I love how all these folks who are so eager to work through lunch to get go out earlier at the end of the day still have time to cruise to slashdot during work hours (for most of the Western Hemisphere).
You have lots to talk about with those people, precisely because of the experiences you don't have in common.
There seems to be a lot of very boring people in this thread. By that I mean, they're only interested in spending time with others who share the same experiences, the same opinions, same political views, and have no interest in anyone who might have something different to say.
If you don't want any exchanges with your coworkers other than the minimum transfer of data required to complete your job, that is your right. I have no issues with that.
But don't pretend your attitude is due to some deficiency in those around you or a lack of common experience. You don't want to talk with the people you work with because of YOU, not because of them.
The idea that being antisocial == leet skillz and social == PHB is simple ignorance.
Since no one has claimed such, I think you've just demonstrated the validity of your position.
So it may be worth my while to get to know the other people in my office. And lunch is a good time to get to know people I don't work with directly on a daily basis.
Did you read the article?
This isn't about having occasional lunches with people in other departments.
This is about having daily lunches with the people in the same department as yourself.
"But in my experience (your experience may differ) it is the more social person who lacks the technical skills." I think I paraphrased your experience pretty well. Perhaps I'm too social to understand.
(And FWIW, I consider myself more to the antisocial side and seek out lunch-time company in part to improve my people skills. So if I'm antisocial but misunderstood your message, did I demonstrated the validity of my position or not?)
And perhaps you're too social to understand that there are more alternatives than "turn lunch into another group meeting" or "eat lunch alone." Since that seemed to be the direction the discussion was heading (and not just from you), I offered the alternative of eating lunch with people, but not the same people you're working with the rest of the day.
I agree there are issues with the approach to lunch in TFA, such as the preference for long rectangular tables over round tables. Long tables allow more people to sit at the same table, but not all those people can interact with each other. Rounds tables allow for a smaller group of people, but all those people are facing each other.
But people who choose to take a mid-shift break should be free to spend that time how they choose. And mandatory lunch-time business activities should be infrequent and well catered.
There is no such thing as a solvent that can dissolve anything. That isn't what is meant by the term. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. That is all that is meant by the term Universal Solvent. Any intro to Chemistry course should mention this.
Really? When I hear "universal solvent" I think DMSO, which dissolves polar and nonpolar compounds. There are just so many everyday materials which do not dissolve in water.
The tone of TFA is abhorrent. "Ooh, he must be so unhappy because he has something worthwhile to do instead of talking to me. I know I'd shrivel up and die if I couldn't get an ego boost from my comrades."
One thing that should tip you off about the TFA is the mention of long cafeteria-style tables. He doesn't want a happy family of people who work well together. He just wants to LOOK like a happy family of people who work well together.
He specifically mentions the long table as the alternative to round tables. At a long table, you can get scores of people at the same table, but each can really only interact with the closest 5 people.
At a round table, you may only get 10 people to a table, but everyone at the table can see and interact with everyone else at the table.
I don't think team lunches should be mandatory. Sometimes you want to clear your head, go for a walk and have some time to yourself. You may also want to check out cute girls in the food court, but I digress. Anyway, just because Joel likes his lunches that way doesn't mean it's the best thing for everyone. Where I work, they provide lunch for those who want it. Some people eat lunch in the rec room, chat, maybe play a game of table tennis or pool. Others take the supplied lunch to their desk to eat. Some people prefer to go out and buy lunch, but even they're a mixed bunch: go alone, go in groups, eat out, bring take-away back to their desks. You've got to give your people some space to move.
1) Who said eating lunch with other people meant eating lunch with your team?
All but the smallest, teeniest company will have different departments--HR, finance, developers, QA. Eating lunch with coworkers doesn't have to equal extra time with the same people you meet with regularly.
You spend a good chunk of your life at work.. why not make it more fun. I'm not saying you have to hang out with coworkers every weekend.. but mixing personal and work life a little bit has made the day go a lot nicer for me.
