i was at a startup where meetings were stifling. i had code to write, but i was stuck in HOURS long meetings half the week while marketing and sales types droned on and on about stuff that was meaningless unless we had a product to sell. uh, guys? we have code to write
walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
This is a dadhacker post, including (especially) the "cow-orker".
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
I love this. Not only the reminders that time's a wastin', but also the unattractive aesthetic, making the meeting space a less pleasant place to linger, and maybe even taking people down a notch from their very important people meetings. The bird calling "cuckoo" could even be commentary on the discussion.
Seems like someone's ego is out of check; these tend to happen when someone needs to "hold court" or otherwise wants to feel important.
In general, your management should take care of this.
Otherwise, if they are unwilling, it requires becoming slightly antagonistic once the meeting runs long. In my case, as soon as someone mentioned another meeting I just interrupted abruptly and said, "We do not need another meeting." The groans of agreement got the point across.
Otherwise, if that doesn't work, you can do something like, "Everyone but [person droning on] needs to leave the room, now." Once everyone leaves, point out that "these long meetings are killing team productivity, morale, and are completely unneeded. Stop wasting the engineering team's time. We don't need to be here."
Writing "WARANT" in crayon on a piece of scratch paper will not give you the authority to detain someone who is in the country illegally. It is my understanding that a valid ICE administrative warrant gives an ICE officer the authority to detain the person named on the warrant. And in cases like the one in question where ICE has ample time to get the warrant, it is my understanding that an ICE officer without the warrant would not have the authority to detain someone who is in the country illegally.
What the ICE warrant doesn't give is the authority to conduct a search of private property without permission. Which the agents in this case were not attempting to do.
henry s f cooper's book _the evening star_ is a great description of the Magellan probe (the venus orbiter), and how they were debugging what turned out to be OS race conditions on a spacecraft millions of miles away
atari marketing was pretty f---ing terrible. objectively so
i had one of the home computer division marketing types come to my office one day, and was asked:
"can you print out all possible 8x8 bitmaps? we'd like to submit them to the copyright office so no one else can use them"
a stunning lack of knowledge of copyright law and basic exponential math. i didn't bother to point out that he really wanted all possible 8x8 _color_ bitmaps (there aren't enough atoms in the universe for this, by many orders of magnitude)
they didn't make very good decisions about consoles or computers, either
Atari made a lot of bad decisions, but what you were asked is not something you should expect someone in marketing to understand in general. There is only so much someone can get good at in their lifetime and so eventually you will have to give up understanding everything - and then look like an idiot when you ask for something that is obviously unreasonable to someone who does know.
What was asked for is a reasonable ask. It just isn't possible to create.
No it isn't. You don't get any copyright protection on a volume of data produced by rules, such as "every possible 8x8 bitmap". Furthermore, you also don't get copyright protection against "copies" that were developed without reference to your work, as would always be the case for this idea. So there is no theoretical benefit from attempting it.
You are thinking as a lawyer, who for sure should have jumped in (if got that far - it appears to have went to engineering first who shut it down for engineering reasons). Someone in marketing should not be expected to know or think of those details about law. Maybe they will, but it isn't there job.
Specialization is a good thing. However it means you will have often ideas that because of something you don't know are bad even though within your lane they are good.
I'm shocked at how "few" pages printing all 8x8 bitmaps would actually require. Assuming full page coverage of an 8.5 x 11 sheet at 600 dpi I'm only coming with a touch over 548 billion pages. I expected it to be more. Legal-size paper drops that to about 430.5 billion pages.
I think your math is a little off (or maybe mine is).
I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.
However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP
there was a special ROM, a version of Asteroids just for him, where the rocks were changed to big, medium and small turtles
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