Sure they are. It's rather hard to detect the morons from the people "being sarcastic", as the postings are incredibly similar. Couple that with the fact that the morons usually backtrack and then claim that they were "joking" or "being sarcastic" and you have a pretty hilarious situation.
BTW: If this posting is okay, then I'm serious, otherwise I'm being sarcastic. Haha. I'm funny.
Uh, no, it isn't. A T1 has a DS1 speed, which is 1.544 megabit per second. I contract in the telecom industry so I know what I'm talking about. Spending about 3 seconds in Google and you would have long been aware of this.
These people are buying T1s for hundreds of dollars a month, then selling us a lousy 3Mbps for $80/mo
? You realize, of course, that a T1 is about 1.544Mbps, or 1/2 that 3Mbps, don't you? In any case, if they were making so much profit then there'd be competitors galore all eating at the trough, but the reality is that, apart from a short burst which ended in lots of bankruptcy, there is incredibly little money in bandwidth for end users.
Isn't it accepted that it rhymes with either room or dumb? I have no doubt that there are professors who try to push the former to disassociate it with it's triple X relative.
However, there is no literal translation of cum because of differences in the languages (i.e. I don't believe that you could say that it maps to a single English word), but rather the usage defines the definition. i.e. In combinations it means "together with", sort of a "acting as".
Is it being misused? While the dictionary definition is "together with" (which would make the posting correct as it is a game machine together with an attack tool piece of software), the popular usage is sortof a "transformed into".
What is the specific relevance of the "Dreamcast" application? I think we all get that consoles are "computers", and with an operating system like Linux there is little to differentiate them from a PC, so why would someone be more likely to drop a rather out-of-place looking dreamcast in a corporation for inside attacks? It just seems really silly to proclaim that there's some additional risk because "theoretically" a dreamcast can be used.
Having said that, many large corporations now enable/disable network drops in a very controlled fashion, and many do MAC filtering on each switch port, the former limits "free" ports sitting for the waiting, and latter ensures that if someone put a hub on one of the active ports that they couldn't communicate on it without a small amount of work (i.e. listening for MAC addresses and then dealing with the conflicts if it tried to duplicate the other devices MAC address). I'm sure there are a lot of companies still getting by with 10Mbps hubs, but I'd like to think that they're the exception rather than the rule now a days? Of course, many companies still have an absurd notion that security is had by simply putting up a firewall, and then all is great, ignoring the massive risk that comes from trojans that get inside the gates. I actually got in an argument with an associate in the business recently when I stipulated that their system needs to presume that there is no firewall, and the system is completely accessible to the outside world. His reply was "Well, we don't worry much about hackers anyways, because there's no way to stop the good ones so why bother?". I was flabbergasted.
As he mentioned, the NYT does referral checks now. By disabling referral forwarding in Opera the site worked perfectly, but when it was enabled the NYT denied it.
Likely the total cost to Sony for this ad "campaign" will be a fax to the Wall Street Journal. As you mention, it looks like it worked brilliantly.
BTW: I'm going advertise my products by hiring midgets to dive off of the tallest building in every city, saving themselves by bouncing on a giant rubber mat that has my logo. This will be right after I launch satellites that are so large that they block out the sun, but show my logo to humanity all day long.
Wow, you really got me there, didn't you genius? I'll go back to school to learn that blog is a "part of a series of words", in this case "Web Log". That's pretty sad if that's your big coup d'états. Maybe I coulda added a comma to a couple of those sentences too, but apparently you missed that in your misguided attempt at redemption.
Also, it might surprize you to know that everything that comes out of a human beings mouth is "opinion". If I write about what's "funny" then I'm stating an opinion. If I talk about going to a thai food place for dinner, I'm implicitly stating an opinion. Observations are really experience clouded by opinion.
So, if I'm "like their leader", then you're the self appointed leader of the anti-blog crusade? In reality I'm not a blog kinda person, and I don't read them myself just because I'm into different things, but it drives me nutty seeing envious, shallow people slathering psychoanalysis on any behaviour that isn't the behaviour that they sanction. We've seen it for people who watch TV, people who like movies, people who listen to Britney Spears, people who play video games, on and on and on: Always the self-righteous assholes ready to profess as to why all "those other" people are wrong. Now if someone was doing something that personally affected you, then sure you have a voice, but when we're talking about people doing something that has absolutely no affect on your whatsoever, then that's just sad.
The underlying purpose of a weblog is to make the writer feel important. No matter what kind of ruse is adopted for a particular weblog, it is designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader, the goal being to convince someone else that goon writer x is not a run-of-the- mill...it is an identity issue, a confidence issue.
What a depressing take on your fellow man. As the old saying goes "Every man has a story to tell". Apparently to a few of you only a select few have a story to tell. I suggest that you should lighten up a bit, and perhaps realize that there is no such thing as a "run of the mill" person (perhaps you need some confidence training): Everyone lives a unique, fascinating life, at least to those who care to listen and learn. To those who don't: No one's asking you to stay.
And I do agree that the only people worth listening to have obtained fame; that's why I read the stories of Hemingway and grasp at the concepts of Einstein
This is supposed to be a humorous attempt at irony given your earlier "it is an identity issue, a confidence issue". I'll bet you listen to classical music and only drink latte too, right?
Good for you. And we don't care that you don't care about it, yet here you are...
I don't care what happened to somebody on the street
Good for you. And we don't care that you don't care what happened to them on the street, yet here you are...
