What gets me angry is when a voice command that Google understood perfectly clear a week prior, in my car, with radio playing and fan running, it will refuse to understand under and circumstances this week. It's great when you're driving and all of the sudden a command that was working fine suddenly dumps you to a search and you have to play "try to click three times while driving at speed in Twin Cities rush hour traffic" for something that used to work.
I don't trust voice commands to work when I need them to, like when I can't be messing with the screen. That's my problem with them.
You have your CCNA? Any knowledge of Cisco call centers? Seriously, if you do, my company is looking for engineers. Believe it or not, networking happens online too.
It means "hate speech" will be illegal (pretty sure it already is) and any site with hate speech will be blocked. The definition of "hate speech" will become "things we don't want people saying; think of the children". Oh, also, streaming sites. They're gone. Podcasts? You betcha'.
You'll notice that they've been using this wording for a LONG time. All of the proposals have featured "lawful content" and I'm sure that's not an accident.
I don't agree. The problem with grades is that they actually don't mean anything. They indicate nothing about a student other than how they responded to questions, at an arbitrary date and time, against how an arbitrary instructor graded those responses. For everyone who understood the game, it didn't matter. For everyone who doesn't understand the game, it probably doesn't matter.
After education, there is a world of "pass/fail" tests where sometimes passing or failing doesn't matter and the rules are foggy. Some people become well adjusted, productive, members of society and their community and some don't with many shades in between. But those aren't things that can always be taught let alone graded. You can maybe grade yourself (if you have the maturity to do so objectively) and your boss and peers may grade you, as may your SO/spouse, but those scores are have real world value and are based on real world criteria. That criteria can't be prepped for and forgotten next week, but has to be part of who you are. If you're passing those tests, you're doing something right, if not, you need to adjust. No amount of schooling (I specifically didn't use "education" there) adequately prepares you for that. Experience and introspection does.
What happened to merit? It was re-labeled "privilege". You don't think you actually earned your accompilshments, do you?
... but, I did. Through a lot of hard work and solo night sessions coding. I'm not saying the world owes me anything for that, but I think it raises my value against those that spent their time differently, all other things being equal. That is, if I have thousands of hours more doing one thing (and, humbly, I believe I have a bit of natural talent - but I really can't be sure of that) at the expense of something else, have I not earned something in one area and potentially lost experience in another?
Once again, I'm not saying the world owes me a job, just that I've done things that put me in a better position to get and stay at one.
Federal sentencing guidelines almost never ask for "fully stacked" sentences.
The term you're looking for is "consecutively." Most of the time, all sentences are served "concurrently," or at the same time. On rare occasions, as you write, a judge will specify that the sentences be served consecutively, to keep an exceptionally bad felon behind bars for as long as possible. Of course, the prosecutor can always threaten to ask for consecutive sentences to bulldoze the defendant into accepting a plea.
I've never considered this before, but isn't that a bit of "the law of unintended consequences"? For instance, if I know that I can commit a single crime now and pay the full rate or commit multiple crimes and pay them off in parallel, why deterrent is there for me to limit my activities?
I've always hated a law that I've heard of (this is strictly hearsay, I've never actually verified it) where in some parts of the US, if you involve a gun in a robbery there's an automatic minimum sentence which is in line with the sentence for having a gun and committing assault; just by having the gun you're already in as much trouble as if you used it, so there really isn't any incentive to not use it if you think doing so could allow you to avoid capture and prosecution. If you're going to be charged for attempted homicide, it's not like taking a hostage is going to add to your sentence at the end of the day and it has the most narrow chance of getting you off the hook.
My SO is a paralegal and I'm always amazed at the perverse incentives that are built into the legal system since you always seem to be in for a pound when you're in for a penny. No doubt legislation passed by someone "tough on crime", but the public seems to support it. I've always thought that putting someone in a place where they stand to lose nothing is a rather poor position to put them in.
