dalai

In the end, it is always lack of motivation I guess.

I've complained about it so often to colleagues and supervisor it has become a running joke, but nothing changed. Previous job was even worse. I've been doing 2-3 weeks of work, followed by 1-2 months (if not more) of just sitting there, even when I have 2 or 3 projects in parallel. Somehow everyone else seems to be busy all the time.

There is little to criticise about pure unadulterated Scrum because there is surprisingly little prescribed and what little there is they openly tell you that you can change it in the retrospective. The real problem is that management, agile coaches (and unfortunately sometimes also some developers) often want to religiously apply every little thing they ever read in a book and seemed like a good idea. I think that solutions to all the problems the author mentioned are possible without deviating significantly or at all from scrum -- should that be important for whatever reason. The only prerequisite is that everyone involved is open to change.

Back in the day Nokia had good hardware, a 40% marketshare, brand recognition, a loyal customer base and a wide distribution network. Certainly noone knows what Android could have done for them, but theoretically they were at a better position to take advantage of it than HTC/Sony/Motorola.

Could you elaborate?

I think I've heard the argument before, but I don't really see how. These outages show up again and again, partly because people cannot access the project issues.

I see markdown more for writing a quick note or something that will not exceed a few pages.

I thought they capped just the roaming charges, isn't calling to mobile numbers in other EU countries still (relatively) expensive? My german carrier currently charges 20 times more for those.

Anyway I think the 90% failure rate might be based on this: http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/90-percent-of-tech-startups-fai...

There is some value in knowing early where an accident occurred, but that is rarely a problem. How much is it worth to fix it for the few cases that happen in the middle of nowhere?

I believe this existed before gmail

> gigabyte storage

was not a tech problem before

> speed

in what way? the ui was and still is as fast as most lightweight desktop clients

> powerful search

maybe, although some clients supported powerful search with regex before

I think gmail was not that innovative, but it did bring everything together very well, in a very user-friendly way, along with some new-ish stuff like tags and the no need to delete anything.

As to why they wouldn't just leave, well let them. You could hire better faculty members and you will have a sparkly clean university that can attract better students. Your research/teaching statistics go up and you can pick more funding. At some point other universities will follow your example and administrator salaries will normalize.

Not going to happen though .... more likely they will outsource the cleaning so that the president can earn 10x the salary of the IT stuff. Then they will probably outsource IT as well ...

But Jobs' mouse wasn't easily found inside. Rather, it was hidden amidst hundreds, or even thousands of other artifacts last seen in 1983. So the "Diggers" team had to wait a few days before reaching their goal.

Which also begs the question. From thousands of artifacts the only thing worth a photo is a mouse?

To me, it would make sense to start with something more expressive. There are many different types of books (fiction, technical, poetry, interactive) and many types of semantic information that you will need to encode that publishers may require. Moreover, it is not just semantic information you need to capture. For some books the placement of the elements on the page, the font used, etc. may be important. If this format is also meant as an intermediate format for printed books then you only need to take a look at LaTeX and its numerous packages to get an idea of all the different things someone might require.

Even if you decide to go with something like Markdown, it makes sense to look at mmd and pandoc extensions (e.g. for tables) before coming up with another syntax.

I don't disagree there. My point (which I probably didn't really make) was that you can't have a recipe for it. Too much depends on the particularities of the person and their situation.

> I don't know how big your city is

I live in Munich, which for Germany is big and quite international.

> Don't get me wrong but your post sounds pretty negative

Maybe I focused too much on the bad stuff. I do have some friends, I do have the opportunity to go out from time to time. It is just that these relationships are superficial and not as fulfilling. Curiously, others do not seem to mind at all.

> Then, why don't you change them?

I am actually in the process of doing that even though, professionally, it is probably a bad move. I've been applying to different places and positions for some time now, unfortunately I haven't had much luck so far due to various reasons.

I live in a central European country for four years now and I find it extremely hard to meet new people even for a superficial friendship.

- I have very few coworkers, but even if I didn’t, people tend to keep professional and private life very separate here. Some actually think they have “enough” friends and you might never get through to them no matter how much you try.

- In my home country I would usually meet people through friends of friends, but here my friends will rarely bring anyone else of their circle when we go out (even when asked).

- Meetups are also a big failure for me. Most of the time they involve huge groups that are very impersonal. They involve people that are here for a month up to people that have been here for 20-30 years and have their own cliques within the meetup. The first year I kept going to the same meetup and kept introducing myself to the same (more or less) people and held the same discussion over and over. Each meetup was as if I was there for the first time and needless to say, I didn’t make a single friend from that. Even in the smaller ones, it seems that most participate either to spend a night away from their spouse/“real” friends or just for the activity.

- Going up to talk to random strangers is also not very common here, but even if it was, it is unfortunately impossible for me. I feel incredibly self-conscious and uncomfortable. I tried it when I was in the US where people are more open and I honestly hated myself. I doubt PUA literature would help.

Anyway, I don't want to be too negative and I also have me to blame for the situation. What I wanted to highlight is that it also depends on the cultural environment and the particular circumstances. To me, it is quite indicative that we have dating websites and meetups and social web sites and whatnot but we are generally more lonely.

I am an author of a robotics book in an even more niche topic and I doubt our royalties totaled more than ~$5000 in the 4 years its been out (no upfront payment). I've always considered it as something to put on the CV more than anything else.

When I was a phd student I did an informal check on the professors in my department. Even though it was no ivy league school, on average it took them 2.8 years from entry into the phd program to getting a tenure-track position. Now 2.8 is probably the average number of years as a postdoc you need to have.

1: http://floridapolytechnic.org/news/non-tenure-faculty-model-...

In my experience as a PhD with (currently) almost 4 yrs postdoc experience, I rarely get an interview when I apply for an industry position. I think there is a good element of truth in what the original author is saying about a gap. As PhD students and postdocs we do a lot of things. We have to write code, we have to manage students, teach, publish, apply for grants, manage research groups or entire projects, handle scientific and financial reporting, etc. The problem is that our skills don't exactly match company requirements that normally have different people for most of these tasks. To make things worse, people tend to believe that we will be arrogant pricks who will demand really high salaries even though we are clueless about how things work outside academia. Just look at some of the comments here.

For an entry level programming position a recent CS BSc appears much more desirable and cheaper than any PhD. I doubt that we even get much of a chance to show how good (or bad) we are. For higher level positions a PhD rarely has the "right" experience. What we are left with is usually something that fits well with our research. This is what the author found and as far as I know he is not in the minority.

In any case, it doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 50. You still need to prepare the same material, you still need to be there for the same amount of time. $3500/class sounds like a bargain to me. A TA earns more.

So there is 50% probability that the other one contains Z/2 and 50% that it has 2Z. Do you disagree with that statement?

I have two values A and B. I ask you to select one. What is the probability that the remaining value is C? Obviously it's zero.

No it doesn't. According to the problem, both 2Z and Z/2 are possible and you don't have the information to decide either way. Think of a simple coin toss, before I show you the result it is 50-50 to be heads or tails, even though it is just one of the two.