing real benefits to society and life in general, but shackled with encumberments imposed by the interests paying for it. It's genuinely incredible to consider the capability the average person has with a basic PC and internet connection, but there is no free lunch.
It's not really about right or wrong, it's about pragmatism.
It's easy to stand up and rattle on about how everything is evil, but people still need things to work. The real world is about compromise and choosing your battles. Hard core idealists serve a purpose, but they don't tend to drive effective change very often, and tend to be regarded (often correctly) as lunatics.
I think most (or at least many) people who use calorie counting recognize that 500 calories from Doritos isn't the same as 500 calories from chicken and veggies. It's still a useful tool for staying on the rails.
As someone who did the whole weight loss via calorie counting thing several years ago, entirely this.
I know going out is going to be high calorie, I accepted and planned for that. Where it made the most difference is in things that I knew were bad, but not "wholly sweet fuck" bad.
Also for the restaurant, when you've got someone like me who is counting calories, just being a known quantity can make you more appealing. Even knowing how much slack and lies are in those numbers, it's hard not to become obsessed with them and find yourself comparing the 110 calorie thing to the 150 calorie thing. Going to a restaurant and ordering a plate of "probably ok-ish" or "probably my only real meal for today" is not something you feel like doing very often when you're at the point of counting how much milk you put in your coffee. Own up to your 1000 calorie pasta dish and I'll have it occasionally because I can factor it into my day. This goes even more so for stuff that's probably ok. I get that this is a small (but growing) market and likely not worth servicing, but still.
.. or be smart enough to just find one of the plethora of jobs that doesn't give a shit when you're at your desk as long as you put your 40 and make meetings (which as said in my post is what I did).
That's not even a hard thing to do. Flex time is a pretty common perk in the software industry, and lots of roles that specifically value people willing to work weird off-hours (a previous gig for instance frequently revolved around testing in a shared prototype environment, being willing to come in at 2am rather than fight for time during the day was a huge advantage). Sure you have to meet the world half way, but you shouldn't also take the first paycheck offered to "find success". You can find success with a job that actually suits you and comes with the selection of perks that actually matter to you.
Well, my first reaction (as many others I'm sure) was that sometimes work doesn't align with your sleep cycle either so suck it up.
But then much of the method in school (especially now) doesn't align with the real world, and school isn't supposed to be analogous to a work environment. I always felt like I was more with it in my afternoon classes going through school, and that has continued on in my work life. Luckily I now have a job with flex hours where I can roll in at 10pm and work till 7pm, covering what seems to be my hard wired peak window of useful brain time.
That said, what can you do. There's plenty of people who are at their best in the morning, and school logistics are complicated enough I'm sure. Switching to online learning sounds great in theory, but I genuinely believe a big part of school is the social aspect. Looking back I probably would have loved to not have to physically go to school, but the social experience probably did shape me for the better.
Same sentiment about discipline, though not necessarily the same solution.
What works for me is dedicating a half hour (Friday morning) to making sure my TODO list still reflects reality, in addition to just the learned discipline of putting stuff in the list as it comes up.
I end up roughly grouping items on my list into: today / immediate, short term, long term, and "parking lot". The specific meanings of those is kinda subjective and varies on a day to day basis.. and if anything has a specific due date I'll usually make a note next to it... but I've found this generally works best for me.
A lot of the guys who were senior devs when I was just starting out had a side hustle of some sort that they basically turned into their full time job. I've seen people go off and do everything from consulting, photography, to professional gambling and a catering business.
Also kinda said it above somewhere, but I think it's really important to set a standard early on. If you accept shitty work from them, they'll keep submitting shitty work (either because it's the path of least effort, or they just don't know it's shitty).
Do code reviews, enforce them, require their work to meet a certain level of quality (and kick it back when it doesn't), and most people people will rise to that standard. If you enforce that all public methods must have good comments, and consistently kick back code with no comments or shitty/ineffective comments, people will start habitually doing it right because they know they can't get away with doing it wrong.
I think this partly falls on the people leading a technical project. Yes, programmers should take initiative to produce the best code they can, and many do, but people have a tendency to the path of least resistance, and even when they are legitimately trying, they may lack the experience to intuitively know that what they are producing is sub-par.