<rambling>
For instance, I had lost my license due to unpaid tickets (I thought I had paid them all off, but I must have missed a payment) and I was pulled over for a taillight being out. At this point I now had a suspended license for driving on a suspended license (aka, strike two before they pull it for 5 years in the state I was then living). I went to a concert with some friends and they all hit the booze a bit hard and when it came time to drive home and they were all too drunk, we let the least drunk guy drive. It was more dangerous than the sober guy driving, obviously, but we reasoned that if we got pulled over the law would take it easier on a guy with a first DUI, a wife and a kid than a guy with a third violation for driving on a suspended license. The math was easy; I got "caught" (I didn't know I was doing anything wrong) a second time and they took my license for a year for the second infraction; your first DUI infraction is an automatic 1 month suspension or so. We knew which crime was "worse" in this case by what would have happened to myself versus what would have happened to the drunk guy that drove us home. We also knew which was safer, but it's not like the cops would have taken that into account, so it wasn't really a consideration in our assessment of the situation.
</rambling>
Once they do sell you a franchise, they dictate your trade dress, which means corporate pays for remodeling the individual franchise stores (after all, McDonalds themselves owns the property), and when they tell you remodel, expect the crews to show up and just do it, you are at best granted minor choices on things like arrangement of the bathrooms, and the manager's office, and so on. Otherwise, they dictate.
[...]
Everything you say other than this is true (former MCD shift manager here, but high school was a long time ago, so I may be mis-recalling). The corporation gives you choice of decor from the "catalog" (yes, there is basically a catalog for interiors) and then you split the bill with them 50/50 for the remodeling/upgrade. But they do tell you when you're going to be doing the remodeling and they do hire the contractors. Usually this also includes upgrades of the old/retrofitted kitchen equipment, which is expensive and provided by corporate approved suppliers only.
I almost mentioned the name of my company as the one that hasn't been hacked. We take security very seriously. No Microsoft products are allowed on the premises, employees are armed, etc.
Then I realized posting that could make us a Target.
Actually, you're very probably correct. I'm honestly too tired to check (I lost a DB cluster last night/this morning and have been dealing with that since yesterday), but you're very probably correct. My head isn't in the game like it usually is. Please excuse the noise.
As AC said, The Windows key is "Super", not "Meta".
At some point you just say, "let's discuss this after the Scrum". Usually when people get off track, it's because they need to talk to someone specifically instead of the group. We don't usually have a problem with this, but we don't mind if a Scrum goes half an hour or so once or twice a week. Sometimes we just decide to break out and brainstorm and let others go about their day. You've got to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
[...] They once had a brilliant young developer who wrote more in three months than their team did in years, before being sacked for delivering code with a bug that caused an outage. [...]
Please tell me this is an exaggeration. Show me a single developer who hasn't caused an issue of some sorts, in production, and I'll show you a developer that hasn't fully matured yet.
[2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.
What ends up happening in that case is that a bug is found in the "original" (or any subset thereof) code and it's fixed. 11 copies with the bug, authored by three other developers, remain.
It's ironic, I was literally just reading that blog post.
I've worked in both environments. Where I currently work we have a daily Scrum (in name only) and we only cover three questions:
What did you work on yesterday?
What do you plan on working on today?
Is there anything blocking you yesterday or today?
It's a liberating thing. I can literally call someone else out for blocking me, or they can call me out for blocking them. Our manager can say, "I understand you were working on X, Y, or Z yesterday, but Alice, Bob or Carl needs you to work on this today so they can get their stuff done." It's simple, it's effective and it makes the team more coherent and cohesive with nothing more than a 15 minute "stand-up" (we all work remotely on any given day and we do the Scrum via Google Hangouts) at 10 AM. It sets the tone for the day. And it only costs our attention for 15 minutes and willingness to be reasonable with other professionals on our team.
We don't have:
Organizational Fear: You can dial up anyone or schedule a meeting to resolve a problem. If you break the build and no one says anything about it... they can either tell you about it the next daily Scrum, or it isn't a problem for them. Simple as that. You need to talk to someone? Schedule a meeting with them and anyone else that needs to be involved. If you can't make that happen, bring it up at the next daily Scrum.
Losing Your Job Fear: We're all paid professionals and are experienced and knowledgeable in our field. Keeping us afraid would only be enough to keep us working, but not enough to keep us innovating and a leader in our field. For more on this, read further.
Fear Of Changing Code: Once again, if you have an issue with code, bring it up with the original author of the code or someone familiar with the code base. They won't take it personal (see previous point). If you're afraid of breaking the build, dial up someone and do some pair programming. At worst, you'll check in something that doesn't pass unit tests (or lacking those, code that will not pass code review before it's deployed). You'll feel stupid for at most a full day and you'll survive.
