Because people are doing work on laptops with wireless? They are going to meetings and expecting to be able to be productive and present things without everyone pulling cables out of the table and someone running short?
Watching site access:
Local culture thing. Shrug.
Flash player:
Because we write a product that needs flash to work?
"Supported Software":
You need to learn the difference between performing work that your policies assign yourselves to get software installed, vs being the on the hook for supporting it fully in a help-desk capacity.
The problem is the End User does the troubleshooting at the start, and then passes the problem fully analyzed to IT. IT hands the problem to their Help Desk personnel, who don't understand the problem, and try to troubleshoot it all over again, incorrectly.
After a few weeks of this, the End User gets pretty annoyed and raises a fuss. The IT people ask the Sysadmin to look at the problem. The Sysadmin hates this, but comes to the same conclusion as the End User -- the hardware is bad. Now the hardware can be replaced.
That's why sysadmins have to troubleshoot computer problems.
I think it's obvious that democracy isn't a proof against bad results, and anyone who says otherwise is usually politically grandstanding, or hiding something, or both.
The who gets to set the limits problem is pretty thorny though. Our (US) byzantine system of procedure for doing it seems better than a simple vote, or a simple law pass, or a single office or bureau getting to pick. But it has problems too.
- They purchase huge expensive redundant solutions and configure them incorrectly so that they don't work. Eg how about a huge redundant cluster of VMs to run stuff on that are accessible over a link that runs at 200 kilobits per second. Sigh.
- Help desk does not even read help tickets, suggesting 4 things in 4 independent mails all of which were clearly ruled out in the original mail. There's 'making sure', and there's reading comprehenension.
In short, IT is really fucking annoying when they can't make infrastructure work correctly.
When they *can* make infrastructure work correctly, you don't notice them, so what positive is there to say?
Well, the applicable laws would probably, in the end, be found to state that you can't revoke the games and that refunds would be appropriate.
However this would probably involve years of lawsuit to resolve, and likely would come as a class action that would result in coupons for end users, if there was any money left.
Of course, that's really what would happen *regardless* of what the EULA/TOS stated. It's an asymmetrical relationship, which means that the big gorilla gets his way by default. This is why asymmetrical relationships are a bad thing.
If I buy food from a market, it's a pretty reasonable relationship, even if the market is big. If I don't like their food, I can just stop shopping there (unless they're the only one). The market can't cancel my food after the fact.
DRM systems give the distributors far too much power. That's what's unconscionable about them. They make an egalitarian seller/buyer relationship into something ugly.
Having workd in, or near phone support for too many years, I will say that most are not competent.
There's pretty basic skills:
- Understanding the issue/problem the caller is calling about
- Determining a response to that problem that is relevant
- Ability to use english words to effectively communicate the reply
Most people fall down pretty hard on one of those three basic abilities. Frequently people get bored and stop paying attention to the caller's issues at all, and give them an irrelevant reply based on the first keywords they recognize.
And that doesn't get into consideration or analysis of problems. Eg typical stuff goes like this Caller: "My computer is shooting out sparks!" Support: "Did you make sure to plug it in?"
total non-understanding on the aprt of the person supposed to support the product.
I've worked in support departments where companies paid five thousand dollars to be allowed to call us, and we still had some if this BS.
That should be no surprise. Scientists are a bunch of assholes like everyone else.
However, peer review and scientific discourse allow them to undermine each others arguments when they're crap, and hold each other's feet to the fire when they get sloppy about their methods or conclusions.
In short, the individuals are good at being careful and accurate. The system is good at sorting out good information from bad. The process is good at finding truth.
My circles of friends growing up were nerds. We swapped commodore 64 pirated games. We played dungeons and dragons. At least until 13-14 or so we all fit the mould. The computer dorkery lasted a lot longer, through high school.
Of my 30 or so aquaintences, nearly all the anglos and asians have found themselves doing something technology related. A few are pretty hardcore doing EE or embedded programming. Many are more IT or programmer types like me. Some had other focuses and created web sites or "social networking" whatever (retch). Some went into videogames, or makeing art or music for them. Not one of the 5 african american kids ended up in anything tech related. One's a counselor, one's a piano teacher and church organizer, one dropped off the face of the earth, and one's an accountant.
