It is my understanding the NRA sponsored the development of the BFG9000. In fact, without their influence most games today would look like the Sims or Animal Crossing.
One other major source of cash is an overfunding of retirement accounts. Companies are responsible for funding accounts at certain rates. These rates assume steady gain in the market. Sometimes if the market has had a good run, the accounts will be overfunded as they have outpaced the presumed rate.
Sun sits on a nice wad of cash. They have assets (real estate, patents, equipment, the mind control drugs used to get everyone to use Java).
Total that versus the stock price and you'll have a good basis for comparison when deciding whether folding is a viable option.
Closing up a company is not that unusual. What would be unusual is if the company's current management did it. Typically the company would be taken over (not necessarily hostile) and liquidated by professionals.
Virtually everyone can read pdf's. Most regular people don't need their documents to be edited by the people they are sending them to.
When will someone notice that Word documents are horrible for reading. One wrong click and you *lose* information.
Even for most businesses, all editing is done within the same business before the document is finally produced.
Make a good $50 pdf editor and get people away from Word.
I know there would have to be retraining involved. You would have to teach people to append.pdf instead of.doc.
Re:Excuse me? You do get repetitive marks in Word.
on
The War Of The Word
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· Score: 1
Typically I write in plain text using a text editor and mark it all up afterward. I do this just to avoid the repetitive marks and other issues I have with word.
This past weekend I invested some time in learning TeX. It looks like this is the real way to go. Exports to PDF or HTML are simple. And the huge benefit that I get is that documents can be put into source control and easiliy diffed. I'm 90% sure this is the way I'll be going for producing documents. Of course there is still a braindead partition on my harddrive for games and.doc resume files (I'm not confident enough to send a resume created by OpenOffice yet).
Ok, you're tied to Boston. You can still work for some smaller place. These places aren't going to have the same advertising budget though and you'll need to do some legwork.
I working outward from where you live. Take note of the kinds of companies in the area. Think of the companies they do business with (who are also likely in the area and you may never even see them). Look up stuff on the Chamber of Commerce website.
The ideal position for moving up is to work some place where there *aren't* enough positions for everything. You want to work someplace where they can't just call some bozo from the corporate office to fix a router. With a smaller shop the first question they'll ask is, "Who knows how to fix a routher?" That question will be asked without regard to who "owns" it. All you have to be doing is standing around and hear that it's broken. Do something like this and save a small place small dollars and you *WILL* be recognized. You'll start to be included on conversations about how things work. You'll be asked for your opinion. These things aren't possible at a large corporation that just multiplies time served by merit points and attendance at company diversity meetings.
I took a job managing some documents once (they needed a person who could read English well and engineer-speak). They decided to test me out at some CAD stuff and thought I would do well at it. My training was: "Here's your computer, here's the plumbing codes (stack of books). Draw."
Learn the business first and you'll get to pick your role later. A year of industry experience is far more important than any particular skill.
"I implemented a java solution to reconile Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable in real time."
"I implemented a Weblogic solution using J2EE and XML and blah blah blah."
The people that actually hire are impressed by the first and fall asleep at the second. It doesn't matter what the industry is or what the job is, the person with industry experience has a tremendous advantage over the other applicants.
Unless it's telecomm, that's just poison these days. I tell them I was in prison (Guest Services Industry).
Big cities think in big company ways. You have management and underlings.
Get to some smaller city where you can work for a smaller business, learn the entire business and move up from there.
At aim for smaller companies ones without a set corporate structure that has no room for you anywhere but the bottom.
Re:I had a discussion...
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 1
Sure, they *say* that want committment...
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 5, Funny
Now you know the reason they were flattened on their corners. In the 70's, before consumer safety laws, they were razor sharp, needle points and tipped with poison.
I literally meant dropping out and digging ditches. The average expectations were much higher then *for those that attended*.
Some differences between 100 years ago and now: Graduating high school was an accomplishment. It was ok for normal people to have not graduated high school. Not everyone could read. School had only one real target language, English. Reading and writing (and grammar and spelling) were important. There was hope and expectation in what science could do for everyone.
Schools were much more locally controlled back then. It wasn't just one textbook for the entire state.
I brought up word problems because those were the most outstanding difference between old textbooks and today's. There were very few straight up math problems and lots and lots of word problems. Even basic problems were generally described in prose, much more like a collegiate text.
I don't know who used the textbooks, only that they were labeled something plain like "A mathematics text for 8th grade". I had found a couple in an antique store.
I wonder if project gutenburg has any of these...I'm off to look.
Re:Lindows? I thought it was not Linspire
on
OpenIPO and Lindows
·
· Score: 2, Funny
LinuXP. Just to screw with that other company.
