Trouble is, this is a country run by crazy religious zealots, that quote their religion when they blow stuff up. The powers that be over there, can't be trusted to 'play nice' with their nukes. They would be very likely to start shooting them off unprovoked.
So why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons?
Re:Different approaches for different problems
on
The Duct Tape Programmer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No. In scenario 1, what should be done is trying to get the customer to reduce the problem. It is unlikely that the customer regularly deals with 400 different forms, much more likely is that at most 5 forms stands for 99% of the traffic and the other 395 are one-off's much to rare to spend time on. The correct approach is to identify those 5 forms, implement the processing for those forms as quickly as possible and then evaluate if the client is happy.
Then when the system has been delivered, you may refactor the code to add support for the more common of the 395 remaining formats. Trying to implement parsers for all those 400 formats at once is a recipe for disaster. You will get architecture astronauts discussing "what if"-scenarios endlessly while building X layers of abstractions without getting anywhere.
Very good advice. If you are known by name to customers, your brand becomes one of their selling points. You have to have a very likable personality for that to work though, technical skills aren't that important. I met a few of those persons. Decent programmers, but the awesomeness they managed to project through humility and charisma were incredible.
The pre-rendering is the easy part of the problem. The newspaper sites could themselves cache and pre-render the content if they really wanted to. The tougher problem is reporting. Counting ad impressions, page hits and link clicks. The paper needs to know as much information about you as possible so that they can sell as much advertising space as possible.
Fast flipping through ten articles would be much different from a user clicking through ten articles on the site itself. For how long did the user rest his eyes on each article? Did he see the ads? What link did he click on after reading the article about X? Etc.
It was that way when Stalin was in power, but not during the post-war period. Rather the opposite. I had a friend from USSR who grew up there in the 70:ies and he told me that basically you didn't have to work unless you wanted. People randomly didn't show up for work because they didn't feel like working, bureaucrats and upper level staff did it too so no one could reprimand them for it. Most companies had a larger workforce than they had work for which was partially caused by the miserable central planning system. So even if they showed up, they would just sit on their asses all day doing nothing.
That was one of the reasons the USSR fell. No incentives to work hard and no repercussions for slacking off. The whole society stagnated. But it is true that they worked less hours than we in capitalist countries do.
Read up on the composite extension, XAA, DRI and all the new stuff being implemented in Xorg. The raw framebuffer model, where the server only cares about stacking and mediating pixel access is exactly where Xorg is going. More and more of X's features are becoming legacy that modern apps just don't need.
Also check out the EWMH spec to understand what kind of mess is involved in supporting a window manager model instead of letting clients draw their own borders. There is a reason why neither Aqua nor Windows have the concept of window manager.
Well if work is depressing then there is something wrong with it. I suggest you fix your attitude because caring so much about it that you get depressed is not healthy.
At my work, I'm also usually right. As I'm sure most techies reading/. often are. People have this peculiar habit of interrupting me when discussing to make my argument appear weaker than it is. I let them, because I'm a soft-spoken guy and I really don't care that much. A month or two later, my predictions come true and we do it my way instead which I initially suggested. I don't tell people "I told you so" because I don't need the acknowledgement. My reward is the salary, their reward is that they get to borrow my brain for 8 hours/day. If they wish to spend my 8 hours on futile, dead end projects then so be it. There is no reason for me to get emotionally involved.
I read a study (in a tabloid, but still) about that most people prefer to work with nice failure persons rather than excellent jerks. That shows how fucked up many of us techies priorities are. We prefer what is best for the company rather than enjoying the time we spend at work. Self-sacrifice is not a virtue, it is the losers mind set.
I'd recommend every techie to work as a consultant at least for a year or two. Because when you do, you learn that your life is not tied to the company's bottom line. Problems and stupid managers aren't frustrating anymore. The more stupidity and bad decisions, the more billable hours you can charge them. Stupid techies work overtime to clean up the mess, smart techies bleed them dry while doing it.:)
I can't seem to google it up right now, but James Gosling wrote a very interesting article in 2002 about what is wrong with X11 and how he would have designed it from scratch if he could. As he was one of the guys involved in the X11 project one would assume he knows what he is talking about.