Because under IDEAL conditions your co-workers would have been selected for their capability to perform the job. Not because they had the same religious / political / etc opinions as you.
IF someone else who you work with has the same opinions as you then it is great if you can become friends.
But to put the focus on that means that the focus is not on getting the work done so you can get out an live your non-work life. Which is a problem.
It shouldn't matter... but it does. When the money runs short... it's a lot easier to let bill, who while not rude, is not exactly friendly go than to let tom, who we were just laughing with at lunch, go.
Yep. And if Bill and Tom had the same skill levels and such, then that would one thing.
But in my experience (your experience may differ) it is the more social person who lacks the technical skills. Simply based upon personality type. The stereotype of the nerd who spends his waking hours hacking on his computer instead of attending parties is a stereotype for a reason.
Really? Are you really so content with where you are and what you know? There's no room for growth?
None of my coworkers have been selected based on "religious / political / etc opinions" but they have been selected based on their skills. Which may be different from my skills. So there may be something I can learn from that person, even if their interests are different than mine.
So it may be worth my while to get to know the other people in my office. And lunch is a good time to get to know people I don't work with directly on a daily basis.
While I like what I do, I wouldn't mind opportunities to work on other projects and in other capacities.
The idea that being antisocial == leet skillz and social == PHB is simple ignorance.
Of course it is ALWAYS nice when you have a nice, homogenous group with the same political / religious / etc beliefs and feel free to discuss them at lunch. Everyone always agrees.
I could not disagree more. I don't want to sit around with a bunch of people who all have the same outlook I do and will agree with me on everything. And I spend enough time in meetings with the people in my group, I don't see to see them during lunch as well.
Luckily, it isn't a choice between eating with my group and eating alone. There are plenty of other people in the company I can eat lunch with. Even in a smaller company, there are other departments. Eating lunch with other people doesn't have to mean eating with other developers.
I actually don't mind speaking with people who have different non-work interests. And when conversation turns to work-related topics (as it does occasionally) I get a different perspective because I'm not sitting with people with similar jobs.
You might also consider logging all that "free" traffic so when the Feds show up with a warrant, you have some kind of audit trail to get yourself out of jail.
How does the audit trail help in any sort of legal situation? If you're trying to show the supposed bad thing didn't pass through your network, you could have edited the logs or turned off logging. And if the Feds are coming by with a warrant, they likely already have evidence the bad thing did at least come down your pipe.
If you're trying to show you weren't the one uploading or downloading the bad thing, how does the audit trail show that? Do you not have access to your own public network? If the agent/IP/MAC logged in the audit trail doesn't match any of your machines, you either 1) changed the agent/IP/MAC, or simply dumped the hardware used to do the deed.
If you're thinking you can use the audit trail to possible find the real killer, just remember, first thing the Feds will do is take all your computers. At best, they'll use the logs against you. At worst, they'll decide they don't need the logs. And since they aren't evidence, they'll fight handing the logs over to your defense.
I think the/. hive mind has this one right. There are several ways you can do this, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
How is voting the way you feel the majority of people will vote a good thing?
He's not saying people should strive to vote with the majority. He's worried about folks voting with the expected majority to hide their bias.
Someone who decides to vote against everything is easy to find. Once you get a large enough set of 99-to-1 votes where the same person is the 1, you know you can ignore that person's vote. Whether it's someone who things everything is inappropriate, doesn't understand the ToS, or whatever, the author's feeling is once you've identified whether something is inappropriate or not, the minority view has no value.
But what if (and these are pretty big ifs) you have someone who is biased against people with red hair. They are going to vote that any picture with red hair is inappropriate. And what if that person knows there is a system to discount or disregard votes from a biased source. And what if that biased person shapes their voting pattern based on that knowledge.
That person could cast that biased vote against any picture with red hair, but then vote with the expected majority, not based on the voter's view of the material, in all other cases, to cultivate a normal appearance and therefor maximize the weight given to the biased votes.
Basically, 1) the author is way over thinking the issue. As others (and I) have posted, he's basically still talking about the/. mod/meta-mod system.
