XP is a 9 year old OS. Even auto makers are only required to support the parts for their cars for 7 years
In the US and Europe, automobiles are heavily regulated to meet certain standards, and software is not. If a 9 year old car is many times safer, more reliable, more fuel efficient, much better looking, and more easily fixed than the 2 year old car coming from the factory now, and the new car is just a total dog, and if community outrage was so high that people would only want to buy the old car, and this was the only auto maker available to buy cars from then damn straight the community would be in the moral right to demand that company continue to support the old car model until the choice of a car that was as good or better came along.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist both in the US and Europe. If there was more competition, and Vista was a dog, people could turn to another company for better service. But they can't. They turn back to Microsoft and demand XP. They are, allegedly, trying to control the supply channel by strangling supplies of XP and hoping this will force demand to Vista, which will make Vista look better as sales go up. They have an image problem with Vista and they are using their monopoly power to try to fix it. If this was a competitive market and Linus and Mac OS had 33% each, We could just switch to one of them and Microsoft would have to compete.
Once you are a monopoly, 99% of the business book is thrown out the window. Everything comes down to, "when you take an action as a monopolistic company, are you abusing your market dominance and reducing choice for the consumer?" A car maker to tried to do this without monopolistic power would shoot themselves in the foot for cancelling a profitable product line just because they want to sell more of another. The American automakers did just this, by trying to sell more trucks and SUVs when the future trend was towards smaller fuel efficient cars. Now GM and Chrysler are on life support, and Hyundai is making out like a bandit. Competition would have done that to Microsoft to, but there is none, so they have to follow different rules. If they don't follow those rules, any and all governments need to slap their greedy hands.
So in Russia it's illegal for a company to sell a 10 year old product, even though that product will be 2 versions old this year? If we could make legal demands to sell retired products I'd still be eating Ninja Turtle cereal [flickr.com] today.
What, Fruity pebbles isn't good enough for you? What are you, a communist?
This is the idiocy of how some businesses deal with networking and the internet. First, they offer free. Then they find out when you offer free, people actually use it, and so the same business turns around and gets upset that people are using what you are offering for free?
Yes, people like free wi-fi, and you offered it in order to drum up traffic and hope those customers would buy stuff, which they did. But you like the business it brings in but you don't like those people freeloading on your network and in your seats when you need more people to be buying stuff?
Yo, McDonalds! Suck it up! You put yourself in this position now you have to deal with it like adults. You either have to limit free to like ten minutes of free, which does reduce the number of people who will come in since they might go to the coffee shop down the road, charge access fees, which also reduces walk ins, or accept that your restaurants don't have enough seats any more. You got greedy and wanted to steal some of the coffee shop crowd to your stores and now you are dealing with the fact that two business ideas are conflicting. Coffee shops work well with wi-fi business models because they have comfy chairs and lounges and expect their clientel to pay a lot for coffee and sit down for a while. It's about atmosphere. You have cheap coffee, no atmosphere, and expect to be selling coffee in volume.
I have a feeling Mickey D's is going to come up with stupid artificial rules that it will expect their employees to enforce and it's going to get ugly and moronic before they end the free wi-fi.
I've paid taxes on internet purchases. It all depends on which merchant you deal with. Most often I've seen it where if you are in the same state as the merchant, to avoid pissing someone off in the state IRS, they charge that tax, but not out of state tax.
And for the record, the progressive left wing of the party finds almost all sales tax to be unfair and regressive. I could go into the details of why we see this, but progressives and liberals find and are far more willing to pay Income tax, not sales tax, because our feeling is income tax is better and in truth fairer for society as a whole. Not all taxes are made equal.
If you want to debate the difference, feel free to follow up and start a whole new flaming thread.
It's not that user generated content can't be good, it's that the majority isn't.
That's not what the top level comment said. They said there isn't anything good on youtube. The implication is that nothing good on youtube that wasn't taken down by DMCA is flatly false. I agree there's a lot of crap on youtube. There's a lot of crap on TV and cable and in movies and in the media in general. The point is that youtube is a drastically different medium because it's free, and yet it has empowered people to create good entertaining content. The cream can and does rise to the top, as with any medium.
and now we have YouTube sucking money from Google.