These things should be left to his/her self, like a diary.
Don't you have a diary you should be writing this in? "WHY EVERYONE SUCKS", by casings
The only reason i can see that someone would want to have a log of their daily life, is for an auto-biography, which should be left to someone who has been in the public eye quite a bit, and whos private life has been affected by it.
Oh, so you're the one who chooses who can write about themselves? I'd say that you've assigned yourself quite a degree of self-importance, wouldn't you agree? Blogs, auto-biographies, whatever, are voluntary (are you forced to read them), and if you don't like it then don't read it. This idea that only people that you feel are interesting should have the right to write down their thoughts which other people who want some entertainment can voluntarily read is unbelievable.
You show your sense of self-importance when you pick on the term "blog": I saw something similar in a local newspaper recently in the "Ask Some Random Columnist" column where a writer wrote in raving about how their friend used a longer word instead a shorter synonym, and how much this drives her nuts. You see, she believes the friend is doing it to "sound intelligent". Yet here's this lady doing everything she can to show her friend as being an idiot for using whatever word she feels is appropriate: Maybe it rolls off the tongue better for her, or she just likes the feel of it. How bitterly ironic. In the case of "Blog", I may not like the term, and as an acronym it's pretty weak, but to many people that is the word that they picked up as a description for what they do and it's a part of the vernacular, oops, language now.
Like it or not, blogs are now in vogue. Anyone who's anyone has one (guess I'm not anyone - I haven't updated my slashdot journal since march).
Huh? "Blogs" were in vogue years ago, and if you think this is some new fangled thing then I'd say that you're a little late to the party.
It's just another way to make unimportant people feel important....Even then, it annoys me to read about taking his In laws out for Thai food, for example. Why the hell should I care about his love of Thai food? Yeah, I know "if it annoys you don't read it". Well, I don't any more.
This just blows me away. Exactly as you alluded to yourself (just as you alluded to the fact that you tried your hand at having a journal through the Slashdot system) if you don't like it, then don't god damn read it. The irony of reading your, and other, posts about "unimportant people trying to feel important", or people with "confidence issues", the only people who have a frothing problem with blogs, websites, whatever, are people with grotesque confidence issues and a serious chip on their shoulders. I've seen these people take jabs at Jamie Zawinski, Joel (on Software), etc: It's a sad envy that these people have people who find their writings interesting. Of all the human traits, raw envy has got to rank as one of the most profounding depressing and deplorable.
if through the magic of online ordering they have the potential to convert a sale right now, why waste ad budget with branding type ads?
Because instant sales very rarely work: Most people shop for certain things within' a very tight window (for instance I think "Boy, I need a new pair of shoes" and shortly thereafter I have myself a new pair of shoes), and it's incredibly unlikely that the prospective client is looking for exactly what your popup is selling at the moment that you get your big chance. That's the whole point behind brand recognition and branding: The ad isn't only effective the moment it's shown, but is also effective days later when the customer is at the store looking for shoes, and that Sketchers brand really rings a bell...
BTW: Branding is the most common form of advertisement-> Newspapers, sides of buses, bus shelters, billboards, TV, magazines, etc.
Pop-up ads were a really bad idea since day one, and the net effect is that many people mentally associate "browsing the web" with a very bad experience. The short term gains of pop-up (or under) ads is very likely for little gain when all your users either go elsewhere, or just give up on looking up information on the net altogether (it's already started happening: The net became the "new TV" for a lot of people, but after months of frustration with bad connections, bad software, and hostile sites, many people went back to other forms of entertainment).
It's quite astounding that standard old-fashion "brand building" advertisements are so uncommon on the net: Where are the Coca Cola, Tums, Maxipad, and food commercials that fill the television airwaves? None of these commercials expect me to click on them and buy the product now.
If I had to pick the #1 best-done Internet advertisement ever, I would say that it was during "You Don't Know Jack - The Webshow" quite a few years back (man, that was a good 4 or 5 years ago). That really was revolutionary, and it really stuck certain names in my mind (such as Sketchers. I'd never heard of them before YDKJTWS).
One thing I've found with automated QA products is that usually they have critical faults that prevent them from being realistically useful (for instance many of them grind to a halt or give false positives in multithreaded apps). How's this product for real world use? (And no this isn't a "Read the Article!" question...the article is like a press release and hence doesn't answer my question).
Re:Training with Video Games
on
Gaming Zone?
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· Score: 1
A NASCAR driver who drives on a road course once a year will have just as much knowledge of the course as an open wheel driver who drives road courses all year, but drive a particular course once per year. F1 drivers (such as Jacques Villeneuve) make extensive use of computer games to get to know the tracks.
Of course that could go both ways: If the game models a particular section of track wrong (which is the nature of the beast, especially given that the tracks often change in subtle ways from year to year), imagine the mental confusion you have everytime you come up to it and your brain, having played the computer game hundreds of time, yells "It's supposed to curve left 30 degrees here!".
If it's under 150, I'm losing because my opponents are cheating.
Or perhaps they're in the zone? Have you never dominated and had countless clueless weenies claiming that you were cheating? Of course you laughed it off, but if you're willing to then throw claims the opposing way when you're not dominating then you might be a little one-sided in your interpretation.
Joining cheaters is reprehensible: I give up on games long before I'd waste my time playing a game where it isn't me playing, but rather a cheat. I really don't get the motivation behind that. Cheating in online games betrays the type of personality attributes that would assure me that if I knew these people in "Real life", I would never do business or fraternize with them.
