Nope, the javascript analogy is NOT a valid one. People don't trust JS because there are a dozen different engine variants which each have subtle incompatibilities. Plus JS can be turned off and otherwise easily skirted.
If you don't give anyone but yourself (whom you presumably trust), and one Business Layer codebase direct access to the tables, there's no compelling reason to rewrite a fair chunk of BL code in the form of triggers and constraints. All that does is make it tougher to update when you decide that Purple is a fine color to have in that field along with Red, Green and Blue.
OTOH, if you simply don't want to write BL code and let the user get an obscuro DB error when they're naughty, so be it. Most developers I know, however, would rather deal with error conditions themselves and have the DB take it like a man.
Yes, I'm a bit of a MySQL bigot, and the only feature I really miss from the "real" RDBMS world is subselects (because like any decent programmer I'm lazy).
Even two years from now, ballmer and friends will not be strong enough to fight every other software company in the world united against them.
Or they will. While $40B (that MSFT has in the bank) might not be enough to buy EVERY software outfit out there, it would certainly be enough to munch up all but maybe the top five other vendors. That, or they could merge with, say, AMD after a couple of years of pseudo-merged operations (aka "partnerships").
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you:-)
Old Account + Bankrupt ISP = Bizarre Issues
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 1
I have an old ISP account (since 1995) that was from a small regional ISP that traded hands a few times until it ended up part of Global Crossing. GC probably has no idea why they're billing me (on paper, even) $22/month.
I hate getting monthly bills for this, so I just sent them a year's payment and get a happy statement every month showing my credit going down bit by bit. I'm totally happy with this arrangement.
About three weeks ago, I received a copy of a court motion stating that I have until date X to respond to some procedural bit of GC's bankruptcy proceedings. Since I have a (slowly evaporating) credit balance, I'm aparrently a creditor of theirs, and am now getting lots of court spam. This one in particular was unnerving because it mentioned the "unsecure creditors" needing to hire counsel at a rat of $200k/month.
So by sending my ISP payment in advance, I'm potentially responsible for paying for part of a $200k/month legal bill. Great. I hope that I'm one of thousands of creditors and am as small a fish as I think I am...
It is a well known fact that AMD Duron processors are made in a sweatshop in Maylasia.
Of course they are! You ever been in a bunny suit? No matter how cold the room is--you sweat, period. The human body just gets hot when surrounded on all sides by millimeter-thick plastic.
Even so, I hope this post was a joke. I saw it was modded funny...
Actually, it does. The GPU is just a number cruncher at heart. Texturing, rotation, scaling, transform, and all the other stuff that a GPU does is just fancy wording for basic binary or trancendental (sin, cos, tan, etc.) functions in mass parallel (i.e. lots of them happening at once).
While this is a conceivable use of a GPU's power, rounding errors will probably result for all but the simplest calculations. And of course the screen will probably be filled with garbage as calculations are performed (so we'd be looking at using them as headless boxes, right?). Short version--you might be able to use this, but probably not.
Don't be so close minded about what a part is supposed to be used for. I'm no big fan of Intel, but I was nothing but impressed at how they noticed that their FPU could be used for several parallel integer operations instead of floating-point ones, then used this fact and some marketing hype to develop a technology in heavy use today. You probably know this technology as MMX.
Right. So drop some of the less-paying work. Surely, if s/he's THAT busy and making nothing, cut the crap and do something that works. Farm 20 acres instead of 40, etc.
That depends on whether the good is a commodity or not. Food, for the most part, is. If you're a wheat farmer and that's all you know/are willing to learn as a trade, then don't be too surprised when you're screwed.
Compare/contrast with the wine industry, which tends to be somewhere between a Monopolistic Competition/Oligopoly-type scenario, precisely because there is a discernable difference between wines (and most of those that consume wine care about that difference). As a result, you can still get away with JUST being a winery. I don't know why anyone expects to be able to get a decent living with being just a crop farmer. You CAN survive by living off the land, but you can only make money at it if you have serious economies of scale. Unless you have something to differentiate you from those that do, you die. That's the nature of Capitalism.