That's a good point, if youtube can't sustain their model, and Google isn't willing to pay for it, there's going to be a real business problem. The article is trying to bring that point up and it's been discussed in other threads. My only point is to dispute the statement that there is no good content, which is different from saying the majority of content is crap.
And we have yet to scratch the surface that most of TV's programming is crap, and yet it still manages to turn a profit.
So there isn't really a conspiracy here, but there is an undercurrent fighting against the pro apple news. The loudest news about apple is pro apple, but only a little less loud is the anti apple news and complaining that said devices aren't perfect. How many people here on slashdot railed against the Mac because it didn't have a command line for so long? Or rail against the iPhone because it's not 100% open or doesn't support Ogg? These are valid arguments, but as people speak out, the almighty dollar takes over, and some journalists pick up on this sentiment and look to make money off it. They establish their niche in reporting and, often, becomes as dogmatic as the pro apple news, and many times stops providing any real content and just keeps finding more ways to say "apple sucks."
You might think "well duh, of course there are two sides to the story why are you saying this" but if you are swept up in the bipolar press, you aren't realizing there is a third voice, very quiet and very small. Those are the moderates who are actively trying to be objective and are somewhere in the middle. But in just about all news these days, not just tech news, objectivity doesn't sell very well, only the extreme viewpoints do.
Of course, all of this does not include the fact that Microsoft has a vested interest in getting as many journalists on their side as they can and if they could would bribe anyone and everyone into believing their OS is best. There is a small, anemic conspiracy there, but that's not Apple specific, that's Microsoft trying to fight against any and all competitors. They've done this with Linux before too.
... is that Washington is full of "revolving door" groups which work in the private sector for a specific company, then go into the government and work for a department in charge of regulating that same portion of the private sector. They then leave when the administration leaves and go back into the same industry. While they were in the government, they create policies, procedures, and precidents which give their industries an advantage. Obama seems interested in reform in general, but still, there are tons of great lawyers out there who have ethics and believe the RIAA is a bad thing. Why tap 5 RIAA lawyers when there is a chance they'll go back to working for the RIAA or a similar organization when they leave?
Ability counts for a lot in government, but so does position and motivation. It's not a bad thing to question if these guys, given their background, will chose to go after the RIAA for malicious prosecution, or not help the RIAA go information scrounging and threaten organizations that don't submit to warrantless searches of personal information. If the government went after the RIAA, would the RIAA accept them back? Would they be willing to find a job somewhere else?
So stuff that a big huge corporation put together and protects with draconian copywrite a DMCA is only worth it? Individuals can't come up with good ideas and offer them for free?
Here are 2 examples that completely blow that out of the water:
The first one is the most subscribed channel on youtube. The second is content for a local radio station in philly. I find both of these sub par compared to the previous links, but hey people want to subscribe to them, and the owners must be leveraging some kind of success out of them.
So I directly challenge that the assertion that the only good stuff on youtube is the stuff taken down by DMCA. I think the only stuff you ever bothered to look for was stuff you already saw on TV.
Oh... and did you forget the Monty Python channel? If you don't think that's worth it, then I demand Taco ban your IP immediately for proclaiming such heresy!
Look at the opposite trend that went from stone to paper to electronic:
1) Data became more portable 2) Data became more easy to edit and change 3) You can store more data in the same size container 4) You can store more types of data, like sounds and moving pictures! 5) You can store more than data, you can store programs which do things that can create and transform their own data!
What can a 50 lb stone slab do?
Also, what is the quality of the content? How much quality information does it tell us? There's some good history there, but I don't see someone using a stone slab to store a human DNA sequence any time soon.
Nice try, but this is the most extreme hyperbole I've ever seen. I'm glad for the mental exercise but it was way too lightweight and way too easy to shoot holes in this.
Re:Rather obvious examples don't you think?
on
The Age of Speed
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· Score: 1
You sir have never worked for or had to deal with government.
I've worked with the government plenty sir. I know how frustratingly slow it can be, especially since I work for customer service for a software organization myself and customers expect nownownow! What's even funny is outside of support, the processes that occur in our company are as frustratingly slow as the government!
Well, I think that is what he is talking about when he was talking about shortcuts.
I don't. He's talking about individual productivity, not groups. Group productivity is a double edged sword.
And the most common I can think of in IT is when a user asks you in a person to help them with a 60 second task and you have to have them call in a log a ticket first even though you are nearby their desk for another problem.