To be honest, FDD seems like a culture problem more than anything else. You're a professional. Act like it and expect those around, and above, you to act like it. If your culture is so messed up that you suffer from these problems, it's most likely just the tip of the iceberg of the organizational challenges that your company faces.
"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller
I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.
Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!
Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.
You forgot to figure in that when the minimum wage goes up all of your suppliers have more overhead and pass that on to you. So your cost of supplies increases as well. When you buy a Big Mac, you're paying for the entire supply chain that got the thing to you. Sometimes that chain is reasonably long and you have to cover the cost of every step of it.
Seems like MS would make a lot of dough if you were to enable these non-XP updates and then one of them bricked your box. Maybe it's a bit of a tinfoil hat idea, but I'm sure they're not going out of their way to make sure that enabling this registry key isn't going to make you a potential customer again.
I'm meeting the requirements of the GPL, even though I'm only technically linking to the library in question. The code is available to anyone that I'm distributing a binary to (read: no one, they have to compile it on their own).
I have three projects on GitHub. One of them is practice code I was writing for when I interviewed with Google (don't worry, they didn't ask me a single question that was on the study sheet - but I did have fun writing a splay tree). It was just a bunch of functions with a description of "nothing to see here".
Another project is eventually going to be a GPL project that runs a football pool. Currently it's just a parser that scrapes nfl.com and puts info into data structs. I haven't bothered putting the license file in it yet. It uses another GPL library, so it's already implied that it will be GPL code when it matures past being a bunch of functions sewn together just enough to test them. Why would I put a license on that? So I can be sure that I get changes back for incomplete interfaces? The interfaces aren't even defined yet.
The last project, I can't even recall what it is. I'm not maintaining it and I don't care if anyone swipes the code. It's probably code that scratched an itch that I had that was unique to me.
Huh, small world. I grew up on the Stroudsburg/Bartonsville line and went to Pocono Mountain. But I left there in 2004. There used to be a couple of computer shops in the area, but I think they're mostly gone now.
Slashdot Mirror
Up with service! Down with monopolies! Up with net neutrality! Down with regulation! Up with Pluto! Down with Kim Dotcom!
Wait a minute - Today's stories leave me feeling edgy and confused.
Things tend to equal out; read Slashdot again on Monday to set things right.
What gets me angry is when a voice command that Google understood perfectly clear a week prior, in my car, with radio playing and fan running, it will refuse to understand under and circumstances this week. It's great when you're driving and all of the sudden a command that was working fine suddenly dumps you to a search and you have to play "try to click three times while driving at speed in Twin Cities rush hour traffic" for something that used to work.
I don't trust voice commands to work when I need them to, like when I can't be messing with the screen. That's my problem with them.
You have your CCNA? Any knowledge of Cisco call centers? Seriously, if you do, my company is looking for engineers. Believe it or not, networking happens online too.
It means "hate speech" will be illegal (pretty sure it already is) and any site with hate speech will be blocked. The definition of "hate speech" will become "things we don't want people saying; think of the children". Oh, also, streaming sites. They're gone. Podcasts? You betcha'.
You'll notice that they've been using this wording for a LONG time. All of the proposals have featured "lawful content" and I'm sure that's not an accident.
I don't agree. The problem with grades is that they actually don't mean anything. They indicate nothing about a student other than how they responded to questions, at an arbitrary date and time, against how an arbitrary instructor graded those responses. For everyone who understood the game, it didn't matter. For everyone who doesn't understand the game, it probably doesn't matter.
After education, there is a world of "pass/fail" tests where sometimes passing or failing doesn't matter and the rules are foggy. Some people become well adjusted, productive, members of society and their community and some don't with many shades in between. But those aren't things that can always be taught let alone graded. You can maybe grade yourself (if you have the maturity to do so objectively) and your boss and peers may grade you, as may your SO/spouse, but those scores are have real world value and are based on real world criteria. That criteria can't be prepped for and forgotten next week, but has to be part of who you are. If you're passing those tests, you're doing something right, if not, you need to adjust. No amount of schooling (I specifically didn't use "education" there) adequately prepares you for that. Experience and introspection does.
