we can begin phase 2. Mounting a machine gun under each video camera. Then, when the computer is really certain the behavior is suspicious, it can take action to make us all very very safe.
First, you need sleep. It's not a good idea to go 3 days without sleep. If you look at what a body needs to live, in order of the length of time we can go without it are:
1. Proper temperature. You won't survive a millisecond at a million degrees C. 2. Reasonably clean air to breath. You might make it 15-30 minutes without air if you're a pearldiver, but otherwise, you're lucky to hold your breath for 2 minutes. 3. Sleep + Water. You'll need sleep and water within 3-5 days. 4. Food. You can go weeks without food.
Second, this over-gamer just got where we're all headed, but a little faster than most. Probably has something to do with powerleveling through real life.
Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.
There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.
It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice -- the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.
Main points:
1. Watching a lot of TV changes the way your brain works.
2. Those changes leave TV watchers with significantly less ability to think through complex problems.
3. As a direct result, we elect morons like George W. Bush who lead us into disasterously stupid wars.
At the moment, I'm running 3 instances of Visual Studio 2003 (I know, I'm a luddite, I've only moved one project to 2005 and already 2008 looms). They are taking 25 MB, 61 MB and 92 MB. I'm running a much smaller project in Flexbuilder/Eclipse and the javaw.exe process is taking 189 MB.
So, yeah, Eclipse (java) takes from 2-6 times as much memory. But so what? It's not like 189MB or 92MB is a significant chunk of the 2,500MB available on my aged and crusty desktop PC.
My gripes with Eclipse are:
1. Eclipse gets in my way when I'm programming. The editor is just plain slow. I am not The Flash on the keyboard, but I can often get ahead of Eclipse and I have to wait 2-3 seconds for the damn thing to catch up. This never happens to me with Visual Studio 2003.
2. The variable inspector in debug mode absolutely sucks. It often throws errors, is insanely slow and there's no way to evaluate an expression, or, if there is, it's not apparent.
3. Visual Studio provides better "in-line" help with methods and arguments.
If you think Eclipse is just as good as Visual Studio then you've not used Visual Studio or you've got significant mental deficiencies.
Ummm...lemme think....I know. Both of you. First the guy who called you a moron when he obviously does not understand copyright law. Second, you....for arguing with a moron.
P.S. I'm a moron too. We're all morons on this bus.
If a boss manages by results...no A's for effort....then surfing on company time is not a problem. If a manager needs to see his or her employees sweat in order to know the work is being done, the company is screwed anyhow.
Peopleware is one of the best. And Mythical Man Month is a classic for a good reason.
Ego-control is a key skill in a manager. You've got to foster success in your team. If you have to be the smartest guy in the room, it won't be fun for you or your people.
That would be a very long list. Maybe you could get Sisyphus to maintain it. I hear he's getting tired of that rock and bird routine.
Five Letter Acronyms vs. Three Letter Acronyms
on
Patent Threats In OOXML
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Always bet on the Three Letter Acronym. Five Letter Acronyms almost never succeed when faced with a competing Three Letter Acronym.
You can ignore OOXML.
...are, in my limited experience, consistently sleazy.
They phoned me up within an hour of downloading the community version and tried to make me afraid of the community version. They hinted that it's less stable than the for-profit version they're selling and that I'd be much happier if I spent the money on the more reliable Enterprise version with their support package.
There ought to be a section in patent law that explicitly allows farmers to continue saving seeds without financial liability. It's stupid and not in the interest of society as a whole that Monsanto thinks they can force farmers to stop saving seeds and replanting them.
...almost always want to re-write old code from scratch.
Almost always without taking the time to understand what that old code does. Why? Because writing code is much easier than reading code. Reading code takes perseverance and ability to focus on large numbers of nit-picky details. Something our TV-age brains cannot easily do.
The result of throwing out the old code without understanding what it is accomplishing is not always positive from a business perspective.