The funny thing about queues and entering cases and the like is that that's supposed to increase productivity of IT/support, and by far it does. There are plenty of one offs and walk ups and sometimes you have to make a decision about what's best for customer service. On one hand, if you always take walk ups, everyone will walkup to you rather than enter an IT case and you can't manage or priortize your workload and your productivity suffers. On the other hand, yes customer service can suffer if you never take a walkup for such a simple question. The funny thing is that having all those inputs open (email/IM/blogging/etc) is like not having a regulated queue. You should have one queue and work on things one at a time to be productive. So you've helped support my point. I work in support and talk walk ups in my company, for customer service, but I could increase my productivity greatly if I had a closed door office and accepted no walk ups.
The government has way too much beauracracy, I understand, but that's the nature of the beast. We do need to invest time in making it better, because we can improve the processes. I've had reasonable experiences at the DMV (gasp! yes they do occur!) and I've had less than reasonable ones. However, if there wasn't any beauracracy, it would be chaos trying to serve 300 million people and be much much worse.
Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
That's because years ago, teachers found out most students don't concentrate on anything.
But this girl is definitely the exception, she's obviously concentrating very hard.
Rather obvious examples don't you think?
on
The Age of Speed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This review completely failed to sell me on the book. The user seems very excited by it, but the suggestions are in themselves, rather mundane. The assumptions and analysis in the beginning is flat out wrong. Here's my review of the review:
The beginning of the book deals with shedding the guilt most people associate with getting things done quickly. We are lead to believe at an early age that shortcuts diminish the reward or the experience of a task. While there are some tasks where this holds true, overall it is a common myth one needs to overcome in the age of speed.
Who exactly has guilt at getting things done quickly? Most people I know get things done too quickly, because they are lazy, and don't do it right the first time. The one or two people who take too long and don't use shortcuts are people who are either too lazy to change their routine, or are overthinking the problem. But now more than ever we are all about quick.
My favorite anecdote was a fresh look at the Tortoise and the Hare. The common moral one associates with this fable is "Slow and steady wins the race." But the story isn't a condemnation on speed, rather against stupidity. The Hare lost simply because he was dumb enough to take a nap in the middle of the race, in no way did his speed work against him.
The fable of the tortoise and the hare has never been a condemnation of speed. The author has created this false "reanalysis" to sell the book. We all get the fable, and know what it means, that's why it's timeless.
Whenever I'm behind the wheel and someone asks if I know where I'm going I reply, "Nope, but I'm going to get there quickly." While I'm usually joking, it perfectly sums up the attitude of a Bottle Rocket. While a Jet has a single target and maintains focus until it's task is complete, a Bottle Rocket constantly changes it's target and never seems to be able to hit it before being distracted by a new goal, leaving a wake of unfinished debris. Obviously one should strive to be a Jet.
From here out, the review basically describes something that doesn't take an entire book. Humans don't do well if they try to multitask too much. Multitasking doesn't make you more productive. Sometimes it's necessary (I have to take questions all day at my job while working on a specific task) but you are never more productive.
So basically you are describing a self help book for teenagers and college students who haven't learned yet that all this blogging/twittering/emailing/chatting at the same time is not productive. When you are home enjoying yourself and relaxing, and you relax by having multiple inputs, that's great, but when you are working, shut it all off. Most hardcore geeks understand this, and if they don't, their friends, coworkers, or managers are telling them so. Outside the geek realm, you have your parents constantly telling you to get off the chat rooms if you expect to get your homework done.
Yanno, I'm not a fanboi of BSG, but I do like it, and feel it's one of the best sci-fi series in a long time. And yet if the show isn't the pinnacle of art, the naysayers on this site come out and get ready to shitcan it. It's unbelievable. If you don't like it, it's fine, don't watch it. But do you have to assassinate it? Criticism is welcome, but if you try to bury it, you aren't going to get more sci-fi series of any quality, just more horror-sci-fi schlock and ghosthunter bullshit that gives the scifi channel the "cheapo paranormal crappy station." Constructive criticism is welcome, but can we cut the crap please?
PS: This is why I hate tags, are they really any useful or are they just a means of entertaining the ultra-sardonic and cynical?