Good technical leadership sets _and enforces_ standards. This should happen at every level, with the quality of the standards increasing as the experience of the people driving them increases. If someone produces sub part work, it should get kicked back to them to fix and re-submit. This is a hard sell for management because they see money and time being spent re-doing stuff that "works fine" during the initial learning period, but if you set the bar early and make it clear what will and won't be accepted, people will rise to it (or demonstrate that they are unsuitable for the role they are in).
Ideally, I want to give them some sort of practicals to do to articulate and demonstrate this, rather than just "present" stuff on best practices...
This raises the question of not only what you'd teach -- whether it's variable naming, modular programming, test-driven development, or the importance of commenting -- but also how you'd teach it.
I think this is already going down the wrong path. Those are just technical skills and practices that will be picked up over time, and some kind of workshop isn't really the place to learn them imo.
The important differences between a new guy and someone with a decent bit of professional experience under their belt isn't so much in technical skills or adherence to best practices, but it's more of a mindset and general direction thing. Once you've seen a few projects from start to completion, you start to recognize certain patterns and points where things can go really well or really bad. Once you've worked on a bunch of different teams, you start to recognize how different people contribute to a team dynamic and the various ways in which a team functions. You start to understand how your job integrates with the rest of our department and the rest of the business, how the whole management structure works, and what really drives most technical decisions (hint: technical merit is often the last thing driving a decision).
The problem is, you can't really teach that. So I guess my answer would really be very generic "how to be a good employee" type stuff: Take ownership of your problems, check your ego, play well with others, etc. Being a more professional programmer has little imo to do with being a better programmer and more to do with being a better professional. You become a more professional programmer by learning how to have a productive meeting with management about your project, not by learning the magic of continuous integration.
I've been involved in refactoring lots of software to replace dependencies on dead or obsolete tools and libraries, some of which were very expensive. Open source projects stagnate and die, but businesses go bankrupt, shift directions and discontinue products if they become unprofitable.
Determining the stability of a product and the impact to your business if it goes away is (or should be) part of the business decision process.
There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides.
Agree entirely. It's a risk and business management decision as much as a technical one. Relying on 3rd party services is obviously (or hopefully obviously) a risk, but risk is a basic component of most business.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not even just plasma. The xfce4 panel is the only thing I've ever found to sanely handle my multi-monitor setup, and even then only just. I currently run it with openbox, and that's been my basic setup for the last several years.
At the insistence of a few people, I recently gave plasma a try (within the last month), and yeah, while much better than KDE4, it's still not there. I think I'm ready to accept a well integrated desktop environment into my life and wouldn't mind changing my workflow a little if everything mostly just work and I could tweak the little things that I really care about. Despite giving it a few weeks however, I just couldn't warm up to it. No one big thing, just a lot of little things that made the experience feel like it was still an unpolished pre-release.
Someone already said it above, but this too was my reaction (I mean, after "the hell was he thinking"). This would have been far worse had he been some poor sap 3 days from retirement with his cottage already picked out and his grand kids excited to spend more time with him.
In today's age if you're in the black at 30, you're pretty far ahead of most. If he was able to squirrel away 400k at this point in his life, we'll probably be fine.
At least from the tone of the article, it doesn't sound like he is playing the pity card or blaming anyone but himself, so I'll give him credit for that.
There are much safer while still being cheaper ways of exchanging money using securities, usually using dual listed ETFs like DLR(.TO). Maybe not as cheap as this scheme, but the only real risk is if the exchange rate goes to shit during the week or so this all takes, compared to the colossal risk associated with anything crypto related.
Right.
I mean people having strong preferences is fair. The web browser gets a lot of use, and minor things can make a big difference in experience.
But who cares what everyone else is using. We're (at least mostly) past the point where it really matters. As long as no one gets enough market share where they can just start making shit up again like in the good ol' ie6 days, it shouldn't matter.
I'll go for Happy!
This one totally caught me off guard. I watched it out of morbid curiosity thinking it was going to be terrible and ended up being probably the best new thing I've seen this year.
It's like John Wick mixed with an old Disney movie. Not just because of the gimmick either, it has that weird childlike morality undertone while still managing to get progressively darker _and_ maintain a sense of whimsy and humour.
