It could also be a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. AC mentions a bad long-term memory but gives an example of writing an essay, something that people with OCD-level fear/anxiety often find themselves blocking out mentally as they do other less stressful things. Forgetting formulae is easy to do for anybody who finds school stressful.
Poor organization skills in people with OCD are also natural if they haven't yet discovered the "right" combination of factors that don't grate on their senses. I am an American with OCD and am unable to use U.S.-style three-ring binders and american-ruled paper. I order my stationery organizational supplies from Japan and had to hire a consultant to help me get on the road to organization, my way.
Though I scored high on the I.Q. test, my general test-taking record tells me that anxiety must have affected my score.
As additional proof I submit the fact that an attractive 30-something woman gave me my test, and when she bought me a soda from a vending machine before the test, I was completely wigging out emotionally. "Did she just buy me a drink? Is that OK? I'm still in elementary school and she probably is hitting on me" etc. Now THAT is OCD at work, folks.
BTW you should be careful about phrases like "bad work ethic." I labored under that phrase for something like 20 years before learning how to meet my specific challenge head on and turn the tables. Considering my anxiety levels, I was one of the hardest working people around me.
Are you asking us questions or what? I want to take those as statements of fact but it's like you're teasing us with some inappropriate punctuation or something.
The 4.X beta on the same hardware? Why don't you just get a live CD and try it? I'm on an Ubuntu Q8300 quad-core with 8GB RAM and even I can tell that, for whatever reason, Chromium is *much* faster than even Opera (to say nothing of Firefox) on my system. It's got its annoyances, but when I need to do Youtube or Slashdot or anything else that Firefox convinces me is "intensive," I switch over to Chromium where I have like 20 tabs open and things fly. So I'm not surprised somebody is bringing this up. It's very fast.
Tell ya what. You're so interested in global content, but we've got all these political hoops we have to go through to make that work. Every last little country has its own media industry and they want things their own way.
But now, here's my proposal: We, the media, will give you global media - your way, anywhere. Now you - you just have to sign on the dotted line here, that says "I the undersigned, agree to a global governing body"...that's right, good. Now, see? We were going this way all along. And you and me, we both benefit this way!
Hey, that's true for now. But as home automation grows more and more popular, let's say somebody decides to build a FSU (food storage unit)-to-Cooking Unit interface with an open communication standard. Pretty soon you've got trucks rolling down your street every week, dropping off FSUs left and right. Sure, your menu will be generally pre-determined, but your grocery bill just got a LOT cheaper. Or if cheap isn't important, you can now eat like a king if you order premium FSUs.
And then there's the reduced need for multitasking...you subscribe to a gourmet menu selection by your favorite chef, and you just walk to the Cooking Unit at mealtime and pick up your food, eat.
Sure, there will always be people who love to cook by hand, the old way...just like there will always be people who read paper books, play old-style board games, etc.
The new & improved Mayan calendar gives us just enough time to accomplish all this, too...:-)
Wait, somebody uses "The late 1930s" in place of "September 3, 1939" and this supports your argument that somehow truth is being obscured?
I can see complaining if the date went from specific to general to generally incorrect, but this example is manifestly the reverse of that. Seems like truth is getting easier to find, doesn't it?
I found out that Dreamcasts were going for $70 at my local Rite-Aid, so I did a quick newsgroup search to find out if any of the games were that great, and which. Turns out a nearby CD shop had a ton of 'em. Bought Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio, Dance Dance Revolution (with dance pad) and Chu Chu Rocket.
Chu Chu Rocket sat there unused for days while my roommates played Soul Calibur. Then we pulled it out one Saturday morning and discovered that it was probably the best game I had purchased. Even people who didn't normally enjoy puzzle games were addicted to it.
I still have everything boxed up...maybe I'll pull it out today and give it a play.
How often do you read outdoors? Usually when I'm outdoors, I'm doing things like recalibrating my retinae, watching my skin burn, etc. No time to read outdoors, really.
Myhrvold's enterprise stunk to high heaven since the day it was conceived. Especially the part about paying scientists to come over to an exciting "tell us what's on your mind" conference and start brainstorming together, which was obviously done so that Myhrvold could collect, patent, and monetize those ideas.
Reminds me of reading Dick Feynman's book about the U.S. government doing the same thing, asking scientists to come up with all sorts of uses for atomic energy that they could patent. Except, that's the government, and presumably they're accountable to someone. At least they ended up giving Feynman a dollar per patent so he could go buy some cookies. I've worked with companies who abuse scientists in similar ways, and to be honest I think our system trains scientists to be scientifically smart and realistically dumb - if you could explain to these guys that they don't have to sell out in order to make money, maybe we'd have MUCH better products and services today.