What bothers me isn't that farmers are getting paid not to farm, it's that there's no good way to get farmers to do something else with some of their time (to make real $) without prying them from their ancestral homes. In this age where the potential of remote work is so real (ask the many companies that are having their employees work from home), why can't we retrain farmers to telecommute part time?
Good point. I wonder if you could get a refund if you prove you weren't using CDs for "bad things." I sense another well-funded government bureaucracy in the works!
While it is true that students should be learning general classes of applications to get work done, it is not written in stone that they have to be Office on Windows. If the students learn the apps well enough, there should be no problem going to the next app suite.
During my years of school, I've used AppleWorks (on a IIe), Word on a Mac, WordPerfect on DOS, Works on a PC, and Office on a PC. The fact that I started on AppleWorks specifically had absolutely no effect on my ability to pick up Office. It's vastly more important to know that a spellchecker exists and to look for it than the keystroke combination used to conjure it up.
Schools are there to teach general concepts and algorithms that will stick with you for life. In the computer world, they can do that with MS Office or StarOffice equally well. They can teach programming with GCC or Visual Whatever equally well. If the point were really to make a seamless transition into the real world without some capacity for independent thought and ability to figure things out, megacorps would be running all the schools (Intel presents Andy Grove Elementary School) and employing all the graduates. In fact, this may happen someday (there is already something of a trend there). We can only hope that it won't come to fruition.
Honestly, if you can't figure out how to print from Word when you can do it in StarOffice and have no other particularly special skills (i.e. you're a general office worker), you don't deserve a good job. Figure it out or take a class at a private institution (who will have the money to spend on licensing software). If you have special skills such that the company wants to keep you anyway, make them pay for it, instead of the taxpayers.
Arguing that we must use Office in schools because "it's the standard" is similar to the argument that millions of schoolkids have tried to use to not learn long division: "But real people just do it on a calculator anyway. Why do I have to learn it?" The fact is that schools are trying to teach concepts to open minds and make them better able to handle concepts. Running a relatively stable group of applications on a stable OS is vastly more useful than training a bunch of kids to run screaming in terror when something not in their tiny world hits them in the face (oh no! This is Office 2000! I only know Office XP!).
If the kids complain, so what. If the parents complain, explain the costs involved and what you're trying to teach (concepts, not brand loyalty). If the parents don't agree and care enough, they will change the policy and pony up the money to do so. More likely, they care more about sports and music programs, as well they should. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be any schools left teaching ClarisWorks or WordPerfect (and there are).
I can only hope THEY are still about in 40 years... I Loved the Shack, and had a great time ROAMing to their beats and can only hope for more! Check out their site at theb52s.com.
Excellent point. The pay-per-cd system must be broken if it can't withstand this kind of scrutiny. Time to found some kind of endowment for the arts to promote the creation of quality music. Er, wait a minute...
Yes, and by demanding that an individual release source, you are taking away that individuals right to use his IP as he sees fit.
His point was that the ability to use your IP to subjugate your users isn't an inappropriate power to have. Your users shouldn't take it, and should therefore either force you to see the light through economic or other pressures, or no longer be your users. The lamentable fact is that companies are still exposing users to subserviance (the selection of laptops without the Windows tax is but one example).
We run Access as a front end to our MS SQL7 backend and have a separate system (parts of which are synched using VBScripts), and here's what we noticed:
1. Don't sync anything with VBScript and ADO if you want to keep your sanity. The scripts' error handling is atrocious--Active Perl on Win32 is MUCH better if you have to glue these backends better.
2. I can live without many of the things I take for granted in MS SQL (transactions, subselects, etc). The only thing that's REALLY annoying to have missing is triggers. Without them, you basically have to write quite a bit of code in the front end that Access is pitifully bad at handling sometimes (especially with bound recordsets).