There's a *huge* skew here. These kids were given computers as very young people. We played videogames together as teenagers. On the c64 sometimes you had to fix the basic that would screw up due to a bad crack. I shared my exp tracking program I wrote in BASIC, and someone added features to it (it was bad). But all the african american kids dropped it, and they dropped it after the age of 16-17, when I no longer was following their lives so closely.
This can't be soley from a lack of exposure and opportunity. There's more to it.
There's a middle ground though. Using tools you have to stretch a bit and get better at applying them is something we should expect of ourselves and each other in a learning environment.
Being given challenging problems when you've not even learned how to apply the tools yet at all is frequently not rewarding, and frequently offputting.
Sure, people have to adjust, but it's easy for you to underestimate how far the students will have to adjust, and it sounds like you're not doing a very good job providing those first steps.
Maybe you don't think that's your job. I think you're wrong. It's the primary difference between teachers and professors, and I think its a big problem.
However, within the confines of the United States, that's not true.
The so-called cost-of-living index is going up, despite feeling free to substitute lower quality goods when people get poorer, and claiming that our money goes farther when the standard item gets better. Ie. If we go from eating sirloin steak generally to eating half-rotten meat.. well that's just substitutability, so the standard of living is maintained! Meanwhile, if today's laptops are much faster than those ten years ago, our money is going ten times farther, even though they are pretty much equivalent in their place in our lives. Having one of these systems at work in the calculations is pretty defendable. But having both is pretty outrageous
Back to the topic: even with all that chicanery, the cost of living is going up, and faster than inflation. Meanwhile, wages are going up slower than inflation. You don't have to be a genius to see that on average a living wage is in reach of fewer people than in the past. And that doesn't get into problems like wealth redistributive policies.
So as a software engineer, I'm not really in danger of not having a living wage right now, but I recognize that some americans are.
Lots of CS departments teach a language for the intro class, then in the second class they've moved onto a new programming language which was never introduced. What, you didn't learn it entirely on your own? Guess you aren't cut out to be a computer science student.
Note that in some cases that means the computer science student didn't teach themselves a new programming language over their first freshman winter break, possibly 4 months after programming for the first time.
The best part is: it's quite possible no one will tell them that they need to do it. They may show up for the next class sequence more or less entirely screwed.
Sure, as you go through college you learn to investigate these sorts of things -- search for non-obvious prerequisites, but have you mastered that before the first year is up?
Note that the person you're responding to *did* fill in the gaps, but points out that this damaged his or her ability to learn.
So your advice and position was followed, and the obvious outcome is being shared here: learning is harmed by too much of what you suggest is acceptable. Since college is *for* learning, it's a mistake.
I went to a fairly seriously academic private high school. I had plenty of challenges, and had successes and failures in my high school years. I learned to try to keep focused, to spend 3+ hours a night studying wIth larger projects like research papers on top of that. I struggled with difference equations problems (second semester calc) in my junior year for a variety of reasons (information wasn't presented so well) and managed to find the resolve to get through it.
Even with all that, I bounced right the heck off college math, and without huge class sizes. I was in a 40-ish member linear algebra class. There was no will to involve the students at all. There was lecture without explanation, new math symbols no one knew without introduction. If you wanted to pass that class you had to cheat, or teach yourself *entirely* on your own. I gave up on college entirely in about 2 months with the pattern repeated across introductory classes in other areas as well. I dropped out and went into computers and programming because I knew it paid.
It's not that college is hard (though it sometimes is a rough introduction). It's that the structure of early science/math doesn't even want anyone to be successful. If people learn things in that phase of school, it's may well be in spite of the structure of the education, rather than as a result of it.
Doing it in soft/firmware, and doing it right, is definitely preferable. We could go back to jumpering IRQs and DMA channels, but I think we're all happier doing this with software.
