I wonder if in the experiment, the participants had the opportunity before starting the 6 to 15 minutes of "thinking" to press the button to know for themselves that the shock would be administered, or if they were simply told that it would be and they had to take that on faith. I would think the conclusions could be very different depending on the answer. If participants were simply told, their choice to press the button may be more rooted in a desire to explore the environment and learn for themselves what happens. One could conclude that the experiment results indicate more a repudiation of blind faith in what they've been told than an unwillingness to spend 15 minutes thinking. On the other hand, if this was accounted for -- say, if the participants could test the button for themselves before beginning the experiment, and knew first-hand the shock that would occur -- then the results are much more interesting.
Mike Ellison
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Men would rather give themselves an electric shock than sit alone in a room with nothing to do -
First True Love?Yea, very similar for me. Was doing BASIC on a TRS-80 as a kid, moved into some Z-80 assembly, then hit Pascal when the original Mac 128k was released. Borland was good, but I really liked Turbo Pascal.
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Ephemeral Loungersno hiding here - for better or worse. My name is my name.
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Quality of Code Project diminishingWell said, Bert
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Further adventures with 12 year old girlsMy own daughter turns 12 next week. I empathize with your concerns, and in being terrified :-)
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Quality of Code Project diminishingWell said, Pete.
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Quality of Code Project diminishinggggustafson wrote:
Chris, don't be so touchy
Neither Chris, nor his response to you, is touchy. That was an insulting statement.
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Quality of Code Project diminishinggggustafson wrote:
I believe that you are now descending into semantics.
You're wrong.
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Quality of Code Project diminishingGus, I'm not sure I should have to have the responsibility of interpreting your comments. I read what you wrote and pointed out to you that you lost me. Perhaps you should keep responsibility yourself for what you choose to write.
gggustafson wrote:
When discussions become heated (as this one has), I take caution to avoid ad hominem arguments. Insulting is an ad hominem argument. When an individual (in this case Chris) takes an action for selfish reasons, failing to consider the 10 million+ folks who supposedly use this site, then that is wrong and that individual needs to be taken down.
You lose me with statements just like this. Do you realize what you're saying in this statement? You think Chris needs to be 'taken down'? You presume to have the wisdom to conclude that? You say no defense of Chris is required, yet you clearly are attacking him - you just wrote he needs to be 'taken down'. Are you sure you're not intending insult? It sounds like in spite of your protests, you certainly do. I'm not even interpreting. Those are your words. For the record, I don't care how forceful you think you are, nor how virtuous you think forcefulness makes you.
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Quality of Code Project diminishingAll right, Gus. I started with your first post on this thread with a mindset of - "yes, occasionally speaking truth to power is a good thing, and Chris and the great folks at CodeProject are really good at listening, building, improving, and taking suggestions to heart... let's see where this goes." After reading your responses to those who responded to you, including Chris, know now that you've lost me. I think you are bordering on insulting, if not outright insulting some very good people.
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How to deal with annoying idiotsI find offbeat responses to idiotic or abusive posts to have interesting effects, often ending the troll's participation. E.g.: Troll: "All you Creighton basketball fans are a bunch of idiots. You [expletive ending in 'ing'] deserve that [expletive] humiliation you got." Me: "Don't mind [first name (preferrably) or handle of troll]. He woke up this morning with a tragic infestation of Lithuanian cumquat beetles, and hasn't been the same since. #YoudBeInABadMoodToo."
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Problematic Stakeholder: How can I make this work?I sympathize with you in your situation, as well as with the owner in his. One can understand that both individuals are doing their best to communicate what they think they're supposed to, and the gap that is apparent won't be overcome easily. If you're willing to approach the project under an Agile paradigm you may find your salvation. Your boss sounds very much like a person who would naturally fit with an Agile approach. If you and he are amenable to implementing a formal process (e.g. scrum) great; if not, you can still approach the project with an agile mindset. Don't worry about having a list of requirements fleshed out from the beginning. Start with one. Start with the first screen as the owner suggests. Do your best to understand the functionality he's asking for on that first screen. Tell him you want weekly meetings with him, in which you will show your progress, and he will gauge whether you're understanding and implementing what he's looking for, or whether there needs to be course correction. Weekly course correction is a wonderful thing. Consider documenting requirements as you go as Agile stories - small functional requirements written from the end user's frame of mind - and have signoffs as the functionality to meet the stories are built and demonstrated. Weekly. Maybe more frequently if it suits the project and the people. Involve those who use the application & business processes directly as well, and not just the owner. Involve them in the weekly meeting(s). Involve them in writing the stories. Good luck.
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we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hardYour points are well taken. There's the other side to it too - when we say "companies", we shouldn't forget that that means "people". Every company starts with some individual person, or a partnership of persons. Some no doubt are interested in just a bottom line - and that's not such a bad thing itself - but many begin businesses because they have a passion to move an interest forward and see it take on its own life, and are willing to take personal & financial risks to do so. When things fail in a business, those taking the risks must deal with the consequences. Sure, an employee of a company that fails may lose a job, and that's not something to dismiss. But that employee certainly can pursue another job with a different organization. The business owner though - that individual may very well have risked his or her life savings, a house, future retirement security, reasonable health care to establish the capital to create the company. Failure in the company means something entirely different for that individual that took the risk. This shouldn't be dismissed either. If a company is nervous about taking risks and shooting for the moon, understand it comes down to another person, such as yourself, who has to deal at a very different level with the consequences of potential failure. I started a small business a couple of years ago. The experience so far has been fascinating to me, particularly in expanding my own perspective about what it means to accept financial risk in the pursuit of a passion.
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Your First Development Machine?My initial development experiences were with BASIC first,then assembly on a TRS-80 Model 1, complete with 4K of RAM and tape cassette storage. It was a great day when my dad finally buckled under pressure and sprung for the 48K expansion interface.
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Look what I did on my summer breakNice work, Chris & CP team!
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Ok Which was very your first programming language?Basic, on a TRS-80 Model 1... complete with tape cassette storage
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The Most Hated Buzzword - 2011How about: "At the end of the day..."
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Iowa Bacon FestMmmm... there's something worth having a festival over! Iowa's got a great tradition for food-oriented festivals. Try the Woodbine Applefest[^] for example - the pie contest is worth it alone.
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Assembly versus Programminggggustafson wrote:
Tell me the ones that went through as many revisions as C#
I think he did.
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Design question: mvc 3 and the data layerHi all. I'm working through the architecture for an ASP.NET MVC 3 solution. I like using LINQ and will probably use the entity framework against a SQL database as the persistence repository. I've seen a lot of examples now where a controller will send lambda expressions to the repository object as a way of indicating a filter, rather than having a specific function declared in the repository interface for the filter scenario. This seems convenient, and performs well as long as you have a LINQ-to-entities or LINQ-toSql compliant repository. I started down that path, but I'm now concerned that it doesn't separate the concerns as much as it should. In the event a new repository layer was needed, one would need to build/implement something that can work with the lambda expressions (e.g construct SQL from the expression tree, or otherwise implementing IQueryable). Otherwise the use of LINQ would require loading a full set into memory from the datastore, potentially killing performance. My question is this: is this a valid concern? Or is the support for LINQ-enabled repositories strong enough among enough database systems that the convenience of LINQ outweighs the coupling concern?