> Simply put, what is the cost involved and relative productivity gained/lost from each layout design. What about experimental designs? Without this type of information, it is difficult to convince a decision maker to improve these conditions. Those metrics need to be quantifiable, not anecdotal (I get more work when there aren't conversations around me vs. I resolved 10 bugs in the open office environment and 25 equivalent bugs in a cubicle).
This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).
Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.
Recently, I've been wondering why we use exhaust fans in bathrooms and not dehumidifiers. I might be way off base here, but it seems like taking conditioned air that's a little moist and dumping it outside and replacing it with drier unconditioned air would be less efficient than just removing the moisture from the already-conditioned air.
I imagine it isn't one of those things where it's "always cheaper to do X", but there's probably a break-even point. Does anyone know how to do the math to draw that chart?
I only take cabs 5-10 times a year anymore, and never in Boston, but I've never been in a cab that pestered me with advertisements. If I found myself in one, it'd be the last ride I took with that company.
On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.
The asteroid belt, which is positively TEEMING with possible collisions... billions of objects... yeah, we don't even bother. Ninety-nine (point nine nine nine...) times out of a hundred you won't hit anything. Space is big.
>...I think it would be kind of embarassing for a town if they couldn't get a robust all terrain vehicle to some location within a reasonable timeframe.
When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.
> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.
I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.
There's 2.5k people in my town and it's news here (literally) when someone is arrested shopping at the local Wal-Mart. The police have two miltary-issue Humvees, for some reason.
I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand.
Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.
I don't really buy that a world where all the work is done by robots will be an issue at all, unless it's only going to benefit the rich.
I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I enjoy doing that sort of "work".
But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.
I had (well, still have, but don't use) a w510. It worked just as well as the t61 before it (which was to say, they both did great under Linux), but it didn't have hybrid graphics... it was Nvidia all the time. The only reason I've replaced it was that it had absolutely abysmal battery life. Old job bought me a comparable ultrabook that weighs 20 pounds less and has 3x the battery life and I couldn't be happier.
Same for Ubuntu Gnome. There's a few addons (or plugins, or whatever they call them) that I install to suite my preferences, but I can do a clean install + additional packages + tweak to my needs in under an hour. If you don't know the package names you'll want, maybe double that. The past few upgrades have also worked flawlessly for me, which makes it even easier.
That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.
This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).
Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.