If this is your impression of the zone (a lazy stupor), then I think you might be misinterpreting what they're calling "the zone". The zone in gaming is when your entire neurological system seems to be working together to perfection, and it really is an astounding state of mind (and is generally very rare). I occasionally play the game Urban Terror (an online multiplayer game) and generally am middle of the road in skill, but every now and then I'll have a session where everything just clicks absolutely perfectly, and I dominate every round: That is the zone.
And that's just it: The anti-goto fanatics always use as their defense the "Well if you did this, and this, and this, then you wouldn't have the goto! See, therefore I've proven that goto is bad!", but to those of us for whom goto is just one of many programming tools at our disposal, we use the goto because we feel that it simplifies and cleans up the code, and can significantly clarify a segment of code.
The anti-goto campaign is understandable in the respect that it is a method of keeping the untalented from shooting themselves in the foot. By the same token, all languages but VB.NET are evil and are only for the crazy kooks!
In truth, I'm not really pro or con XP, and I can see how components could be advantageous in certain situations. For instance, exactly as you mentioned large companies often have very strict processes because people respect that which is encapsulated in a methodology, so by calling these less activities "XP" it's legitimized it. Now someone can legitimately compare "XP versus 12207" rather than "12207 versus unorganized chaos!".
My particular gripe with this book I brought forth only because I just happened to just finish it (in two short train ride commutes to work) and it happened to be sitting beside my desk when this request for book suggestions came up. Again, my real issue with this book is that the content is so trivial that it could have been condensed ot a hyphenated list covering a page, and two that there isn't the effort to study actual scenarios and derive metrics to support the suppositions (which, when we buy a fact book, is largely what we should be paying for). Paying $45 Canadian for a very brief, softcover, cuff of the pants "the way I see it is..." book just hit me the wrong way, and truly was something that I see as nothing more than a money grab capitalizing on an industry grasping for salvations.
The quality of a book is not directly proportional to it's thickness/weight/# of pages.....With all due respect ergo98 you sound fairly uninformed
Oh give me a break. Firstly, it is a personal review, and saying that I am "uninformed" about my own opinion of a book hints of stunning arrogance. Secondly, the size of a book conveys the amount of information, and backing of said information, that a technical tome has: If a "Advanced C++" book were 80 pages of large print, there is a very good foundation to say that perhaps it's a tad incomplete.
the idea that productivity increases emerge from the interaction of a number of different practices, and not one single "silver bullet" sounds like common sense to me, not snake oil.
What absolutely ridiculous nonsense. Each of the various factors proposed in Extreme Programming Explained are completely independant ideas: Pair program, build the tests first, go by the seat of your pants, refactor-> Many first use one or more of these as a basic factor of software development. The idea that these functionally separate philosophies come together to form some new paradigm is ridiculous, and the book proposes that even if you're 80% of the way to incorporating XP, you still might not see the benefits because the last 20% is what'll push you over the top: That is the nonsense of cultists, and people who want to sell a whole series of books describing what could be thoroughly described on a one page website.
The ideas behind XP Explained were not hashed together on the weekend, they came out of years of experience in smalltalk projects, culminating in the C3 project at Chrysler
The ideas behind XP Explained isn't some clever new paradigm developed at Chrysler: These are things that small, dynamic shops have been doing since the beginning of software development (about the only, and most critized and dubious, claim of XP that could be considered unique is pair programming, however the foundation for that sounds like someone should re-read Peopleware). I appreciate that it's been given a name (though most advocates have taken to call it "Agile Development" instead, somewhat embarrased about the "Extreme" title), but this is not some amazing new paradigm breakthorugh some someone independantly developed and is unleashing to the world: It's basic observations.
you compare a seminal book in the software engineering/methodology field (regardless of whether you agree with it) unfavourably with a computer game? Huh? I like computer games, but there's a hell of a lot of trash that gets pumped out in that industry. Not a very good comparison in my opinion.
My comparison was specifically to the amount of work that went into the product versus the amount of reward (the costXcopies) that they derive from it. This book I know has sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies, yet I will say it again: It literally could have been put together on the weekend (versus games that sell similar numbers of copies at a similar price, yet take years of work for teams): There are virtually no empirical studies or statistical analysis to back up the claims of the book (because such would be work), but rather it's just someone meandering on, rather verbosely, about some trivially easy to comprehend beliefs of software development. Maybe I just don't understand XP, and it'll all come together in some Voltron like magnification system that'll make me understand it 500x more if I pony up $30 US each for all the other books in his series (he hints at those books in this book as well...keep the $ coming kids!).
If this book were $9.99, perhaps I would think "Huh, pretty empty but as an opinion piece of some guy's take on software development it was fascinating", but at $30 ($45 Canadian) it's just an outrage. I came to the conclusion many years ago that many books that line the bookstore are vacuous, useless money grabs, so normally this would have been heaped in the reject pile at a cursory glance, however I made the mistake of ordering it online sight unseen: That is a mistake I will not make again (at least not without considerable reviews indicating that it's worthy).
This is a tremendous waste of money at $45 CDN ($29.95 US). Firstly, it's lacking gross content at a measly 165 pages of large print pages (for $45 that is already criminal). More importantly, however, the content that is there could easily have been condensed to a two page article (I say this with complete sincerity): The author clearly strung along simple statements for long periods of time to convey the idea of foundation for some pretty dubious assertions.
