Peppers cause pain, brain releases natural pain killers.. gives you that mellowed out relaxed feeling that is always strangely contradictory.
Eating peppers slightly beyond your tolerance where you still enjoy the food but get just the right amount of burn is highly enjoyable. Eating peppers way beyond your tolerance serves no purpose beyond being able to say you did it (which I'll admit I'm guilty of on occasion).
Could have just been a "or you might kill someone" warning and not a "or we'll convene the ambulance committee and have you ambulanced to death" warning.
I know if I eat enough scotch bonnets I start to get a sort of tingling sensation in my fingers. Makes sense that if you ramp it up enough it would kill someone.
Version control, yes.. you'd need a pretty damn compelling argument to say that version control doesn't adds value to just about any dev operation. Even on an individual level, it's nice to be able to make huge changes safe in the knowledge that a previous version is just a command away. That said people do succeed without it (web devs in particular). If it were me I'd work hard to try and introduce it, but I certainly wouldn't run screaming just because of that.
My argument was mainly against other tools and processes. Requirements management, unit testing, nightly builds, release coordination, bug tracking, etc. I've seen extreme cases of teams crushed under the weight of the tools that are supposed to help them, usually because the tools were imposed by upper management who were sold on them mainly using buzzwords. Not saying these tools (or at least a subset of them) don't add a lot of value, just that they shouldn't automatically be bolted on because "that's what you do".
The thing to consider at the end of the day is whether you succeed because of or inspite of your tools and processes. If the later, it's time to look at whether it really makes sense to keep using them.
Start looking for a new job -- unless you are in a position of authority and can fix that train wreck.
Or fix from below. The key to that is not being cocky.. introduce stuff slowly, in a "this might be a good idea" vice "you are all idiots for not using this" kinda way.
If the people you work with really are idiots, then yeah.. run. Fancy process and powerful dev tools won't fix bad programmers, and in fact will just make your life more hell because in addition to messing up the code, they will now mess up the process (ever seen someone try to use VC who just doesn't get it.. "but it compiles on _my_ box".. it's not pretty).
I'd say it depends on what they are actually doing.
Rigid process and a solid tool set is usually a good thing.. but "room full of coders with a goal" can work in some situations.
As for the norm.. I'd say most companies fall in the middle. You've seen the two extremes. Most places have a handful of critical tools that are very well maintained and kept up to date.. and a whole bunch that are "we should really upgrade that" or "yeah, that's a messy pile of scripts, but it still works" and will usually have something between "20 person process with 8 layers of review and testing to roll the dev version into production" and "I'll just copy the file over after lunch" for their production management.
Honestly the more important thing to be looking at is the people you work with, not the tools they use. The situation you describe would seem to speak poorly of them, but must not judge a book by its cover and all that. Well motivated, focused, and intelligent people can make masterpieces in the shittiest environment.. all the expensive tools in the world can't make a shitty coder produce gold.
I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?
Hold on there, I didn't say that anywhere. In fact, I agree that this is a big problem with the current system. The whole point of my post was that the current system is flawed (but that simply having no system wouldn't work either).
If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?
Both time figures were somewhat unrealistic, but the point is copying something is usually a lot cheaper and quicker than developing something from scratch. Certainly I think something could be ripped off after release long before an inventor would see his profit.
That, and some "simple" things come out of long periods of trying to solve a problem. The end solution might be a simple widget, but coming up with that widget as a solution to the problem may have involved significant resources. If someone can then just start producting that widget with no money going to the people who came up with it, you'll see people a lot less willing to spend money inventing.
Problem with this is that we only really see those who succeeded because of huge risk. Behind everyone one of them are probably several thousand who ended up living in a cardboard box for the rest of their lives.
On an individual level, all or nothing risk is viable.. at a country level, it seems like less of a good idea.
I said this in an earlier post, but I think we need a better system. We need to protect people from getting ripped off, but we need to allow people to innovate and invent without needing a huge team of lawyers.
Not necessarily. Failing is character building, and I think helped a lot of people crawl out of that dust. Failure in school shows you the important "if you half ass it, this is what happens". To my generation this seems intuitive, because if we half assed it, we got a big F in scary red pen (not a G or Q or R or whatever the hell non-threatening grade they give out now). We then had to go take it home to our parents, who would be somewhat displeased with us.
Now days everyone is, as you said, told they are a winner. No one gets told "you failed, you are a loser" until it's way too late for it to do much good.
George Carlin actually had a really good piece on this (a lot of his stuff is hit or miss, but this was a big hit imo).