What happened to merit? It was re-labeled "privilege". You don't think you actually earned your accompilshments, do you?
... but, I did. Through a lot of hard work and solo night sessions coding. I'm not saying the world owes me anything for that, but I think it raises my value against those that spent their time differently, all other things being equal. That is, if I have thousands of hours more doing one thing (and, humbly, I believe I have a bit of natural talent - but I really can't be sure of that) at the expense of something else, have I not earned something in one area and potentially lost experience in another?
Once again, I'm not saying the world owes me a job, just that I've done things that put me in a better position to get and stay at one.
Federal sentencing guidelines almost never ask for "fully stacked" sentences. The term you're looking for is "consecutively." Most of the time, all sentences are served "concurrently," or at the same time. On rare occasions, as you write, a judge will specify that the sentences be served consecutively, to keep an exceptionally bad felon behind bars for as long as possible. Of course, the prosecutor can always threaten to ask for consecutive sentences to bulldoze the defendant into accepting a plea.
I've never considered this before, but isn't that a bit of "the law of unintended consequences"? For instance, if I know that I can commit a single crime now and pay the full rate or commit multiple crimes and pay them off in parallel, why deterrent is there for me to limit my activities?
I've always hated a law that I've heard of (this is strictly hearsay, I've never actually verified it) where in some parts of the US, if you involve a gun in a robbery there's an automatic minimum sentence which is in line with the sentence for having a gun and committing assault; just by having the gun you're already in as much trouble as if you used it, so there really isn't any incentive to not use it if you think doing so could allow you to avoid capture and prosecution. If you're going to be charged for attempted homicide, it's not like taking a hostage is going to add to your sentence at the end of the day and it has the most narrow chance of getting you off the hook.
My SO is a paralegal and I'm always amazed at the perverse incentives that are built into the legal system since you always seem to be in for a pound when you're in for a penny. No doubt legislation passed by someone "tough on crime", but the public seems to support it. I've always thought that putting someone in a place where they stand to lose nothing is a rather poor position to put them in.
<rambling>
For instance, I had lost my license due to unpaid tickets (I thought I had paid them all off, but I must have missed a payment) and I was pulled over for a taillight being out. At this point I now had a suspended license for driving on a suspended license (aka, strike two before they pull it for 5 years in the state I was then living). I went to a concert with some friends and they all hit the booze a bit hard and when it came time to drive home and they were all too drunk, we let the least drunk guy drive. It was more dangerous than the sober guy driving, obviously, but we reasoned that if we got pulled over the law would take it easier on a guy with a first DUI, a wife and a kid than a guy with a third violation for driving on a suspended license. The math was easy; I got "caught" (I didn't know I was doing anything wrong) a second time and they took my license for a year for the second infraction; your first DUI infraction is an automatic 1 month suspension or so. We knew which crime was "worse" in this case by what would have happened to myself versus what would have happened to the drunk guy that drove us home. We also knew which was safer, but it's not like the cops would have taken that into account, so it wasn't really a consideration in our assessment of the situation.
</rambling>
[...]
Once they do sell you a franchise, they dictate your trade dress, which means corporate pays for remodeling the individual franchise stores (after all, McDonalds themselves owns the property), and when they tell you remodel, expect the crews to show up and just do it, you are at best granted minor choices on things like arrangement of the bathrooms, and the manager's office, and so on. Otherwise, they dictate. [...]
Everything you say other than this is true (former MCD shift manager here, but high school was a long time ago, so I may be mis-recalling). The corporation gives you choice of decor from the "catalog" (yes, there is basically a catalog for interiors) and then you split the bill with them 50/50 for the remodeling/upgrade. But they do tell you when you're going to be doing the remodeling and they do hire the contractors. Usually this also includes upgrades of the old/retrofitted kitchen equipment, which is expensive and provided by corporate approved suppliers only.
I almost mentioned the name of my company as the one that hasn't been hacked. We take security very seriously. No Microsoft products are allowed on the premises, employees are armed, etc.
Then I realized posting that could make us a Target.
Well played, sir. Well played.
Actually, you're very probably correct. I'm honestly too tired to check (I lost a DB cluster last night/this morning and have been dealing with that since yesterday), but you're very probably correct. My head isn't in the game like it usually is. Please excuse the noise. As AC said, The Windows key is "Super", not "Meta".