While I've always found XP to be pretty sketchy to begin with (indeed this book further convinced me of that: This book actually claims that each of its revolutionary new ideas can't be measured alone, but rather have to be all performed in parallel, whereby they'll have an amazing cross-product effect and you'll get multiples of the effects of each piece individually. I couldn't help but thinking of snake oil salesmen: "You didn't have the best luvin' ever? Well you muster forgot to take it while facin' to the East!"
The only way I could even imagine recommending this book is if the same copy is going to be shared among a very large team, but otherwise save you're money. It's shameful to think that this book that literally could have been hashed together on the weekend is seling for the same price that a game that a team worked on for a couple of years.
which you make out to be massive though everybody hates immmigrants
Very few people "hate immigrants", and the reality is that North America is all immigrants. I'm 1/8th Native American and I'll still say that they were immigrants too. The problem is that we've built such a nice society that everyone wants to crash the party (the same for Europe as well), and the problem is that there's only so much stress that said society can endure before the things that make it great are lost (just like a party becomes a bust if everyone in the town decides to crash it).
And you have no valid argument other than you canadian equity (whatever that is) is being diluted so it's easy to conclude that you're being racist.
This would make some sense if being "Canadian" was a particular race, creed or religion, but the reality is that the Canadians for whom I'm defending the "ownership" rights of come in every colour, shape and size. I will presume from this that if you want to see a racist, you might want to look in the mirror.
First of all that is complete bullshit, and not only that immigrants LEFT their homeland.. so dont judge them on what people in their homelands believe (if they believed the same things they wouldnt be in Canada).
The point is that you bear a hatred to these people who are just coming to Canada seeking a better future for themselves and their kids.
How very naive. Firstly, many migrants nowadays are economic migrants: They come to North America or Europe because the money is good, not because they see a society working quite well in peace and harmony. Yet, when World Cup season hits they're parading the streets with flags of whatever nationality they originated from (it depends on the society. For example, Japanese `assimilate' and become die-hard Canadians very quickly [as Canadian as anybody], but there are other societies that form very distinct cliques, and remain most loyal to their homeland: They treat being here as a form of prostitution-> They're just doing it until they have enough to go home a king, or a queen as the case may be, or for Canada many come here just long enough to get their citizenship so they can then make the transition to the US. Many of these societies are overwhelmingly racist [see who they let their daughter marry] and carry the baggage of hate and intolerance from their homeland). Every time a world conflict arises these people go storming embassies not as Canadians looking out for the interests of Canada and/or NATO, but as whatever-they-were looking out for their original nations interests. Already we're seeing Middle Eastern hatred and intolerance rising in Canada as people bring their baggage from their countries to North America. During the Yugoslavian crisis every day you could catch some "Serbian Canadian" derided Canada and stomping on our flag, and pledging allegienge to their country (it's unfortunate that their Canadian landed immigrant cards couldn't have been confiscated right there, but we're too bleeding heart to actually say "Hey, maybe we should make people value what we're giving them instead of taking it for granted").
It is nonsensical to claim that North Americans, or Europeans (note that these are Geographic areas, not races or religions) don't have any right to defend what is theirs, and bringing up Hitler or crying racism is just pathetic (it's the classic that any race or country can be horribly racist and exclusive, except for "white man North America or Europe". I wonder how people feel about emigrating to the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, or any other fairly well off nation).
There is a very powerful pro-immigration lobby in North America, and in a nutshell it is "The Wealthy". When you're wealthy and you own the infrastructure, raising the GDP significantly contributes to your wealth, but to the common man the GDP/capita stays the same or declines (when adjusted against inflation). These people live in gated communities with a wealth buffer that shields them from anything adverse, so what the hell: Open the gates. You're entirely right that "big business" is pro-immigration, and it's for the same reason (because it's the same people). Note that I never said that we should have NO immigration, but rather that we are threatening that which makes us a destination in the first place when you bring in people so rapidly that they form mini versions of their home country: Take a walk through Chinatown in Toronto some day - In what historically was a clean city is one of the dirtiest, almost third-worldish feeling area because standards weren't propagated as masses came in, bringing along the monster that they were fleeing.
Whoever the project manager is should have recognized different skill sets or motivations very early on and pursued actions to rectify it. While about 90% of the postings to this thread have been "Boohoo, I'm out of work so fire them all!", the reality is that no business sustains with a "fire them all" mentality (which is why those posts are all by people working for someone else), and the reality is that almost every talented employee has periods of low productivity, sometimes lasting for months. Again, these are just basics of human nature that one has to recognize and plan around.
The reality is that people are motivated by varying things (and "fear of being fired" is the #1 worst motivator and is the cyclical spiral to oblivion for any organization), and a good project manager understands how to understand and utilize those motivations (and it very seldomly is $, by the way): The biggest ___KILLER___ to motivation (and it's a killer in the sense that people will write garbage code, if any at all, regardless of their skillz) is a project death march: A project that has no hope in hell of ever being finished, and is absolutely guaranteed to be killed. Any talented coder will have a brain gnawing at them screaming "THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME!", and the truth of the mater is that in the end, sitting around reading Slashdot all day, or dutifully spitting out lines of code, has the same net result: The project is canned and the code is deleted. There are many projects out there like this, pursued by managers with agendas and severe myopia: If your project is like this then good for you, but realize that it won't be long before you too spend your days wishing for 5pm to hit.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they are. It's rather hard to detect the morons from the people "being sarcastic", as the postings are incredibly similar. Couple that with the fact that the morons usually backtrack and then claim that they were "joking" or "being sarcastic" and you have a pretty hilarious situation.