You'd also sell an extra 2 copies to all the LISP programmers out there who would think it's the "true Linux".
Check out some textbooks from 100 years ago. They have word problems that would blow students out of the water today. You were expected to be able to read and think back then (or drop out and dig ditches).
I found that in college I was entirely more likely to read the English Lit book than the English majors. They fought over the various "notes" books (I remember that they preferred something to Cliff's but don't remember what.)
Math isn't about the numbers its about the manipulation of those numbers. Having done a fair amount of tutoring for high school and college kids, I saw that most of the calculator based classes were built around learning by rote and not teaching "the big picture" as someone mentioned above.
I could just buy a research paper, edit it some and turn it in. That's doesn't make it an acceptable substitute for doing the work myself just because I claim to have seen the "big picture".
There is much to be gained from trudging through the mundane details. I like to call it fluency. One bit of education I think people are missing out on these days is the old style card catalogs. Searches today are far superior but I can get a lot more out of a search engine that a lot of people and I attribute this to long hours in the stacks.
The card catalog was inferior in every way except as an educational tool. The calculator is the same way.
* ok, the card catalog had one advantage of removable cards, to stop someone else finding and reserving the book you needed. Something I was more frustrated by than guilty of purpetrating.
I was working on something to make a command driven application using a more natural language. It was to work a bit more like Zork.
> show gas bill (shows the upcoming bill, guessing date and amount based on last bill)
> edit it (asks some questions about how much and when, in case they are different from last time)
> pay gas bill 36.44 > pay gas bill
Basically, my sentences would consist of a verb (command form), and indirect object and some other stuff.
Indirect objects would map nearly directly to objects and have methods that generally map to the command. These methods would know what to do with the other stuff on the command line and query for whatever was left out.
I kept one object around to be the "it" pronoun.
Everything had reasonable defaults (date defaulted to today, amounts defaulted to last month's amount).
Tab completion was the next thing to go in, as soon as I figured out how to do it.
Just as I had the framework in place where all I had to do was flesh out functionality my hard drive died a terrible death.
Since then I've managed to get Gnucash working. Fiddling with is frustrating, but I don't generally have to double check their math.
My first version was in Python. If I do it over I may look into Scheme for Gnucash or write it in clisp just to simplify parsing sentences.
Parts catalog kiosks. Gonna need thousands of them to be searchable. Some inserts and updates will be done to save state.
Data loss can be corrected by uploading the entire catalog again. Constant connections to the master database is not acceptable requiring a db locally.
I've run into situations where the cost of repairing data loss by the db was considerably less than the cost of maintaining another oracle license.
Too many defenders of Oracle (which I do in fact like and use) want to buy licenses first and think about the problem second.
Solutions (appropriate ones) I've used where other people would buy a RDBMS solution: A proprietary db (Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, Informix, Sybase) A free db (Mysql, msql, Postgres) A flat file (gasp!) A 2G+ data set kept in memory to make unusual queries faster
Solutions that have been inflicted upon me as some sort of karmic retribution: Access Excel (yes, to store data) Word (yes, to store data) PowerPoint (yes, to store data)
There seems to be a theme with that last set. I understand FoxPro has quite the fanatical following though and I've been curious to see why.
"Law enforcement uses special equipment to "see through" walls and observe the occupants inside a building, without a warrant because it's observable from the street."
These things haven't been made free "mostly thanks to Unix" but to people who weren't fond of paying for Unix or being locked into something they couldn't change.
I was born with the inalienable right to pursue happiness. That right is neither given nor taken away without due process of the law.
Driving safely certainly qualifies as the pursuit of happiness. Through various proceedings of the law, that right has been taken away from classes of people and qualifications put upon those who still choose to drive.
Put it this way: I have the right to drink. I have the privelege of drinking at a fancy establishment.
I have the right to speak my mind. Howard Stern has the privelege to speak it to millions.
Now the rights vs. priveleges argument with your parents has an entirely different definition of "rights" that shouldn't be brought into a discussion concerning the government. Parents are hopefully a benign dictatorship our government has only one of those (ambiguity intended for entertainment purposes only).
Slashdot Mirror
It is my understanding the NRA sponsored the development of the BFG9000. In fact, without their influence most games today would look like the Sims or Animal Crossing.
One other major source of cash is an overfunding of retirement accounts. Companies are responsible for funding accounts at certain rates. These rates assume steady gain in the market. Sometimes if the market has had a good run, the accounts will be overfunded as they have outpaced the presumed rate.
Sun sits on a nice wad of cash.