They were bonuses... retention bonuses. I don't care how you wrap them up, they were bonuses. Any other term is just an attempt to hide their true intent.
Bonuses to keep people on so they... don't go somewhere else? Number one, where would they go? Number two, maybe if they screwed up this company that bad, they SHOULD go somewhere else? If I were a shareholder and they just fucked up the company with credit default swaps, I wouldn't want them working there.
I understand that sometimes you have to "sell" something to the masses, but sometimes it's better to take the long way around and instead of selling it to them, work on educating them. There's a subtle difference. Marketing is jazzing up the name is marketing. Explaining it's significance and telling you what we could do with that knowledge is education. Education has a longer term significance, and encourages the masses in general to learn more. In the US the populace is getting less and less interested in becoming educated because we are too concerned with marketing and sound bites and what sounds good without explaining what is good.
Besides, the words Calculus, Gravity, Physics, and neuropsychology weren't picked for their marketability.
I'm probably going to get modded as a troll, particularly amongst the linux elite, but depending on what you are interested in, what about iPhone development? Right now it seems the application waiting list is a bit long and delayed, but if, at some point you get in, would you consider creating a project on your own for the general consumer populace? Taking the initiative and creating applications on your own which can be readily identified in the market space might be a good thing to add to your resume, and there are more than just linux developers out there.
I'm not a code developer per se. My baliwick is SQL and I love it. I look at some languages and cringe a little, or just get annoyed. SQL is a query language, but it's just as much a development language as anything else, it just has a different use.
There are also plenty of developers out there using Perl, PHP and others and other things who design web applications and websites. And then there's python...
You did say you you knew some C/C++ and were looking to get into development. Most developers know multiple languages, but when picking something you enjoy, it's important to make sure you enjoy that particular type of programming. You may enjoy C++ coding for a business application, but the moment someone shows you LISP you may run scream from the building (most people do;)).
I just want to bring up the question of what do you see yourself developing for? That's something a lot of employers ask. You could love coding for the sake of creation, but if you are like me, you may prefer database development over something else. If you think that might concern you, come up with a vision for yourself.
spam filtering in email: You haven't answered the question why you aren't doing spam filtering on the server rather than your phone? Set up a hosted email server and set up your spam filtering there. You have to get your email from somewhere, again, filter on the server. Hundred lines of code my ass, it's not a matter of lines of code if ten lines on a server would be less work. What if your phone goes down and you need to access your email from another PC or a web browser? It would be even better to filter there if you use IMAP. If you are still using POP then this discussion should be over:P
Printing: I can understand sometimes you might want to print something, but why not email the project plan? Or use that handy dandy peer to peer stuff in 3.0? You also need to be more specific about printing from a deskop because the reasons to print from a desktop are not all great ones. Some bad reasons are:
- I can't read it (I respect this reason but if you can't read your document on an iPhone you shouldn't have an iPhone. - I like to have a paper copy as backup (you should be backing up electronically and not wasting paper) - my coworker doesn't have X so I can't send it to him (well then get coworker X because if you are paperless and your buddy isn't and you work for the same company then your company is being stupid. - Paper just feels better (sure it does, and it's nice and flexible, but if you are printing out 20 emails a day, you aren't getting good work out of your screen are you?)
Come companies require paper, and government still requires paper. However, the reasons for printing are becoming less and less each day. While I do understand the reasons for printing, what you haven't answered is the demand itself, which I asserted in my sentence as being lower than you think. Saying Ford should have sold buggywhips on the side because people still want to use them kind of flies in the face that you have this shiny new mode of transportation that doesn't need them. Sure you are going to be pining for a buggy whip once in a while when you have a buggy and horse and no way to get the horse to move, but does that mean every Ford should be sold with them just in case?
Slashdot Mirror
XP is a 9 year old OS. Even auto makers are only required to support the parts for their cars for 7 years
In the US and Europe, automobiles are heavily regulated to meet certain standards, and software is not. If a 9 year old car is many times safer, more reliable, more fuel efficient, much better looking, and more easily fixed than the 2 year old car coming from the factory now, and the new car is just a total dog, and if community outrage was so high that people would only want to buy the old car, and this was the only auto maker available to buy cars from then damn straight the community would be in the moral right to demand that company continue to support the old car model until the choice of a car that was as good or better came along.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist both in the US and Europe. If there was more competition, and Vista was a dog, people could turn to another company for better service. But they can't. They turn back to Microsoft and demand XP. They are, allegedly, trying to control the supply channel by strangling supplies of XP and hoping this will force demand to Vista, which will make Vista look better as sales go up. They have an image problem with Vista and they are using their monopoly power to try to fix it. If this was a competitive market and Linus and Mac OS had 33% each, We could just switch to one of them and Microsoft would have to compete.