[...]
You can even skip 1 and 2 by pushing your windows (or whatever you want to call it) button, which acts like the upper corner thingy.
The "Windows" key is called the "meta key" on all platforms that I'm aware of.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle." -- Sgt. Slaughter (Sorry, but that GI Joe quote was too tempting)
At some point you just say, "let's discuss this after the Scrum". Usually when people get off track, it's because they need to talk to someone specifically instead of the group. We don't usually have a problem with this, but we don't mind if a Scrum goes half an hour or so once or twice a week. Sometimes we just decide to break out and brainstorm and let others go about their day. You've got to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
> It's ironic, I was literally just reading that blog post.
Like rain on your wedding day.
Fair enough. At least I didn't use the term "literally" to mean "figuratively". :s/It's ironic/Strangely enough/
[...] They once had a brilliant young developer who wrote more in three months than their team did in years, before being sacked for delivering code with a bug that caused an outage. [...]
Please tell me this is an exaggeration. Show me a single developer who hasn't caused an issue of some sorts, in production, and I'll show you a developer that hasn't fully matured yet.
[2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.
What ends up happening in that case is that a bug is found in the "original" (or any subset thereof) code and it's fixed. 11 copies with the bug, authored by three other developers, remain.
I've worked in both environments. Where I currently work we have a daily Scrum (in name only) and we only cover three questions:
It's a liberating thing. I can literally call someone else out for blocking me, or they can call me out for blocking them. Our manager can say, "I understand you were working on X, Y, or Z yesterday, but Alice, Bob or Carl needs you to work on this today so they can get their stuff done." It's simple, it's effective and it makes the team more coherent and cohesive with nothing more than a 15 minute "stand-up" (we all work remotely on any given day and we do the Scrum via Google Hangouts) at 10 AM. It sets the tone for the day. And it only costs our attention for 15 minutes and willingness to be reasonable with other professionals on our team.
We don't have:
To be honest, FDD seems like a culture problem more than anything else. You're a professional. Act like it and expect those around, and above, you to act like it. If your culture is so messed up that you suffer from these problems, it's most likely just the tip of the iceberg of the organizational challenges that your company faces.
"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller
So... you just DDOSed your friends. You sure you're not a sysadmin yourself?
I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.
Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!
Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.
Seems legit.
You forgot to figure in that when the minimum wage goes up all of your suppliers have more overhead and pass that on to you. So your cost of supplies increases as well. When you buy a Big Mac, you're paying for the entire supply chain that got the thing to you. Sometimes that chain is reasonably long and you have to cover the cost of every step of it.
Seems like MS would make a lot of dough if you were to enable these non-XP updates and then one of them bricked your box. Maybe it's a bit of a tinfoil hat idea, but I'm sure they're not going out of their way to make sure that enabling this registry key isn't going to make you a potential customer again.
I'm not sure whether it's the language, or the people who choose to use it.
Yes.
I'm meeting the requirements of the GPL, even though I'm only technically linking to the library in question. The code is available to anyone that I'm distributing a binary to (read: no one, they have to compile it on their own).
I agree.
I have three projects on GitHub. One of them is practice code I was writing for when I interviewed with Google (don't worry, they didn't ask me a single question that was on the study sheet - but I did have fun writing a splay tree). It was just a bunch of functions with a description of "nothing to see here".
Another project is eventually going to be a GPL project that runs a football pool. Currently it's just a parser that scrapes nfl.com and puts info into data structs. I haven't bothered putting the license file in it yet. It uses another GPL library, so it's already implied that it will be GPL code when it matures past being a bunch of functions sewn together just enough to test them. Why would I put a license on that? So I can be sure that I get changes back for incomplete interfaces? The interfaces aren't even defined yet.
The last project, I can't even recall what it is. I'm not maintaining it and I don't care if anyone swipes the code. It's probably code that scratched an itch that I had that was unique to me.
Huh, small world. I grew up on the Stroudsburg/Bartonsville line and went to Pocono Mountain. But I left there in 2004. There used to be a couple of computer shops in the area, but I think they're mostly gone now.
Your user name... you don't happen to live in the Mount Pocono area, do you?