When was the last time you saw "Banned Books week" at amazon.com or Barnes & Noble?
Actually, the last time I was at Barnes & Noble they had a table featuring "banned" books. (Mind you, this was a couple of months ago.) Nothing too radical, but your usual fare of classics: Farenheit 451, Huckleberry Finn, Wizard of Oz, etc.
It seems like the creators of this system have noble goals, and I appreciate their efforts. It reminds me of Esperanto's Prague Manifesto. "Every language both liberates and imprisons its users, giving them the ability to communicate among themselves but barring them from communication with others."
I think anything that can bring the disparate world together is a good thing. But we woulnd't need technology like this if everyone got off their duff and learned a second language. For the purpose of learning a common second language, Esperanto is ideal. A smart kid like you can learn it in just a few hours of study.
I've used it to communicate with people from Brazil, Korea, and Germany, without having to learn Portuguese, Korean, and German. We just learned a simple middleware language to help us communicate. The Esperanto community offers Free Tutored Courses to help you get started. It's well worth the small investment to become bilingual.
But don't take my word for it. In the words of Tolkein: "My advice to all who have the time or inclination to concern themselves with the international language movement would be, 'Back Esperanto loyally.'"
-- Yekrats
I've beat Nethack... once upon a time.
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Nethack 3.4.0
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You know you're getting a bit long in the tooth when you beat Nethack on mainframe dummy terminals in the computer lab during the 80s. I guess I'm one of those longtooths. I think it was version 1.[3?] that I beat. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to beat it since.
Call me a whiner, but I think the damn game is too hard to win. ("Whiner!") Even with careful resource management, knowing all of the tricks, pouring over all of the spoilers, I still can't seem to beat the stupid thing again. Lord knows I've tried.
Too often Nethack will lead you too a impossible situation. You poke your head around a corner and get blasted by a Black Dragon or a major bad-ass demon without recourse. Maybe fairness is overrated in games, but instant death after hours of work isn't fun. Winning Nethack takes truly a herculean effort.
So that's why I don't play it any more. I can't imagine winning without cheating. I sure as heck won't download this version. Well, maybe I'll download it just to look at it, but I'll delete it right after. Honest!:-)
But it doesn't surprise me. Some companies are slimy like that. Heck, it happened a couple of years ago to my wife. Fortunately for us, the IRS has pretty stringent rules on who is and is not a contractor. If it's called into question, there's 20 Guidelines which the IRS uses to determine if a person is self-employed or an employee.
If you think you're an employee, but your employer dodges their own taxes by handing you a 1099, you can petition the IRS to look into it. Check out Form SS-8.
Could this employee not file a dispute with his or her credit card issuer? Or is there a 'statute of limitations' of sorts in typical card-issuer fine print?
Well, I'm pretty sure Visa and MasterCard are both 90 days. (I used to work as a credit card customer service representative a few years ago.) However, I don't think a dispute procedure would help here.
This would be a complicated case. If the credit card was in the company's name, then the credit card company should charge it off as a bankruptcy.
If a person used their own personal card to charge things for the company, and the company did not reimburse him, then tough luck. That's like saying, "I bought some stuff for my roommate, and he never paid me back. Can I get those charges taken off my bill?" The card issuer is going to laugh in your face. It won't care if your business or your roommate made the charges. Of course, the second that the word "bankruptcy" is mentioned, the account will likely be frozen, either way.
Best of luck, guys. Sorry to hear the awful news...
Have you seen this film that Disney is so trying to keep out of the public domain? Boy-oh-boy, Steamboat Willie sucks. It is simply a horrible film. For those of you who care, and those of you who don't, here's my synopsis.
Mickey is piloting a steamboat ship when old Pete comes to the bridge, roughs Mickey up a bit and tells him to scram. Pete chews some tobacco, doing tricks with the juice, until he splats tobacco juice into his own face. Meanwhile, the boat makes a stop to pick up some farm animals. In doing so, Mickey gets squirted in the face by a cow's udder. The boat leaves without Minnie Mouse (huh? where did she come from?), so Mickey uses a winch to pick her up by her underwear and hauls her onto the deck.
A goat eats Minnie's violin and sheet music, so the mice get the idea to wind his tail like a music box. The goat starts bleating the song "Turkey in the Straw." Then Mickey goes around the ship, torturning all of the animals in time with the music. He pulls piglets' tails to make music; he repeatedly strangles a cat then tosses it by its tail. Old Pete catches him, and tosses him into the potato bin, where Mickey hits a mocking parrot with a potato.
That's where it ends. I'm not making this crap up. It's so awful, it's laughable. This is the precious commodity that Disney is trying to save.