And 2) He's a sociopath and assuming there is a large population of people who think like he does.
It's basically the/. mod system, except mods only vote on posts/messages that are flagged by a user as violating the ToS and the choices are 'OK' or 'Not OK'.
As for who watches the watchers, it's basically the/. meta-mod system.
The "algorithm" is safety in numbers. You get a large enough pool of mods, and hopefully the "normal" people sufficiently outnumber the extreme folks who mod everything as 'Not OK' or who volunteer to mod just to get a peek at naughty content.
If STEM majors are likely to make more money after graduation, aren't they also likely to give back more to their alma mater? Aren't they also more likely to participate in activities bringing grants and income to the school while still in school, such as research?
I don't want to come off like a nutcase 'Obama is Hitler and turning us into socialists,' but isn't this the textbook definition of communism? "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," compounded with gross misunderstanding of ability and need?
The University of Manchester, through the provisions of the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, owns the intellectual property rights (IPR) in patentable inventions, computer software, designs and other copyrightable material arising from the research activities of its staff.
The nett income from exploitation is shared with staff and their departments and in accordance with a reward scheme approved by the University's Board of Governors.
I am third year physics student in the UK, hoping to go on to do PHD work in one of the nuclear energy fields, most likely fusion research. The big thing that has worried me for a while is the possibility that I can make a discovery only to have the University I work for pounce on it with patents and copyrighting that prevent the unhindered use of that discovery to improve the world.
I'm not for a moment bigheaded enough to think I would make such a discovery personally, but the concept is a frightening one; the idea that a technology that could revolutionize some part of our world never seeing the light of day, because an academic institution is more interested in profiteering than in actually furthering the cause of science.
As a previous poster (RightwingNutJob) said "Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind."
Problem is investing in development of real world things from this research is costly, and not always successful. If before even starting on the research a company has to pay through the nose to license the idea, that makes said company less likely to bother in the first place surely?
Open Source University Anyone?
How does the U make a profit on your idea if it never sees the light of day? Doesn't the profit motive give the U incentive to get your innovations out to the world?
And how is this different from an employer? The folks who pay the bills--pay for the labs and computers and lights and empty the trash bins--own the work. If you want to own your work, then work for yourself. Otherwise, that is the trade you make in exchange for salary, stipend, tuition, or whatever.
You bemoan the expense of starting the company on a licensed idea. Yet 1) you're talking about someone else's idea. And 2) if folks are hesitant to invest in idea because of licensing costs, aren't they even less likely to bother if there's no income at the end of the process?
"Problem is investing in development of real world things from this research is costly, and not always successful."
So expect people to carry that burden, then just give away the results at the end?
The statement that no threats, legal or otherwise, were made is false. Even if the threats were made accidentally, threats were made. Saying an automated email was kicked off inadvertently does not mean the email was never sent.
Then there's the issue of the mistakenly activated automated email. Why do they have a process that automatically sends out DCMA notices?
Then there's the action of removing the files at issue. I'm not sure how I feel about the selective action on files. If I'm breaking the ToS, why not freeze my account? On the one hand, I can appreciate the effort to not freeze accounts, but at the same time, I don't want the admins at Dropbox going through my files.
Theoretically, Agile sounds nice enough. And I don't know if it's a sign that after years of getting by on good looks I'm starting to understand software development, or that my mind has turned into mush, that when I hear or read about Agile, I think I can actually identify applicable concepts as opposed to it being a clump of jargon.
That being said, is anyone living actually living and working in this colorful Agile world? Cause from where I sit, it's all sepia tones.
My first exposure to (what turned out to be) Agile was on a project scheduled for about 9 months that was stretching out to 18. Not the worst boondoggle in history. A new manager was brought in and immediately instituted a daily 9 AM meeting. I know now this is a "daily scrum." I also now know a "daily scrum" should be 15 minutes of updates, not 2 hours of back-and-forth done without the stakeholders who hold the missing piece information and the authority to make decisions.
That first meeting of the day was followed by meetings with smaller groups discussing the issues raised during the previous meeting. Then we'd break for lunch.