BTW: If this posting is okay, then I'm serious, otherwise I'm being sarcastic. Haha. I'm funny.
Uh, no, it isn't. A T1 has a DS1 speed, which is 1.544 megabit per second. I contract in the telecom industry so I know what I'm talking about. Spending about 3 seconds in Google and you would have long been aware of this.
These people are buying T1s for hundreds of dollars a month, then selling us a lousy 3Mbps for $80/mo
? You realize, of course, that a T1 is about 1.544Mbps, or 1/2 that 3Mbps, don't you? In any case, if they were making so much profit then there'd be competitors galore all eating at the trough, but the reality is that, apart from a short burst which ended in lots of bankruptcy, there is incredibly little money in bandwidth for end users.
Isn't it accepted that it rhymes with either room or dumb? I have no doubt that there are professors who try to push the former to disassociate it with it's triple X relative.
However, there is no literal translation of cum because of differences in the languages (i.e. I don't believe that you could say that it maps to a single English word), but rather the usage defines the definition. i.e. In combinations it means "together with", sort of a "acting as".
Is it being misused? While the dictionary definition is "together with" (which would make the posting correct as it is a game machine together with an attack tool piece of software), the popular usage is sortof a "transformed into".
i.e.
Simple nerd cum spider shooting superhero
Lowly PC cum corporate server
blah blah.
What is the specific relevance of the "Dreamcast" application? I think we all get that consoles are "computers", and with an operating system like Linux there is little to differentiate them from a PC, so why would someone be more likely to drop a rather out-of-place looking dreamcast in a corporation for inside attacks? It just seems really silly to proclaim that there's some additional risk because "theoretically" a dreamcast can be used.
Having said that, many large corporations now enable/disable network drops in a very controlled fashion, and many do MAC filtering on each switch port, the former limits "free" ports sitting for the waiting, and latter ensures that if someone put a hub on one of the active ports that they couldn't communicate on it without a small amount of work (i.e. listening for MAC addresses and then dealing with the conflicts if it tried to duplicate the other devices MAC address). I'm sure there are a lot of companies still getting by with 10Mbps hubs, but I'd like to think that they're the exception rather than the rule now a days? Of course, many companies still have an absurd notion that security is had by simply putting up a firewall, and then all is great, ignoring the massive risk that comes from trojans that get inside the gates. I actually got in an argument with an associate in the business recently when I stipulated that their system needs to presume that there is no firewall, and the system is completely accessible to the outside world. His reply was "Well, we don't worry much about hackers anyways, because there's no way to stop the good ones so why bother?". I was flabbergasted.
As he mentioned, the NYT does referral checks now. By disabling referral forwarding in Opera the site worked perfectly, but when it was enabled the NYT denied it.
this pdf also offers an extremely good tutorial of the game.
Likely the total cost to Sony for this ad "campaign" will be a fax to the Wall Street Journal. As you mention, it looks like it worked brilliantly.
BTW: I'm going advertise my products by hiring midgets to dive off of the tallest building in every city, saving themselves by bouncing on a giant rubber mat that has my logo. This will be right after I launch satellites that are so large that they block out the sun, but show my logo to humanity all day long.
Wow, you really got me there, didn't you genius? I'll go back to school to learn that blog is a "part of a series of words", in this case "Web Log". That's pretty sad if that's your big coup d'états. Maybe I coulda added a comma to a couple of those sentences too, but apparently you missed that in your misguided attempt at redemption.
Also, it might surprize you to know that everything that comes out of a human beings mouth is "opinion". If I write about what's "funny" then I'm stating an opinion. If I talk about going to a thai food place for dinner, I'm implicitly stating an opinion. Observations are really experience clouded by opinion.
So, if I'm "like their leader", then you're the self appointed leader of the anti-blog crusade? In reality I'm not a blog kinda person, and I don't read them myself just because I'm into different things, but it drives me nutty seeing envious, shallow people slathering psychoanalysis on any behaviour that isn't the behaviour that they sanction. We've seen it for people who watch TV, people who like movies, people who listen to Britney Spears, people who play video games, on and on and on: Always the self-righteous assholes ready to profess as to why all "those other" people are wrong. Now if someone was doing something that personally affected you, then sure you have a voice, but when we're talking about people doing something that has absolutely no affect on your whatsoever, then that's just sad.
The underlying purpose of a weblog is to make the writer feel important. No matter what kind of ruse is adopted for a particular weblog, it is designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader, the goal being to convince someone else that goon writer x is not a run-of-the- mill...it is an identity issue, a confidence issue.
What a depressing take on your fellow man. As the old saying goes "Every man has a story to tell". Apparently to a few of you only a select few have a story to tell. I suggest that you should lighten up a bit, and perhaps realize that there is no such thing as a "run of the mill" person (perhaps you need some confidence training): Everyone lives a unique, fascinating life, at least to those who care to listen and learn. To those who don't: No one's asking you to stay.
And I do agree that the only people worth listening to have obtained fame; that's why I read the stories of Hemingway and grasp at the concepts of Einstein
This is supposed to be a humorous attempt at irony given your earlier "it is an identity issue, a confidence issue". I'll bet you listen to classical music and only drink latte too, right?
I don't care about other people's daily life.
Good for you. And we don't care that you don't care about it, yet here you are...