There are some really amazing ways to gauge competitiveness in ways that don't offend peoples' way of living. I wouldn't say competitiveness is really addressed in the strip-club scenario, either.
The real problem comes when you put an employee in a situation where he is compelled by a group to act against his beliefs (i.e., go to a strip club). You can make a real argument that making sure there is only one car and taking other actions to ensure the "exercise" works would be a HUGE sign of compulsion. And then the employer has to explain why this was even a necessary team-building activity, and explain why all the other team-building activities out there that focused on real problems (i.e. non-anecdotal) were deemed insufficient.
That you seem to think "strip club team building == competitive, has drive to succeed" is pretty worrying too.
That's nice, unless you work in a place that's even mildly diverse, where you have people like Kevin the married Mormon who is into skydiving, Samir the introvert muslim who regularly takes prayer breaks and loves Sunny-D, and Tammi the feminist who enjoys electronic music and builds analog synths in her spare time.
No, I think your amazing team-building system would work best with extroverted dopey white guys aged 20 - 30 and see nothing wrong with TV. Mooks, basically. It assumes a non-diverse team, so by definition it's a weak way to build teams in general.
...a cosmocracy, that is. For the last several years I've felt this way. We're a global society now, and the average guy from wherever just doesn't seem to give a care.
"The man that is not moved at what he reads,
That takes not fire at their heroic deeds,
Unworthy of the blessings of the brave,
Is base in kind, and born to be a slave."
-Cowper
IMO, if we ever are globally-governed 100%, it's going to be born out of our "need" for security from the likes of the Taliban (organized crime, basically).
For those who had all but given up on Skype in Linux, they just released a new Linux client beta version in the last few days or so. Finally there are changes afoot...
That doesn't sound right to me. You mention a consultant being fired for having a spot on his tie...really? Let's hear the other side of that story. You mention people not reporting their hours correctly, being afraid of getting fired if the real hour number leaked out.
The only problem with that is, it's the sign of a loser in every industry on the planet. Under-reporting your hours means 99% of the time that you got hired based on how cheap you are, so it should be no surprise that they got treated that way. They told a lie (or just couldn't estimate well in the first place), and the result is, they are paying for it.
So I'm thinking: It sounds like you know a bunch of people who aren't very experienced in their industry, and through them, you know a bunch of people who exploit that type of folk. Makes sense to me.
Wired are actually telling us that we LIKE high quality stuff, but after a point, consumer products are just repetitive. It's pornographic to the T - they're exploiting consumers by pushing for higher and higher quality while the essential creation remains the same.
So we're starting to get a sense for what industrialism brought us: The need to put a harness on creativity, to attempt to "own" creativity. And it can't be done.
My own theory is that we've tried unsuccessfully to sustain ourselves on consumerism, and the people who are doing the real creative stuff now are no longer what would be termed "consumers." They have withdrawn from the marketplace. So industry and media need to put a spin on this fast - they need to siphon off what's left in the can before they start to die. They're just in a mad grab for gobs of raw ideas, knowing that they can't hold onto individual ideas for so long anymore.
...open source SABDFLs can definitely take a lesson from other industries where vying for media attention is pretty competitive. You put a big link on your website that says "Trade and Media" or "Press Kits" and then you put Screenshots, Videos, High-res photos of those contributing to the project (not 1"x1" blurry crop from a team photo taken at your workplace). Put together a list of websites you'll be updating every time you release a new version. Ask your community members to make PDF flyers and other materials available for volunteers to print and hand out.
Looking from the other POV, I doubt most open source developers will care about this stuff. It's like eating glass for them, and a huge number of open source projects are pure hobby. A magazine picks up your software and says, "WHOA, this could be really cool," but maybe the last thing you want is more pressure in your life. If that's the case, I recommend being VERY open about your standpoint. If you want to do it your way or the highway, be even MORE open about it. People tend to get really pissed when they contribute many, many lines of code to your project and never see their work merged in. Likewise with people creating icons, splash screens, documentation, project website mockups, videos, etc. There are some very prominent open source projects that are embarrassingly backward in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
...for people who secretly want to do everything from scratch anyway.
By the way, I almost dropped out of my university for GP's reasons as well; guess that triggered my response. :)
It could also be a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. AC mentions a bad long-term memory but gives an example of writing an essay, something that people with OCD-level fear/anxiety often find themselves blocking out mentally as they do other less stressful things. Forgetting formulae is easy to do for anybody who finds school stressful.