Not snarky, I'm serious. I totally agree, patents have created a world where unless you are a huge company, it's pretty damn hard to invent something new. All the patent nonsense has raised the bar way above the head of the garage tinkerer, and given that this is where a lot of earlier innovation came from, that seems like a really bad thing.
But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.
How do we let people invent stuff while at the same time preventing blatant rip-offs and ensuring inventors get paid for their work.
Anyone who has every worked with people who arn't getting paid (doesn't just apply to open source, but to community volunteering and other such stuff as well) knows these problems well.
If people are not getting anything back besides good feelings from their work.. it takes a lot of diplomacy sometimes to keep everyone working together while still staying focuses on what you are trying to do.
Open source is especially hard, because as we know, as programmers we tend to have very extreme and differing opinions. You can't make everyone happy, at the end of the day you have to pick a direction and everyone has to go with it. Failure to do so is why we have the kind of excessive forking and massive feature bloat.
The only successful way I've seen is to have people who are devoted enough to the end goal to let the occasional thing slide. "ok fine, we'll do it that way and I'll get behind it, because seeing this thing finished is more important than using my prefered approach". In other words, you need someone who gets people excited about what they are working on. In other words, you need the geek equivilant of motivational speakers. These people are rare (and I'm definitely not one).
Yet so many companies still bother to write flowery privacy policies that boldly claim that your personal info is yours and will NEVER be sold or shared.
Borders didn't even do that. Their policy explicitly stated that they _could_ give your data to companies they merge with, aquire, or are bought out by.
I consented to Borders. Not whomever scarfs the data up after Borders goes TU.
The agreement you consented to explicitly gave them permission to give your data to other parties they do business with, are bought by, or merge with. Was spelled right out (and is in a depressingly large number of similar agreements). Should it be legal.. hell no.. but it's reality.
Interestingly, I find over-the-top "you must be a moron if you don't agree with my opinion" type sarcasm puts me off reading someones argument (even when I generally agree with it) way faster than bad language. Language just adds emphasis, whereas the sarcasm shows a blatant one-sided mindset... and it just rubs me the wrong way.
In general, I don't think people should have to make legal agreements every time they buy something. There should be a set of common laws that dictate the saner of the stuff found in every agreement, and probably some give n` take on the other stuff. Once in place, business and consumers should implicitly be bound by these rules. Any extra agreement, as you say, should involve a lawyer.. not a button. If a business can't operate within the terms that society dictates, and their customers are unwilling to lawyer up to make purchases.. then they just can't do business.
Of course, putting my cynic hat back on, who do you think will have more influence over those laws. The average consumer, or the big businesses with the cash?
Unfortunately, you do consent when you click the "I Agree" button. It was clearly stated in their terms that your data would be given to other companies if they merged or where bought.
It sucks that we can't buy anything these days without signing these kind of mostly one sides "you have little choice" type agreements.. but it's reality.
You consent when you clicked the "I agree" button while signing up. I agree that this is a shitty deal, and we live in a time where you can't buy a pack of tictacs without signing away basic rights and something should be done about this... but lets not delude ourselves.
against having their personal information sold to who-the-fuck-knows who
That pretty much happens all the time. That's why I was kind of surprised when this became a news item. And again, not saying it's not a bad thing, just saying it has kind of become the norm. You have to try pretty damn hard to not do business with companies who sell your data and don't even make a secret of it.
I agree it's unlikely we'll see cars directly powered by only solar. I can see solar being used to re-charge batteries while the car isn't moving. My car sits in a parking lot out in the sun for about 8 hours a day while I'm at work, in preparation for a 25 minute drive. I can see that working.
On the subject of batteries, this is where the tech really needs to improve. The current state of batteries is they mostly suck. Once we start seeing light weight batteries that hold more energy than gas per weight, that's when we'll see electric cars adopted by the masses.
Last I checked, the best solar panels were somewhere in the area of 17% to 18% efficiency. Seems to me there is still too much room for improvement to start making definite statements like that.
When I watch footage of this stuff, I get visions of those films of early flying contraptions. That is where we are at. I think solar is the future, but I think we are quite far from practical usage in cars and homes.
Slashdot Mirror
Tried it... I started to get dizzy and chickened out (fearing actual bodily harm)... then felt terrible for like the rest of the day ;p
It's a cheap high ;p
Peppers cause pain, brain releases natural pain killers.. gives you that mellowed out relaxed feeling that is always strangely contradictory.
Eating peppers slightly beyond your tolerance where you still enjoy the food but get just the right amount of burn is highly enjoyable. Eating peppers way beyond your tolerance serves no purpose beyond being able to say you did it (which I'll admit I'm guilty of on occasion).