I don't care what happened to somebody on the street
Good for you. And we don't care that you don't care what happened to them on the street, yet here you are...
These things should be left to his/her self, like a diary.
Don't you have a diary you should be writing this in? "WHY EVERYONE SUCKS", by casings
The only reason i can see that someone would want to have a log of their daily life, is for an auto-biography, which should be left to someone who has been in the public eye quite a bit, and whos private life has been affected by it.
Oh, so you're the one who chooses who can write about themselves? I'd say that you've assigned yourself quite a degree of self-importance, wouldn't you agree? Blogs, auto-biographies, whatever, are voluntary (are you forced to read them), and if you don't like it then don't read it. This idea that only people that you feel are interesting should have the right to write down their thoughts which other people who want some entertainment can voluntarily read is unbelievable.
You show your sense of self-importance when you pick on the term "blog": I saw something similar in a local newspaper recently in the "Ask Some Random Columnist" column where a writer wrote in raving about how their friend used a longer word instead a shorter synonym, and how much this drives her nuts. You see, she believes the friend is doing it to "sound intelligent". Yet here's this lady doing everything she can to show her friend as being an idiot for using whatever word she feels is appropriate: Maybe it rolls off the tongue better for her, or she just likes the feel of it. How bitterly ironic. In the case of "Blog", I may not like the term, and as an acronym it's pretty weak, but to many people that is the word that they picked up as a description for what they do and it's a part of the vernacular, oops, language now.
Like it or not, blogs are now in vogue. Anyone who's anyone has one (guess I'm not anyone - I haven't updated my slashdot journal since march).
Huh? "Blogs" were in vogue years ago, and if you think this is some new fangled thing then I'd say that you're a little late to the party.
It's just another way to make unimportant people feel important....Even then, it annoys me to read about taking his In laws out for Thai food, for example. Why the hell should I care about his love of Thai food? Yeah, I know "if it annoys you don't read it". Well, I don't any more.
This just blows me away. Exactly as you alluded to yourself (just as you alluded to the fact that you tried your hand at having a journal through the Slashdot system) if you don't like it, then don't god damn read it. The irony of reading your, and other, posts about "unimportant people trying to feel important", or people with "confidence issues", the only people who have a frothing problem with blogs, websites, whatever, are people with grotesque confidence issues and a serious chip on their shoulders. I've seen these people take jabs at Jamie Zawinski, Joel (on Software), etc: It's a sad envy that these people have people who find their writings interesting. Of all the human traits, raw envy has got to rank as one of the most profounding depressing and deplorable.
if through the magic of online ordering they have the potential to convert a sale right now, why waste ad budget with branding type ads?
Because instant sales very rarely work: Most people shop for certain things within' a very tight window (for instance I think "Boy, I need a new pair of shoes" and shortly thereafter I have myself a new pair of shoes), and it's incredibly unlikely that the prospective client is looking for exactly what your popup is selling at the moment that you get your big chance. That's the whole point behind brand recognition and branding: The ad isn't only effective the moment it's shown, but is also effective days later when the customer is at the store looking for shoes, and that Sketchers brand really rings a bell...
BTW: Branding is the most common form of advertisement-> Newspapers, sides of buses, bus shelters, billboards, TV, magazines, etc.
Pop-up ads were a really bad idea since day one, and the net effect is that many people mentally associate "browsing the web" with a very bad experience. The short term gains of pop-up (or under) ads is very likely for little gain when all your users either go elsewhere, or just give up on looking up information on the net altogether (it's already started happening: The net became the "new TV" for a lot of people, but after months of frustration with bad connections, bad software, and hostile sites, many people went back to other forms of entertainment).
It's quite astounding that standard old-fashion "brand building" advertisements are so uncommon on the net: Where are the Coca Cola, Tums, Maxipad, and food commercials that fill the television airwaves? None of these commercials expect me to click on them and buy the product now.
If I had to pick the #1 best-done Internet advertisement ever, I would say that it was during "You Don't Know Jack - The Webshow" quite a few years back (man, that was a good 4 or 5 years ago). That really was revolutionary, and it really stuck certain names in my mind (such as Sketchers. I'd never heard of them before YDKJTWS).
One thing I've found with automated QA products is that usually they have critical faults that prevent them from being realistically useful (for instance many of them grind to a halt or give false positives in multithreaded apps). How's this product for real world use? (And no this isn't a "Read the Article!" question...the article is like a press release and hence doesn't answer my question).
A NASCAR driver who drives on a road course once a year will have just as much knowledge of the course as an open wheel driver who drives road courses all year, but drive a particular course once per year. F1 drivers (such as Jacques Villeneuve) make extensive use of computer games to get to know the tracks.
Of course that could go both ways: If the game models a particular section of track wrong (which is the nature of the beast, especially given that the tracks often change in subtle ways from year to year), imagine the mental confusion you have everytime you come up to it and your brain, having played the computer game hundreds of time, yells "It's supposed to curve left 30 degrees here!".
If it's under 150, I'm losing because my opponents are cheating.
Or perhaps they're in the zone? Have you never dominated and had countless clueless weenies claiming that you were cheating? Of course you laughed it off, but if you're willing to then throw claims the opposing way when you're not dominating then you might be a little one-sided in your interpretation.
Joining cheaters is reprehensible: I give up on games long before I'd waste my time playing a game where it isn't me playing, but rather a cheat. I really don't get the motivation behind that. Cheating in online games betrays the type of personality attributes that would assure me that if I knew these people in "Real life", I would never do business or fraternize with them.