They have assets (real estate, patents, equipment, the mind control drugs used to get everyone to use Java).
Total that versus the stock price and you'll have a good basis for comparison when deciding whether folding is a viable option.
Closing up a company is not that unusual. What would be unusual is if the company's current management did it. Typically the company would be taken over (not necessarily hostile) and liquidated by professionals.
Why must every office suite target .doc?
.pdf
.pdf instead of .doc.
Someone should target
Virtually everyone can read pdf's.
Most regular people don't need their documents to be edited by the people they are sending them to.
When will someone notice that Word documents are horrible for reading. One wrong click and you *lose* information.
Even for most businesses, all editing is done within the same business before the document is finally produced.
Make a good $50 pdf editor and get people away from Word.
I know there would have to be retraining involved. You would have to teach people to append
Typically I write in plain text using a text editor and mark it all up afterward. I do this just to avoid the repetitive marks and other issues I have with word.
.doc resume files (I'm not confident enough to send a resume created by OpenOffice yet).
This past weekend I invested some time in learning TeX. It looks like this is the real way to go. Exports to PDF or HTML are simple. And the huge benefit that I get is that documents can be put into source control and easiliy diffed. I'm 90% sure this is the way I'll be going for producing documents. Of course there is still a braindead partition on my harddrive for games and
Ok, you're tied to Boston. You can still work for some smaller place. These places aren't going to have the same advertising budget though and you'll need to do some legwork.
I working outward from where you live. Take note of the kinds of companies in the area. Think of the companies they do business with (who are also likely in the area and you may never even see them). Look up stuff on the Chamber of Commerce website.
The ideal position for moving up is to work some place where there *aren't* enough positions for everything. You want to work someplace where they can't just call some bozo from the corporate office to fix a router. With a smaller shop the first question they'll ask is, "Who knows how to fix a routher?" That question will be asked without regard to who "owns" it. All you have to be doing is standing around and hear that it's broken. Do something like this and save a small place small dollars and you *WILL* be recognized. You'll start to be included on conversations about how things work. You'll be asked for your opinion. These things aren't possible at a large corporation that just multiplies time served by merit points and attendance at company diversity meetings.
I took a job managing some documents once (they needed a person who could read English well and engineer-speak). They decided to test me out at some CAD stuff and thought I would do well at it. My training was: "Here's your computer, here's the plumbing codes (stack of books). Draw."
Learn the business first and you'll get to pick your role later. A year of industry experience is far more important than any particular skill.
"I implemented a java solution to reconile Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable in real time."
"I implemented a Weblogic solution using J2EE and XML and blah blah blah."
The people that actually hire are impressed by the first and fall asleep at the second. It doesn't matter what the industry is or what the job is, the person with industry experience has a tremendous advantage over the other applicants.
Unless it's telecomm, that's just poison these days. I tell them I was in prison (Guest Services Industry).
Move out a Boston.
Big cities think in big company ways. You have management and underlings.
Get to some smaller city where you can work for a smaller business, learn the entire business and move up from there.
At aim for smaller companies ones without a set corporate structure that has no room for you anywhere but the bottom.
Sure, they *say* that want committment...
Now you know the reason they were flattened on their corners. In the 70's, before consumer safety laws, they were razor sharp, needle points and tipped with poison.
I literally meant dropping out and digging ditches. The average expectations were much higher then *for those that attended*.
Some differences between 100 years ago and now:
Graduating high school was an accomplishment.
It was ok for normal people to have not graduated high school.
Not everyone could read.
School had only one real target language, English.
Reading and writing (and grammar and spelling) were important.
There was hope and expectation in what science could do for everyone.
Schools were much more locally controlled back then. It wasn't just one textbook for the entire state.
I brought up word problems because those were the most outstanding difference between old textbooks and today's. There were very few straight up math problems and lots and lots of word problems. Even basic problems were generally described in prose, much more like a collegiate text.
I don't know who used the textbooks, only that they were labeled something plain like "A mathematics text for 8th grade". I had found a couple in an antique store.
I wonder if project gutenburg has any of these...I'm off to look.
LinuXP. Just to screw with that other company.
You'd also sell an extra 2 copies to all the LISP programmers out there who would think it's the "true Linux".
Calculators belong in science classes, not math.
Check out some textbooks from 100 years ago. They have word problems that would blow students out of the water today. You were expected to be able to read and think back then (or drop out and dig ditches).
I found that in college I was entirely more likely to read the English Lit book than the English majors. They fought over the various "notes" books (I remember that they preferred something to Cliff's but don't remember what.)
