You ought to try MS Money. I use it in exactly the way you describe. Every time I open it up, it tells me where I've already overspent my budget for the month. Every week, I check where I have money left in the budget, and spend accordingly.
$120 left in the grocery budget on the last Sunday of the month? Let's eat steak! Gas budget is over by $20? Better reallocate from groceries...
Not only that, but it also includes a "Lifetime Planner," which tells you how much you'll want to earn when you're having kids, paying for college, retiring, and so on.
I once worked on an app where an engineer had included the error message "If you see this message, call Customer Support and have them fire (engineer)"
And the rumor is that some customer saw the error message...
Codeguide, available for a trial download at www.omnicore.com, is amazing.
1) lightweight. REALLY lightweight.
2) cheap. $299 for a license.
3) automatic "code analysis", which roughly translates to constant, real-time compilation. Every bug in your code is highlighted, bookmarked,
and explained. It dramatically reduces typos
4) awesome code completion. better than anything I've seen, and faster.
5) amazing support -- I submit a lot of bugs to these guys, and often I get a response in under 2 hours of the form "x doesn't work because you didn't hit button y"
6) great support for remote debugging.
7) user configurable tools... makes it easy to add things like clearcase integration, even though the IDE doesn't natively support it
8) configurable code templates, so you can say "enume" translates to
for (Enumeration ee = |.elements(); ee.hasMoreElements())
{
}
The | actually represents where the cursor will start after expansion, and is configurable.
In all, CodeGuide takes many small, useful, good ideas from many other systems, and brings them together in one product. Nothing in CodeGuide is revolutionary, it is just implemented so well that it has major advantages over the other bloatware on the market.
Since I've been using it, my productivity has gone up dramatically. In the past, I have used VisualCafe, editplus, and J++. I briefly tried NetBeans. CodeGuide puts all of them to shame.
Fourth: Are you aware that there's a fairly large talent pool endemic to Utah? There's 3 universities here with student bases of over 20,000 and more than decent engineering schools. Some of these people want to leave (me), but I'd expect that many of them wouldn't mind staying.
Please name them. And give their national rankings in engineering and/or computer science.
There is a major myth being perpetrated by the media at large right now. The myth is that Silicon Valley is full of thousands of servers, sucking kilowatts as fast as they can be produced.
In fact, many Silicon Valley companies who have mission-critical hardware have moved that out of CA years ago. It was done as a matter of protection from earthquakes.
This is why the heavy-hitters like Intel and Sun are not too hard hit by rolling blackouts. They don't need the electricity to power hardware, just the lights.
Cube warriors are assigned karma points based on how funny their spamed e-mail jokes really are. When a cube warrior has a high enough karma they are given moderator points that they can use to rate up and down a management decision.
Any other CMU CS'ers who remember the zephyr ++ and --?
Basically, you could agree with someone's broadcast comment with a reply of <userid>[++|--] and that got tracked off to somewhere that accumulated scores over time.
How hard is it exactly to upgrade your Kernel? (I use redhat6.2)
Wow. Now, I'll admit, I haven't touched a linux box in over 18 months, but, when I was using it as my daily desktop, it was just sort of assumed that running linux meant recompiling the kernel with some frequency...
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know any sites that provide movies copied from DVDs using DeCSS? I've seen a lot of avi's and mpgs copied from VHS, and a few copied from DVDs using the older copiers, but I've never seen anyone post or provide (IRC, Gnutella, etc) a _good_ copy of a DVD. They're just too big!
Even admitting that I don't search really hard for.vob files, how many can there be? They're too big to download easily, too big to keep many, and too rare to show up in the many places I visit.
Anyone could have said the same thing about mp3s three years ago. But when the bandwidth for distribution becomes available (which it will, sooner or later), we'll have Napster for movies in a heartbeat.
You do _NOT_ get jurisdiction over every single human being in the entire world merely because they post something on the 'net.
One of the points they raise in the brief is that firing a gun across state lines is just as much against the law as if you fired gun within the state. I think their argument is that DeCSS was criminally harmful to businesses based in California, so, regardless of the location of the defendant, he must be tried in California.
Imagine if I blackmailed someone in Virginia from North Carolina. I'm still subject to criminal prosecution in Virginia, right?
