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to persuade people in a negotiation you need to be able to get some kind of source to be able to prove your claims.

No, there are plenty of techniques you can use. I strongly suggest reading this book, because you are going about it the wrong way. In fact, if you go up to your boss and say, "My salary is below average, here is proof," he'll probably look at your proof for a while, then say, "You are right, my boy. Let's talk about this during your next performance review and see what we can do for you." At the next performance review, you'll get a 2%-3% payraise, if you are lucky. To some degree, facts don't matter during negotiation.

But who decides what is toxic and what is merely communication pointing out people's mistakes?

It's a judgment call, but you have to decide what a reasonable person could honestly think is inappropriate and go from there.

I doubt there's a single competent corporate manager who would not discipline someone who said things like this at work. And if there were, I'd hate to work at that person's company.

Guys insult each other. It's how we communicate, it's how we bond. It's also brutally honest and helps to enforce the environment that makes for good IT

Yeah? Nonsense. Some of the stuff on LKML and especially some of Torvalds' rants are way over the top. I run a software company and I would fire anyone, no matter how talented, who said or posted stuff like this in public or to another employee.

Guys have different modes of interacting than women. I get that. But that doesn't give anyone the right to be an asshole. Time for people who think that it's OK to grow up.

Three words:

High frequency trading

Most of the code driving that is written in Haskell, which is just criminal, since it's some very bright people writing that code, and they're not contributing in any meaningful way to humanity, just fiddling bits to determine who has how much of what money at the end of each trade.

http://adtmag.com/articles/201...

I hear this custom Android build is pretty secure, if you can get your hands on it of course.

Shutting down Desktop search really sucks. GDS was an amazing productivity tool and will be sorely missed; it was and still is so much better than the native search faculties available on Windows and OS X. The review I wrote about GDS in '05 still stands.

Scala isn't a dynamic language. And Java 7 isn't much help to it.

android might "own" the smartphone market, but nobody except google is making much profit off of it.

apps drive demand, so: http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/06/02/android-apps-not-as-profitable.aspx

apple is still making 40% margins on their iPhone 4 hardware; the other manufacturers would love this kind of return.

as for single smartphone models, the iphone 4 is the best seller worldwide, beating any other single android smartphone.

The site I work for just posted an article on how IBM is looking to train the next generation of COBOL programmers:

http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/07/ibm-mainframes-cobol-recruits.aspx

(Read down past the laptop stuff in that article). Definitely not saying not to learn the new, just FYI that your earlier skills might have some marketability that you might not be aware of.

I don't disagree that 'Unbreakable Linux' is the support program, and 'Enterprise Linux' may have been it's product name from the very beginning. However the GP is sort of correct too, because 'Unbreakable Linux' was a slogan used before distro was released (i.e. for their support commitment to fix any bugs in the database on Linux), and it was utilised liberally in the marketing of the distro, overshadowing any other name. The term 'Enterprise Linux' in the November 09 FAQ was always proceeded with 'Redhat'; an answer to this terminology problem is provided in the FAQ archived 6 days later.

SOAP is not! the semantic web!

If you don't know that, then I suggest you turn the lights on before you eat stuff lying around you [...]

RDF is more RESTful than plain xml in many ways, since the terms in the language are URLS and so you can get their meaning. It is also very compatible with Atom. I am on the Atom Protocol list and my name is on the Atom Spec. So I know the debate well. I have a small AtomOwl ontology with XQuery transform, so you can transform andy atom document into XML. (ouch! xml. Damn people here find that too difficult! Are the people here your friends?) Think of RDF as databases + URIs. Take a plain old vanilla mysql database, add a RDF mapping, and you can query it with sparql. I know, I have done this for the Roller Blog database. (you know, the database that publishes atom feeds)

