I will definitely concur with your observations, from my work both with "offshore" Indian teams and "near-shore" Puerto Rican teams. The median developer on the team can definitely be counter-productive, so it takes a couple of miracle-workers to bring the mean developer positive and make things crawl along on the positive side of zero.
I will also concur that a great indicator of a highly-positive developer is a developer who is really interested in technology. It's not a litmus test, but it's a cumulative benefit. I always ask other folks if they code things in their spare time. In many cases, it's really easy to see the folks who will not benefit the team-- they have no imagination or creative urges to solve problems, they simply took the courses with a paycheck in mind.
However, I won't quite go so far as to say that this is a truism or even anything more than a stereotype with some "truthiness" to it. I have found some very determined, even dogged, worker-bee personalities who couldn't solve their way out of a paper bag if given a sharp sashimi knife. There are a LOT of this personality available in the workforce, and it's these types of workers that the average manager tends to hire for those offshore/nearshore teams. There is a way to get value from them: don't have them solve the problems. Demonstrate to them how to cut a paper bag with a sashimi knife, and then point them at the seven thousand paper bags that need cutting. If you can organize them in such a way as to not require too much problem-solving, they'll execute your job requirements deep into the night while you're at home with the kids.
In short, an outsourcing services team isn't for solving problems, it's for executing plans. If you have a local resource who behaves this way, see how you can make them part of the outsourcing services team, instead of the core team. If you have a great problem-solver in the remote team, ask your Legal department how you can poach them.
Some people won't try it until there's (1) a task that needs to be done, and (2) the only resource available is the unfamiliar one. It helps if there's a docent who doesn't have a vested interest. If she's visiting Aunt Marge for a week and wants to view some snapshots on her camera, Aunt Marge will walk her through the interface to get the task done without trying to sell her on anything. If this is a positive experience, then she might be interested in fiddling with some Macs at the Apple Store without talking to you or any of the blackshirts hovering around.
It's simple, really. If the market doesn't see software as a product, but rather sees software as inseparable or an ephemeral customization of the hardware "appliance," then the only way to make a profit on software is to bundle it and make profits on the hardware it's installed.
Rarely do people copy a completed MS Word installation from one machine to another. They copy an installer. If there's no installer, there's one piracy vector down. If all the machines have equal deployed software images, that's another piracy vector down. However, if all the machines are alike, but some don't come with the Office and some do, will they start to copy those post-install files and try to get them to work anyway?
Yeah, like US Law has never ever changed. Remember trade embargoes during apartheid? Castro's ill, it's not clear who will be taking over. New high-level talks have opened with Syria recently also. Not saying that either of these things are likely to change next month, but "never" is pretty long.
I don't see why this is an issue. The Intel Desktop temperature monitor doesn't even work on my E6600, so how can it detect an invalid temperature?
I don't see why this is an issue. The burnt-out low-oil lamp on my dashboard doesn't even work on my car, so how can the oil pump detect an invalid oil level?
If the input is working right, then a high temperature reading should trigger an interrupt to warn the OS that it should back off for a while. If the input isn't working right, perhaps it's just making up values, most of which are valid (10C, 80C, 345C, etc.) but maybe sometimes those made-up values are not valid (#NAN, #INF). Now, I don't know squat about this situation, but this is what it sounds like to me. Maybe if it thinks it has *ever* seen a #NAN, it will *never* trigger an interrupt again.
Potential DoS exploit: even on a good processor with a good sensor, make it think it has seen a #NAN, then work the processor until it locks up without any warning or notice given to the OS.
> librarian, where is "war and peace"?
The librarian coos, "Oh, that's a lovely book. I can point you directly to the shelf where it belongs. It's in the basement, near the new Ancient Egypt exhibits."
> north
You are in a twisty maze of Paleology stacks, all alike.
> north
You are in a twisty maze of Bolivian Studies stacks, all alike. There is a staircase leading down.
> down
I don't understand you.
> go down the stairs
It is dark. You might be eaten by a grue.
> light light
I don't understand you.
> turn on flashlight
You are in a twisty maze of Egyptian stacks, all alike. An archway leads east between two papier mache sphynxes.
> east
A janitor yells at you, "Hey! You can't go in there! The exhibit's closed until Monday. But if you fetch me a bottle of whiskey I stashed in the Astronomy stacks on the third floor, I'll let you in."