2. There is a good deal of heavily entrenched and saturated languages like Java and TCL already poised to defend their positions.
Come on, be reasonable. How did Java get adapted, then? C, C++, and perl were already heavily entrenched! Or how about C? Fortran and COBOL were already heavily entrenched!
First, evolution takes place on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Humans have not been recording their observations of the world long enough to see the changes in ourselves or anything else around us.
True. Nonetheless, in the last few hundred years, we have constructed roadblocks to natural selection in the form of modern medicine.
Are you genetically predisposed to:
bad eyesight? No worries, we've got laser vision correction!
obesity? Don't sweat it, you won't have to chase down your dinner, just pull through to the next window!
impotence? VIAGRA!
anything else that makes you "weaker" and less likely to propogate your genes in a natural state? Bah, we'll build a designer drug! Have kids! Spread those genes down through the generations!
No worries! We don't enough recorded history to show that we're slowing evolution! Let the weak live!
And the tech environment out here is much more astounding then you would expect, with the entire breadth of the industry represented.
No, no, no, no, no...
As a CM CS grad myself, I'm sorry you've been brainwashed by the Pittsburgh High Technology Council -- who acts indignant every time a list of "The Best High Tech Cities in the U.S." fails to mention Pittsburgh.
Yes, there are some great technology success stories in Pittsburgh. Yes, there's a load of startup activity in the area now. But Pittsburgh doesn't hold a candle to the Valley, Austin, Boston, New York, or Seattle.
Pittsburgh has no urban nightlife to attract young talent to the area
Pittsburgh's main source of technical talent is Carnegie Mellon grads. But less than 20% of those grads stay in Pittsburgh! (At least, that was the statistic from the CM career center when I discussed it with them last spring) With an average graduating CS class of 140, that's less than 30 people a year.
Pittsburgh has no venture capital infrastructure. Venture is a huge influence in making a good company into a success. The last I heard, the largest first round funding in the Pittsburgh for a tech startup was under 10 million dollars. Talk to Stanford MBAs, and they will tell you, "If you want to raise 10 million dollars, hold a cocktail party. Don't talk to VCs until you need at least 30 million."
Please name a major technology company based in the Pittsburgh area. And before you yell about FORE -- no, they don't count, they're now part of a European-based company (and most of their Pittsburgh engineering talent has fled the sinking ship). FreeMarkets? I'll wait until they settle their class action lawsuit about defrauding investors.
Open your eyes. Read a few issues of the Industry Standard. The tech industry in Pittsburgh is O.K, but it's microscopic compared to lots of other cities.
I hate to say it, but please talk about competition with products that are released.
The PS2 is Competing against the DC in japan and 5 months from now it will finally be *ABLE* to compete with the DreamCast (which will have 10 million units by then..).
Bzzzt...wrong answer. The PS2 is competing with all the other systems in the U.S. right now.
Don't believe me? Imagine the buying decision of someone in the market for a new gaming system today. They have n dollars to spend. They can choose to spend that money on a system which is available today, or hold on to it until the PS2 (or X-Box) is available.
This is how products which aren't available for purchase can compete with those that are.
Let's see here...either (1) you've never worked in a corporate environment where you've had to deal with consultants or (2) you're a consultant yourself and "resemble that remark." From the (admittedly limited) experience I have with them, the original poster's remarks were on-target, though. Those who can, do; those who can't, consult.
It's good to see that you're just as blind as all the other sheep around here.
I am a technical consultant, who deals daily with customers who think they know better -- customers who don't understand that by specializing in a particular field, I bring a depth of knowledge to each project; customers who don't understand that by working on many projects, I bring a breadth of experience to each new endeavor.
In short, customers who think they can be jacks-of-all-trades, masters-of-all. In a lot of fields, it pays to specialize. And when you're specialized, you can sell your skills to many different people.
As for your "anti-moron" bit, hah! You're clueless
If consultants are so worthless, why do so many companies use them? Because consultants provide skills to companies that their own employees don't have.
Sounds to me like "those who can, consult; those who can't, get a cushy job with no outside pressure."
