When I was with a startup during the dot com era, it seemed to me that the worker bees were on speed, while the executives were on coke. I could see what the worker bees were doing, but nothing else could explain the decisions made at the upper levels. The incentives were pretty obvious--long hours without sleep, and demand to be 'on' regardless of circumstance, and the arrogance that comes with mastering a small domain and thinking you've mastered everything (see Dunning-Kruger.)

Personally, when I was tired, what I craved was sleep. But that was frowned upon. You can see why so many did drugs.

Arrogance, though, is a major consideration. Notice the parent comment: If you take drugs and get addicted... but no one plans to get addicted. Oh, take drugs by all means, just don't get addicted. They take drugs to cope, and as they are masters of the universe, they could not possibly get addicted. Besides, it's just to meet this deadline... and the next... and the next...

The entire culture is a massive fuck-up. Tired people make mistakes, and mistakes cost money. In the 1850's they discovered that 40 hours a week was the sweet spot for productivity, and every generation since has had to discover the same thing the hard way. I cannot count the number of projects I have seen crash and burn because of this bullshit.

But fuck it. We're John Galt. We can do anything. Just another bump to get me through...

How's that working out?

CSS3 is not a programming language. No more then HTML is.

Of course they are. They can be used to tell the computer to perform some task (render a logical structure with a particular formatting). They just aren't Turing complete.

A _web developer_ maybe, but a _programmer_ surely isn't.

JavaFX insists on setting component attributes by feeding them Strings containing CSS fragments rather than using setter functions. True story.

Well then, Iranian homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else there: they can avoid gay sex or die. And Jews in Nazi Germany were perfectly equal: after all, they could live if they weren't Jewish.

If you must lie to yourself, shouldn't you still have enough self-respect to use a bit less transparent bullshit?

Israel is sure doing a good job in that area creating more enemies, if that is their intention, the plan is working.

They've spent decades - most of their existence - surrounded by enemies. At this point, an end to the hostilities and siege mentality would be a threat to established powers that be. Just as happened in the US after Cold War, really.

When you "calibrate" swap for specific uses, it becomes non-general.

Metric, not swap. I'm talking about compressing memory pages before swapping out, possibly to another memory region, and calibrating the metric to balance between CPU cycles used vs. disk traffick saved, possibly dynamically.

In that situation it is far better to let the application use on-disk storage, because _it_ knows the data profile.

And the OS knows the general state of the system. Also, virtual memory systems are far from trivial to create, and can't really be done via libraries or such since every memory access could potentially require swapping data in first so your algorithms get littered with calls to swap_in and swap_out. On the other hand, the OS can use hardware features to do this transparently.

Sorry, but fail to understand swap.

Yes, you do. And English too.

There is no right to a game designed the way you would want to design it. Your right is to vote with your wallets. If the second companies instituted DRM everyone stopped buying their products, then companies would not see DRM as a valid business model.

The question is, do you have an obligation to follow a corrupt law enacted solely to protect corporate interests?

Copyright law, along with the Prohibition and the War on Drugs, are interesting case studies about the limits of law.

A "combined score" for speed and ratio is useless, as that relation is not linear.

A combined score could be quite useful when implementing, for example, compressed swap. Obviously you'd need to calibrate it for the specifics of a case.

true, i took the ** to note hyperbole but perhaps i shouldnt have made that leap

Seem more like emphasis to me. And besides, there is a qualitative rather than just quantitative difference between "many things", "most things" and "all things", so hyperbole is just a fancy term for lying in this case.

It is not actually possible to look at someone's post history*, which is clearly what you are counting on.

Just google site:slashdot.org "Zero__Kelvin (151819)".

Oh, I'm sorry, let me translate... "Don't you know how to motherfucking google, pinhead?" Was that correct? Does it need more fucks? Should I use "moron" instead? My Tough Nerd is a bit rusty.

We all like to think leaders all command respect and everyone just follows them because they're the leader. Bullshit. One technique, employed by MANY leaders is being a total fucking asshole, at least part of the time.

Yes, and the result it gets is that those who can, leave, and you're left with those desperate enough to put up with you taking your personal problems out on them. And even they will do their best to hide anything that might set you off from you, so you'll get the winning combo of bottom of the barrel workers and bad situational awareness.

You don't get respect by acting like an asshole. You get treated like the crazy person you are.

If you're coding GCC, maybe you might at least sub-consciously think "boy, I better not release utter shit, or I'll catch some serious shit from that asshole Linus Torvalds... what a cock gobbling asshole that Torvalds is".

Or you'll just start deleting messages from him without bothering to read them. If there's a serious bug, a person who isn't an asshole will report it eventually. Even if you're getting paid and must open the message, there are other bugs not submitted by assholes, and guess which - or rather, who - gets priority?

Is that the ONLY way to run an organization? Probably not, but as another thread points out, it's a common pattern of effective leaders.

It's a common pattern for people who get power, even through pure luck. Lots of people only behave because of peer pressure, and when that pressure eases a little, they lose control and degenerate into schoolyard bullies. That doesn't mean their behaviour was the reason of their success - especially since they only start manifesting it after gaining power - rather than a personality flaw that makes them less effective.

Compare this article about the rampant use of cocaine in Silicon Valley. Is the cocaine abuse there the reason to Silicon Valley's success, or a symptom?

Well, if I elect them, it makes it kinda immoral to shoot them...

So, Divine Right of the Kings with you wielding it?

No, the assumption is that when the private operator screws up he will get fired and replaced.

Thus he has an incentive to hide the mistake for as long as possible. At the same time he has an incentive to cut as many corners as possible to minimize costs, so he can make the lowest offer. You can counter these by making him unfirable for anything short of intentional sabotage, and by providing the contract at profit + costs, but then you have lost all the supposed benefits of privatization and are actually paying more - those profits.

Apparently you are unaware of this basic economic principle which those who push privatization take as a basic assumption.

Economics has nothing to do with either proposing or opposing privatization, it's all about ideology.

Greenpeace is for a move away from nuclear, coal and gas towards renewable energy sources.

But those renewable energy sources can't take the load, so in reality they're causing a move from nuclear to coal and gas.

Like what Germany is doing. In 30 or 40 years they will be nuclear and probably coal free as well.

And running on what? Hot air from election promises?

Just because you like what a politician is saying doesn't mean they're able to actually deliver. And just because you don't like an option doesn't mean there are better alternatives. Renewables cannot produce energy at a guaranteed rate, which means using them exclusively will result in rolling blackouts. I doubt germans are willing to put up with those, so either they return to nuclear power or continue using coal.

John Stewart Mill made the point that you should consider every argument, even if only one person in the entire world is making it against the consensus of everyone else, on its merits. The person speaking does not matter, only the merits of the argument.

Which is fine if you have the resources to consider it right down to first principles and performing any relevant experiments yourself. If you don't, which is usually the case, then trust enters the picture. And that means an argument by Greenpeace has a high cost - they're untrustworthy, so you need to fact-check very thoroughly before accepting anything they say - and low expected return - they're untrustworthy, so an argument by them has a low chance of actually being correct - of consideration.

Effectively you harm yourself by dismissing things that could be beneficial for you, simply because you dislike the messenger.

Only until you take into account the opportunity cost. There are plenty of messengers so you have to decide how much of your limited resources to invest into considering each one's argument.

Greenpeace is crying wolf again, and maybe this time there really is one there, but is that likely enough to justify dropping what you're doing to go investigate?