>...
It wouldn't surprise me, as the act of teaching while learning tends to reinforce the learning. The oldest kid, whether consciously or not, ends up demonstrating any new knowledge and capabilities to the younger kids in the family or neighborhood.
Heck, I've been waiting for arcologies for ages and ages. In Oath of Fealty, the arcology was called Todos Santos, and was in southern California. Rich people had implants in their head which functioned like a mental interface to Google. But in that story, wasn't it the hydroponic strawberry farmer whodunnit? (To bring this back on topic of vertical greenhouses.)
There was an attempt at building an arcology called ARCOSANTI in the outer Phoenix Arizona area, but it died due to lack of funds, and is now a pretty disappointing museum. Sure, the hippy creator still wants to believe it could happen, and charges money to teach other hippies how to build mud domes, but you get the clear and strong impression it will just rot in the sun.
well, it allows some rich asshole to buy his way into a game he should have worked hard at. it destroys the concept of a meritocracy, and replaces it with aristocracy. hwever, there is no financial replacement for real skill. and so any such bad player behind a high level avatar will rapidly become apparent: a joke
I think of it this way: a rich guy buys a top-of-the-line $5000 Digital SLR camera, and then he takes fifteen snapshots of his beagle, and doesn't really scream when his silver-spoon daughter drops it down the country club's marble terrace staircase a couple months later. The guy was a boor when he showed off this camera to his friend, who busted his ass to get through photojournalism school with a $500 camera. The guy was a boor when he recounted the complete "horror" story of how the insurance company denied his claim for full replacement. But you know he'll buy another $5000 camera when that beagle has her pups.
How has this honestly changed the profession of photography? His friend probably felt uncomfortable with the rich man's effortless and pointless consumerism, but his friend wasn't actually denied other opportunities when it came right down to it.
The MMORPG is a smaller economy but it works the same way. The real issue is the design of that game, and whether it can withstand such tilted gamesmanship. If the gold farmers or the insta-knighthood characters are really clogging up the playground by camping at all the spawn points and inflating the price of dragon eyeballs, then I would point to the playground designers, not the farmers and not the insta-knights.
I think that many fanbois sound more like they're a product of the Stockholm Syndrome box of psychology. They justify and excuse the shortcomings of their platform, thanks to all the history and resources they've invested in their product of choice.
Sure, Microsoft has been influential in the industry thanks to many circumstances, but fanbois resent all the negativity about the glaring shortcomings. You can swap "Microsoft" for Linux, Apple, OS/2, Sony, Grateful Dead, America, and the Democratic Party, and it still fits.
I'm nowhere near competent enough to be sure, but it looked like they were measuring differentially (comparing two or more tests done within a short period of time on the same apparatus), and so would only be sensitive to shifts in gravity that are amazingly short-time domain. I think that any method to determine constants like Plank's constant will, by definition, have some aspect of astronomical and quantum awareness. They're not independent, but with proper methodology, they can be accounted and isolated.
What is an Open Source movie?! It comes with a script and blueprints for a set, and I am free to make modifications to them and make my own movie and distribute it, so long as I make my script and blueprints available?
No, that's more like a GNU movie. With the blender Orange project (aka Elephant's Dream), it came with a script and blueprints for a set, and you're free to make modifications to them and make your own movie and distribute it, but you don't have to make your script and blueprints available. Anyone can build on Elephant's Dream all they want, but it's up to you whether you want people building their own movies on top of your Oyenstikker's Dream movie. The community might appreciate your continued generosity, but the Orange group (aka Blender development and artists) don't deign to tell you what you can do with your creative works, just their own.
If Peach and Apricot follow the progress made in Orange, you will be sure to see a lot of very useful, general purpose improvements in Blender for everyone. The need for specific features in Orange really focused the developers (some of which were Orange team, some of which were in the general development community) on solving specific creative problems. It's the difference between "scratch an idle itch" and "remove a troublesome splinter."
. Your agreement is with the retailer, not the issuing state. There doesn't seem to be any way for a third party (the state which manages the open space) to insinuate itself into the transaction.
You might refresh yourself on what the L of EULA means.
My vote is for Sim City: Crystalline Power World, with lots of anime-spiky-haired disaffected youths in all of the council seats, and a galaxy police starship floating overhead whenever the yakuza get too organized.