3. We have three programmers (well, two FTE) working on the Access front end at any given time and it has major issues once you pass the basic levels of usefulness, even if it's not responsible for storing any data. Things we've noticed:
A. No reasonable way to handle version control once the DB gets large (front end over 10MB when "compiled" to an.MDE). Sourcesafe supposedly handles individual modules, but it's unmitigated crap on a DB of this size (20 mins to save a form, wierd errors, etc.), and so you're stuck doing versioning manually.
B. It doesn't handle versioning of ActiveX components well at all. Any variance, and your Forms break with cryptic errors. Yet using OCXes and DLLs are your only hope of modularizing things when you're using an Access frontend.
C. MDBs and MDEs corrupt easily in the hands of users. We have an "update" script that individual users can run on their copies of the frontend, which is a necessary evil. Good thing remote offices can use ICA to run the DB frontend. It would be hell on our bandwidth otherwise.
D. I could probably go on for five solid pages on this topic alone. The only reason that we're still working with Access at all is that there has been six years of development on it, and there are a LOT of vestigial forms that rely on bound recordsets that we don't have the time to rewrite yet. We're using OCXes a ton, and anything that's still in Access is being done unbound now to make it easier to at least port to VB (the things that are really UI-intensive) or the web using ASP (reports, especially).
The lesson here is that you shouldn't develop a DB front-end in Access if you're not going to store the data there. Basically, if you are then the app probably isn't going to be used by more than a few people and Access is proabably OK. If not, then you're serious enough that you should be using something else. VB's a good start if you must, PHP is better.
Depending on your UI requirements, I'd start with a PHP/MySQL or PHP/MS-SQL combo. Write some OCXes if you need to (and have your guys use IE or write a VB wrapper for them). If you're not that serious (and your boss's FileMaker background is holding you back--Access and FM are more similar than not), you could try Access/MySQL or Access/MS-SQL, but PLEASE save yourself some sanity and avoid binding the forms straight. You might not want the complexity of reading/writing/syncing the data right off, but you'll save yourself tons of grief when you boss decides that he wants column X updated if and only if it meets some wierd constraints, the user clicks yes on a confirmation form, and is cancelled if they click no (it happens more often than you think when you're starting out--business logic is never as simple as it seems).
We in the US haven't had to deal with this since we gained our independence from Britain in the 1700s. I say we take a stand, and show these totalitarian swine what we're made of!
The one question I haven't seen asked yet is whether you believe in the product or not. As mentioned by other folks, the job situation of your coworkers will work itself out, but if you are that critical to the production of the company, is the product worth it.
Ask yourself if you're truly working on the Next Great Thing or just a bauble. Is your work relevant? Are you PROUD to be working on it? Imagine the horrible working conditions behind, say, the Hoover Dam. Dozens of people died during construction, many others injured themselves, screwed up their families or God knows what else, but the product was for the benefit of many and one of the wonders of all time.
I'm not saying that you're building a functional National Monument (of whatever country you're in), but do you believe in what you do? If not, why stay and put up with the BS? If so, maybe you should save it. Perhaps it's time to do what it takes to save your sinking ship (since you can do so with near-impunity, assuming you do nothing illegal or that you could be sued for). Confront management and speak your mind. Times like these are ripe for confrontation and change. Poach ideas (or offer to license them if you must). If you believe in the product, make it happen! If not, put it behind you.
Will this be worth talking to your grandkids about in years to come? Hopefully so...
...the fact that I looked at all the ads, the fact that I remember the inner debate I had in 1984 (should I stick with Tandy stuff or switch to Apple stuff?), or the fact that I just looked on eBay for a Tandy Model 100 portable (three on right now, ranging from $15-$25!). Ugh...