If this is your impression of the zone (a lazy stupor), then I think you might be misinterpreting what they're calling "the zone". The zone in gaming is when your entire neurological system seems to be working together to perfection, and it really is an astounding state of mind (and is generally very rare). I occasionally play the game Urban Terror (an online multiplayer game) and generally am middle of the road in skill, but every now and then I'll have a session where everything just clicks absolutely perfectly, and I dominate every round: That is the zone.
And that's just it: The anti-goto fanatics always use as their defense the "Well if you did this, and this, and this, then you wouldn't have the goto! See, therefore I've proven that goto is bad!", but to those of us for whom goto is just one of many programming tools at our disposal, we use the goto because we feel that it simplifies and cleans up the code, and can significantly clarify a segment of code.
The anti-goto campaign is understandable in the respect that it is a method of keeping the untalented from shooting themselves in the foot. By the same token, all languages but VB.NET are evil and are only for the crazy kooks!
In truth, I'm not really pro or con XP, and I can see how components could be advantageous in certain situations. For instance, exactly as you mentioned large companies often have very strict processes because people respect that which is encapsulated in a methodology, so by calling these less activities "XP" it's legitimized it. Now someone can legitimately compare "XP versus 12207" rather than "12207 versus unorganized chaos!".
My particular gripe with this book I brought forth only because I just happened to just finish it (in two short train ride commutes to work) and it happened to be sitting beside my desk when this request for book suggestions came up. Again, my real issue with this book is that the content is so trivial that it could have been condensed ot a hyphenated list covering a page, and two that there isn't the effort to study actual scenarios and derive metrics to support the suppositions (which, when we buy a fact book, is largely what we should be paying for). Paying $45 Canadian for a very brief, softcover, cuff of the pants "the way I see it is..." book just hit me the wrong way, and truly was something that I see as nothing more than a money grab capitalizing on an industry grasping for salvations.
The quality of a book is not directly proportional to it's thickness/weight/# of pages.....With all due respect ergo98 you sound fairly uninformed
Oh give me a break. Firstly, it is a personal review, and saying that I am "uninformed" about my own opinion of a book hints of stunning arrogance. Secondly, the size of a book conveys the amount of information, and backing of said information, that a technical tome has: If a "Advanced C++" book were 80 pages of large print, there is a very good foundation to say that perhaps it's a tad incomplete.
the idea that productivity increases emerge from the interaction of a number of different practices, and not one single "silver bullet" sounds like common sense to me, not snake oil.
What absolutely ridiculous nonsense. Each of the various factors proposed in Extreme Programming Explained are completely independant ideas: Pair program, build the tests first, go by the seat of your pants, refactor-> Many first use one or more of these as a basic factor of software development. The idea that these functionally separate philosophies come together to form some new paradigm is ridiculous, and the book proposes that even if you're 80% of the way to incorporating XP, you still might not see the benefits because the last 20% is what'll push you over the top: That is the nonsense of cultists, and people who want to sell a whole series of books describing what could be thoroughly described on a one page website.
The ideas behind XP Explained were not hashed together on the weekend, they came out of years of experience in smalltalk projects, culminating in the C3 project at Chrysler
The ideas behind XP Explained isn't some clever new paradigm developed at Chrysler: These are things that small, dynamic shops have been doing since the beginning of software development (about the only, and most critized and dubious, claim of XP that could be considered unique is pair programming, however the foundation for that sounds like someone should re-read Peopleware). I appreciate that it's been given a name (though most advocates have taken to call it "Agile Development" instead, somewhat embarrased about the "Extreme" title), but this is not some amazing new paradigm breakthorugh some someone independantly developed and is unleashing to the world: It's basic observations.
you compare a seminal book in the software engineering/methodology field (regardless of whether you agree with it) unfavourably with a computer game? Huh? I like computer games, but there's a hell of a lot of trash that gets pumped out in that industry. Not a very good comparison in my opinion.
My comparison was specifically to the amount of work that went into the product versus the amount of reward (the costXcopies) that they derive from it. This book I know has sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies, yet I will say it again: It literally could have been put together on the weekend (versus games that sell similar numbers of copies at a similar price, yet take years of work for teams): There are virtually no empirical studies or statistical analysis to back up the claims of the book (because such would be work), but rather it's just someone meandering on, rather verbosely, about some trivially easy to comprehend beliefs of software development. Maybe I just don't understand XP, and it'll all come together in some Voltron like magnification system that'll make me understand it 500x more if I pony up $30 US each for all the other books in his series (he hints at those books in this book as well...keep the $ coming kids!).
If this book were $9.99, perhaps I would think "Huh, pretty empty but as an opinion piece of some guy's take on software development it was fascinating", but at $30 ($45 Canadian) it's just an outrage. I came to the conclusion many years ago that many books that line the bookstore are vacuous, useless money grabs, so normally this would have been heaped in the reject pile at a cursory glance, however I made the mistake of ordering it online sight unseen: That is a mistake I will not make again (at least not without considerable reviews indicating that it's worthy).
This is a tremendous waste of money at $45 CDN ($29.95 US). Firstly, it's lacking gross content at a measly 165 pages of large print pages (for $45 that is already criminal). More importantly, however, the content that is there could easily have been condensed to a two page article (I say this with complete sincerity): The author clearly strung along simple statements for long periods of time to convey the idea of foundation for some pretty dubious assertions.