Granted, the composite extension has solved many of X11's problems such as the damn stupid expose event system, but has also introduced many new ones. For example every time you resize a window xorg has to call on both the client application and the wm to render an image of the window being resized. Which is why Compiz cheats and uses wireframe resizing by default. Or just compare a modern Linux desktop to Vista. Sadly, after just a few minutes use it becomes undeniable that Vista's graphics are smoother, shinier and more flicker free than xorg.
I'm aware of the difference between flv and swf. But most video sites only use swf for the player which merely fetches the flv file from somewhere and streams it. That is only a small subset of the whole swf specification. While the specification was closed until last year, there still existed dozens of third party decompilers, encrypters and other kind of tools for swf, so it appears that it wasn't all that hard to reverse engineer the format.
And no offense to the Gnash developers, but they haven't gotten very far since the swf format was opened.
The Flash video format was opened long time ago. Adobes Linux Mozilla plugin is still proprietary and sucks monkeyballs of course. But there is nothing stopping any open source developer from writing a good plugin themselves. That no developer has done that is not Adobe's fault. Meanwhile, if you know what you are doing (check the/tmp directory!), you can download the video and it will play perfect in fullscreen in any gstreamer based player such as totem.
That would be fair if the test results was reflected in the salary offer. A person that aces all the test questions should receive a very generous salary. But that's not how it works and why I nowadays refuse to take tests on principle.
At one company I solved a stupid sql puzzle that the interviewer emailed me. Then I got a real life interview which consited of me completing a 1.5 hour long exam kind of test, about 15 pages long, about ASP programming. All this before getting to the actual interview stage. Four weeks later, after I had tried several times to reach the interviewer on phone to know about how my test went, he emails me and tells me that although I aced both tests, he didn't think I was "consultant material." Whatever that means. And no, my hair is neither long nor greasy and I do shower and change clothes regularily.
At another company, I was tasked to write a c# program to solve a hexagonal 6x6 sudoku puzzle. It involved writing a quite complicated constraint solver and was far from simple to create. Took me two days or something. I was the only one to submit a working application. Then at the interview the guy explained the salary structure which meant that I would get a salary lower than if I were a bus driver. I politely declined the offer.
At my current job, I got to met the techies directly, who could instantly see that I knew my shit, and we sat and chatted about our summer vacations for an hour.
And that is why I won't do tests. If a company wants to figure out if I can code or not, they can either google my name or call my references. They can also have a technical person conduct the interview. Testing candidates is meaningless.
Yassir Arafat, Mahmoud Ahaminejad, Neil Armstrong, Bill Gates.. there are quite a few celebrities that are engineers. Granted it generally isn't their engineering that made them famous. But your question is like asking for famous astronomers and the only one you can think of is Brain May.
Lies, gmail has been down several times in the past many times for hours at a time. The difference between google and other service provides isn't the number of outages (gmail has more than even hotmail) it is how they are dealt with. E.g. the App Engine outage.
Very cool program! Taught me some things about IP. The program could be made one byte shorter by using for(;;) instead of while(1) and it is not strictly necessary to use "unsigned short" instead of "short" afaict. I wonder what other interesting programs that can be written in only 140 bytes.
That's definitely not entirely true. Here are some basic historical facts about alcohol that everyone arguing for drugs should know. In the 18th century potatoes were imported to Europe and it became a staple foodstuff because you could easily and cheaply make hard liquor from it. Before you had to use wheat which was much more expensive. What happened? Alcohol consumption skyrocketed. In the mid 19th century in Sweden (which is the only country I have stats for, the numbers are similar for other countries) the annual per capita consumption of hard liquor was 46 liters per person and year.
Please think about it and understand how much that is.
Adult men stood for more than two thirds of the consumption which was slanted towards the most heavily drinkers since not everyone drank equally much. That means that a large portion of the population drank 4-6 liters per week, they were constantly drunk. Imagine the kind of grief and social costs drinking on that scale lead to. That were also the time when the number of murders/capita was at its highest, hardly a coincidence.
It is in that background that the puritan movements grew. At that time alcohol was the devil that destroyed men and shattered families. They had the support of the women (who mostly didn't enjoy having husbands that were constantly drunk) and the establishment. Gradually they managed to change peoples perceptions about alcohol and they successfully lobbied for stricter alcohol control laws and higher taxes. So while the prohibition in the US did not work, the puritan movement itself was a huge success that made the world sober up. Alcohol consumption decreased markedly from 1900 to 1950 and so did alcohol related violence.