Math isn't about the numbers its about the manipulation of those numbers. Having done a fair amount of tutoring for high school and college kids, I saw that most of the calculator based classes were built around learning by rote and not teaching "the big picture" as someone mentioned above.
I could just buy a research paper, edit it some and turn it in. That's doesn't make it an acceptable substitute for doing the work myself just because I claim to have seen the "big picture".
There is much to be gained from trudging through the mundane details. I like to call it fluency. One bit of education I think people are missing out on these days is the old style card catalogs. Searches today are far superior but I can get a lot more out of a search engine that a lot of people and I attribute this to long hours in the stacks.
The card catalog was inferior in every way except as an educational tool. The calculator is the same way.
* ok, the card catalog had one advantage of removable cards, to stop someone else finding and reserving the book you needed. Something I was more frustrated by than guilty of purpetrating.
We frequently watch hockey with the radio on going. The video comes in a second or so behind. This makes the radio play by play seem psychic at times.
"He shoots he scores!"
Then we see the shot and the goal.
I was working on something to make a command driven application using a more natural language. It was to work a bit more like Zork.
> show gas bill
(shows the upcoming bill, guessing date and amount based on last bill)
> edit it
(asks some questions about how much and when, in case they are different from last time)
> pay gas bill 36.44
> pay gas bill
Basically, my sentences would consist of a verb (command form), and indirect object and some other stuff.
Indirect objects would map nearly directly to objects and have methods that generally map to the command. These methods would know what to do with the other stuff on the command line and query for whatever was left out.
I kept one object around to be the "it" pronoun.
Everything had reasonable defaults (date defaulted to today, amounts defaulted to last month's amount).
Tab completion was the next thing to go in, as soon as I figured out how to do it.
Just as I had the framework in place where all I had to do was flesh out functionality my hard drive died a terrible death.
Since then I've managed to get Gnucash working. Fiddling with is frustrating, but I don't generally have to double check their math.
My first version was in Python. If I do it over I may look into Scheme for Gnucash or write it in clisp just to simplify parsing sentences.
I'd be rather happy with just command line functionality for gnucash. It would be nice to be able to say something like:
paid gas 18.44
paid electric 188.34
tab complete and everything. That's the financial program I want.
The proper technicians aren't hard to find. Haven't you ever heard of Quantum Mechanics? I'm sure they work on this stuff.
Ok, scale this with Oracle:
Parts catalog kiosks. Gonna need thousands of them to be searchable. Some inserts and updates will be done to save state.
Data loss can be corrected by uploading the entire catalog again. Constant connections to the master database is not acceptable requiring a db locally.
I've run into situations where the cost of repairing data loss by the db was considerably less than the cost of maintaining another oracle license.
Too many defenders of Oracle (which I do in fact like and use) want to buy licenses first and think about the problem second.
Solutions (appropriate ones) I've used where other people would buy a RDBMS solution:
A proprietary db (Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, Informix, Sybase)
A free db (Mysql, msql, Postgres)
A flat file (gasp!)
A 2G+ data set kept in memory to make unusual queries faster
Solutions that have been inflicted upon me as some sort of karmic retribution:
Access
Excel (yes, to store data)
Word (yes, to store data)
PowerPoint (yes, to store data)
There seems to be a theme with that last set. I understand FoxPro has quite the fanatical following though and I've been curious to see why.
Dallas? Around here we call that Far South Frisco.
3500 sq feet. $210k.
Frisco, Tx.
Just north of Dallas, lots of business programming type stuff up here.
"Law enforcement uses special equipment to "see through" walls and observe the occupants inside a building, without a warrant because it's observable from the street."
Yea, it's called a window.
Mod parent (+1 Informative).
Thanks for the info about the beer. How's the internet connection though?
(-1 RMS)
These things haven't been made free "mostly thanks to Unix" but to people who weren't fond of paying for Unix or being locked into something they couldn't change.
Bad memories. Bad, bad memories.
Ordered stacks of punch cards are a major reason why Computer Science spends so much time on sorting algorithms.
I was born with the inalienable right to pursue happiness. That right is neither given nor taken away without due process of the law.
Driving safely certainly qualifies as the pursuit of happiness. Through various proceedings of the law, that right has been taken away from classes of people and qualifications put upon those who still choose to drive.
Put it this way:
I have the right to drink.
I have the privelege of drinking at a fancy establishment.
I have the right to speak my mind.
Howard Stern has the privelege to speak it to millions.
Now the rights vs. priveleges argument with your parents has an entirely different definition of "rights" that shouldn't be brought into a discussion concerning the government. Parents are hopefully a benign dictatorship our government has only one of those (ambiguity intended for entertainment purposes only).