Sure, sometimes crufty code is crap.
But sometimes, like on a terminal emulator project I worked on in the mid-90's, the cruft was a bunch of code, accumulated from 1985 to 1995, that actually emulated the bugs in the firmware of 10 different manufacturer's dumb terminals. The programmers who wrote the applications that ran on these dumb terminals relied upon these bugs in the firmware and when the bugs disappeared, the applications broke.
The company that tried to sell the "correct", "new", "elegant" terminal emulator hit a big solid brick wall called "market acceptance." The company that kept the cruft made roughly $4 million per year in profits and supported 25 employees' and their families for a decade while they developed new products.
So, before you look at code in a shipping product and say to yourself "this is crufty crap and should be re-written from scratch" ask yourself this question: "Do I really understand what this crufty crap is doing?"
Consider Software Engineering if you like to write programs. Computer Science if you like to discover new algorithms. And IT if you like to golf and sit in the corporate box seats of your Fortune 2000 companies' vendors.
This sounds like another one of them. If brought to market, it will create an opportunity for some enterprising programmer.
I have not upgraded my PC's to Vista. However, I'll bet within 5 years, most of us will be running Vista (and Apple will double, maybe triple, it's market share). The hardware we're running will wear out and at some point, the newer hardware will not have XP support.
If you want to exercise your "I hate Microsoft" neurons, write and distribute solid 3rd-party XP drivers for new hardware that lacks XP support from the manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
we can begin phase 2. Mounting a machine gun under each video camera. Then, when the computer is really certain the behavior is suspicious, it can take action to make us all very very safe.
First, you need sleep. It's not a good idea to go 3 days without sleep. If you look at what a body needs to live, in order of the length of time we can go without it are:
1. Proper temperature. You won't survive a millisecond at a million degrees C.
2. Reasonably clean air to breath. You might make it 15-30 minutes without air if you're a pearldiver, but otherwise, you're lucky to hold your breath for 2 minutes.
3. Sleep + Water. You'll need sleep and water within 3-5 days.
4. Food. You can go weeks without food.
Second, this over-gamer just got where we're all headed, but a little faster than most. Probably has something to do with powerleveling through real life.
...you can hear the worm slithering into your ears when you use SKYPE.
Since nobody wants it, nobody will pirate it. Totally brilliant strategy by MSFT!
I guess that's redundant...Linux User and Wasting Time.
Unless your pacemaker is hooked up to a Microsoft Website, loss of access to a web-site or even an e-mail account probably won't kill you.
Stop watching TV.
From: http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html/
Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
That's roughly 800 hours per person per year.
Main points:
1. Watching a lot of TV changes the way your brain works.
2. Those changes leave TV watchers with significantly less ability to think through complex problems.
3. As a direct result, we elect morons like George W. Bush who lead us into disasterously stupid wars.
At the moment, I'm running 3 instances of Visual Studio 2003 (I know, I'm a luddite, I've only moved one project to 2005 and already 2008 looms). They are taking 25 MB, 61 MB and 92 MB. I'm running a much smaller project in Flexbuilder/Eclipse and the javaw.exe process is taking 189 MB.
So, yeah, Eclipse (java) takes from 2-6 times as much memory. But so what? It's not like 189MB or 92MB is a significant chunk of the 2,500MB available on my aged and crusty desktop PC.
My gripes with Eclipse are:
1. Eclipse gets in my way when I'm programming. The editor is just plain slow. I am not The Flash on the keyboard, but I can often get ahead of Eclipse and I have to wait 2-3 seconds for the damn thing to catch up. This never happens to me with Visual Studio 2003.
2. The variable inspector in debug mode absolutely sucks. It often throws errors, is insanely slow and there's no way to evaluate an expression, or, if there is, it's not apparent.
3. Visual Studio provides better "in-line" help with methods and arguments.
If you think Eclipse is just as good as Visual Studio then you've not used Visual Studio or you've got significant mental deficiencies.