Once you are a monopoly, 99% of the business book is thrown out the window. Everything comes down to, "when you take an action as a monopolistic company, are you abusing your market dominance and reducing choice for the consumer?" A car maker to tried to do this without monopolistic power would shoot themselves in the foot for cancelling a profitable product line just because they want to sell more of another. The American automakers did just this, by trying to sell more trucks and SUVs when the future trend was towards smaller fuel efficient cars. Now GM and Chrysler are on life support, and Hyundai is making out like a bandit. Competition would have done that to Microsoft to, but there is none, so they have to follow different rules. If they don't follow those rules, any and all governments need to slap their greedy hands.
So in Russia it's illegal for a company to sell a 10 year old product, even though that product will be 2 versions old this year? If we could make legal demands to sell retired products I'd still be eating Ninja Turtle cereal [flickr.com] today.
What, Fruity pebbles isn't good enough for you? What are you, a communist?
(Lets act like adults)
Really? You want slashdotters to have a mature, serious discussion with no inuendo about "Great Tits?" You have to be out of your mind!
Well if you are so offended by our elementary school breast humor, then all I have to say is tough tits!! Get over it!
and in one voice, black white and mexicowan get together and as the new confederate battle flag is raised...
Oh really?
Rest assured that these people count cash all day long, they can certainly work out exactly how much such changes will cost.
I would have had faith in that statement before the credit crisis of 2008 took hold.
... the first man who has a porn movie style encounter with one of the sexy TSA guards because she saw "the real him" thru one of these scanners.
Smoke signals here... I win!!
This is the idiocy of how some businesses deal with networking and the internet. First, they offer free. Then they find out when you offer free, people actually use it, and so the same business turns around and gets upset that people are using what you are offering for free?
Yes, people like free wi-fi, and you offered it in order to drum up traffic and hope those customers would buy stuff, which they did. But you like the business it brings in but you don't like those people freeloading on your network and in your seats when you need more people to be buying stuff?
Yo, McDonalds! Suck it up! You put yourself in this position now you have to deal with it like adults. You either have to limit free to like ten minutes of free, which does reduce the number of people who will come in since they might go to the coffee shop down the road, charge access fees, which also reduces walk ins, or accept that your restaurants don't have enough seats any more. You got greedy and wanted to steal some of the coffee shop crowd to your stores and now you are dealing with the fact that two business ideas are conflicting. Coffee shops work well with wi-fi business models because they have comfy chairs and lounges and expect their clientel to pay a lot for coffee and sit down for a while. It's about atmosphere. You have cheap coffee, no atmosphere, and expect to be selling coffee in volume.
I have a feeling Mickey D's is going to come up with stupid artificial rules that it will expect their employees to enforce and it's going to get ugly and moronic before they end the free wi-fi.
9. saintly American companies that never do anything wrong PROFIT!!
Yes.
Yeah I know it's a troll but I'll bite.
I've paid taxes on internet purchases. It all depends on which merchant you deal with. Most often I've seen it where if you are in the same state as the merchant, to avoid pissing someone off in the state IRS, they charge that tax, but not out of state tax.
And for the record, the progressive left wing of the party finds almost all sales tax to be unfair and regressive. I could go into the details of why we see this, but progressives and liberals find and are far more willing to pay Income tax, not sales tax, because our feeling is income tax is better and in truth fairer for society as a whole. Not all taxes are made equal.
If you want to debate the difference, feel free to follow up and start a whole new flaming thread.
It's not that user generated content can't be good, it's that the majority isn't.
That's not what the top level comment said. They said there isn't anything good on youtube. The implication is that nothing good on youtube that wasn't taken down by DMCA is flatly false. I agree there's a lot of crap on youtube. There's a lot of crap on TV and cable and in movies and in the media in general. The point is that youtube is a drastically different medium because it's free, and yet it has empowered people to create good entertaining content. The cream can and does rise to the top, as with any medium.
and now we have YouTube sucking money from Google.