Microsoft Office is currently the de facto standard for office programs, because competitors have done more to imitate it than to develop an improved solution.
That is so full of crap it's not even funny. Microsoft Office is currently the defacto standard because they've strong-armed corporate stiffs into using their product. They shift their API every few months so that competitors can't make their competing products stable.
Whenever Microsoft changes versions, a flood of corporate numbskulls switch to the latest-greatest version. This encourages their employees to upgrade, otherwise they are "not compatible". Then all their friends start getting uncompatible attachments. I have heard "I have this document that I can't read but I have Microsoft Word." more times than I care to count in my past 6 years as a help-desk tech.
Imitation is a very small part of why people use MS Office. Microsoft's dirty tricks is far more culpable.
There's a big difference in that your typical code jockey will (should) set up a contract with a client. Both parties agree to certain terms, and those terms are ideally carried out. Both the end-user and the code monkey are protected because of that contract.
The shrinkwrapped click-thrus take away all rights from the consumer and only benefit the company. They take away rights to sell the software (whether you agree to the contract or not). Huh?
Stuff like UML is perhaps useful when you are working on some huge government project where they spend $10 million on auditing to make sure you don't waste $2 million tax dollars. Other than that, it isn't very useful.
Au contraire! I just had a class on UML last semester, and was surprised how useful UML could be. Simple diagrams can be used to show management where you're headed with your ideas. Some of the more complicated diagrams can lay everything out for your code-jockey to do the work. Proper modelling will usually save time and energy on all but the smallest of projects.
An analogy may be drawn from construction. A simple construction project like a shelf may require no modelling. Even I can eyeball a piece of wood and probably craft a pretty decent shelf. (Can you tell I practically failed wood-shop?) However, more complicated projects like a cabinet would require me to write down how I would construct the thing. How complex does a project have to be before one would want to risk NOT modelling?
I've actually used UML since I took the class. I've been playing around with making pinball machines in Visual Pinball lately, and found that UML State Charts are perfect for modelling the states of a pinball table. Not exactly a practical application, but still...;-)
UML can be a very complicated system, but not all of it is necessary all at once. Probably the 20/80 rule applies to it. Learning 20% of UML, will yield about 80% functionality. A little bit of UML can go a long way. Now that I've taken the class, I can't imagine doing OO design without it.
UML is worthy to explore, but I'll agree with the poster on one point: I don't think I trust getting info about it in a "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" book. --
Basically, they will do no business with you without the sales receipt.
Why is this unreasonable? Why should they exchange merchandise purchased at other stores? *ahem* Of course, you wouldn't do that, but others would.
Because some of us misplace receipts, or have family that replace receipts when giving as a gift. Or have family that live out of town giving gifts.
This happened to me: My mother bought me a shirt as a Christmas gift, which was one size too big. She made the purchase at Target. I wanted to exchange it for the exact same style of shirt with a different size. There was nothing wrong with the shirt that I brought back, and the shirt was obviously purchased from the store. They refused the exchange without a receipt, and my mother had to make the 1-hour trip to bring me the receipt.
I know there are a few people out there that try to defraud retail stores, but I think the percentage is pretty small, and the store writes it off. (It's a tax break!) It doesn't seem worth it to hassle customers this way.
This is way off-subject, but don't purchase anything at Target. They're return policy is horrible.
Recently, as of last November, they implemented a new policy for exchanges.
Basically, they will do no business with you without the sales receipt. Even if an item is defective and you want to exchange it, you can't without the receipt. (This sucks if you got something as a present, and the gift-giver lives out of town! This happened to me.)
Furthermore, they do absolutely no exchanges after 90 days, and if something goes on clearance in the meantime, you will only get the clearance price, not the price you paid.
Target's customer service totally sucks, and would be the last place I buy something now. Especially electronics!
As an employee and student of Purdue, the recent "raids" have been completely ignored by all local media. The only coverage I've seen was from national sources: Wired, etc. Who was raided?
The site mentions a raid occuring in Indianapolis, IN, but Purdue's main campus is in West Lafayette, IN. I don't know of any Purdue campuses in Indianapolis other than IUPUI (pronounced EEyoo-POOey:-), a tiny joint satellite campus shared between Indiana University and Purdue. I'm sure the spin-doctors changed it, because IUPUI doesn't have the name-recognition that Purdue has. I don't think IUPUI is known to anyone outside of Indiana.
Being one of the entrants to the Competition (5th place, yay!) I was not allowed to vote, but we were allowed to send in our top three favorites for a "Miss Congeniality" vote. In that light, here were my three favorites:
1. Earth and Sky: Designed to be an interactive fiction version of issue 1 of a super hero comic book. Fun stuff, if you're into the super hero genre.