Dunno about fedex, but with UPS you can sign up for "MyChoice", and then tell them to hold it for pickup (this is also how you pre-emptively sign for the package).
It works pretty well. When you sign up they mail you a pin number that you have to enter (to prove you actually live there), then from that point any package destined for you shows up on the website right away, so no need to wait for a door sticker. You can also apparently pay COD in advance as well, but I haven't had to do that yet.
Shipping companies did the math, and determined that under a certain value it's cheaper to just leave the package and pay for the occasional stolen one than it is to attempt re-delivery.
The shipper can stipulate that someone must sign for the package and that the carrier can't just leave it. As the receiver you can waive this in advance, but then you assume the liability of the package getting stolen.
Isn't this par for the course basically everywhere?
Lets get full on pedantic.
I read your explanation and while I found it interesting, I did not however find it exciting. I suspect this reaction is probably common among most of the geek audience here.
A small subset of readers (and people within the general population) who deal with precise measurement and may be directly or indirectly effected by this may have become excited, but to most the reality that what we refer to as a kilogram is ultimately derived from a brick locked up in a vault somewhere in France is at most a neat bit of trivia.
This seems like a nice solution to a problem I was only mildly aware of and not at all concerned about, but exciting to most, nope.
All that said, who cares. Great bit of news and great article.
While I'll definitely agree that a lot of his predictions come true, I feel like many of them arn't exactly revolutionary nor surprising. A lot of us see the way things are playing out and are going to play out in the future.. but simply screaming about it does nothing.
Whether we like to admit it or not, a lot of technology (particularly hardware and infrastructure) often needs big business and government really driving it. What we are seeing is huge ongoing improvements in technology that is bringing real benefits to society and life in general, but shackled with encumberments imposed by the interests paying for it. It's genuinely incredible to consider the capability the average person has with a basic PC and internet connection, but there is no free lunch.
It's not really about right or wrong, it's about pragmatism.
It's easy to stand up and rattle on about how everything is evil, but people still need things to work. The real world is about compromise and choosing your battles. Hard core idealists serve a purpose, but they don't tend to drive effective change very often, and tend to be regarded (often correctly) as lunatics.
I think most (or at least many) people who use calorie counting recognize that 500 calories from Doritos isn't the same as 500 calories from chicken and veggies. It's still a useful tool for staying on the rails.
As someone who did the whole weight loss via calorie counting thing several years ago, entirely this.
I know going out is going to be high calorie, I accepted and planned for that. Where it made the most difference is in things that I knew were bad, but not "wholly sweet fuck" bad.
Also for the restaurant, when you've got someone like me who is counting calories, just being a known quantity can make you more appealing. Even knowing how much slack and lies are in those numbers, it's hard not to become obsessed with them and find yourself comparing the 110 calorie thing to the 150 calorie thing. Going to a restaurant and ordering a plate of "probably ok-ish" or "probably my only real meal for today" is not something you feel like doing very often when you're at the point of counting how much milk you put in your coffee. Own up to your 1000 calorie pasta dish and I'll have it occasionally because I can factor it into my day. This goes even more so for stuff that's probably ok. I get that this is a small (but growing) market and likely not worth servicing, but still.
.. or be smart enough to just find one of the plethora of jobs that doesn't give a shit when you're at your desk as long as you put your 40 and make meetings (which as said in my post is what I did).
That's not even a hard thing to do. Flex time is a pretty common perk in the software industry, and lots of roles that specifically value people willing to work weird off-hours (a previous gig for instance frequently revolved around testing in a shared prototype environment, being willing to come in at 2am rather than fight for time during the day was a huge advantage). Sure you have to meet the world half way, but you shouldn't also take the first paycheck offered to "find success". You can find success with a job that actually suits you and comes with the selection of perks that actually matter to you.
Well, my first reaction (as many others I'm sure) was that sometimes work doesn't align with your sleep cycle either so suck it up.
But then much of the method in school (especially now) doesn't align with the real world, and school isn't supposed to be analogous to a work environment. I always felt like I was more with it in my afternoon classes going through school, and that has continued on in my work life. Luckily I now have a job with flex hours where I can roll in at 10pm and work till 7pm, covering what seems to be my hard wired peak window of useful brain time.