After lunch, I'd have a meeting or two, with perhaps 30 to 60 minutes of 'free time' to do actual work. At the time I was an 'internal consultant'--an employee working for another group on loan for this project, so I still had some responsibilities to my home group.
Then we'd end the day with a quick meeting of what was done today and what's the target for tomorrow. Well, what was done today is I attended a series of meetings. What's on the agenda for tomorrow is more of the same. (And by quick meeting, I mean about an hour before folks started making excuses to leave.)
I understand the idea behind having many short meetings throughout the development process. I just finished managing a 3-day project for a configured OTS application. We received a patch from the vendor on Tuesday, ran through the cycle of documentation and testing, and deployed to prod Thursday night. During that sprint I was meeting every few hours.
But that's a project that lived its life in one week. For a project even as short as 6-weeks, daily meetings are too much. It's baby-sitting. If your developers can't make it through one day (or aren't trusted to make it through one day) without meeting, something is seriously wrong.
And that 6 week cycle, how can development be responsive to business at that pace? My business can't pick its nose in 6 weeks. If I had a report with all the data field requirements locked down, my business couldn't decide on the report layout in 6 weeks. (I have, and they couldn't.)
And they want everything at the same time. My customers would love new features rolling out every 6 weeks. But they'd want EVERY new feature in 6 weeks. Wait 12 weeks for a change? But that's forever! My team has managed to get on a generally regular schedule of releases every 3 to 4 months, but that includes about 6 weeks of taking the business's 3 years worth of requests and paring it down to 3 months of work.
For that age old questions, "How can I build the exact software I need as quickly and efficiently as possible," is that really the question we fight with every day? How many developers are really working on that cutting edge, attempting to solve complex problems with precise solutions?
Any how many developers are reimplementing the wheel and just trying to get the business customer to decide what color it should be? I can build the software. The question I need answered is, "What is the exact software I (or my customers) need?"
While the hidden data in image files is interesting, the real news here is there are people left who don't mean to broadcast their location.
I suspect these researchers started with a picture of a man standing in front of his house, with the house number visible, and a street sign in the background, and a sign on the house reading "Welcome to the home of John and Jane Smith," while the man wears a "Hi, My Name is John Smith" name tag.
And there were able to decode the image meta-data to discover they had a picture of John Smith and find his address.
In the meantime, they could have saved time by going to facebook, where John Smith reports his his every move with four square.
In other news, I have a picture of someone standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. The image meta-data indicates the person was in Paris at the time.
I don't know about your GPS, but mine often has me moving 5 mph while sitting in a parked car. So I don't know how you check your speedometer with your GPS. How did you verify your GPS is a reliable measure to check against?
And I'd bet when you saw that flash your foot eased up on the accelerator. You could easily lose a mile or 2 per hour in the moment it takes to look down. And if the speedometer is a analogue, your reading could easily be off by a mile or 2 per hour.
By the best available evidence, I'd say you were going closer to 52 than 48.
Some of that may be due to the fact that Apple charges a lot less -- a LOT less -- for OS upgrades than Microsoft does, and some of it may be due to the fact that OS X is a lot less likely to be heavily tied into some company's corporate network than XP was.
But Apple also charges for updates on the level of the service packs MS provides at no charge.
my company has around 60 or so XP boxes, and I can tell you now they care much more about money than updates to windows
So what you think the attitude is at a company with 20,000 XP boxes, all running IE 6?
(Currently our plan...I mean, the plan at a company where a friend of mine works, is to roll out IE8 on XP in July, then start issuing Win7 with new PCs in December.
The existing XP PCs will not get an OS upgrade and will not get retired ahead of the usual hardware schedule (which runs about 3 years). So someone who gets a new computer today will have XP for the next 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Get it? You might not want to bet against him? Because he was a card shark?
The term is "card sharp"
I love how all these folks who are so eager to work through lunch to get go out earlier at the end of the day still have time to cruise to slashdot during work hours (for most of the Western Hemisphere).