I don't mind if an implementation of STL has some hidden/private/singleton allocation pools behind the scenes to speed things up. What I find really friggin' annoying is that they never track those allocations and offer any form of "reset" function that you can call before exiting your app, so that the simplest global malloc-counting methods can audit for leaks. You shouldn't need an "SGI-STL-aware-and-compatible leak detector," you should only need a malloc leak detector.
people who equate copyright violation (civil) with piracy (mayhem, murder, etc)
Oy, this old chestnut? There's no point in trying to redefine a term that has been used in this meaning for about four hundred years. If you're as interested in cleaning up word-fog as you say you are, you should know something about words.
In time, this project is likely to overtake NeoOffice, simply because changes to OpenOffice.org will always be faster than those in NeoOffice, which is in a continual state of catch-up.
Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"? I'd have to say, Java or no Java, NeoOffice has held the top of the hill for a while now. It may fall behind now (or it may not), but to deny it was out front to this point is just Washington-level spin.
The OOo attitude sounds a lot like those commercials where they claim to be the first, but only by qualifying it with circular trademark references. "PolyCleen(tm) is the first toothpaste with Britenol(tm)." Uh, yeah, because nobody else would include that trademark, even if it's really just baking soda and peroxide.
Er, I would have to say that GNU Emacs is one of the "flagships" of the whole GNU philosophy, and yet, the core team has been quite insular and private about code until a new public release. Some people whine about how this "undermines" the openness while others point out that "free" doesn't always equate to "open." When they are ready with a release, they release it under the GPL and every user gets the mystical rights. Until the release is readied, they collaborate internally.
I don't know if it's a matter of my getting older and not remembering the feel of the controls of these ancient games, or if there's poor latency/response in the Virtual Console itself, but I found the Starfox64 to be pretty "syrupy" in the controls, and hard to jump on cue in the Mario64 as well. I'm not inclined to spend too many more Wii points if all of the Virtual Console suffers from bad latency.
I initially wished for the standard Wii-motes to play the Virtual Console games, but I fear those bluetooth protocols would just compound the problem of response-times even worse.
Yeah, I took the brave and unheard of step of clicking through to the actual article. I then cut-n-pasted the three words into my reply, which is what the original poster should have done in the first place.
Would it have been so hard to actually type (or cut-n-paste) what CEA stands for into the blurb? I couldn't guess WTF it was, an NGO like the BBB, CCC, NAA, or ANA, or more like the FBI, FTC, or GAO.
Slashdot Mirror
In Stephen King's Pet Sematary, of course!
I will definitely concur with your observations, from my work both with "offshore" Indian teams and "near-shore" Puerto Rican teams. The median developer on the team can definitely be counter-productive, so it takes a couple of miracle-workers to bring the mean developer positive and make things crawl along on the positive side of zero.
I will also concur that a great indicator of a highly-positive developer is a developer who is really interested in technology. It's not a litmus test, but it's a cumulative benefit. I always ask other folks if they code things in their spare time. In many cases, it's really easy to see the folks who will not benefit the team-- they have no imagination or creative urges to solve problems, they simply took the courses with a paycheck in mind.
However, I won't quite go so far as to say that this is a truism or even anything more than a stereotype with some "truthiness" to it. I have found some very determined, even dogged, worker-bee personalities who couldn't solve their way out of a paper bag if given a sharp sashimi knife. There are a LOT of this personality available in the workforce, and it's these types of workers that the average manager tends to hire for those offshore/nearshore teams. There is a way to get value from them: don't have them solve the problems. Demonstrate to them how to cut a paper bag with a sashimi knife, and then point them at the seven thousand paper bags that need cutting. If you can organize them in such a way as to not require too much problem-solving, they'll execute your job requirements deep into the night while you're at home with the kids.
In short, an outsourcing services team isn't for solving problems, it's for executing plans. If you have a local resource who behaves this way, see how you can make them part of the outsourcing services team, instead of the core team. If you have a great problem-solver in the remote team, ask your Legal department how you can poach them.
Can you tell me how forking a GPLv2-only variant is NOT complying with the license?
Some people won't try it until there's (1) a task that needs to be done, and (2) the only resource available is the unfamiliar one. It helps if there's a docent who doesn't have a vested interest. If she's visiting Aunt Marge for a week and wants to view some snapshots on her camera, Aunt Marge will walk her through the interface to get the task done without trying to sell her on anything. If this is a positive experience, then she might be interested in fiddling with some Macs at the Apple Store without talking to you or any of the blackshirts hovering around.
