Re: Coding like a ... (car commercial slogan)
on
Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd opine that it is more important; promoting "alternative" software to the management types requires a tricky blend of eye-candy and stability. Most of my discussions went easier when you can say "This software does _____"... and it does it well enough to avoid crashing until the boss walks away and doesn't see you restart.
I'm seeing a lot of remarks about flash, and if a particular important reference site you you just happens to have that magic combination of elements to take you down, it's a tough initial impression to erase.
I think about "Trust Grids". It's about who has what agenda.
On one corner, I was late to understand, but I watched enough of MS's tricks unfold live to absolutely distrust everything they do.
My verdict is out on Apple.
Some of the famous OSS icons have their special situations, but I feel that their mistakes are somewhat easier to both see through and counteract afterward.
Because I have no programming skill at all, I have to trust someone; I currently trust the independent coders as a cohesive whole to produce purer code because that's in their best interests long term.
Bugs can still lie dormant, but when someone eventually becomes motivated to fix it, they can usually get their results out faster without having to deal with private company politics.
Of course, high end commercial packages will be here for a while.
What the OSS movement has done well is to provide alternatives to commodity software so that the ancillaries don't smoke your budget. OSS can also provide add-ons that the mainline vendor has not built into their official package releases.
Applying what I have learned through this site, I have completely replaced IE as a browser, and because MS-Office 7 is so silly, *almost* replaced that with Open Office (the 3.0 betas are out, and can handle the new extensions.)
Now when we buy software, at least I can be satisfied when it's spent on first-tier applications rather than the result of a 25-year old weasel deal in Seattle.
Wasn't this a topic of the other news story a few hours ago, "bots gaming the system"? I think I recall the solution proposed in a post as "change the game so that the bots can't win".
No more waiting (wasting!) an entire week for an episode, then as it plays sitting through 22 minutes of commercials.
If you can't stand to be serious and must relax, then burn one day, watch 9 episodes in 7 hours, and put the next 8 weeks to your previously scheduled productive activity.
I will gladly put support behind this trade. "Productive" doesn't need to be creating a second job for yourself... only that some kind of value is forming.
I think the trick is that TV is guaged at a level of "Here I am with the remote... is there *something* worth staying here for, or is *all* of it so bad I have to shut it off?"
I am a very enthusiastic reader, and 95% of my books are better chosen with a theme than TV's forced selection.
Also, I find that books create their own fatigue indicator. If I'm tired and have wound down after 45 minutes of reading, time for a nap. TV constantly pushes you awake on a low grade idle, clicking the raw hours by.
Out of pique I once did a mini personal project around my Psych 101 class.
I had stumbled onto an edition of the older textbook after having duly bought my new one.
The new one was *smaller*. That's right, the folks who published the thing decided that "Students who paid huge sums of money to go to college and buy a $88 dollar book would rather buy a 580 page book instead of the 730 page book."
Um... If our deal ol' student prefers to party and wants to skip a few pages, fine. But when I read the chapters in parallel the larger older edition had a ton of secondary explanation that I found quite valuable.
Though Microsoft is getting pretty good at the Chewbacca defense.
"Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP." Meanwhile Windows 7 is aimed at being comprised of (overpriced?) components so you can skip the bloat and make it smaller than XP. Maybe this is the Three Bears philosophy of programming.
"A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies." (And that hasn't even been updated yet!)
While everyone basically suspected as such, the nation's highest leadership exacted retribution as if it were true, creating your mentioned dangerous cognitive dissonance.
"You are in possession of at least seven orifices. Your website demonstrates fifteen cables, one of which you may discard. If so, the other fourteen are still under the terms of your retributuion. You will now insert those cables into the orifices in the 1-1-1-1-3-1-7 configuration."
Actually, I've mapped the few hours of story arcs on/. a few times, and several of the editors have accounted for 18 hour spans of news.
People with "Programmer's Ethic" work well from home, but other posts are correct that the types of people who subconsciously need the flow of people around them begin to drift when working from home.
This is where non-time metrics can sometimes be fun if they're not too tightly calibrated. "I don't care what you do with your time so long as you post 137 stories on/. per week".
If that means a 3 hour break on Tuesday from 11 AM till 2Pm with a large pizza, large Hunan Chicken, 4 Liters of Dew, a bowl of wings, and 7 friends, go for it. Then after the "American Siesta" you can go back to work from 2PM until midnight.
Blogging is really starting to allow non-traditional working hours. It might take a couple decades more, but eventually the Brick&Mortar world will begin to notice that it's no fun anymore for every business to be open only from 8:15AM until 4PM if their customers are working from 6:45AM until 4:45PM.
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That's why Memorial Weekend is much anticipated.
I'd opine that it is more important; promoting "alternative" software to the management types requires a tricky blend of eye-candy and stability. Most of my discussions went easier when you can say "This software does _____"
I'm seeing a lot of remarks about flash, and if a particular important reference site you you just happens to have that magic combination of elements to take you down, it's a tough initial impression to erase.
So it's not my imagination that the "new form" makes it more easy to accidentally post as AC by not having an on-demand login field?
Should people put links to personal pages documenting their machine configs? (I wouldn't want to see raw posts of that data here!)
Or do people actually think that level of data becomes a security flaw? Anyone?
I, for one, welcome my C-Coding grandmotherly overlords.