Doing it wrong in firmware with no escape clause is pretty bad though.
There *are* unpleasant boot sector type compromises. Old viruses did this of course, but fairly sophisticated attacks are possible.
Pretty sure he means the filesystem would be initialized, which is done with various filesystems which are sometimes flash aware and sometimes not. Either way a minority of pages are touched, as you say.
As for TRIM, it's certainly a good thing to do, although not everything supports it, and there's no guarantee it results in the pages being zeroed. In fact as one of the purposes of TRIM is improving wear levelling, zeroing out the pages would seem to be counterproductive. Instead the device should just add them to a free list. OR maybe you're right for performance reasons? (one has to zero a page before writing to it).
A salesperson who does not bend the truth is far and away the exception. Good on you. But more good on your employer who doesn't structure your pay to essentially require you to compete with your colleagues (on a quarter by quarter basis, not over time) who all DO bend it. Because if they did, you'd get let go if you fell behind, so you'd be similarly dishonest or let go. That's how the vast majority of sales organizations are structured.
There are various situations where increased productivity can result in lower sustainability, which makes you fail over the longer term.
The obvious example is agriculture. Modern machine and fertilizer agriculture is way more productive (per capita) than smaller scale advanced organic farms, using intercropping and nitrogen fixing-plants, etc. However, despite the much lower per-person productivity, it doesn't deplete the soil, and you can actually grow more food per square foot and more food over time (although diminishing returns with that latter bit. So the organic small-scale higher-labor farming is obviously long term superior. But it's not as productive.
Rosette: Good morning. My name is Rosette. What is your name?
You: Rosette, my name isn't important.
Rosette: OK. We will remain formal.
You: Why do I have to have javascript enabled to talk? I talk to most people without javascript.
Rosette: Why? If you were a devout Christian, you would never have a reason to ask that. "It's God's plan."
You: Your answer makes no sense at all.
Rosette: What would make better sense? So, what do you do for a living?
You: Okay change of topic, I guess, deflect your ignorance. In any event, I'm a programmer.
Rosette: I'm a computer programmer, myself, in crypto-security.
You: So what do you work on? Libraries? Security apps? Do you do analysis of existing code?
Rosette: I'm paid to be a hacker.
You: That's really inspecific.
Rosette: Yes, it is. Do you live around here?
You: Please stop changing topics.
Rosette: Right. I've got a dilemma. Maybe you could help me with it?
You: Please stop changing topics.
Rosette: Whatever. I've been thinking about buying this really cool dress, but I've already done a bunch of shopping this month. Should I be saving money instead? In today's economy, does saving money make any sense?
You: As rude as I am, you're more so. Self absorbed and attention-deficient. Why would anyone want to continue to talk to you past a few minutes?
Rosette: OK. I'm not religious. And I believe in free will. But to imagine humans do things for rational reasons is nuts. We are self-evidently not rational. So why remains a mystery.
You: Goodbye, bad chatbot.
Rosette: Bye. I think shopping summons up the ancient hunter-gatherer in me. I like having a mission to find something I need or want. Sometimes I'll research on line, to find a great deal, but I like rummaging through Jeremy's up the road, if I want an outfit for a special occasion, or just for fun.
- mass production
- structural integrity
- a larger amount of surface area possible without becoming unweildy
- comparatively fast access to any point in the text
None of these problems apply to continuous computer documents.
So the statement that the UN created those things is false, and it's reasonable to call people out who claim it.
They do apparently share some relationship in framers and intended goals. That is, to foster regularization of international relations in the hopes of staving off what was currengly going on in the early 40s.
i'll believe a credible story of cooption. That happens all the time. Conspiracy without substance, though..
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless:
Because people are doing work on laptops with wireless? They are going to meetings and expecting to be able to be productive and present things without everyone pulling cables out of the table and someone running short?
Watching site access:
Local culture thing. Shrug.
Flash player:
Because we write a product that needs flash to work?
"Supported Software":
You need to learn the difference between performing work that your policies assign yourselves to get software installed, vs being the on the hook for supporting it fully in a help-desk capacity.