2. Moments Out of Time: A time travel story, allowing a character to go back in time before an apocolypse and record data for the future. You start the game, choosing from a collection of gadgetry to help you on your mission.
3. No Time To Squeal: Please, no jokes about the title for a second or two. This story (though a bit linear) packs an emotional whallop about a husband, his very pregnant wife, and his psychotic business associate.
Kudos to all of the authors. Personally, I think it was a pretty good year for the IF Comp, but some will argue with me on that point.
Hey there, for those of us too lazy or modem-impaired to download the games, they are available via Telnet at telnet://chungkuo.org . (BBS account setup required, but worth it.)
They've not only got this year's competition playable (at least the ones playable sans graphics) but appear to have all past years' games, as well as many other Interactive Fiction goodies.
Fourth, judge. You can play games for a maximum of two hours before giving it a rating. Note that you don't have to play for two hours. We only set a maximum play time, not a minimum one. To rate a game, give it a score from 1 to 10. 10 is good. 1 is not good. Use whatever criteria you wish.
So in other words games will probably only be awarded a six or higher, anyone found playing a game for longer than twenty minutes which generates emotions equivalent to beating yourself with rancid haddocks are quite sick and disturbed. Skewed ratings here we come.
Au contraire! If you take a look at last year's results you'll find that the votes are pretty much spread across the spectrum, with most of the voting looking pretty normalized (non-skewed) to my statistical eye. (Ooh, pretty charts!) In fact, considering the relatively small sample size, it seems to be a very normal distribution! (That link for the paranoid: http://www.ifcomp.org/comp00/detailed-results.html )
Speaking as one of the authors of the competition, I do not mind the voting system. If you enter the contest, you are subject to the whims of both geniuses and trolls. However, enough people vote, that I think it balances things out. No, it may not be completely fair... (Name a voting system that is.) But I think it's fair enough that it just doesn't matter.
This argument has been rehashed on rec.*.int-fiction several times in the past few years, yet we always come back to the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
This horrible, absurd, unconsitutional law must be stopped before it is given life. I'm writing that letter right now and faxing it.
Honestly, this seems like the sort of law that will be largely ignored, that is, until a MegaCorporation want to bitchslap someone they don't like. It won't be the first time a Corporation has bought and abused a law to create their own private mafia.
Listen, Disney, you greedy sons-of-bitches: The only way you'll get Linux off my computer is to pry it out of my cold dead hard drive.
A little off-subject here, but a couple of weeks ago I heard an interesting article by Frank Deford* on NPR. The article concerned Lance Armstrong being accused of "doping" by the media, even after his drug tests came out "clean."
Deford argued that we shouldn't worry about testing athletes for drugs, because many Olympians do it anyway. Drugs are becoming incresingly more difficult to detect, and increasingly being used by athletes. Even when drugs aren't detected, even the mere speculation of drugs can sully an athlete (like in Lance Armstrong's case.) If we want a level playing field, he suggests, don't test for drugs.
*[A Sports Illustrated link on/.? The age of the apocolypse is here, I think...]
I used to be one of the "Yeah, Global Warming is a farce. Prove it to me." crowd, but last year I saw a special on Global Warming on PBS which opened my eyes, especially this data. The program showed both sides of the issue in a fair manner, but the Global Warming argument slam-dunked the "it's the natural cycle" argument without a contest.
Yes, we have a severe effect on the amount of carbon dioxide, and currently there is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than ever in the history of the earth. The ppm of CO2 is skyrocketing off the charts.
This may not be totally bad. The show mentioned that CO2 makes great plant fertilizer. Plants grow much better under high-CO2 atmospheres. Really, the coal industry funded a major study showing that CO2 in the atmosphere isn't such a bad thing! The bad news is, well, I wouldn't want to live in Florida.
Spam is *not* free speech!
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You do not have a right to spam my email-box. Spam has become impossible to stop using blocking at the user level. Spammers set up a dozen free "throwaway" accounts a week, so a user blocking one will do no good. Usually the accounts are cancelled after a few days anyway.
Saying "spam is free speech" is like saying "I, posing as you, using your neighbor's phone card, calling some guy in California to sell him a penile enhancement tool which he doesn't want" is free speech.
The best strategy I can see for limiting spam is ending the open relays. I don't see any legitimate use for an open relay. Anyone care to enlighten me?
For about a year, I replied to most spam that I got, complaining and asking to be removed...Perhaps spammers remove your email address after a certain amount of time, figuring that there is no way anyone would ever keep their email address more than five years...
Never, never, never reply to a spammer. Replying to a spammer is the best way a spammer has to verify that your address is fresh, and there's a live body on the end of the email address. Frankly, I'm surprised you don't receive much more spam.