That's a good point, if youtube can't sustain their model, and Google isn't willing to pay for it, there's going to be a real business problem. The article is trying to bring that point up and it's been discussed in other threads. My only point is to dispute the statement that there is no good content, which is different from saying the majority of content is crap.
And we have yet to scratch the surface that most of TV's programming is crap, and yet it still manages to turn a profit.
So there isn't really a conspiracy here, but there is an undercurrent fighting against the pro apple news. The loudest news about apple is pro apple, but only a little less loud is the anti apple news and complaining that said devices aren't perfect. How many people here on slashdot railed against the Mac because it didn't have a command line for so long? Or rail against the iPhone because it's not 100% open or doesn't support Ogg? These are valid arguments, but as people speak out, the almighty dollar takes over, and some journalists pick up on this sentiment and look to make money off it. They establish their niche in reporting and, often, becomes as dogmatic as the pro apple news, and many times stops providing any real content and just keeps finding more ways to say "apple sucks."
You might think "well duh, of course there are two sides to the story why are you saying this" but if you are swept up in the bipolar press, you aren't realizing there is a third voice, very quiet and very small. Those are the moderates who are actively trying to be objective and are somewhere in the middle. But in just about all news these days, not just tech news, objectivity doesn't sell very well, only the extreme viewpoints do.
Of course, all of this does not include the fact that Microsoft has a vested interest in getting as many journalists on their side as they can and if they could would bribe anyone and everyone into believing their OS is best. There is a small, anemic conspiracy there, but that's not Apple specific, that's Microsoft trying to fight against any and all competitors. They've done this with Linux before too.
... is that Washington is full of "revolving door" groups which work in the private sector for a specific company, then go into the government and work for a department in charge of regulating that same portion of the private sector. They then leave when the administration leaves and go back into the same industry. While they were in the government, they create policies, procedures, and precidents which give their industries an advantage. Obama seems interested in reform in general, but still, there are tons of great lawyers out there who have ethics and believe the RIAA is a bad thing. Why tap 5 RIAA lawyers when there is a chance they'll go back to working for the RIAA or a similar organization when they leave?
Ability counts for a lot in government, but so does position and motivation. It's not a bad thing to question if these guys, given their background, will chose to go after the RIAA for malicious prosecution, or not help the RIAA go information scrounging and threaten organizations that don't submit to warrantless searches of personal information. If the government went after the RIAA, would the RIAA accept them back? Would they be willing to find a job somewhere else?
So stuff that a big huge corporation put together and protects with draconian copywrite a DMCA is only worth it? Individuals can't come up with good ideas and offer them for free?
Here are 2 examples that completely blow that out of the water:
http://www.youtube.com/user/davidspates
http://www.youtube.com/user/Peacer
And the second guy recently got a job with some major media group because of the talent he showed on youtube!
Here's another example, but it may not be to everyone's entertainment tastes but you can't dispute the quality of the actual animation is great:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MondoMedia
And here's some "big media" content actually provided without those draconian restrictions:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BritainsSoTalented
http://www.youtube.com/user/JanisDigitalMedia
The first one is the most subscribed channel on youtube. The second is content for a local radio station in philly. I find both of these sub par compared to the previous links, but hey people want to subscribe to them, and the owners must be leveraging some kind of success out of them.
So I directly challenge that the assertion that the only good stuff on youtube is the stuff taken down by DMCA. I think the only stuff you ever bothered to look for was stuff you already saw on TV.
Oh... and did you forget the Monty Python channel? If you don't think that's worth it, then I demand Taco ban your IP immediately for proclaiming such heresy!
OMG Pandas!!!!
Look at the opposite trend that went from stone to paper to electronic:
1) Data became more portable
2) Data became more easy to edit and change
3) You can store more data in the same size container
4) You can store more types of data, like sounds and moving pictures!
5) You can store more than data, you can store programs which do things that can create and transform their own data!
What can a 50 lb stone slab do?
Also, what is the quality of the content? How much quality information does it tell us? There's some good history there, but I don't see someone using a stone slab to store a human DNA sequence any time soon.
Nice try, but this is the most extreme hyperbole I've ever seen. I'm glad for the mental exercise but it was way too lightweight and way too easy to shoot holes in this.