The problem is the End User does the troubleshooting at the start, and then passes the problem fully analyzed to IT. IT hands the problem to their Help Desk personnel, who don't understand the problem, and try to troubleshoot it all over again, incorrectly.
After a few weeks of this, the End User gets pretty annoyed and raises a fuss. The IT people ask the Sysadmin to look at the problem. The Sysadmin hates this, but comes to the same conclusion as the End User -- the hardware is bad. Now the hardware can be replaced.
That's why sysadmins have to troubleshoot computer problems.
Fact.
Complete fact.
I hadn't heard of the irregularities in Napoleonic elections. Some googling turned up Victor Hugo's writings on the topic. http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/napoleon-the-little/45/
Are there other places I should read?
I think it's obvious that democracy isn't a proof against bad results, and anyone who says otherwise is usually politically grandstanding, or hiding something, or both.
The who gets to set the limits problem is pretty thorny though. Our (US) byzantine system of procedure for doing it seems better than a simple vote, or a simple law pass, or a single office or bureau getting to pick. But it has problems too.
I hate our IT department because:
- They cannot keep ethernet working.
- They cannot provide correctly functioning DNS
- They purchase huge expensive redundant solutions and configure them incorrectly so that they don't work. Eg how about a huge redundant cluster of VMs to run stuff on that are accessible over a link that runs at 200 kilobits per second. Sigh.
- Help desk does not even read help tickets, suggesting 4 things in 4 independent mails all of which were clearly ruled out in the original mail. There's 'making sure', and there's reading comprehenension.
In short, IT is really fucking annoying when they can't make infrastructure work correctly.
When they *can* make infrastructure work correctly, you don't notice them, so what positive is there to say?
Slashdot editors to not encourage lack of insufficient reading comprehension for the text that submitters don't send.
Well, the applicable laws would probably, in the end, be found to state that you can't revoke the games and that refunds would be appropriate.
However this would probably involve years of lawsuit to resolve, and likely would come as a class action that would result in coupons for end users, if there was any money left.
Of course, that's really what would happen *regardless* of what the EULA/TOS stated. It's an asymmetrical relationship, which means that the big gorilla gets his way by default. This is why asymmetrical relationships are a bad thing.
If I buy food from a market, it's a pretty reasonable relationship, even if the market is big. If I don't like their food, I can just stop shopping there (unless they're the only one). The market can't cancel my food after the fact.
DRM systems give the distributors far too much power. That's what's unconscionable about them. They make an egalitarian seller/buyer relationship into something ugly.
Having workd in, or near phone support for too many years, I will say that most are not competent.
There's pretty basic skills:
- Understanding the issue/problem the caller is calling about
- Determining a response to that problem that is relevant
- Ability to use english words to effectively communicate the reply
Most people fall down pretty hard on one of those three basic abilities. Frequently people get bored and stop paying attention to the caller's issues at all, and give them an irrelevant reply based on the first keywords they recognize.
And that doesn't get into consideration or analysis of problems. Eg typical stuff goes like this
Caller: "My computer is shooting out sparks!"
Support: "Did you make sure to plug it in?"
total non-understanding on the aprt of the person supposed to support the product.
I've worked in support departments where companies paid five thousand dollars to be allowed to call us, and we still had some if this BS.
That should be no surprise. Scientists are a bunch of assholes like everyone else.
However, peer review and scientific discourse allow them to undermine each others arguments when they're crap, and hold each other's feet to the fire when they get sloppy about their methods or conclusions.
In short, the individuals are good at being careful and accurate. The system is good at sorting out good information from bad. The process is good at finding truth.
I reject that this is entirely up to exposure.
My circles of friends growing up were nerds. We swapped commodore 64 pirated games. We played dungeons and dragons. At least until 13-14 or so we all fit the mould. The computer dorkery lasted a lot longer, through high school.