My point is that if you legalize cannabis, what prevents the situation from becoming as bad as it was in Sweden in the mid 19th century? Instead of alcoholics you'll have a large segment of the population being high on pot all the time.
What's interesting is how the word 'poaching' has gone from the illegal murder of animals while trespassing to stealing away of top talent. The evolution of this word as well as 'hunting' and other terms typically associated with big game hunting have become part of our employment lexicon.
I don't think it is as much interesting as it is sad. What Apple was trying to set up was an illegal agreement to collude to keep salary competition down. Companies should have to compete for top talent, that is what the free market is all about. If a company loses an important employee to a competitor, well tough shit, you could have paid him more. What they are trying is simply pure price fixing.
The sad thing about the word 'poaching' is that the corporations are trying to get the act of offering a companies employees better working conditions sound immoral. Poaching is illegal so a non-poaching deal to prevent it obviously has to be good. And the media buys their terminology wholesale which is why it is called a "non-poaching deal" and not a "salary fixing deal."
Here is the thing: You are a moron. You was taught Java and you have a learning disability which prevents you from learning anything new unless it is in a college course and you are forced to. Your mind is closed which is why you will never excel at what you do. Have fun being a drone.
Honestly I have no clue on how it works in most of Europe. In Norway tuition is free even for foreign students. There is a sign up fee of about 50$ per semester which is negligible. In Sweden it is free until 2010 because the new government has decided that non-Europeans should pay roughly $10000 per semester which is totally pathetic. There is no better advertising for a country than free education. Denmark and Finland is also free if the student is enrolled in an exchange program. And Iceland is also tuition free. Maybe it's a Scandinavian thing.
But yes, it is still possible for non-Europeans to receive free university education here.
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Trouble is, this is a country run by crazy religious zealots, that quote their religion when they blow stuff up. The powers that be over there, can't be trusted to 'play nice' with their nukes. They would be very likely to start shooting them off unprovoked.
So why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons?
No. In scenario 1, what should be done is trying to get the customer to reduce the problem. It is unlikely that the customer regularly deals with 400 different forms, much more likely is that at most 5 forms stands for 99% of the traffic and the other 395 are one-off's much to rare to spend time on. The correct approach is to identify those 5 forms, implement the processing for those forms as quickly as possible and then evaluate if the client is happy.
Then when the system has been delivered, you may refactor the code to add support for the more common of the 395 remaining formats. Trying to implement parsers for all those 400 formats at once is a recipe for disaster. You will get architecture astronauts discussing "what if"-scenarios endlessly while building X layers of abstractions without getting anywhere.
Very good advice. If you are known by name to customers, your brand becomes one of their selling points. You have to have a very likable personality for that to work though, technical skills aren't that important. I met a few of those persons. Decent programmers, but the awesomeness they managed to project through humility and charisma were incredible.
Seriously, this "story" SUCKS!
The pre-rendering is the easy part of the problem. The newspaper sites could themselves cache and pre-render the content if they really wanted to. The tougher problem is reporting. Counting ad impressions, page hits and link clicks. The paper needs to know as much information about you as possible so that they can sell as much advertising space as possible.
Fast flipping through ten articles would be much different from a user clicking through ten articles on the site itself. For how long did the user rest his eyes on each article? Did he see the ads? What link did he click on after reading the article about X? Etc.
Well, it seems that stupid people actually *build* linux too!
It was that way when Stalin was in power, but not during the post-war period. Rather the opposite. I had a friend from USSR who grew up there in the 70:ies and he told me that basically you didn't have to work unless you wanted. People randomly didn't show up for work because they didn't feel like working, bureaucrats and upper level staff did it too so no one could reprimand them for it. Most companies had a larger workforce than they had work for which was partially caused by the miserable central planning system. So even if they showed up, they would just sit on their asses all day doing nothing.
That was one of the reasons the USSR fell. No incentives to work hard and no repercussions for slacking off. The whole society stagnated. But it is true that they worked less hours than we in capitalist countries do.
Read up on the composite extension, XAA, DRI and all the new stuff being implemented in Xorg. The raw framebuffer model, where the server only cares about stacking and mediating pixel access is exactly where Xorg is going. More and more of X's features are becoming legacy that modern apps just don't need.