Just saying.
No common experience, nothing to talk about.
There's your fallacy.
You have lots to talk about with those people, precisely because of the experiences you don't have in common.
There seems to be a lot of very boring people in this thread. By that I mean, they're only interested in spending time with others who share the same experiences, the same opinions, same political views, and have no interest in anyone who might have something different to say.
If you don't want any exchanges with your coworkers other than the minimum transfer of data required to complete your job, that is your right. I have no issues with that.
But don't pretend your attitude is due to some deficiency in those around you or a lack of common experience. You don't want to talk with the people you work with because of YOU, not because of them.
I'll get off your lawn now.
Since no one has claimed such, I think you've just demonstrated the validity of your position.
Did you read the article?
This isn't about having occasional lunches with people in other departments.
This is about having daily lunches with the people in the same department as yourself.
"But in my experience (your experience may differ) it is the more social person who lacks the technical skills." I think I paraphrased your experience pretty well. Perhaps I'm too social to understand.
(And FWIW, I consider myself more to the antisocial side and seek out lunch-time company in part to improve my people skills. So if I'm antisocial but misunderstood your message, did I demonstrated the validity of my position or not?)
And perhaps you're too social to understand that there are more alternatives than "turn lunch into another group meeting" or "eat lunch alone." Since that seemed to be the direction the discussion was heading (and not just from you), I offered the alternative of eating lunch with people, but not the same people you're working with the rest of the day.
I agree there are issues with the approach to lunch in TFA, such as the preference for long rectangular tables over round tables. Long tables allow more people to sit at the same table, but not all those people can interact with each other. Rounds tables allow for a smaller group of people, but all those people are facing each other.
But people who choose to take a mid-shift break should be free to spend that time how they choose. And mandatory lunch-time business activities should be infrequent and well catered.
There is no such thing as a solvent that can dissolve anything. That isn't what is meant by the term. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. That is all that is meant by the term Universal Solvent. Any intro to Chemistry course should mention this.
Really? When I hear "universal solvent" I think DMSO, which dissolves polar and nonpolar compounds. There are just so many everyday materials which do not dissolve in water.
Whatever. Not the first time I've been wrong.
Indeed, it's the universal solvent. Pretty dangerous stuff.
Wow. That is wrong. So wrong, I tempted to think it is a joke. Water is not a universal solvent.
No, I will not edit the page.
You're not interested in the inane chit chat of people with nothing interesting to say, yet you read slashdot?
So you really have no issue with bullshit and idiotic stories, you'd just rather read it from strangers than hear it from people you see everyday.
The tone of TFA is abhorrent. "Ooh, he must be so unhappy because he has something worthwhile to do instead of talking to me. I know I'd shrivel up and die if I couldn't get an ego boost from my comrades."
One thing that should tip you off about the TFA is the mention of long cafeteria-style tables. He doesn't want a happy family of people who work well together. He just wants to LOOK like a happy family of people who work well together.
He specifically mentions the long table as the alternative to round tables. At a long table, you can get scores of people at the same table, but each can really only interact with the closest 5 people.
At a round table, you may only get 10 people to a table, but everyone at the table can see and interact with everyone else at the table.
I don't think team lunches should be mandatory. Sometimes you want to clear your head, go for a walk and have some time to yourself. You may also want to check out cute girls in the food court, but I digress. Anyway, just because Joel likes his lunches that way doesn't mean it's the best thing for everyone. Where I work, they provide lunch for those who want it. Some people eat lunch in the rec room, chat, maybe play a game of table tennis or pool. Others take the supplied lunch to their desk to eat. Some people prefer to go out and buy lunch, but even they're a mixed bunch: go alone, go in groups, eat out, bring take-away back to their desks. You've got to give your people some space to move.
1) Who said eating lunch with other people meant eating lunch with your team?
2) Why not eat lunch with the cute girls?
All but the smallest, teeniest company will have different departments--HR, finance, developers, QA. Eating lunch with coworkers doesn't have to equal extra time with the same people you meet with regularly.