It's simple, really. If the market doesn't see software as a product, but rather sees software as inseparable or an ephemeral customization of the hardware "appliance," then the only way to make a profit on software is to bundle it and make profits on the hardware it's installed.
Rarely do people copy a completed MS Word installation from one machine to another. They copy an installer. If there's no installer, there's one piracy vector down. If all the machines have equal deployed software images, that's another piracy vector down. However, if all the machines are alike, but some don't come with the Office and some do, will they start to copy those post-install files and try to get them to work anyway?
Yeah, like US Law has never ever changed. Remember trade embargoes during apartheid? Castro's ill, it's not clear who will be taking over. New high-level talks have opened with Syria recently also. Not saying that either of these things are likely to change next month, but "never" is pretty long.
To turn to the usual car analogy tactic:
I don't see why this is an issue. The Intel Desktop temperature monitor doesn't even work on my E6600, so how can it detect an invalid temperature?I don't see why this is an issue. The burnt-out low-oil lamp on my dashboard doesn't even work on my car, so how can the oil pump detect an invalid oil level?
If the input is working right, then a high temperature reading should trigger an interrupt to warn the OS that it should back off for a while. If the input isn't working right, perhaps it's just making up values, most of which are valid (10C, 80C, 345C, etc.) but maybe sometimes those made-up values are not valid (#NAN, #INF). Now, I don't know squat about this situation, but this is what it sounds like to me. Maybe if it thinks it has *ever* seen a #NAN, it will *never* trigger an interrupt again.
Potential DoS exploit: even on a good processor with a good sensor, make it think it has seen a #NAN, then work the processor until it locks up without any warning or notice given to the OS.
> librarian, where is "war and peace"? ...
The librarian coos, "Oh, that's a lovely book. I can point you directly to the shelf where it belongs. It's in the basement, near the new Ancient Egypt exhibits."
> north
You are in a twisty maze of Paleology stacks, all alike. > north
You are in a twisty maze of Bolivian Studies stacks, all alike. There is a staircase leading down. > down
I don't understand you.
> go down the stairs
It is dark. You might be eaten by a grue.
> light light I don't understand you.
> turn on flashlight
You are in a twisty maze of Egyptian stacks, all alike. An archway leads east between two papier mache sphynxes.
> east
A janitor yells at you, "Hey! You can't go in there! The exhibit's closed until Monday. But if you fetch me a bottle of whiskey I stashed in the Astronomy stacks on the third floor, I'll let you in."
>
It wouldn't surprise me, as the act of teaching while learning tends to reinforce the learning. The oldest kid, whether consciously or not, ends up demonstrating any new knowledge and capabilities to the younger kids in the family or neighborhood.
Heck, I've been waiting for arcologies for ages and ages. In Oath of Fealty, the arcology was called Todos Santos, and was in southern California. Rich people had implants in their head which functioned like a mental interface to Google. But in that story, wasn't it the hydroponic strawberry farmer whodunnit? (To bring this back on topic of vertical greenhouses.)
There was an attempt at building an arcology called ARCOSANTI in the outer Phoenix Arizona area, but it died due to lack of funds, and is now a pretty disappointing museum. Sure, the hippy creator still wants to believe it could happen, and charges money to teach other hippies how to build mud domes, but you get the clear and strong impression it will just rot in the sun.
I think of it this way: a rich guy buys a top-of-the-line $5000 Digital SLR camera, and then he takes fifteen snapshots of his beagle, and doesn't really scream when his silver-spoon daughter drops it down the country club's marble terrace staircase a couple months later. The guy was a boor when he showed off this camera to his friend, who busted his ass to get through photojournalism school with a $500 camera. The guy was a boor when he recounted the complete "horror" story of how the insurance company denied his claim for full replacement. But you know he'll buy another $5000 camera when that beagle has her pups.
How has this honestly changed the profession of photography? His friend probably felt uncomfortable with the rich man's effortless and pointless consumerism, but his friend wasn't actually denied other opportunities when it came right down to it.