Could have just been a "or you might kill someone" warning and not a "or we'll convene the ambulance committee and have you ambulanced to death" warning.
I know if I eat enough scotch bonnets I start to get a sort of tingling sensation in my fingers. Makes sense that if you ramp it up enough it would kill someone.
In all but the most closed groups, having a system that generates lots of false positives is in most cases going to be a bad move in my opinion.
Version control, yes.. you'd need a pretty damn compelling argument to say that version control doesn't adds value to just about any dev operation. Even on an individual level, it's nice to be able to make huge changes safe in the knowledge that a previous version is just a command away. That said people do succeed without it (web devs in particular). If it were me I'd work hard to try and introduce it, but I certainly wouldn't run screaming just because of that.
My argument was mainly against other tools and processes. Requirements management, unit testing, nightly builds, release coordination, bug tracking, etc. I've seen extreme cases of teams crushed under the weight of the tools that are supposed to help them, usually because the tools were imposed by upper management who were sold on them mainly using buzzwords. Not saying these tools (or at least a subset of them) don't add a lot of value, just that they shouldn't automatically be bolted on because "that's what you do".
The thing to consider at the end of the day is whether you succeed because of or inspite of your tools and processes. If the later, it's time to look at whether it really makes sense to keep using them.
Start looking for a new job -- unless you are in a position of authority and can fix that train wreck.
Or fix from below. The key to that is not being cocky.. introduce stuff slowly, in a "this might be a good idea" vice "you are all idiots for not using this" kinda way.
If the people you work with really are idiots, then yeah.. run. Fancy process and powerful dev tools won't fix bad programmers, and in fact will just make your life more hell because in addition to messing up the code, they will now mess up the process (ever seen someone try to use VC who just doesn't get it.. "but it compiles on _my_ box" .. it's not pretty).
I'd say it depends on what they are actually doing.
Rigid process and a solid tool set is usually a good thing.. but "room full of coders with a goal" can work in some situations.
As for the norm.. I'd say most companies fall in the middle. You've seen the two extremes. Most places have a handful of critical tools that are very well maintained and kept up to date.. and a whole bunch that are "we should really upgrade that" or "yeah, that's a messy pile of scripts, but it still works" and will usually have something between "20 person process with 8 layers of review and testing to roll the dev version into production" and "I'll just copy the file over after lunch" for their production management.
Honestly the more important thing to be looking at is the people you work with, not the tools they use. The situation you describe would seem to speak poorly of them, but must not judge a book by its cover and all that. Well motivated, focused, and intelligent people can make masterpieces in the shittiest environment.. all the expensive tools in the world can't make a shitty coder produce gold.
(and if they don't counter, you know how you're valued. Leave.)
Or more commonly, they can't afford it.
This tends to be the problem, as was said, companies grow slower than employees. Eventually the employee is worth more than the company can pay.
I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?
Hold on there, I didn't say that anywhere. In fact, I agree that this is a big problem with the current system. The whole point of my post was that the current system is flawed (but that simply having no system wouldn't work either).
If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?
Both time figures were somewhat unrealistic, but the point is copying something is usually a lot cheaper and quicker than developing something from scratch. Certainly I think something could be ripped off after release long before an inventor would see his profit.
That, and some "simple" things come out of long periods of trying to solve a problem. The end solution might be a simple widget, but coming up with that widget as a solution to the problem may have involved significant resources. If someone can then just start producting that widget with no money going to the people who came up with it, you'll see people a lot less willing to spend money inventing.
Problem with this is that we only really see those who succeeded because of huge risk. Behind everyone one of them are probably several thousand who ended up living in a cardboard box for the rest of their lives.
On an individual level, all or nothing risk is viable.. at a country level, it seems like less of a good idea.
I said this in an earlier post, but I think we need a better system. We need to protect people from getting ripped off, but we need to allow people to innovate and invent without needing a huge team of lawyers.
I haven't got any ideas.. does anyone?
and left the rest in the dust
Not necessarily. Failing is character building, and I think helped a lot of people crawl out of that dust. Failure in school shows you the important "if you half ass it, this is what happens". To my generation this seems intuitive, because if we half assed it, we got a big F in scary red pen (not a G or Q or R or whatever the hell non-threatening grade they give out now). We then had to go take it home to our parents, who would be somewhat displeased with us.
Now days everyone is, as you said, told they are a winner. No one gets told "you failed, you are a loser" until it's way too late for it to do much good.
George Carlin actually had a really good piece on this (a lot of his stuff is hit or miss, but this was a big hit imo).