1. Snippets - Enhancing existing web applications (Slashdot; other tech site that I shall not mention)
2. Widgets - Snippets + UI Components such as Tree & Grid (IBM Online Help; Yahoo UI Widgets; Backbase)
3. Specialized Framework - Single purpose, mostly client-side logic (Gmail; Google Maps; Yahoo Mail, Tibco GI)
4. RIA Framework - General purpose, tightly coupled client & server side architecture (ThinWire http://www.thinwire.com/, Echo2)

• ThinWire Playground Demo http://207.200.22.70:8086/playground/
• ThinWire FormCreator Early Access http://207.200.22.70:8086/fc_beta/
• ThinWire Mail http://207.200.22.70:8086/mail/

Amazon, interestingly enough, uses a LInux/Oracle RAC data warehouse, for data analysis. It is one of the larger deployments in the world, at over 15 terabytes. I found this article, but there have been many over the years, some on Oracle's site.

And, to re-iterate, Oracle RAC is shared-disk... ;-)

No where did it say hiring increased .

Just less lay offs .

Under those conditions and terms a natonwide job freese could be
in effect at most places, and still some lay offs occuring .

What the trend is typically is to hire more L1, H1-B's ,
and offshore or near shore .

Some countries have setup cruise ships off the coast ,
and this is called near shoring .

Bizarre indeed .

http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=10959&page=

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.

Apple will have to give OSX away for free. You can read my arguments for this at: ADT Mag

I realize this sounds outlandish on the surface, but it also is plausible, and could actually work.
Thoughts?

Yes, that's right.

Shame on Microsoft. And how rude that Office 2003 doesn't implement and utilize the wonderful and open OASIS file format that was ratified 3 days ago.

I don't expect much from Microsoft these days (god knows I'd be constantly disappointed if I did) but I somehow feel time travel is probably asking a bit much - even for them.

that's microsoft's fault for not using an open standard document format.

i'm looking forward to castigating MS regularly now, until they fully support the standard.

This argument (that tests may be flawed, and so don't help) isn't as much of a problem as you think.

Suppose 10% of the code you write contains errors (at random), and you write tests covering 50% of the code. Then you find 90% of the errors in 50% of the code (assuming your error rate in test code is the same as the error rate in 'real' code). Your error rate for the overall program should now be around 5.5%.

In other words, it doesnt matter if your tests can also be flawed, you'll still improve your code by doing testing. On the other hand, planning will make absolutely /zero/ difference to your error rate (compared to any other method that appears to implement a specification). In order to remove bugs, you have to do /some/ testing, so I have to assume you're advocating test-last.

It then boils down to whether test-driven or test-last is the most economic policy, and how much testing to do.

Anyway - since this economic argument (not flawed tests) is the crux of the matter, you should take a read of Beck's thinking on the issue, in May 1999 issue of C++ Report, particularly the last paragraph.

Cheers,
Baz

There have been consumer satisfaction surveys that show that consumer satisfaction with fast-food restaurants goes down during low-unemployment periods, and goes up during high-unemployment periods.

I maintain that the reason for this is that during low unemployment, the better workers have all got jobs, and the job pool has fewer good workers left in it. Therefore the fast food places have to hire the best people they can get, but those aren't as good as the best people available at 5% unemployment.

Further, you can't fire them, because they'll not only be hard to replace, but the pool of replacements mostly consists of people who couldn't get a job.

I'm not the only person who has reached this conclusion:

Here's a link to an audio recording of a National Public Radio "All Things Considered" segment on the subject.

Here's Cnet's Mike Yamamoto talking about it.

Here's ADT Mag's Charles Trepper on the subject.

You'll find that below 3%, it's hard to put ANY warm body into a job, much less find a good employee. Somewhere close to that percentage, you find the people who are pretending to look for a job, so they can collect unemployment assistance, but deliberately sabotaging their interviews or even outright defrauding the system so that they'll never be employed.

Personally, I think they should subtract another 3% from the figures and report 3% unemployment or less as 0% unemployment. They already don't count people who are unemployed and not filing unemployment claims or applying for jobs.

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