While I've always found XP to be pretty sketchy to begin with (indeed this book further convinced me of that: This book actually claims that each of its revolutionary new ideas can't be measured alone, but rather have to be all performed in parallel, whereby they'll have an amazing cross-product effect and you'll get multiples of the effects of each piece individually. I couldn't help but thinking of snake oil salesmen: "You didn't have the best luvin' ever? Well you muster forgot to take it while facin' to the East!"
The only way I could even imagine recommending this book is if the same copy is going to be shared among a very large team, but otherwise save you're money. It's shameful to think that this book that literally could have been hashed together on the weekend is seling for the same price that a game that a team worked on for a couple of years.
which you make out to be massive though everybody hates immmigrants
Very few people "hate immigrants", and the reality is that North America is all immigrants. I'm 1/8th Native American and I'll still say that they were immigrants too. The problem is that we've built such a nice society that everyone wants to crash the party (the same for Europe as well), and the problem is that there's only so much stress that said society can endure before the things that make it great are lost (just like a party becomes a bust if everyone in the town decides to crash it).
And you have no valid argument other than you canadian equity (whatever that is) is being diluted so it's easy to conclude that you're being racist.
This would make some sense if being "Canadian" was a particular race, creed or religion, but the reality is that the Canadians for whom I'm defending the "ownership" rights of come in every colour, shape and size. I will presume from this that if you want to see a racist, you might want to look in the mirror.
First of all that is complete bullshit, and not only that immigrants LEFT their homeland .. so dont judge them on what people in their homelands believe (if they believed the same things they wouldnt be in Canada).
The point is that you bear a hatred to these people who are just coming to Canada seeking a better future for themselves and their kids.
How very naive. Firstly, many migrants nowadays are economic migrants: They come to North America or Europe because the money is good, not because they see a society working quite well in peace and harmony. Yet, when World Cup season hits they're parading the streets with flags of whatever nationality they originated from (it depends on the society. For example, Japanese `assimilate' and become die-hard Canadians very quickly [as Canadian as anybody], but there are other societies that form very distinct cliques, and remain most loyal to their homeland: They treat being here as a form of prostitution-> They're just doing it until they have enough to go home a king, or a queen as the case may be, or for Canada many come here just long enough to get their citizenship so they can then make the transition to the US. Many of these societies are overwhelmingly racist [see who they let their daughter marry] and carry the baggage of hate and intolerance from their homeland). Every time a world conflict arises these people go storming embassies not as Canadians looking out for the interests of Canada and/or NATO, but as whatever-they-were looking out for their original nations interests. Already we're seeing Middle Eastern hatred and intolerance rising in Canada as people bring their baggage from their countries to North America. During the Yugoslavian crisis every day you could catch some "Serbian Canadian" derided Canada and stomping on our flag, and pledging allegienge to their country (it's unfortunate that their Canadian landed immigrant cards couldn't have been confiscated right there, but we're too bleeding heart to actually say "Hey, maybe we should make people value what we're giving them instead of taking it for granted").
It is nonsensical to claim that North Americans, or Europeans (note that these are Geographic areas, not races or religions) don't have any right to defend what is theirs, and bringing up Hitler or crying racism is just pathetic (it's the classic that any race or country can be horribly racist and exclusive, except for "white man North America or Europe". I wonder how people feel about emigrating to the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, or any other fairly well off nation).
There is a very powerful pro-immigration lobby in North America, and in a nutshell it is "The Wealthy". When you're wealthy and you own the infrastructure, raising the GDP significantly contributes to your wealth, but to the common man the GDP/capita stays the same or declines (when adjusted against inflation). These people live in gated communities with a wealth buffer that shields them from anything adverse, so what the hell: Open the gates. You're entirely right that "big business" is pro-immigration, and it's for the same reason (because it's the same people). Note that I never said that we should have NO immigration, but rather that we are threatening that which makes us a destination in the first place when you bring in people so rapidly that they form mini versions of their home country: Take a walk through Chinatown in Toronto some day - In what historically was a clean city is one of the dirtiest, almost third-worldish feeling area because standards weren't propagated as masses came in, bringing along the monster that they were fleeing.
Whoever the project manager is should have recognized different skill sets or motivations very early on and pursued actions to rectify it. While about 90% of the postings to this thread have been "Boohoo, I'm out of work so fire them all!", the reality is that no business sustains with a "fire them all" mentality (which is why those posts are all by people working for someone else), and the reality is that almost every talented employee has periods of low productivity, sometimes lasting for months. Again, these are just basics of human nature that one has to recognize and plan around.
The reality is that people are motivated by varying things (and "fear of being fired" is the #1 worst motivator and is the cyclical spiral to oblivion for any organization), and a good project manager understands how to understand and utilize those motivations (and it very seldomly is $, by the way): The biggest ___KILLER___ to motivation (and it's a killer in the sense that people will write garbage code, if any at all, regardless of their skillz) is a project death march: A project that has no hope in hell of ever being finished, and is absolutely guaranteed to be killed. Any talented coder will have a brain gnawing at them screaming "THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME!", and the truth of the mater is that in the end, sitting around reading Slashdot all day, or dutifully spitting out lines of code, has the same net result: The project is canned and the code is deleted. There are many projects out there like this, pursued by managers with agendas and severe myopia: If your project is like this then good for you, but realize that it won't be long before you too spend your days wishing for 5pm to hit.