Kids should have the right to fail!
So what is the solution?
Not snarky, I'm serious. I totally agree, patents have created a world where unless you are a huge company, it's pretty damn hard to invent something new. All the patent nonsense has raised the bar way above the head of the garage tinkerer, and given that this is where a lot of earlier innovation came from, that seems like a really bad thing.
But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.
How do we let people invent stuff while at the same time preventing blatant rip-offs and ensuring inventors get paid for their work.
Anyone who has every worked with people who arn't getting paid (doesn't just apply to open source, but to community volunteering and other such stuff as well) knows these problems well.
If people are not getting anything back besides good feelings from their work.. it takes a lot of diplomacy sometimes to keep everyone working together while still staying focuses on what you are trying to do.
Open source is especially hard, because as we know, as programmers we tend to have very extreme and differing opinions. You can't make everyone happy, at the end of the day you have to pick a direction and everyone has to go with it. Failure to do so is why we have the kind of excessive forking and massive feature bloat.
The only successful way I've seen is to have people who are devoted enough to the end goal to let the occasional thing slide. "ok fine, we'll do it that way and I'll get behind it, because seeing this thing finished is more important than using my prefered approach". In other words, you need someone who gets people excited about what they are working on. In other words, you need the geek equivilant of motivational speakers. These people are rare (and I'm definitely not one).
Yet so many companies still bother to write flowery privacy policies that boldly claim that your personal info is yours and will NEVER be sold or shared.
Borders didn't even do that. Their policy explicitly stated that they _could_ give your data to companies they merge with, aquire, or are bought out by.
I consented to Borders. Not whomever scarfs the data up after Borders goes TU.
The agreement you consented to explicitly gave them permission to give your data to other parties they do business with, are bought by, or merge with. Was spelled right out (and is in a depressingly large number of similar agreements). Should it be legal.. hell no.. but it's reality.
Interestingly, I find over-the-top "you must be a moron if you don't agree with my opinion" type sarcasm puts me off reading someones argument (even when I generally agree with it) way faster than bad language. Language just adds emphasis, whereas the sarcasm shows a blatant one-sided mindset... and it just rubs me the wrong way.
This is largely my view.
In general, I don't think people should have to make legal agreements every time they buy something. There should be a set of common laws that dictate the saner of the stuff found in every agreement, and probably some give n` take on the other stuff. Once in place, business and consumers should implicitly be bound by these rules. Any extra agreement, as you say, should involve a lawyer.. not a button. If a business can't operate within the terms that society dictates, and their customers are unwilling to lawyer up to make purchases.. then they just can't do business.
Of course, putting my cynic hat back on, who do you think will have more influence over those laws. The average consumer, or the big businesses with the cash?
can be somehow extended without your consent.
Unfortunately, you do consent when you click the "I Agree" button. It was clearly stated in their terms that your data would be given to other companies if they merged or where bought.
It sucks that we can't buy anything these days without signing these kind of mostly one sides "you have little choice" type agreements.. but it's reality.
so now competition is defined in terms of who can shaft the customers the best.
Yup. Best quote on this I've heard (and have no idea where it is from and am paraphrasing from fuzzy memory):
"the biggest deciding factor on who to do business with is who uses the best lube."
without their consent
You consent when you clicked the "I agree" button while signing up. I agree that this is a shitty deal, and we live in a time where you can't buy a pack of tictacs without signing away basic rights and something should be done about this ... but lets not delude ourselves.
against having their personal information sold to who-the-fuck-knows who
That pretty much happens all the time. That's why I was kind of surprised when this became a news item. And again, not saying it's not a bad thing, just saying it has kind of become the norm. You have to try pretty damn hard to not do business with companies who sell your data and don't even make a secret of it.
I agree it's unlikely we'll see cars directly powered by only solar. I can see solar being used to re-charge batteries while the car isn't moving. My car sits in a parking lot out in the sun for about 8 hours a day while I'm at work, in preparation for a 25 minute drive. I can see that working.
On the subject of batteries, this is where the tech really needs to improve. The current state of batteries is they mostly suck. Once we start seeing light weight batteries that hold more energy than gas per weight, that's when we'll see electric cars adopted by the masses.
Solar does not permit that.
Last I checked, the best solar panels were somewhere in the area of 17% to 18% efficiency. Seems to me there is still too much room for improvement to start making definite statements like that.
I think even that 10% is a pretty long ways off.
When I watch footage of this stuff, I get visions of those films of early flying contraptions. That is where we are at. I think solar is the future, but I think we are quite far from practical usage in cars and homes.