All this notwithstanding, the original post still wasn't "Interesting"
Know the difference between flamebait and a dissenting opinion
My experience with consultants is that a good many of them are clueless. The reason they're consultants is they can easily BS the customer into believing they know what they're talking about long enough to bleed you dry. They may even provide you an actual solution that may even kind of work but which is patently the worst way to do what you were wanting to do. Then when you DO get someone in who knows what he's doing, that guy will have to spend twice as long beating your company into shape because he has to go back and undo everything the previous one did.
Interesting? This gets moderated as "Interesting?"
It's flamebait, and if the moderators weren't so blind from anti-corporate propoganda, they would rate it as such.
Read slashdot for the articles, read the discussion for laughs.
Slashdot Mirror
You ought to try MS Money. I use it in exactly the way you describe. Every time I open it up, it tells me where I've already overspent my budget for the month. Every week, I check where I have money left in the budget, and spend accordingly.
$120 left in the grocery budget on the last Sunday of the month? Let's eat steak! Gas budget is over by $20? Better reallocate from groceries...
Not only that, but it also includes a "Lifetime Planner," which tells you how much you'll want to earn when you're having kids, paying for college, retiring, and so on.
Joe Vs. The Volcano, hands down.
"Wherever we go, whatever we do, we're going to take this lkuggage with us."
I once worked on an app where an engineer had included the error message "If you see this message, call Customer Support and have them fire (engineer)"
And the rumor is that some customer saw the error message...
very well put! mod the parent up!
Codeguide, available for a trial download at www.omnicore.com, is amazing.
1) lightweight. REALLY lightweight.
2) cheap. $299 for a license.
3) automatic "code analysis", which roughly translates to constant, real-time compilation. Every bug in your code is highlighted, bookmarked,
and explained. It dramatically reduces typos
4) awesome code completion. better than anything I've seen, and faster.
5) amazing support -- I submit a lot of bugs to these guys, and often I get a response in under 2 hours of the form "x doesn't work because you didn't hit button y"
6) great support for remote debugging.
7) user configurable tools... makes it easy to add things like clearcase integration, even though the IDE doesn't natively support it
8) configurable code templates, so you can say "enume" translates to
for (Enumeration ee = |.elements(); ee.hasMoreElements())
{
}
The | actually represents where the cursor will start after expansion, and is configurable.
In all, CodeGuide takes many small, useful, good ideas from many other systems, and brings them together in one product. Nothing in CodeGuide is revolutionary, it is just implemented so well that it has major advantages over the other bloatware on the market.
Since I've been using it, my productivity has gone up dramatically. In the past, I have used VisualCafe, editplus, and J++. I briefly tried NetBeans. CodeGuide puts all of them to shame.
Either way, he's been writing it long enough that you could subtitle it "The Phantom Menace"
-JTB
You've given me new hope that there are people reading & posting who are not all part of the same herd.
-JTB
In fact, many Silicon Valley companies who have mission-critical hardware have moved that out of CA years ago. It was done as a matter of protection from earthquakes.
This is why the heavy-hitters like Intel and Sun are not too hard hit by rolling blackouts. They don't need the electricity to power hardware, just the lights.
-JTB
Basically, you could agree with someone's broadcast comment with a reply of <userid>[++|--] and that got tracked off to somewhere that accumulated scores over time.
-JTB
Wow. Now, I'll admit, I haven't touched a linux box in over 18 months, but, when I was using it as my daily desktop, it was just sort of assumed that running linux meant recompiling the kernel with some frequency...
times, they are-a-changin.
Oh, come off it, that's not true and you should know better than to think it is.
-JTB
Anyone could have said the same thing about mp3s three years ago. But when the bandwidth for distribution becomes available (which it will, sooner or later), we'll have Napster for movies in a heartbeat.
-JTB
And big business is really REALLY upset about that.
-JTB
One of the points they raise in the brief is that firing a gun across state lines is just as much against the law as if you fired gun within the state. I think their argument is that DeCSS was criminally harmful to businesses based in California, so, regardless of the location of the defendant, he must be tried in California.
Imagine if I blackmailed someone in Virginia from North Carolina. I'm still subject to criminal prosecution in Virginia, right?
-JTB
Come on, be reasonable. How did Java get adapted, then? C, C++, and perl were already heavily entrenched! Or how about C? Fortran and COBOL were already heavily entrenched!