Excellent point. All game development on the PC should cease and we should all be buying games for the consoles (and ONLY for the consoles). The N64, PS2, and Dreamcast are optimally designed for just such a purpose, therefore we should use nothing else. Anything else is a waste of hardware ($2000 for a gaming machine when you can get your work done on a $600 PC and your gaming done on a $200 console? Are we crazy?).
I used to actually believe this line of thought back when I sold computers retail (a disheartening experience to say the least). Then there was the one argument that changed it all for me: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Without games on our PCs, many of us would get disinterested in computers altogether, and there would be little pushing the demand for faster systems anymore. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure, but I'm not going to quit wishing for a Linux port of everything possible.
As a former grunt tech and tech lead, I've drawn callers into three categories: The first, and my favorite, is the person who totally knows what s/he is doing and just needs that one critical piece of information. The second-my second favorite-is the person that's scared to death of the computer, and won't do anything that you don't explicitly tell them to. The third, and worst, is the person who knows just enough to be dangerous and you have to keep reined in constantly to keep them on task.
The ratio between types 1, 2, and 3 is about 10%/30%/60%. That should clue in anyone reading on why support folk (especially front-line folk) go insane. Why we don't have more and bloodier murders as a result is inexplicable to me.
Though there are probably a ton more factors involved in the drop in crime rates (metal detectors in schools, etc.), this raises several interesting points. Even though it might be scary that kids know how to evicerate their foes with a nailgun, it doesn't seem to be happening in reality, only virtually.
I wonder how many school fights have been redirected to virtual deathmatches in the last few years?
For personal LD, the provider is also required to provide an independent third party online to verify that you really wanted to do this (I believe this is an FCC thing). I used to work for a company that had a bank of people that did this for AT&T.
The process:
1. You talk to the telemarketer.
2. If you agree, the TM conferences in the third party (or has the third party contact you later, or...).
3. The third party verifies that you do want to switch long distance carriers (this part is usually tightly scripted and pretty obvious once you know what they're doing).
When I switched to Sprint, everything went great until this step. For some reason we got a half-dozen verify calls before I finally got disgusted and bitched out a supervisor. I guess that's the opposite of slamming...:-)
Since working for my current company, we've been slammed on a couple of our lines, as well. It isn't fun for businesses, either, we just have more resources to throw at the problem.
WRT to PIC codes: The 10-10 numbers you see advertised are actually the PIC codes for the carrier (10-10-288 is AT&T, 10-10-222 and 10-10-555 are MCI, etc.). If you find out what PIC code you should be using for your carrier, you can always override the default by using it before dialing the number (hence the reason this became a business in itself). If you get slammed and want to make sure they don't get any additional cash in the interim (above and beyond monthly fees), this is the way to go until you get things resolved.
If you know your PIC code, you can also tell your local telco to switch them directly without involving the LD carrier, which is sometimes faster than getting a LD rep to do it for you. YMMV.
They are all expecting the NEXT packet, not a retransmit.
In that case, couldn't the recipient just queue up a list of all the packets that got lost, wait until the end of the broadcast, then just request those packets (maybe giving up if lost > a few percent)? This would solve the dropped packet problem, and this would still imply a significant bandwidth savings. All you'd need is an algorithm built in to make sure that not all nodes on the broadcast shoot the "repost" request at the same time (which might Slashdot the server).
The AMD vs. Intel analogy is really interesting here. While AMD has only recently won over the hearts of the hard-core geek, it has had a reasonable presence in the mass market for quite some time. Linux, on the other hand, has pretty much always been a toy of the l33t, and is only now starting to make inroads in the mass market.
Even so, it's likely that Linux will soon do to M$, Sun, and anyone else caught with their pants down what AMD is currently doing to Intel. This is, of course, thanks in no insignificant amount to efforts like this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. So MS finally came up with a De-moronizer of their own. Go fig.