That said, what can you do. There's plenty of people who are at their best in the morning, and school logistics are complicated enough I'm sure. Switching to online learning sounds great in theory, but I genuinely believe a big part of school is the social aspect. Looking back I probably would have loved to not have to physically go to school, but the social experience probably did shape me for the better.
Google keep feels like it would be perfect as a day to day (non-work) TODO list.. if it was just a _little_ bit better.
I use it for things like my grocery list and it works well enough for that, but it could be so much better.
Same sentiment about discipline, though not necessarily the same solution.
What works for me is dedicating a half hour (Friday morning) to making sure my TODO list still reflects reality, in addition to just the learned discipline of putting stuff in the list as it comes up.
I end up roughly grouping items on my list into: today / immediate, short term, long term, and "parking lot". The specific meanings of those is kinda subjective and varies on a day to day basis.. and if anything has a specific due date I'll usually make a note next to it... but I've found this generally works best for me.
A lot of the guys who were senior devs when I was just starting out had a side hustle of some sort that they basically turned into their full time job. I've seen people go off and do everything from consulting, photography, to professional gambling and a catering business.
Agree.
Also kinda said it above somewhere, but I think it's really important to set a standard early on. If you accept shitty work from them, they'll keep submitting shitty work (either because it's the path of least effort, or they just don't know it's shitty).
Do code reviews, enforce them, require their work to meet a certain level of quality (and kick it back when it doesn't), and most people people will rise to that standard. If you enforce that all public methods must have good comments, and consistently kick back code with no comments or shitty/ineffective comments, people will start habitually doing it right because they know they can't get away with doing it wrong.
These are management problems and are way deeper than programmers producing shitty code. Unfortunately they arn't that uncommon.
I think this partly falls on the people leading a technical project. Yes, programmers should take initiative to produce the best code they can, and many do, but people have a tendency to the path of least resistance, and even when they are legitimately trying, they may lack the experience to intuitively know that what they are producing is sub-par.
Good technical leadership sets _and enforces_ standards. This should happen at every level, with the quality of the standards increasing as the experience of the people driving them increases. If someone produces sub part work, it should get kicked back to them to fix and re-submit. This is a hard sell for management because they see money and time being spent re-doing stuff that "works fine" during the initial learning period, but if you set the bar early and make it clear what will and won't be accepted, people will rise to it (or demonstrate that they are unsuitable for the role they are in).
Ideally, I want to give them some sort of practicals to do to articulate and demonstrate this, rather than just "present" stuff on best practices...
This raises the question of not only what you'd teach -- whether it's variable naming, modular programming, test-driven development, or the importance of commenting -- but also how you'd teach it.
I think this is already going down the wrong path. Those are just technical skills and practices that will be picked up over time, and some kind of workshop isn't really the place to learn them imo.
The important differences between a new guy and someone with a decent bit of professional experience under their belt isn't so much in technical skills or adherence to best practices, but it's more of a mindset and general direction thing. Once you've seen a few projects from start to completion, you start to recognize certain patterns and points where things can go really well or really bad. Once you've worked on a bunch of different teams, you start to recognize how different people contribute to a team dynamic and the various ways in which a team functions. You start to understand how your job integrates with the rest of our department and the rest of the business, how the whole management structure works, and what really drives most technical decisions (hint: technical merit is often the last thing driving a decision).
The problem is, you can't really teach that. So I guess my answer would really be very generic "how to be a good employee" type stuff: Take ownership of your problems, check your ego, play well with others, etc. Being a more professional programmer has little imo to do with being a better programmer and more to do with being a better professional. You become a more professional programmer by learning how to have a productive meeting with management about your project, not by learning the magic of continuous integration.
write a web page
I said non-trivial. Most web pages are pretty trivial.
I've been involved in refactoring lots of software to replace dependencies on dead or obsolete tools and libraries, some of which were very expensive. Open source projects stagnate and die, but businesses go bankrupt, shift directions and discontinue products if they become unprofitable.
Determining the stability of a product and the impact to your business if it goes away is (or should be) part of the business decision process.
There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides.
Agree entirely. It's a risk and business management decision as much as a technical one. Relying on 3rd party services is obviously (or hopefully obviously) a risk, but risk is a basic component of most business.