Also check out the EWMH spec to understand what kind of mess is involved in supporting a window manager model instead of letting clients draw their own borders. There is a reason why neither Aqua nor Windows have the concept of window manager.
Well if work is depressing then there is something wrong with it. I suggest you fix your attitude because caring so much about it that you get depressed is not healthy.
At my work, I'm also usually right. As I'm sure most techies reading /. often are. People have this peculiar habit of interrupting me when discussing to make my argument appear weaker than it is. I let them, because I'm a soft-spoken guy and I really don't care that much. A month or two later, my predictions come true and we do it my way instead which I initially suggested. I don't tell people "I told you so" because I don't need the acknowledgement. My reward is the salary, their reward is that they get to borrow my brain for 8 hours/day. If they wish to spend my 8 hours on futile, dead end projects then so be it. There is no reason for me to get emotionally involved.
I read a study (in a tabloid, but still) about that most people prefer to work with nice failure persons rather than excellent jerks. That shows how fucked up many of us techies priorities are. We prefer what is best for the company rather than enjoying the time we spend at work. Self-sacrifice is not a virtue, it is the losers mind set.
I'd recommend every techie to work as a consultant at least for a year or two. Because when you do, you learn that your life is not tied to the company's bottom line. Problems and stupid managers aren't frustrating anymore. The more stupidity and bad decisions, the more billable hours you can charge them. Stupid techies work overtime to clean up the mess, smart techies bleed them dry while doing it. :)
I can't seem to google it up right now, but James Gosling wrote a very interesting article in 2002 about what is wrong with X11 and how he would have designed it from scratch if he could. As he was one of the guys involved in the X11 project one would assume he knows what he is talking about.
Granted, the composite extension has solved many of X11's problems such as the damn stupid expose event system, but has also introduced many new ones. For example every time you resize a window xorg has to call on both the client application and the wm to render an image of the window being resized. Which is why Compiz cheats and uses wireframe resizing by default. Or just compare a modern Linux desktop to Vista. Sadly, after just a few minutes use it becomes undeniable that Vista's graphics are smoother, shinier and more flicker free than xorg.
I'm aware of the difference between flv and swf. But most video sites only use swf for the player which merely fetches the flv file from somewhere and streams it. That is only a small subset of the whole swf specification. While the specification was closed until last year, there still existed dozens of third party decompilers, encrypters and other kind of tools for swf, so it appears that it wasn't all that hard to reverse engineer the format.
And no offense to the Gnash developers, but they haven't gotten very far since the swf format was opened.
The Flash video format was opened long time ago. Adobes Linux Mozilla plugin is still proprietary and sucks monkeyballs of course. But there is nothing stopping any open source developer from writing a good plugin themselves. That no developer has done that is not Adobe's fault. Meanwhile, if you know what you are doing (check the /tmp directory!), you can download the video and it will play perfect in fullscreen in any gstreamer based player such as totem.
Not true. Read up on the history of Bell Labs, the state owned research branch of AT&T. Without it, computing wouldn't be anything like today.
That would be fair if the test results was reflected in the salary offer. A person that aces all the test questions should receive a very generous salary. But that's not how it works and why I nowadays refuse to take tests on principle.
At one company I solved a stupid sql puzzle that the interviewer emailed me. Then I got a real life interview which consited of me completing a 1.5 hour long exam kind of test, about 15 pages long, about ASP programming. All this before getting to the actual interview stage. Four weeks later, after I had tried several times to reach the interviewer on phone to know about how my test went, he emails me and tells me that although I aced both tests, he didn't think I was "consultant material." Whatever that means. And no, my hair is neither long nor greasy and I do shower and change clothes regularily.
At another company, I was tasked to write a c# program to solve a hexagonal 6x6 sudoku puzzle. It involved writing a quite complicated constraint solver and was far from simple to create. Took me two days or something. I was the only one to submit a working application. Then at the interview the guy explained the salary structure which meant that I would get a salary lower than if I were a bus driver. I politely declined the offer.
At my current job, I got to met the techies directly, who could instantly see that I knew my shit, and we sat and chatted about our summer vacations for an hour.
And that is why I won't do tests. If a company wants to figure out if I can code or not, they can either google my name or call my references. They can also have a technical person conduct the interview. Testing candidates is meaningless.