Nope, the javascript analogy is NOT a valid one. People don't trust JS because there are a dozen different engine variants which each have subtle incompatibilities. Plus JS can be turned off and otherwise easily skirted.
If you don't give anyone but yourself (whom you presumably trust), and one Business Layer codebase direct access to the tables, there's no compelling reason to rewrite a fair chunk of BL code in the form of triggers and constraints. All that does is make it tougher to update when you decide that Purple is a fine color to have in that field along with Red, Green and Blue.
OTOH, if you simply don't want to write BL code and let the user get an obscuro DB error when they're naughty, so be it. Most developers I know, however, would rather deal with error conditions themselves and have the DB take it like a man.
Yes, I'm a bit of a MySQL bigot, and the only feature I really miss from the "real" RDBMS world is subselects (because like any decent programmer I'm lazy).
Even two years from now, ballmer and friends will not be strong enough to fight every other software company in the world united against them.
Or they will. While $40B (that MSFT has in the bank) might not be enough to buy EVERY software outfit out there, it would certainly be enough to munch up all but maybe the top five other vendors. That, or they could merge with, say, AMD after a couple of years of pseudo-merged operations (aka "partnerships").
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you :-)
I have an old ISP account (since 1995) that was from a small regional ISP that traded hands a few times until it ended up part of Global Crossing. GC probably has no idea why they're billing me (on paper, even) $22/month.
I hate getting monthly bills for this, so I just sent them a year's payment and get a happy statement every month showing my credit going down bit by bit. I'm totally happy with this arrangement.
About three weeks ago, I received a copy of a court motion stating that I have until date X to respond to some procedural bit of GC's bankruptcy proceedings. Since I have a (slowly evaporating) credit balance, I'm aparrently a creditor of theirs, and am now getting lots of court spam. This one in particular was unnerving because it mentioned the "unsecure creditors" needing to hire counsel at a rat of $200k/month.
So by sending my ISP payment in advance, I'm potentially responsible for paying for part of a $200k/month legal bill. Great. I hope that I'm one of thousands of creditors and am as small a fish as I think I am...
It is a well known fact that AMD Duron processors are made in a sweatshop in Maylasia.
Of course they are! You ever been in a bunny suit? No matter how cold the room is--you sweat, period. The human body just gets hot when surrounded on all sides by millimeter-thick plastic.
Even so, I hope this post was a joke. I saw it was modded funny...
Your post makes no sense.
Actually, it does. The GPU is just a number cruncher at heart. Texturing, rotation, scaling, transform, and all the other stuff that a GPU does is just fancy wording for basic binary or trancendental (sin, cos, tan, etc.) functions in mass parallel (i.e. lots of them happening at once).
While this is a conceivable use of a GPU's power, rounding errors will probably result for all but the simplest calculations. And of course the screen will probably be filled with garbage as calculations are performed (so we'd be looking at using them as headless boxes, right?). Short version--you might be able to use this, but probably not.
Don't be so close minded about what a part is supposed to be used for. I'm no big fan of Intel, but I was nothing but impressed at how they noticed that their FPU could be used for several parallel integer operations instead of floating-point ones, then used this fact and some marketing hype to develop a technology in heavy use today. You probably know this technology as MMX.
Right. So drop some of the less-paying work. Surely, if s/he's THAT busy and making nothing, cut the crap and do something that works. Farm 20 acres instead of 40, etc.
That depends on whether the good is a commodity or not. Food, for the most part, is. If you're a wheat farmer and that's all you know/are willing to learn as a trade, then don't be too surprised when you're screwed.
Compare/contrast with the wine industry, which tends to be somewhere between a Monopolistic Competition/Oligopoly-type scenario, precisely because there is a discernable difference between wines (and most of those that consume wine care about that difference). As a result, you can still get away with JUST being a winery. I don't know why anyone expects to be able to get a decent living with being just a crop farmer. You CAN survive by living off the land, but you can only make money at it if you have serious economies of scale. Unless you have something to differentiate you from those that do, you die. That's the nature of Capitalism.