You sir have never worked for or had to deal with government.
I've worked with the government plenty sir. I know how frustratingly slow it can be, especially since I work for customer service for a software organization myself and customers expect nownownow! What's even funny is outside of support, the processes that occur in our company are as frustratingly slow as the government!
Well, I think that is what he is talking about when he was talking about shortcuts.
I don't. He's talking about individual productivity, not groups. Group productivity is a double edged sword.
And the most common I can think of in IT is when a user asks you in a person to help them with a 60 second task and you have to have them call in a log a ticket first even though you are nearby their desk for another problem.
The funny thing about queues and entering cases and the like is that that's supposed to increase productivity of IT/support, and by far it does. There are plenty of one offs and walk ups and sometimes you have to make a decision about what's best for customer service. On one hand, if you always take walk ups, everyone will walkup to you rather than enter an IT case and you can't manage or priortize your workload and your productivity suffers. On the other hand, yes customer service can suffer if you never take a walkup for such a simple question. The funny thing is that having all those inputs open (email/IM/blogging/etc) is like not having a regulated queue. You should have one queue and work on things one at a time to be productive. So you've helped support my point. I work in support and talk walk ups in my company, for customer service, but I could increase my productivity greatly if I had a closed door office and accepted no walk ups.
The government has way too much beauracracy, I understand, but that's the nature of the beast. We do need to invest time in making it better, because we can improve the processes. I've had reasonable experiences at the DMV (gasp! yes they do occur!) and I've had less than reasonable ones. However, if there wasn't any beauracracy, it would be chaos trying to serve 300 million people and be much much worse.
Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
That's because years ago, teachers found out most students don't concentrate on anything.
But this girl is definitely the exception, she's obviously concentrating very hard.
This review completely failed to sell me on the book. The user seems very excited by it, but the suggestions are in themselves, rather mundane. The assumptions and analysis in the beginning is flat out wrong. Here's my review of the review:
The beginning of the book deals with shedding the guilt most people associate with getting things done quickly. We are lead to believe at an early age that shortcuts diminish the reward or the experience of a task. While there are some tasks where this holds true, overall it is a common myth one needs to overcome in the age of speed.
Who exactly has guilt at getting things done quickly? Most people I know get things done too quickly, because they are lazy, and don't do it right the first time. The one or two people who take too long and don't use shortcuts are people who are either too lazy to change their routine, or are overthinking the problem. But now more than ever we are all about quick.
My favorite anecdote was a fresh look at the Tortoise and the Hare. The common moral one associates with this fable is "Slow and steady wins the race." But the story isn't a condemnation on speed, rather against stupidity. The Hare lost simply because he was dumb enough to take a nap in the middle of the race, in no way did his speed work against him.
The fable of the tortoise and the hare has never been a condemnation of speed. The author has created this false "reanalysis" to sell the book. We all get the fable, and know what it means, that's why it's timeless.
Whenever I'm behind the wheel and someone asks if I know where I'm going I reply, "Nope, but I'm going to get there quickly." While I'm usually joking, it perfectly sums up the attitude of a Bottle Rocket. While a Jet has a single target and maintains focus until it's task is complete, a Bottle Rocket constantly changes it's target and never seems to be able to hit it before being distracted by a new goal, leaving a wake of unfinished debris. Obviously one should strive to be a Jet.
From here out, the review basically describes something that doesn't take an entire book. Humans don't do well if they try to multitask too much. Multitasking doesn't make you more productive. Sometimes it's necessary (I have to take questions all day at my job while working on a specific task) but you are never more productive.
So basically you are describing a self help book for teenagers and college students who haven't learned yet that all this blogging/twittering/emailing/chatting at the same time is not productive. When you are home enjoying yourself and relaxing, and you relax by having multiple inputs, that's great, but when you are working, shut it all off. Most hardcore geeks understand this, and if they don't, their friends, coworkers, or managers are telling them so. Outside the geek realm, you have your parents constantly telling you to get off the chat rooms if you expect to get your homework done.
There I saved everyone the price of the book.