Ummm...lemme think....I know. Both of you. First the guy who called you a moron when he obviously does not understand copyright law. Second, you....for arguing with a moron.
P.S. I'm a moron too. We're all morons on this bus.
If a boss manages by results...no A's for effort....then surfing on company time is not a problem. If a manager needs to see his or her employees sweat in order to know the work is being done, the company is screwed anyhow.
Peopleware is one of the best. And Mythical Man Month is a classic for a good reason.
Ego-control is a key skill in a manager. You've got to foster success in your team. If you have to be the smartest guy in the room, it won't be fun for you or your people.
The problem of teen access to internet porn is self-limiting. The boy will eventually go blind and then what's he gonna do? Digitized braille porn?
That would be a very long list. Maybe you could get Sisyphus to maintain it. I hear he's getting tired of that rock and bird routine.
Always bet on the Three Letter Acronym. Five Letter Acronyms almost never succeed when faced with a competing Three Letter Acronym. You can ignore OOXML.
Ignore registered mail.
The only inspector worse than the VS inspector is the FlexBuilder/Eclipse inspector.
...for Adobe and Flash/Flex. For Linux, it's no news.
.NET...well, I've worked with .NET, at least the handcuffs are golden.
As for locking people into
...are, in my limited experience, consistently sleazy.
They phoned me up within an hour of downloading the community version and tried to make me afraid of the community version. They hinted that it's less stable than the for-profit version they're selling and that I'd be much happier if I spent the money on the more reliable Enterprise version with their support package.
There ought to be a section in patent law that explicitly allows farmers to continue saving seeds without financial liability. It's stupid and not in the interest of society as a whole that Monsanto thinks they can force farmers to stop saving seeds and replanting them.
...paid you for that teabagging comment, didn't they? I think I'll go have a mug of hot tasty Lipton's tea now.
...almost always want to re-write old code from scratch.
Almost always without taking the time to understand what that old code does. Why? Because writing code is much easier than reading code. Reading code takes perseverance and ability to focus on large numbers of nit-picky details. Something our TV-age brains cannot easily do.
The result of throwing out the old code without understanding what it is accomplishing is not always positive from a business perspective.
Sure, sometimes crufty code is crap.
But sometimes, like on a terminal emulator project I worked on in the mid-90's, the cruft was a bunch of code, accumulated from 1985 to 1995, that actually emulated the bugs in the firmware of 10 different manufacturer's dumb terminals. The programmers who wrote the applications that ran on these dumb terminals relied upon these bugs in the firmware and when the bugs disappeared, the applications broke.
The company that tried to sell the "correct", "new", "elegant" terminal emulator hit a big solid brick wall called "market acceptance." The company that kept the cruft made roughly $4 million per year in profits and supported 25 employees' and their families for a decade while they developed new products.
So, before you look at code in a shipping product and say to yourself "this is crufty crap and should be re-written from scratch" ask yourself this question: "Do I really understand what this crufty crap is doing?"
Consider Software Engineering if you like to write programs. Computer Science if you like to discover new algorithms. And IT if you like to golf and sit in the corporate box seats of your Fortune 2000 companies' vendors.
have been patented? Anyone? Anyone?
This sounds like another one of them. If brought to market, it will create an opportunity for some enterprising programmer.
I have not upgraded my PC's to Vista. However, I'll bet within 5 years, most of us will be running Vista (and Apple will double, maybe triple, it's market share). The hardware we're running will wear out and at some point, the newer hardware will not have XP support.
If you want to exercise your "I hate Microsoft" neurons, write and distribute solid 3rd-party XP drivers for new hardware that lacks XP support from the manufacturer.
Runescape in Java,
...C/C++?
WOW and EQ2 and EVE in
Which games look better? Based on the current crop of games, it does not look like Java has arrived as a tool for making 3d games.