Of my 30 or so aquaintences, nearly all the anglos and asians have found themselves doing something technology related. A few are pretty hardcore doing EE or embedded programming. Many are more IT or programmer types like me. Some had other focuses and created web sites or "social networking" whatever (retch). Some went into videogames, or makeing art or music for them. Not one of the 5 african american kids ended up in anything tech related. One's a counselor, one's a piano teacher and church organizer, one dropped off the face of the earth, and one's an accountant.
There's a *huge* skew here. These kids were given computers as very young people. We played videogames together as teenagers. On the c64 sometimes you had to fix the basic that would screw up due to a bad crack. I shared my exp tracking program I wrote in BASIC, and someone added features to it (it was bad). But all the african american kids dropped it, and they dropped it after the age of 16-17, when I no longer was following their lives so closely.
This can't be soley from a lack of exposure and opportunity. There's more to it.
There's a middle ground though. Using tools you have to stretch a bit and get better at applying them is something we should expect of ourselves and each other in a learning environment.
Being given challenging problems when you've not even learned how to apply the tools yet at all is frequently not rewarding, and frequently offputting.
Sure, people have to adjust, but it's easy for you to underestimate how far the students will have to adjust, and it sounds like you're not doing a very good job providing those first steps.
Maybe you don't think that's your job. I think you're wrong. It's the primary difference between teachers and professors, and I think its a big problem.
Globally, that's true.
However, within the confines of the United States, that's not true.
The so-called cost-of-living index is going up, despite feeling free to substitute lower quality goods when people get poorer, and claiming that our money goes farther when the standard item gets better. Ie. If we go from eating sirloin steak generally to eating half-rotten meat .. well that's just substitutability, so the standard of living is maintained! Meanwhile, if today's laptops are much faster than those ten years ago, our money is going ten times farther, even though they are pretty much equivalent in their place in our lives. Having one of these systems at work in the calculations is pretty defendable. But having both is pretty outrageous
Back to the topic: even with all that chicanery, the cost of living is going up, and faster than inflation. Meanwhile, wages are going up slower than inflation. You don't have to be a genius to see that on average a living wage is in reach of fewer people than in the past. And that doesn't get into problems like wealth redistributive policies.
So as a software engineer, I'm not really in danger of not having a living wage right now, but I recognize that some americans are.
That sort of things is quite common.
Lots of CS departments teach a language for the intro class, then in the second class they've moved onto a new programming language which was never introduced. What, you didn't learn it entirely on your own? Guess you aren't cut out to be a computer science student.
Note that in some cases that means the computer science student didn't teach themselves a new programming language over their first freshman winter break, possibly 4 months after programming for the first time.
The best part is: it's quite possible no one will tell them that they need to do it. They may show up for the next class sequence more or less entirely screwed.
Sure, as you go through college you learn to investigate these sorts of things -- search for non-obvious prerequisites, but have you mastered that before the first year is up?
Note that the person you're responding to *did* fill in the gaps, but points out that this damaged his or her ability to learn.
So your advice and position was followed, and the obvious outcome is being shared here: learning is harmed by too much of what you suggest is acceptable. Since college is *for* learning, it's a mistake.
I went to a fairly seriously academic private high school. I had plenty of challenges, and had successes and failures in my high school years. I learned to try to keep focused, to spend 3+ hours a night studying wIth larger projects like research papers on top of that. I struggled with difference equations problems (second semester calc) in my junior year for a variety of reasons (information wasn't presented so well) and managed to find the resolve to get through it.
Even with all that, I bounced right the heck off college math, and without huge class sizes. I was in a 40-ish member linear algebra class. There was no will to involve the students at all. There was lecture without explanation, new math symbols no one knew without introduction. If you wanted to pass that class you had to cheat, or teach yourself *entirely* on your own. I gave up on college entirely in about 2 months with the pattern repeated across introductory classes in other areas as well. I dropped out and went into computers and programming because I knew it paid.
It's not that college is hard (though it sometimes is a rough introduction). It's that the structure of early science/math doesn't even want anyone to be successful. If people learn things in that phase of school, it's may well be in spite of the structure of the education, rather than as a result of it.
I came looking for study results, but all I got were assertions and recommendations based on those assertions.