Yanno, I'm not a fanboi of BSG, but I do like it, and feel it's one of the best sci-fi series in a long time. And yet if the show isn't the pinnacle of art, the naysayers on this site come out and get ready to shitcan it. It's unbelievable. If you don't like it, it's fine, don't watch it. But do you have to assassinate it? Criticism is welcome, but if you try to bury it, you aren't going to get more sci-fi series of any quality, just more horror-sci-fi schlock and ghosthunter bullshit that gives the scifi channel the "cheapo paranormal crappy station." Constructive criticism is welcome, but can we cut the crap please?
PS: This is why I hate tags, are they really any useful or are they just a means of entertaining the ultra-sardonic and cynical?
They were bonuses... retention bonuses. I don't care how you wrap them up, they were bonuses. Any other term is just an attempt to hide their true intent.
Bonuses to keep people on so they... don't go somewhere else? Number one, where would they go? Number two, maybe if they screwed up this company that bad, they SHOULD go somewhere else? If I were a shareholder and they just fucked up the company with credit default swaps, I wouldn't want them working there.
And no one really called bullshit on this before?
I understand that sometimes you have to "sell" something to the masses, but sometimes it's better to take the long way around and instead of selling it to them, work on educating them. There's a subtle difference. Marketing is jazzing up the name is marketing. Explaining it's significance and telling you what we could do with that knowledge is education. Education has a longer term significance, and encourages the masses in general to learn more. In the US the populace is getting less and less interested in becoming educated because we are too concerned with marketing and sound bites and what sounds good without explaining what is good.
Besides, the words Calculus, Gravity, Physics, and neuropsychology weren't picked for their marketability.
I'm probably going to get modded as a troll, particularly amongst the linux elite, but depending on what you are interested in, what about iPhone development? Right now it seems the application waiting list is a bit long and delayed, but if, at some point you get in, would you consider creating a project on your own for the general consumer populace? Taking the initiative and creating applications on your own which can be readily identified in the market space might be a good thing to add to your resume, and there are more than just linux developers out there.
I'm not a code developer per se. My baliwick is SQL and I love it. I look at some languages and cringe a little, or just get annoyed. SQL is a query language, but it's just as much a development language as anything else, it just has a different use.
There are also plenty of developers out there using Perl, PHP and others and other things who design web applications and websites. And then there's python...
You did say you you knew some C/C++ and were looking to get into development. Most developers know multiple languages, but when picking something you enjoy, it's important to make sure you enjoy that particular type of programming. You may enjoy C++ coding for a business application, but the moment someone shows you LISP you may run scream from the building (most people do ;)).
I just want to bring up the question of what do you see yourself developing for? That's something a lot of employers ask. You could love coding for the sake of creation, but if you are like me, you may prefer database development over something else. If you think that might concern you, come up with a vision for yourself.
spam filtering in email: :P
You haven't answered the question why you aren't doing spam filtering on the server rather than your phone? Set up a hosted email server and set up your spam filtering there. You have to get your email from somewhere, again, filter on the server. Hundred lines of code my ass, it's not a matter of lines of code if ten lines on a server would be less work. What if your phone goes down and you need to access your email from another PC or a web browser? It would be even better to filter there if you use IMAP. If you are still using POP then this discussion should be over
Printing:
I can understand sometimes you might want to print something, but why not email the project plan? Or use that handy dandy peer to peer stuff in 3.0? You also need to be more specific about printing from a deskop because the reasons to print from a desktop are not all great ones. Some bad reasons are:
- I can't read it (I respect this reason but if you can't read your document on an iPhone you shouldn't have an iPhone.
- I like to have a paper copy as backup (you should be backing up electronically and not wasting paper)
- my coworker doesn't have X so I can't send it to him (well then get coworker X because if you are paperless and your buddy isn't and you work for the same company then your company is being stupid.
- Paper just feels better (sure it does, and it's nice and flexible, but if you are printing out 20 emails a day, you aren't getting good work out of your screen are you?)
Come companies require paper, and government still requires paper. However, the reasons for printing are becoming less and less each day. While I do understand the reasons for printing, what you haven't answered is the demand itself, which I asserted in my sentence as being lower than you think. Saying Ford should have sold buggywhips on the side because people still want to use them kind of flies in the face that you have this shiny new mode of transportation that doesn't need them. Sure you are going to be pining for a buggy whip once in a while when you have a buggy and horse and no way to get the horse to move, but does that mean every Ford should be sold with them just in case?