Because under IDEAL conditions your co-workers would have been selected for their capability to perform the job. Not because they had the same religious / political / etc opinions as you.
IF someone else who you work with has the same opinions as you then it is great if you can become friends.
But to put the focus on that means that the focus is not on getting the work done so you can get out an live your non-work life. Which is a problem.
Yep. And if Bill and Tom had the same skill levels and such, then that would one thing.
But in my experience (your experience may differ) it is the more social person who lacks the technical skills. Simply based upon personality type. The stereotype of the nerd who spends his waking hours hacking on his computer instead of attending parties is a stereotype for a reason.
Really? Are you really so content with where you are and what you know? There's no room for growth?
None of my coworkers have been selected based on "religious / political / etc opinions" but they have been selected based on their skills. Which may be different from my skills. So there may be something I can learn from that person, even if their interests are different than mine.
So it may be worth my while to get to know the other people in my office. And lunch is a good time to get to know people I don't work with directly on a daily basis.
While I like what I do, I wouldn't mind opportunities to work on other projects and in other capacities.
The idea that being antisocial == leet skillz and social == PHB is simple ignorance.
Of course it is ALWAYS nice when you have a nice, homogenous group with the same political / religious / etc beliefs and feel free to discuss them at lunch. Everyone always agrees.
I could not disagree more. I don't want to sit around with a bunch of people who all have the same outlook I do and will agree with me on everything. And I spend enough time in meetings with the people in my group, I don't see to see them during lunch as well.
Luckily, it isn't a choice between eating with my group and eating alone. There are plenty of other people in the company I can eat lunch with. Even in a smaller company, there are other departments. Eating lunch with other people doesn't have to mean eating with other developers.
I actually don't mind speaking with people who have different non-work interests. And when conversation turns to work-related topics (as it does occasionally) I get a different perspective because I'm not sitting with people with similar jobs.
You might also consider logging all that "free" traffic so when the Feds show up with a warrant, you have some kind of audit trail to get yourself out of jail.
How does the audit trail help in any sort of legal situation? If you're trying to show the supposed bad thing didn't pass through your network, you could have edited the logs or turned off logging. And if the Feds are coming by with a warrant, they likely already have evidence the bad thing did at least come down your pipe.
If you're trying to show you weren't the one uploading or downloading the bad thing, how does the audit trail show that? Do you not have access to your own public network? If the agent/IP/MAC logged in the audit trail doesn't match any of your machines, you either 1) changed the agent/IP/MAC, or simply dumped the hardware used to do the deed.
If you're thinking you can use the audit trail to possible find the real killer, just remember, first thing the Feds will do is take all your computers. At best, they'll use the logs against you. At worst, they'll decide they don't need the logs. And since they aren't evidence, they'll fight handing the logs over to your defense.
I think the /. hive mind has this one right. There are several ways you can do this, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
How is voting the way you feel the majority of people will vote a good thing?
He's not saying people should strive to vote with the majority. He's worried about folks voting with the expected majority to hide their bias.
Someone who decides to vote against everything is easy to find. Once you get a large enough set of 99-to-1 votes where the same person is the 1, you know you can ignore that person's vote. Whether it's someone who things everything is inappropriate, doesn't understand the ToS, or whatever, the author's feeling is once you've identified whether something is inappropriate or not, the minority view has no value.
But what if (and these are pretty big ifs) you have someone who is biased against people with red hair. They are going to vote that any picture with red hair is inappropriate. And what if that person knows there is a system to discount or disregard votes from a biased source. And what if that biased person shapes their voting pattern based on that knowledge.
That person could cast that biased vote against any picture with red hair, but then vote with the expected majority, not based on the voter's view of the material, in all other cases, to cultivate a normal appearance and therefor maximize the weight given to the biased votes.
Basically, 1) the author is way over thinking the issue. As others (and I) have posted, he's basically still talking about the /. mod/meta-mod system.
And 2) He's a sociopath and assuming there is a large population of people who think like he does.
Mod parent up.