What bothers me isn't that farmers are getting paid not to farm, it's that there's no good way to get farmers to do something else with some of their time (to make real $) without prying them from their ancestral homes. In this age where the potential of remote work is so real (ask the many companies that are having their employees work from home), why can't we retrain farmers to telecommute part time?
Good point. I wonder if you could get a refund if you prove you weren't using CDs for "bad things." I sense another well-funded government bureaucracy in the works!
Now if only there were banner ads at the top of every solitare game, you'd make at least a good $10/year in click-throughs!
Simple rebuttal: Sink or swim!
While it is true that students should be learning general classes of applications to get work done, it is not written in stone that they have to be Office on Windows. If the students learn the apps well enough, there should be no problem going to the next app suite.
During my years of school, I've used AppleWorks (on a IIe), Word on a Mac, WordPerfect on DOS, Works on a PC, and Office on a PC. The fact that I started on AppleWorks specifically had absolutely no effect on my ability to pick up Office. It's vastly more important to know that a spellchecker exists and to look for it than the keystroke combination used to conjure it up.
Schools are there to teach general concepts and algorithms that will stick with you for life. In the computer world, they can do that with MS Office or StarOffice equally well. They can teach programming with GCC or Visual Whatever equally well. If the point were really to make a seamless transition into the real world without some capacity for independent thought and ability to figure things out, megacorps would be running all the schools (Intel presents Andy Grove Elementary School) and employing all the graduates. In fact, this may happen someday (there is already something of a trend there). We can only hope that it won't come to fruition.
Honestly, if you can't figure out how to print from Word when you can do it in StarOffice and have no other particularly special skills (i.e. you're a general office worker), you don't deserve a good job. Figure it out or take a class at a private institution (who will have the money to spend on licensing software). If you have special skills such that the company wants to keep you anyway, make them pay for it, instead of the taxpayers.
Arguing that we must use Office in schools because "it's the standard" is similar to the argument that millions of schoolkids have tried to use to not learn long division: "But real people just do it on a calculator anyway. Why do I have to learn it?" The fact is that schools are trying to teach concepts to open minds and make them better able to handle concepts. Running a relatively stable group of applications on a stable OS is vastly more useful than training a bunch of kids to run screaming in terror when something not in their tiny world hits them in the face (oh no! This is Office 2000! I only know Office XP!).
If the kids complain, so what. If the parents complain, explain the costs involved and what you're trying to teach (concepts, not brand loyalty). If the parents don't agree and care enough, they will change the policy and pony up the money to do so. More likely, they care more about sports and music programs, as well they should. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be any schools left teaching ClarisWorks or WordPerfect (and there are).
I can only hope THEY are still about in 40 years... I Loved the Shack, and had a great time ROAMing to their beats and can only hope for more! Check out their site at theb52s.com.
Excellent point. The pay-per-cd system must be broken if it can't withstand this kind of scrutiny. Time to found some kind of endowment for the arts to promote the creation of quality music. Er, wait a minute...
Yes, and by demanding that an individual release source, you are taking away that individuals right to use his IP as he sees fit.
His point was that the ability to use your IP to subjugate your users isn't an inappropriate power to have. Your users shouldn't take it, and should therefore either force you to see the light through economic or other pressures, or no longer be your users. The lamentable fact is that companies are still exposing users to subserviance (the selection of laptops without the Windows tax is but one example).
We run Access as a front end to our MS SQL7 backend and have a separate system (parts of which are synched using VBScripts), and here's what we noticed:
.MDE). Sourcesafe supposedly handles individual modules, but it's unmitigated crap on a DB of this size (20 mins to save a form, wierd errors, etc.), and so you're stuck doing versioning manually.
1. Don't sync anything with VBScript and ADO if you want to keep your sanity. The scripts' error handling is atrocious--Active Perl on Win32 is MUCH better if you have to glue these backends better.