I think about "Trust Grids". It's about who has what agenda.
On one corner, I was late to understand, but I watched enough of MS's tricks unfold live to absolutely distrust everything they do.
My verdict is out on Apple.
Some of the famous OSS icons have their special situations, but I feel that their mistakes are somewhat easier to both see through and counteract afterward.
Because I have no programming skill at all, I have to trust someone; I currently trust the independent coders as a cohesive whole to produce purer code because that's in their best interests long term.
Bugs can still lie dormant, but when someone eventually becomes motivated to fix it, they can usually get their results out faster without having to deal with private company politics.
Not quite.
Somewhere around Beta 3 and 4 in Windows, Yahoo Mail was giving me fits. One of my work sites was also rather nutty-rendered.
Beta 5 was at least better, and I am sure RC1 will be at least modestly better still, so now we're back on track.
Of course, high end commercial packages will be here for a while.
What the OSS movement has done well is to provide alternatives to commodity software so that the ancillaries don't smoke your budget. OSS can also provide add-ons that the mainline vendor has not built into their official package releases.
Applying what I have learned through this site, I have completely replaced IE as a browser, and because MS-Office 7 is so silly, *almost* replaced that with Open Office (the 3.0 betas are out, and can handle the new extensions.)
Now when we buy software, at least I can be satisfied when it's spent on first-tier applications rather than the result of a 25-year old weasel deal in Seattle.
Of course you have.
MS stuffed the channels again, so the same three Zunes are sitting on the vendor's display shelf with 3 more out back.
However, their presence on the vendor shelf means that they weren't sold.
Wasn't this a topic of the other news story a few hours ago, "bots gaming the system"?
I think I recall the solution proposed in a post as "change the game so that the bots can't win".
Now we know where those White House emails went!
"We kept 1 Million Bytes of Emails".
"But Sir, a megabyte is larger than that. Where are the missing emails?"
"I don't know where then!"
But isn't that barely preferable to the usual first posts?
It worked.
Not enough people are mean enough to reverse-mod you.
However, something like "insightful" applied to your post comes close to a paradox.
Nope.
No more waiting (wasting!) an entire week for an episode, then as it plays sitting through 22 minutes of commercials.
If you can't stand to be serious and must relax, then burn one day, watch 9 episodes in 7 hours, and put the next 8 weeks to your previously scheduled productive activity.
I will gladly put support behind this trade. "Productive" doesn't need to be creating a second job for yourself ... only that some kind of value is forming.
I think the trick is that TV is guaged at a level of "Here I am with the remote... is there *something* worth staying here for, or is *all* of it so bad I have to shut it off?"
I am a very enthusiastic reader, and 95% of my books are better chosen with a theme than TV's forced selection.
Also, I find that books create their own fatigue indicator. If I'm tired and have wound down after 45 minutes of reading, time for a nap. TV constantly pushes you awake on a low grade idle, clicking the raw hours by.
Out of pique I once did a mini personal project around my Psych 101 class.
I had stumbled onto an edition of the older textbook after having duly bought my new one.
The new one was *smaller*. That's right, the folks who published the thing decided that "Students who paid huge sums of money to go to college and buy a $88 dollar book would rather buy a 580 page book instead of the 730 page book."
Um... If our deal ol' student prefers to party and wants to skip a few pages, fine. But when I read the chapters in parallel the larger older edition had a ton of secondary explanation that I found quite valuable.
The Bush Administration has done wonders to support this industry.
... nooo!
Don't drag "think of the children" into this!
Though Microsoft is getting pretty good at the Chewbacca defense.
"Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP."
Meanwhile Windows 7 is aimed at being comprised of (overpriced?) components so you can skip the bloat and make it smaller than XP. Maybe this is the Three Bears philosophy of programming.
The story of the Bush regime.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/10/0079780?pg=1
"A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies." (And that hasn't even been updated yet!)
While everyone basically suspected as such, the nation's highest leadership exacted retribution as if it were true, creating your mentioned dangerous cognitive dissonance.
"You are in possession of at least seven orifices. Your website demonstrates fifteen cables, one of which you may discard. If so, the other fourteen are still under the terms of your retributuion. You will now insert those cables into the orifices in the 1-1-1-1-3-1-7 configuration."
So not spending extra words citing your idea means you can bring the copyright angle in as well?
Except that the HR people also do the probability weighting on those two days, and discover that 60% of "Sick" days occur on those two days.
Can someone source this? This would be a nice counter-factoid for some of the copyright discussions.
Actually, I've mapped the few hours of story arcs on
People with "Programmer's Ethic" work well from home, but other posts are correct that the types of people who subconsciously need the flow of people around them begin to drift when working from home.
This is where non-time metrics can sometimes be fun if they're not too tightly calibrated. "I don't care what you do with your time so long as you post 137 stories on
If that means a 3 hour break on Tuesday from 11 AM till 2Pm with a large pizza, large Hunan Chicken, 4 Liters of Dew, a bowl of wings, and 7 friends, go for it. Then after the "American Siesta" you can go back to work from 2PM until midnight.
Blogging is really starting to allow non-traditional working hours. It might take a couple decades more, but eventually the Brick&Mortar world will begin to notice that it's no fun anymore for every business to be open only from 8:15AM until 4PM if their customers are working from 6:45AM until 4:45PM.