-JTB
True. Nonetheless, in the last few hundred years, we have constructed roadblocks to natural selection in the form of modern medicine.
Are you genetically predisposed to:
bad eyesight? No worries, we've got laser vision correction!
obesity? Don't sweat it, you won't have to chase down your dinner, just pull through to the next window!
impotence? VIAGRA!
anything else that makes you "weaker" and less likely to propogate your genes in a natural state? Bah, we'll build a designer drug! Have kids! Spread those genes down through the generations!
No worries! We don't enough recorded history to show that we're slowing evolution! Let the weak live!
Make sense?
-JTB
But the cat was kind of scary.
Don Bluth was a genetic pioneer
-JTB
As a CM CS grad myself, I'm sorry you've been brainwashed by the Pittsburgh High Technology Council -- who acts indignant every time a list of "The Best High Tech Cities in the U.S." fails to mention Pittsburgh.
Yes, there are some great technology success stories in Pittsburgh. Yes, there's a load of startup activity in the area now. But Pittsburgh doesn't hold a candle to the Valley, Austin, Boston, New York, or Seattle.
Pittsburgh has no urban nightlife to attract young talent to the area
Pittsburgh's main source of technical talent is Carnegie Mellon grads. But less than 20% of those grads stay in Pittsburgh! (At least, that was the statistic from the CM career center when I discussed it with them last spring) With an average graduating CS class of 140, that's less than 30 people a year.
Pittsburgh has no venture capital infrastructure. Venture is a huge influence in making a good company into a success. The last I heard, the largest first round funding in the Pittsburgh for a tech startup was under 10 million dollars. Talk to Stanford MBAs, and they will tell you, "If you want to raise 10 million dollars, hold a cocktail party. Don't talk to VCs until you need at least 30 million."
Please name a major technology company based in the Pittsburgh area. And before you yell about FORE -- no, they don't count, they're now part of a European-based company (and most of their Pittsburgh engineering talent has fled the sinking ship). FreeMarkets? I'll wait until they settle their class action lawsuit about defrauding investors.
Open your eyes. Read a few issues of the Industry Standard. The tech industry in Pittsburgh is O.K, but it's microscopic compared to lots of other cities.
-JTB
Don't believe me? Imagine the buying decision of someone in the market for a new gaming system today. They have n dollars to spend. They can choose to spend that money on a system which is available today, or hold on to it until the PS2 (or X-Box) is available.
This is how products which aren't available for purchase can compete with those that are.
Here endeth today's cluefulness seminar
Then some research group came out and said "B2B will be a 4 trillion dollar industry by 2003" (no, literally, the number they used was $4 trillion)
And the true B2B companies saw their stock prices shoot up.
And everyone else wanted their stock price to shoot up, so they announced that they were also "B2B". And now the term means nothing.
Read thestandard.com for news. Read slashdot.org for propoganda
It's good to see that you're just as blind as all the other sheep around here.
I am a technical consultant, who deals daily with customers who think they know better -- customers who don't understand that by specializing in a particular field, I bring a depth of knowledge to each project; customers who don't understand that by working on many projects, I bring a breadth of experience to each new endeavor.
In short, customers who think they can be jacks-of-all-trades, masters-of-all. In a lot of fields, it pays to specialize. And when you're specialized, you can sell your skills to many different people.
As for your "anti-moron" bit, hah! You're clueless
If consultants are so worthless, why do so many companies use them? Because consultants provide skills to companies that their own employees don't have .
Sounds to me like "those who can, consult; those who can't, get a cushy job with no outside pressure."
All this notwithstanding, the original post still wasn't "Interesting"
Know the difference between flamebait and a dissenting opinion
Interesting? This gets moderated as "Interesting?"
It's flamebait, and if the moderators weren't so blind from anti-corporate propoganda, they would rate it as such.
Read slashdot for the articles, read the discussion for laughs.
Or, at least trim the inflammatory commentary, and keep the link to the original news pieces.
Hmm.. ever heard of the Constitution? Ever ranted about how pirating MP3s is protected by the First Amendment?
Oddly enough, smart people can set out government regulation that will stand the test of time.