For the tl;dr crowd, to summarize:
It's basically the /. mod system, except mods only vote on posts/messages that are flagged by a user as violating the ToS and the choices are 'OK' or 'Not OK'.
As for who watches the watchers, it's basically the /. meta-mod system.
The "algorithm" is safety in numbers. You get a large enough pool of mods, and hopefully the "normal" people sufficiently outnumber the extreme folks who mod everything as 'Not OK' or who volunteer to mod just to get a peek at naughty content.
Absolutely.
If STEM majors are likely to make more money after graduation, aren't they also likely to give back more to their alma mater? Aren't they also more likely to participate in activities bringing grants and income to the school while still in school, such as research?
I don't want to come off like a nutcase 'Obama is Hitler and turning us into socialists,' but isn't this the textbook definition of communism? "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," compounded with gross misunderstanding of ability and need?
RISC architecture is going to change everything.
(I couldn't resist)
As an example:
Extract from the University Of Manchester IP Ltd Website http://www.umip.com/university_policy.htm:
The University of Manchester, through the provisions of the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, owns the intellectual property rights (IPR) in patentable inventions, computer software, designs and other copyrightable material arising from the research activities of its staff.
The nett income from exploitation is shared with staff and their departments and in accordance with a reward scheme approved by the University's Board of Governors.
I am third year physics student in the UK, hoping to go on to do PHD work in one of the nuclear energy fields, most likely fusion research. The big thing that has worried me for a while is the possibility that I can make a discovery only to have the University I work for pounce on it with patents and copyrighting that prevent the unhindered use of that discovery to improve the world.
I'm not for a moment bigheaded enough to think I would make such a discovery personally, but the concept is a frightening one; the idea that a technology that could revolutionize some part of our world never seeing the light of day, because an academic institution is more interested in profiteering than in actually furthering the cause of science.
As a previous poster (RightwingNutJob) said "Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind."
Problem is investing in development of real world things from this research is costly, and not always successful. If before even starting on the research a company has to pay through the nose to license the idea, that makes said company less likely to bother in the first place surely?
Open Source University Anyone?
How does the U make a profit on your idea if it never sees the light of day? Doesn't the profit motive give the U incentive to get your innovations out to the world?
And how is this different from an employer? The folks who pay the bills--pay for the labs and computers and lights and empty the trash bins--own the work. If you want to own your work, then work for yourself. Otherwise, that is the trade you make in exchange for salary, stipend, tuition, or whatever.
You bemoan the expense of starting the company on a licensed idea. Yet 1) you're talking about someone else's idea. And 2) if folks are hesitant to invest in idea because of licensing costs, aren't they even less likely to bother if there's no income at the end of the process?
"Problem is investing in development of real world things from this research is costly, and not always successful."
So expect people to carry that burden, then just give away the results at the end?
None of which makes me feel any better.
The statement that no threats, legal or otherwise, were made is false. Even if the threats were made accidentally, threats were made. Saying an automated email was kicked off inadvertently does not mean the email was never sent.
Then there's the issue of the mistakenly activated automated email. Why do they have a process that automatically sends out DCMA notices?
Then there's the action of removing the files at issue. I'm not sure how I feel about the selective action on files. If I'm breaking the ToS, why not freeze my account? On the one hand, I can appreciate the effort to not freeze accounts, but at the same time, I don't want the admins at Dropbox going through my files.
Just high on life :)
Theoretically, Agile sounds nice enough. And I don't know if it's a sign that after years of getting by on good looks I'm starting to understand software development, or that my mind has turned into mush, that when I hear or read about Agile, I think I can actually identify applicable concepts as opposed to it being a clump of jargon.
That being said, is anyone living actually living and working in this colorful Agile world? Cause from where I sit, it's all sepia tones.
My first exposure to (what turned out to be) Agile was on a project scheduled for about 9 months that was stretching out to 18. Not the worst boondoggle in history. A new manager was brought in and immediately instituted a daily 9 AM meeting. I know now this is a "daily scrum." I also now know a "daily scrum" should be 15 minutes of updates, not 2 hours of back-and-forth done without the stakeholders who hold the missing piece information and the authority to make decisions.