2. I can live without many of the things I take for granted in MS SQL (transactions, subselects, etc). The only thing that's REALLY annoying to have missing is triggers. Without them, you basically have to write quite a bit of code in the front end that Access is pitifully bad at handling sometimes (especially with bound recordsets).
3. We have three programmers (well, two FTE) working on the Access front end at any given time and it has major issues once you pass the basic levels of usefulness, even if it's not responsible for storing any data. Things we've noticed:
A. No reasonable way to handle version control once the DB gets large (front end over 10MB when "compiled" to an
B. It doesn't handle versioning of ActiveX components well at all. Any variance, and your Forms break with cryptic errors. Yet using OCXes and DLLs are your only hope of modularizing things when you're using an Access frontend.
C. MDBs and MDEs corrupt easily in the hands of users. We have an "update" script that individual users can run on their copies of the frontend, which is a necessary evil. Good thing remote offices can use ICA to run the DB frontend. It would be hell on our bandwidth otherwise.
D. I could probably go on for five solid pages on this topic alone. The only reason that we're still working with Access at all is that there has been six years of development on it, and there are a LOT of vestigial forms that rely on bound recordsets that we don't have the time to rewrite yet. We're using OCXes a ton, and anything that's still in Access is being done unbound now to make it easier to at least port to VB (the things that are really UI-intensive) or the web using ASP (reports, especially).
The lesson here is that you shouldn't develop a DB front-end in Access if you're not going to store the data there. Basically, if you are then the app probably isn't going to be used by more than a few people and Access is proabably OK. If not, then you're serious enough that you should be using something else. VB's a good start if you must, PHP is better.
Depending on your UI requirements, I'd start with a PHP/MySQL or PHP/MS-SQL combo. Write some OCXes if you need to (and have your guys use IE or write a VB wrapper for them). If you're not that serious (and your boss's FileMaker background is holding you back--Access and FM are more similar than not), you could try Access/MySQL or Access/MS-SQL, but PLEASE save yourself some sanity and avoid binding the forms straight. You might not want the complexity of reading/writing/syncing the data right off, but you'll save yourself tons of grief when you boss decides that he wants column X updated if and only if it meets some wierd constraints, the user clicks yes on a confirmation form, and is cancelled if they click no (it happens more often than you think when you're starting out--business logic is never as simple as it seems).
We in the US haven't had to deal with this since we gained our independence from Britain in the 1700s. I say we take a stand, and show these totalitarian swine what we're made of!
Who's up for the Boston CD Party?
I'm sure we can build a Planetary Transwarp drive by the time we need to move. Come on, people!
How many fighters DOES the Earth produce in a day?
The one question I haven't seen asked yet is whether you believe in the product or not. As mentioned by other folks, the job situation of your coworkers will work itself out, but if you are that critical to the production of the company, is the product worth it.
Ask yourself if you're truly working on the Next Great Thing or just a bauble. Is your work relevant? Are you PROUD to be working on it? Imagine the horrible working conditions behind, say, the Hoover Dam. Dozens of people died during construction, many others injured themselves, screwed up their families or God knows what else, but the product was for the benefit of many and one of the wonders of all time.
I'm not saying that you're building a functional National Monument (of whatever country you're in), but do you believe in what you do? If not, why stay and put up with the BS? If so, maybe you should save it. Perhaps it's time to do what it takes to save your sinking ship (since you can do so with near-impunity, assuming you do nothing illegal or that you could be sued for). Confront management and speak your mind. Times like these are ripe for confrontation and change. Poach ideas (or offer to license them if you must). If you believe in the product, make it happen! If not, put it behind you.
Will this be worth talking to your grandkids about in years to come? Hopefully so...
...the fact that I looked at all the ads, the fact that I remember the inner debate I had in 1984 (should I stick with Tandy stuff or switch to Apple stuff?), or the fact that I just looked on eBay for a Tandy Model 100 portable (three on right now, ranging from $15-$25!). Ugh...