But you do reply to Slashdot comments. Slashdot is also a form of cloud computing service in which you store your comment replies.
Yassir Arafat, Mahmoud Ahaminejad, Neil Armstrong, Bill Gates.. there are quite a few celebrities that are engineers. Granted it generally isn't their engineering that made them famous. But your question is like asking for famous astronomers and the only one you can think of is Brain May.
Lies, gmail has been down several times in the past many times for hours at a time. The difference between google and other service provides isn't the number of outages (gmail has more than even hotmail) it is how they are dealt with. E.g. the App Engine outage.
No it's not. RTFA or try compiling the program.
Very cool program! Taught me some things about IP. The program could be made one byte shorter by using for(;;) instead of while(1) and it is not strictly necessary to use "unsigned short" instead of "short" afaict. I wonder what other interesting programs that can be written in only 140 bytes.
That's definitely not entirely true. Here are some basic historical facts about alcohol that everyone arguing for drugs should know. In the 18th century potatoes were imported to Europe and it became a staple foodstuff because you could easily and cheaply make hard liquor from it. Before you had to use wheat which was much more expensive. What happened? Alcohol consumption skyrocketed. In the mid 19th century in Sweden (which is the only country I have stats for, the numbers are similar for other countries) the annual per capita consumption of hard liquor was 46 liters per person and year.
Please think about it and understand how much that is.
Adult men stood for more than two thirds of the consumption which was slanted towards the most heavily drinkers since not everyone drank equally much. That means that a large portion of the population drank 4-6 liters per week, they were constantly drunk. Imagine the kind of grief and social costs drinking on that scale lead to. That were also the time when the number of murders/capita was at its highest, hardly a coincidence.
It is in that background that the puritan movements grew. At that time alcohol was the devil that destroyed men and shattered families. They had the support of the women (who mostly didn't enjoy having husbands that were constantly drunk) and the establishment. Gradually they managed to change peoples perceptions about alcohol and they successfully lobbied for stricter alcohol control laws and higher taxes. So while the prohibition in the US did not work, the puritan movement itself was a huge success that made the world sober up. Alcohol consumption decreased markedly from 1900 to 1950 and so did alcohol related violence.
My point is that if you legalize cannabis, what prevents the situation from becoming as bad as it was in Sweden in the mid 19th century? Instead of alcoholics you'll have a large segment of the population being high on pot all the time.
What's interesting is how the word 'poaching' has gone from the illegal murder of animals while trespassing to stealing away of top talent. The evolution of this word as well as 'hunting' and other terms typically associated with big game hunting have become part of our employment lexicon.
I don't think it is as much interesting as it is sad. What Apple was trying to set up was an illegal agreement to collude to keep salary competition down. Companies should have to compete for top talent, that is what the free market is all about. If a company loses an important employee to a competitor, well tough shit, you could have paid him more. What they are trying is simply pure price fixing.
The sad thing about the word 'poaching' is that the corporations are trying to get the act of offering a companies employees better working conditions sound immoral. Poaching is illegal so a non-poaching deal to prevent it obviously has to be good. And the media buys their terminology wholesale which is why it is called a "non-poaching deal" and not a "salary fixing deal."
Learn to read teabagger.
And two paragraphs down which you conveniently omitted. :) The anti-ketosis conclusions have been challenged by a number of doctors and adherents of low-carbohydrate diets, who dispute assertions that the body has a preference for glucose and that there are dangers associated with ketosis."
It appears that the "no-carb diet" controversy is far from settled.
Here is the thing: You are a moron. You was taught Java and you have a learning disability which prevents you from learning anything new unless it is in a college course and you are forced to. Your mind is closed which is why you will never excel at what you do. Have fun being a drone.
Honestly I have no clue on how it works in most of Europe. In Norway tuition is free even for foreign students. There is a sign up fee of about 50$ per semester which is negligible. In Sweden it is free until 2010 because the new government has decided that non-Europeans should pay roughly $10000 per semester which is totally pathetic. There is no better advertising for a country than free education. Denmark and Finland is also free if the student is enrolled in an exchange program. And Iceland is also tuition free. Maybe it's a Scandinavian thing.
But yes, it is still possible for non-Europeans to receive free university education here.