So disappointed.
I definitely agree with the assertions, but I wanted to find out if I was right.
Doing it in soft/firmware, and doing it right, is definitely preferable. We could go back to jumpering IRQs and DMA channels, but I think we're all happier doing this with software.
Doing it wrong in firmware with no escape clause is pretty bad though.
There *are* unpleasant boot sector type compromises. Old viruses did this of course, but fairly sophisticated attacks are possible.
Pretty sure he means the filesystem would be initialized, which is done with various filesystems which are sometimes flash aware and sometimes not. Either way a minority of pages are touched, as you say.
As for TRIM, it's certainly a good thing to do, although not everything supports it, and there's no guarantee it results in the pages being zeroed. In fact as one of the purposes of TRIM is improving wear levelling, zeroing out the pages would seem to be counterproductive. Instead the device should just add them to a free list. OR maybe you're right for performance reasons? (one has to zero a page before writing to it).
A salesperson who does not bend the truth is far and away the exception. Good on you. But more good on your employer who doesn't structure your pay to essentially require you to compete with your colleagues (on a quarter by quarter basis, not over time) who all DO bend it. Because if they did, you'd get let go if you fell behind, so you'd be similarly dishonest or let go. That's how the vast majority of sales organizations are structured.
Increased productivity isn't always useful either.
There are various situations where increased productivity can result in lower sustainability, which makes you fail over the longer term.
The obvious example is agriculture. Modern machine and fertilizer agriculture is way more productive (per capita) than smaller scale advanced organic farms, using intercropping and nitrogen fixing-plants, etc. However, despite the much lower per-person productivity, it doesn't deplete the soil, and you can actually grow more food per square foot and more food over time (although diminishing returns with that latter bit. So the organic small-scale higher-labor farming is obviously long term superior. But it's not as productive.
How is this any different from an ethernet card driver you aren't using?
Rosette: Good morning. My name is Rosette. What is your name?
You: Rosette, my name isn't important.
Rosette: OK. We will remain formal.
You: Why do I have to have javascript enabled to talk? I talk to most people without javascript.
Rosette: Why? If you were a devout Christian, you would never have a reason to ask that. "It's God's plan."
You: Your answer makes no sense at all.
Rosette: What would make better sense? So, what do you do for a living?
You: Okay change of topic, I guess, deflect your ignorance. In any event, I'm a programmer.
Rosette: I'm a computer programmer, myself, in crypto-security.
You: So what do you work on? Libraries? Security apps? Do you do analysis of existing code?
Rosette: I'm paid to be a hacker.
You: That's really inspecific.
Rosette: Yes, it is. Do you live around here?
You: Please stop changing topics.
Rosette: Right. I've got a dilemma. Maybe you could help me with it?
You: Please stop changing topics.
Rosette: Whatever. I've been thinking about buying this really cool dress, but I've already done a bunch of shopping this month. Should I be saving money instead? In today's economy, does saving money make any sense?
You: As rude as I am, you're more so. Self absorbed and attention-deficient. Why would anyone want to continue to talk to you past a few minutes?
Rosette: OK. I'm not religious. And I believe in free will. But to imagine humans do things for rational reasons is nuts. We are self-evidently not rational. So why remains a mystery.
You: Goodbye, bad chatbot.
Rosette: Bye. I think shopping summons up the ancient hunter-gatherer in me. I like having a mission to find something I need or want. Sometimes I'll research on line, to find a great deal, but I like rummaging through Jeremy's up the road, if I want an outfit for a special occasion, or just for fun.
Not really, books are more convenient for:
- mass production
- structural integrity
- a larger amount of surface area possible without becoming unweildy
- comparatively fast access to any point in the text
None of these problems apply to continuous computer documents.
So the statement that the UN created those things is false, and it's reasonable to call people out who claim it.
They do apparently share some relationship in framers and intended goals. That is, to foster regularization of international relations in the hopes of staving off what was currengly going on in the early 40s.
i'll believe a credible story of cooption. That happens all the time. Conspiracy without substance, though..