Excellent point. All game development on the PC should cease and we should all be buying games for the consoles (and ONLY for the consoles). The N64, PS2, and Dreamcast are optimally designed for just such a purpose, therefore we should use nothing else. Anything else is a waste of hardware ($2000 for a gaming machine when you can get your work done on a $600 PC and your gaming done on a $200 console? Are we crazy?).
I used to actually believe this line of thought back when I sold computers retail (a disheartening experience to say the least). Then there was the one argument that changed it all for me: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Without games on our PCs, many of us would get disinterested in computers altogether, and there would be little pushing the demand for faster systems anymore. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure, but I'm not going to quit wishing for a Linux port of everything possible.
As a former grunt tech and tech lead, I've drawn callers into three categories: The first, and my favorite, is the person who totally knows what s/he is doing and just needs that one critical piece of information. The second-my second favorite-is the person that's scared to death of the computer, and won't do anything that you don't explicitly tell them to. The third, and worst, is the person who knows just enough to be dangerous and you have to keep reined in constantly to keep them on task.
The ratio between types 1, 2, and 3 is about 10%/30%/60%. That should clue in anyone reading on why support folk (especially front-line folk) go insane. Why we don't have more and bloodier murders as a result is inexplicable to me.
Though there are probably a ton more factors involved in the drop in crime rates (metal detectors in schools, etc.), this raises several interesting points. Even though it might be scary that kids know how to evicerate their foes with a nailgun, it doesn't seem to be happening in reality, only virtually.
I wonder how many school fights have been redirected to virtual deathmatches in the last few years?
For personal LD, the provider is also required to provide an independent third party online to verify that you really wanted to do this (I believe this is an FCC thing). I used to work for a company that had a bank of people that did this for AT&T.
:-)
The process:
1. You talk to the telemarketer.
2. If you agree, the TM conferences in the third party (or has the third party contact you later, or...).
3. The third party verifies that you do want to switch long distance carriers (this part is usually tightly scripted and pretty obvious once you know what they're doing).
When I switched to Sprint, everything went great until this step. For some reason we got a half-dozen verify calls before I finally got disgusted and bitched out a supervisor. I guess that's the opposite of slamming...
Since working for my current company, we've been slammed on a couple of our lines, as well. It isn't fun for businesses, either, we just have more resources to throw at the problem.
WRT to PIC codes: The 10-10 numbers you see advertised are actually the PIC codes for the carrier (10-10-288 is AT&T, 10-10-222 and 10-10-555 are MCI, etc.). If you find out what PIC code you should be using for your carrier, you can always override the default by using it before dialing the number (hence the reason this became a business in itself). If you get slammed and want to make sure they don't get any additional cash in the interim (above and beyond monthly fees), this is the way to go until you get things resolved.
If you know your PIC code, you can also tell your local telco to switch them directly without involving the LD carrier, which is sometimes faster than getting a LD rep to do it for you. YMMV.
In that case, couldn't the recipient just queue up a list of all the packets that got lost, wait until the end of the broadcast, then just request those packets (maybe giving up if lost > a few percent)? This would solve the dropped packet problem, and this would still imply a significant bandwidth savings. All you'd need is an algorithm built in to make sure that not all nodes on the broadcast shoot the "repost" request at the same time (which might Slashdot the server).
The AMD vs. Intel analogy is really interesting here. While AMD has only recently won over the hearts of the hard-core geek, it has had a reasonable presence in the mass market for quite some time. Linux, on the other hand, has pretty much always been a toy of the l33t, and is only now starting to make inroads in the mass market.
Even so, it's likely that Linux will soon do to M$, Sun, and anyone else caught with their pants down what AMD is currently doing to Intel. This is, of course, thanks in no insignificant amount to efforts like this one.