I think this is a more appropriate way of looking at things. If you want to keep valuable employees happy, it helps to show them that they're appreciated. That might mean giving them free candy and soda, but there are many other options. It might mean that you let them leave a little early or have an extra day off. It might mean that you give them a more flexible schedule or let them work from home. It might mean that you give them more interesting and more challenging projects. It might mean that you make a point to say "Thank you. Job well done."

The ways of showing people that they're important and appreciated are varied, and part of how you show someone that you appreciate them is by bothering to figure out what makes them feel appreciated.

Soda and candy? That wouldn't make me feel appreciated, and I wouldn't worry about a company that cut those. I'd be more concerned about a company that treats its employees badly but hopes to buy them off with soda and candy.

I don't think this is a trojan horse to force you to use Google+. I think it's the beginning of Google trying to position Hangouts as a more major project in its own right, rather than a small offshoot of Google+.

I think there is a large question in there: To what degree do we feel like we can forego the standard educational requirements and simply allow people to learn by whatever methods, and take tests to prove knowledge/ability?

To take it to an extreme, should we allow anyone to become a lawyer if they can pass a Bar exam? How about allowing someone to be a doctor just by passing a series of medical exams, but without going to med school?

Is there a value to sending people to school beyond testable knowledge? That's a big question.

-The Dutch

It doesn't really change the basic idea. In fact, I think it makes my point even stronger.

If it's Java 1.7, why refer to a version as 7u40-3 version 1.0? Are you ever going to have a version of Java 1.7 that you're calling 7u40-3 version 2.0? That's insane.

Just call it 1.7.40.3. Or really, make it simpler than that.

Why not just do a normal numbering scheme? If you dig into their packages, they sometimes claim stupidly to be version 1 of Java 7 update 17. WTF? Instead of that, how about Oracle just acts with some sanity and call it v. 7.17?

If you need sub versions of 7.17, then call it 7.17.1 and 7.17.2. You know, a sane person might do.

Or how about we all just drop Java since it's terrible and the cause of too many security problems?

I love when people answer their own questions.

The GP post said Facebook had "powerful networking effects", which means, as explained by the Wikipedia:

Well... there's not much of a reason to rip a rival limb from limb when he's already dead. It'd be in pretty poor taste, actually, and I'd expect Gates to avoid badmouthing Jobs if only to avoid looking like an asshole.

Also, their relationship was reportedly far less adversarial than people tended to assume. Most of the people who were supposedly in-the-know claimed that they were friends to some extent, and got along pretty well in spite of disagreeing on a lot of things.

I'm not sure why. I would definitely say it's unhelpful at times to see them as "illness with biological causes", though I wouldn't go as far as to say generalize and say it's always unhelpful. I also wouldn't go as far as to say that biology doesn't factor in on some level in all cases, but that's not really the point.

I think the point being made, rather, is that something happens when you start labeling all these things as "illnesses" and setting the expectation that they will be "cured". The truth is that many of these psychological processes and behaviors are within the range of what "normal people" experience. Nobody goes through life being happy, functional, and productive at all times, but we've gotten into treating every moment of dysfunction and unhappiness as a distinct disease. Taking these huge lumps of people and labeling them as suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, AD&D, OCD, and schizophrenia might be a bit like taking everyone over 6' tall and saying that they have hyper-tallness syndrome and treating that as a disease, and then everyone under 6' as suffering from the disease of hypo-tallness syndrome.

At some level, these things may not be diseases to be cured, but different personalities and ways of thinking that could be understood and granted some space for expression. Of course in very extreme cases where there's some kind of danger, some kinds of medical intervention may be necessary. However, there seems to be a very real danger of us creating a Procrustean bed of "mental health", trying to stretch and chop everyone to fit.

Why should one have to "believe in" science? I thought the deal with science is that it was a process of constantly questioning, developing, and attempting to disprove poor theories. I'm not sure I'm interested in your faith-based reasoning.

More directly to the point, science itself comes up short on determining what "mental health" is. Once we classify a set of symptoms and label it as an "illness", we can test whether a particular medication seems to improve the "illness" by whether it diminishes the symptoms, but that's just about the limit of science. So once you assume that hallucinations are "illness", then science can be used to determine whether a given medication diminishes hallucinations.

But it's not quite science that tells us that the medication "cures schizophrenia". It's like if you go hit by a car and your leg hurt afterwards. You could call that pain an "illness" and then science can determine that morphine is effective at treating the "illness". You can run thousands of studies that prove that morphine will remove the "illness" of leg pain, but it won't ever tell you whether that's an appropriate treatment until you redefine the illness to downplay the pain and focus instead on the broken leg.

It's also nice because sometimes, people who don't understand what your job instead understand other things. Sometimes they understand how to do their own jobs, and that sure is handy.

Sometimes the problem is just that everyone likes to believe that they themselves are very important. If you're a sloppy thinker, this might lead you to believe that your skills are the most useful skills, and that the things you know are things that everyone should know. For most of us, we aren't actually that important.

Yes, but since most currencies are not generated by an encryption scheme, they're arguably not quite as subject to software bugs and upgrade incompatibilities. Not in the same way.

When you come up with an answer like this, it raises the question, "What is the causal link?"

They dismiss both intelligence and socioeconomic status, and yet I would guess that there's some connection between reading/math ability and intelligence/socioeconomic status. Dumb children with poor uneducated parents are probably not doing well on these tests. Also they seem dismissive of the role of later education, though I'm sure that early test performance affects subsequent educational opportunities.

It seems like they may have found a statistical correlation without explaining what it actually means.

When it does pass, it'll be too little too late. A few years ago, I really wished my cable company would let me subscribe to only the channels I wanted. I thought, "Why should I have to pay for all these channels? Why can't I just pay for the channels I want?"

Now I think, "Why should I have to pay for a whole channel? Why can't I just pay for the shows I want?"

But they're already on the verge of missing that boat, too. I'm starting to think, "Why should I have to pay for all these shows? Why can't they just put everything on Netflix?" Strangely, it's circular, since we started at "Why should I pay for a whole big package instead of only paying for what I want?" and by the end of the process I'm heading back towards, "Why should I pay for individual shoes instead of putting them all together in one big package?" The big difference is that now the market expects the "Whole big package" to be around $10-$20 per month instead of $100.

No, you misunderstand the nature of the problem that is being solved. You're a managing windows and want to push out a standard set of packages to environments where you don't necessarily have complete control. Given the option of telling a user to download and install a package manager and write an appropriate config file vs. download an .EXE and run it, I'd choose the latter.

Now obviously I would prefer a package manager with a standard packaging format, but you can't blame Ninite for servicing a need. For the environment that they're operating in, they provide something meaningfully close to the functionality of a package manager for a series of disparate apps that aren't packaged in standard ways. I don't think the "pro" version will accept a config file per se, but there are various options in the command line, so you can still script it and have it select which applications you want to install/update.

It's not perfect, but trying to get Adobe to adhere to the same package standard as Oracle is a fool's errand.