The MMORPG is a smaller economy but it works the same way. The real issue is the design of that game, and whether it can withstand such tilted gamesmanship. If the gold farmers or the insta-knighthood characters are really clogging up the playground by camping at all the spawn points and inflating the price of dragon eyeballs, then I would point to the playground designers, not the farmers and not the insta-knights.
I think that many fanbois sound more like they're a product of the Stockholm Syndrome box of psychology. They justify and excuse the shortcomings of their platform, thanks to all the history and resources they've invested in their product of choice.
Sure, Microsoft has been influential in the industry thanks to many circumstances, but fanbois resent all the negativity about the glaring shortcomings. You can swap "Microsoft" for Linux, Apple, OS/2, Sony, Grateful Dead, America, and the Democratic Party, and it still fits.
I'm nowhere near competent enough to be sure, but it looked like they were measuring differentially (comparing two or more tests done within a short period of time on the same apparatus), and so would only be sensitive to shifts in gravity that are amazingly short-time domain. I think that any method to determine constants like Plank's constant will, by definition, have some aspect of astronomical and quantum awareness. They're not independent, but with proper methodology, they can be accounted and isolated.
No, that's more like a GNU movie. With the blender Orange project (aka Elephant's Dream), it came with a script and blueprints for a set, and you're free to make modifications to them and make your own movie and distribute it, but you don't have to make your script and blueprints available. Anyone can build on Elephant's Dream all they want, but it's up to you whether you want people building their own movies on top of your Oyenstikker's Dream movie. The community might appreciate your continued generosity, but the Orange group (aka Blender development and artists) don't deign to tell you what you can do with your creative works, just their own.
If Peach and Apricot follow the progress made in Orange, you will be sure to see a lot of very useful, general purpose improvements in Blender for everyone. The need for specific features in Orange really focused the developers (some of which were Orange team, some of which were in the general development community) on solving specific creative problems. It's the difference between "scratch an idle itch" and "remove a troublesome splinter."
You go to the sports equipment store and buy
a state-issued hunting/fishing permit
. Your agreement is with the retailer, not the issuing state. There doesn't seem to be any way for a third party (the state which manages the open space) to insinuate itself into the transaction.You might refresh yourself on what the L of EULA means.
My vote is for Sim City: Crystalline Power World, with lots of anime-spiky-haired disaffected youths in all of the council seats, and a galaxy police starship floating overhead whenever the yakuza get too organized.
I don't mind if an implementation of STL has some hidden/private/singleton allocation pools behind the scenes to speed things up. What I find really friggin' annoying is that they never track those allocations and offer any form of "reset" function that you can call before exiting your app, so that the simplest global malloc-counting methods can audit for leaks. You shouldn't need an "SGI-STL-aware-and-compatible leak detector," you should only need a malloc leak detector.
Oy, this old chestnut? There's no point in trying to redefine a term that has been used in this meaning for about four hundred years. If you're as interested in cleaning up word-fog as you say you are, you should know something about words.
Not trying to troll here, and maybe you don't even ascribe to the mindset you imply with the above line, but how can you "overtake" a project that's "in a continual state of catch-up"? I'd have to say, Java or no Java, NeoOffice has held the top of the hill for a while now. It may fall behind now (or it may not), but to deny it was out front to this point is just Washington-level spin.
The OOo attitude sounds a lot like those commercials where they claim to be the first, but only by qualifying it with circular trademark references. "PolyCleen(tm) is the first toothpaste with Britenol(tm)." Uh, yeah, because nobody else would include that trademark, even if it's really just baking soda and peroxide.
Er, I would have to say that GNU Emacs is one of the "flagships" of the whole GNU philosophy, and yet, the core team has been quite insular and private about code until a new public release. Some people whine about how this "undermines" the openness while others point out that "free" doesn't always equate to "open." When they are ready with a release, they release it under the GPL and every user gets the mystical rights. Until the release is readied, they collaborate internally.
I see little difference here.
I initially wished for the standard Wii-motes to play the Virtual Console games, but I fear those bluetooth protocols would just compound the problem of response-times even worse.
Yeah, I took the brave and unheard of step of clicking through to the actual article. I then cut-n-pasted the three words into my reply, which is what the original poster should have done in the first place.
Would it have been so hard to actually type (or cut-n-paste) what CEA stands for into the blurb? I couldn't guess WTF it was, an NGO like the BBB, CCC, NAA, or ANA, or more like the FBI, FTC, or GAO.