Poor organization skills in people with OCD are also natural if they haven't yet discovered the "right" combination of factors that don't grate on their senses. I am an American with OCD and am unable to use U.S.-style three-ring binders and american-ruled paper. I order my stationery organizational supplies from Japan and had to hire a consultant to help me get on the road to organization, my way.
Though I scored high on the I.Q. test, my general test-taking record tells me that anxiety must have affected my score.
As additional proof I submit the fact that an attractive 30-something woman gave me my test, and when she bought me a soda from a vending machine before the test, I was completely wigging out emotionally. "Did she just buy me a drink? Is that OK? I'm still in elementary school and she probably is hitting on me" etc. Now THAT is OCD at work, folks.
BTW you should be careful about phrases like "bad work ethic." I labored under that phrase for something like 20 years before learning how to meet my specific challenge head on and turn the tables. Considering my anxiety levels, I was one of the hardest working people around me.
Are you asking us questions or what? I want to take those as statements of fact but it's like you're teasing us with some inappropriate punctuation or something.
The 4.X beta on the same hardware? Why don't you just get a live CD and try it? I'm on an Ubuntu Q8300 quad-core with 8GB RAM and even I can tell that, for whatever reason, Chromium is *much* faster than even Opera (to say nothing of Firefox) on my system. It's got its annoyances, but when I need to do Youtube or Slashdot or anything else that Firefox convinces me is "intensive," I switch over to Chromium where I have like 20 tabs open and things fly. So I'm not surprised somebody is bringing this up. It's very fast.
Tell ya what. You're so interested in global content, but we've got all these political hoops we have to go through to make that work. Every last little country has its own media industry and they want things their own way.
But now, here's my proposal: We, the media, will give you global media - your way, anywhere. Now you - you just have to sign on the dotted line here, that says "I the undersigned, agree to a global governing body"...that's right, good. Now, see? We were going this way all along. And you and me, we both benefit this way!
Yeah, there are instructions out there that show how to do this with Ubuntu and other Linuxes.
> If you're cooking YOU'RE IN THE DAMNED KITCHEN!
:-)
Hey, that's true for now. But as home automation grows more and more popular, let's say somebody decides to build a FSU (food storage unit)-to-Cooking Unit interface with an open communication standard. Pretty soon you've got trucks rolling down your street every week, dropping off FSUs left and right. Sure, your menu will be generally pre-determined, but your grocery bill just got a LOT cheaper. Or if cheap isn't important, you can now eat like a king if you order premium FSUs.
And then there's the reduced need for multitasking...you subscribe to a gourmet menu selection by your favorite chef, and you just walk to the Cooking Unit at mealtime and pick up your food, eat.
Sure, there will always be people who love to cook by hand, the old way...just like there will always be people who read paper books, play old-style board games, etc.
The new & improved Mayan calendar gives us just enough time to accomplish all this, too...
Amazing that there were podcasts NINE years ago.
Wait, somebody uses "The late 1930s" in place of "September 3, 1939" and this supports your argument that somehow truth is being obscured?
I can see complaining if the date went from specific to general to generally incorrect, but this example is manifestly the reverse of that. Seems like truth is getting easier to find, doesn't it?
So many...ellipses in summary...make it hard to...believe....like...telegram from distant...planet
"And to your left - if everyone will put on their goggles, please - you'll see our product tester of the month, Jorge. Let's all give Jorge a hand!"
"Stand back a little there, ma'am. Thank you."
...my brother is an astronaut, and he was TOTALLY looking forward to the air lock door flying open and some taikonauts shouting, "SUPPLIES!"
I found out that Dreamcasts were going for $70 at my local Rite-Aid, so I did a quick newsgroup search to find out if any of the games were that great, and which. Turns out a nearby CD shop had a ton of 'em. Bought Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio, Dance Dance Revolution (with dance pad) and Chu Chu Rocket.
Chu Chu Rocket sat there unused for days while my roommates played Soul Calibur. Then we pulled it out one Saturday morning and discovered that it was probably the best game I had purchased. Even people who didn't normally enjoy puzzle games were addicted to it.
I still have everything boxed up...maybe I'll pull it out today and give it a play.
How often do you read outdoors? Usually when I'm outdoors, I'm doing things like recalibrating my retinae, watching my skin burn, etc. No time to read outdoors, really.
Myhrvold's enterprise stunk to high heaven since the day it was conceived. Especially the part about paying scientists to come over to an exciting "tell us what's on your mind" conference and start brainstorming together, which was obviously done so that Myhrvold could collect, patent, and monetize those ideas.