That first meeting of the day was followed by meetings with smaller groups discussing the issues raised during the previous meeting. Then we'd break for lunch.
After lunch, I'd have a meeting or two, with perhaps 30 to 60 minutes of 'free time' to do actual work. At the time I was an 'internal consultant'--an employee working for another group on loan for this project, so I still had some responsibilities to my home group.
Then we'd end the day with a quick meeting of what was done today and what's the target for tomorrow. Well, what was done today is I attended a series of meetings. What's on the agenda for tomorrow is more of the same. (And by quick meeting, I mean about an hour before folks started making excuses to leave.)
I understand the idea behind having many short meetings throughout the development process. I just finished managing a 3-day project for a configured OTS application. We received a patch from the vendor on Tuesday, ran through the cycle of documentation and testing, and deployed to prod Thursday night. During that sprint I was meeting every few hours.
But that's a project that lived its life in one week. For a project even as short as 6-weeks, daily meetings are too much. It's baby-sitting. If your developers can't make it through one day (or aren't trusted to make it through one day) without meeting, something is seriously wrong.
And that 6 week cycle, how can development be responsive to business at that pace? My business can't pick its nose in 6 weeks. If I had a report with all the data field requirements locked down, my business couldn't decide on the report layout in 6 weeks. (I have, and they couldn't.)
And they want everything at the same time. My customers would love new features rolling out every 6 weeks. But they'd want EVERY new feature in 6 weeks. Wait 12 weeks for a change? But that's forever! My team has managed to get on a generally regular schedule of releases every 3 to 4 months, but that includes about 6 weeks of taking the business's 3 years worth of requests and paring it down to 3 months of work.
For that age old questions, "How can I build the exact software I need as quickly and efficiently as possible," is that really the question we fight with every day? How many developers are really working on that cutting edge, attempting to solve complex problems with precise solutions?
Any how many developers are reimplementing the wheel and just trying to get the business customer to decide what color it should be? I can build the software. The question I need answered is, "What is the exact software I (or my customers) need?"
While the hidden data in image files is interesting, the real news here is there are people left who don't mean to broadcast their location.
I suspect these researchers started with a picture of a man standing in front of his house, with the house number visible, and a street sign in the background, and a sign on the house reading "Welcome to the home of John and Jane Smith," while the man wears a "Hi, My Name is John Smith" name tag.
And there were able to decode the image meta-data to discover they had a picture of John Smith and find his address.
In the meantime, they could have saved time by going to facebook, where John Smith reports his his every move with four square.
In other news, I have a picture of someone standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. The image meta-data indicates the person was in Paris at the time.
IOW, you have no idea how fast you were going.
I don't know about your GPS, but mine often has me moving 5 mph while sitting in a parked car. So I don't know how you check your speedometer with your GPS. How did you verify your GPS is a reliable measure to check against?
And I'd bet when you saw that flash your foot eased up on the accelerator. You could easily lose a mile or 2 per hour in the moment it takes to look down. And if the speedometer is a analogue, your reading could easily be off by a mile or 2 per hour.
By the best available evidence, I'd say you were going closer to 52 than 48.
Some of that may be due to the fact that Apple charges a lot less -- a LOT less -- for OS upgrades than Microsoft does, and some of it may be due to the fact that OS X is a lot less likely to be heavily tied into some company's corporate network than XP was.
But Apple also charges for updates on the level of the service packs MS provides at no charge.
Just saying.
my company has around 60 or so XP boxes, and I can tell you now they care much more about money than updates to windows
So what you think the attitude is at a company with 20,000 XP boxes, all running IE 6?
(Currently our plan...I mean, the plan at a company where a friend of mine works, is to roll out IE8 on XP in July, then start issuing Win7 with new PCs in December.
The existing XP PCs will not get an OS upgrade and will not get retired ahead of the usual hardware schedule (which runs about 3 years). So someone who gets a new computer today will have XP for the next 3 years.