Reminds me of reading Dick Feynman's book about the U.S. government doing the same thing, asking scientists to come up with all sorts of uses for atomic energy that they could patent. Except, that's the government, and presumably they're accountable to someone. At least they ended up giving Feynman a dollar per patent so he could go buy some cookies. I've worked with companies who abuse scientists in similar ways, and to be honest I think our system trains scientists to be scientifically smart and realistically dumb - if you could explain to these guys that they don't have to sell out in order to make money, maybe we'd have MUCH better products and services today.
There are some really amazing ways to gauge competitiveness in ways that don't offend peoples' way of living. I wouldn't say competitiveness is really addressed in the strip-club scenario, either.
The real problem comes when you put an employee in a situation where he is compelled by a group to act against his beliefs (i.e., go to a strip club). You can make a real argument that making sure there is only one car and taking other actions to ensure the "exercise" works would be a HUGE sign of compulsion. And then the employer has to explain why this was even a necessary team-building activity, and explain why all the other team-building activities out there that focused on real problems (i.e. non-anecdotal) were deemed insufficient.
That you seem to think "strip club team building == competitive, has drive to succeed" is pretty worrying too.
That's nice, unless you work in a place that's even mildly diverse, where you have people like Kevin the married Mormon who is into skydiving, Samir the introvert muslim who regularly takes prayer breaks and loves Sunny-D, and Tammi the feminist who enjoys electronic music and builds analog synths in her spare time.
No, I think your amazing team-building system would work best with extroverted dopey white guys aged 20 - 30 and see nothing wrong with TV. Mooks, basically. It assumes a non-diverse team, so by definition it's a weak way to build teams in general.
...a cosmocracy, that is. For the last several years I've felt this way. We're a global society now, and the average guy from wherever just doesn't seem to give a care.
"The man that is not moved at what he reads,
That takes not fire at their heroic deeds,
Unworthy of the blessings of the brave,
Is base in kind, and born to be a slave."
-Cowper
IMO, if we ever are globally-governed 100%, it's going to be born out of our "need" for security from the likes of the Taliban (organized crime, basically).
For those who had all but given up on Skype in Linux, they just released a new Linux client beta version in the last few days or so. Finally there are changes afoot...
That doesn't sound right to me. You mention a consultant being fired for having a spot on his tie...really? Let's hear the other side of that story. You mention people not reporting their hours correctly, being afraid of getting fired if the real hour number leaked out.
The only problem with that is, it's the sign of a loser in every industry on the planet. Under-reporting your hours means 99% of the time that you got hired based on how cheap you are, so it should be no surprise that they got treated that way. They told a lie (or just couldn't estimate well in the first place), and the result is, they are paying for it.
So I'm thinking: It sounds like you know a bunch of people who aren't very experienced in their industry, and through them, you know a bunch of people who exploit that type of folk. Makes sense to me.
Nah, we are OK with GPLv3. This is just an Apple thing.
Signed,
All Linux-loving folks
Wired are actually telling us that we LIKE high quality stuff, but after a point, consumer products are just repetitive. It's pornographic to the T - they're exploiting consumers by pushing for higher and higher quality while the essential creation remains the same.
So we're starting to get a sense for what industrialism brought us: The need to put a harness on creativity, to attempt to "own" creativity. And it can't be done.
My own theory is that we've tried unsuccessfully to sustain ourselves on consumerism, and the people who are doing the real creative stuff now are no longer what would be termed "consumers." They have withdrawn from the marketplace. So industry and media need to put a spin on this fast - they need to siphon off what's left in the can before they start to die. They're just in a mad grab for gobs of raw ideas, knowing that they can't hold onto individual ideas for so long anymore.
...open source SABDFLs can definitely take a lesson from other industries where vying for media attention is pretty competitive. You put a big link on your website that says "Trade and Media" or "Press Kits" and then you put Screenshots, Videos, High-res photos of those contributing to the project (not 1"x1" blurry crop from a team photo taken at your workplace). Put together a list of websites you'll be updating every time you release a new version. Ask your community members to make PDF flyers and other materials available for volunteers to print and hand out.
Looking from the other POV, I doubt most open source developers will care about this stuff. It's like eating glass for them, and a huge number of open source projects are pure hobby. A magazine picks up your software and says, "WHOA, this could be really cool," but maybe the last thing you want is more pressure in your life. If that's the case, I recommend being VERY open about your standpoint. If you want to do it your way or the highway, be even MORE open about it. People tend to get really pissed when they contribute many, many lines of code to your project and never see their work merged in. Likewise with people creating icons, splash screens, documentation, project website mockups, videos, etc. There are some very prominent open source projects that are embarrassingly backward in this regard.
"Felicidades."