Once spammers have proven your address to be live, your email address is much more valuable, and you can expect spam for years to come. My old email address from 10+ years ago (which was unactivated for 7 years) still recieves weekly spam.
The only way I've been able to make a dent in the amount of spam that I recieve, is through SpamCop. Some may disagree with its tactics or methods, but it does much of the drudgework of parsing forged headers and complaining to the proper authorities for me quickly and easily. Plus there are free and for-pay versions. Worth a look-see.
No offense, but if these laws exist... huh? "Advanced Training" is about as vague as it gets - perhaps that means you've worked there for X period of time and "know the place" and what you're working on well. Maybe it means you have prior work experience relevant to the company. Or "certain classes of employees" - what? If there were such a stupid thing, what would prevent a company from classifying there employees in whatever way they pleased. Are there enormous checklists put out by the Department of Labor (or state laws) which enumerate the sort of tasks people who can "legally" be salaried can perform? I have a very hard time believing one must meet certain credentials in order to be salaried.
Basically, there are four types of employees that can be made exempt: Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Salespeople. We computer guys fall into the Professional group.
To be an Exempt Professional (quoting the DOL site) one must perform (1) Work requiring knowledge of an advance type in a field of
science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of
specialized intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a
general academic education and from an apprenticeship, and from training
in the performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes...
or (4) Work that requires theoretical and practical application of
highly-specialized knowledge in computer systems analysis, programming,
and software engineering, and who is employed and engaged in these
activities as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software
engineer, or other similarly skilled worker in the computer software
field. (This fourth item has some strings attached.)
(Clauses (2) and (3) don't pertain to us.)
If we are in a "learned profession" that is considered professional exempt, then (from the DOL) "The ``learned'' professions are described in Sec. 541.3(a)(1) as
those requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or
learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized
intellectual instruction and study as distinguished from a general
academic education and from an apprenticeship and from training in the
performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes.
I also found where the department of labor states that exempt employees must "excercise discretion and independent judgement." The DOL cites an example that a computer programmer who makes the preparations, writes the code, and completes a project would be considered exempt. It also said that a junior programmer, or one that just does the flowcharting for a programmer would not be considered exempt, because they are not working independently. An exempt worker must show that they make these sorts of independent decisions "customarily and regularly."
Note, that I'm not a lawyer... I had a similar experience which may or may not relate to your case. That being said...
Wow, your situation is so similar to what happened to me three years ago, it's almost as if I wrote it myself. Here's the scoop on how I got my own back pay.
I used to work for a major financial institution in their IT office, and like you, I was an hourly employee forced to work after hours on-call work. ("It's part of the job," they said.) Well, I had an inkling it wasn't right, but I didn't argue. Nor did I question it, until the on-call time became oppressive.
Since taking the job, we went from being a 8am-10pm shop with one location to a 24/7 shop with multiple locations nationally. It became common to recieve three or four calls during the night. The employer also changed us from hourly to salary employees to avoid paying us overtime.
Please read the book for a better description... But to sum up, there are two kinds of employees: Hourly and Salaried. Hourly employees *must* be paid at least time-and-a-half overtime pay. Period. They can't be compensated with "comp time" or bribed with Rice Krispy Treats. No, as I understand it, the employer must pay 1.5 x Hourly Pay for every hour worked overtime during a week.
That little poster in the break room just about sums it up. To compensate for less (or not at all, like some posters are infering) is illegal.
If you're on-call, you get hours for everything you do for the company, but not necessarily for waiting around for the beeper to go off. So, if during the night you get called at 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., and work a half an hour on each, you've worked 1 hour of overtime.
There are pretty strict rules for who can be an Salaried employee. Basically, someone has to have "advanced training" (ie. college degree) or else fit into certain classes of employee. (Managerial or secretarial). If you are a salaried employee, you are the whippin' boy of your employer. They can do anything... ask you to work any amount of time, and it's your job to do it with a smile. Since I did not have a computer degree, and the job was formerly an hourly position, I was made an salaried employee illegally.
I'd advise checking with the US Department of Labor closest to you. There's probably one in your state. You can have questions answered without "turning them in." You can even request a complaint form. Have it ready, in case things go awry.
In the US, we have whistleblower laws to protect people from employers who try to punish those that turn them in for wrongdoings. If the thought of losing your job concerns you, you can turn them in anonymously.
You have some leverage on your side. If an employer is sued for breaking this law, they generally pay through the nose. I forget the exact figures.
However, I spoke to my employer one on one about the law, and about my findings. I went armed with information, I backed up my evidence, and my manager took the information to H.R., who talked to the corporate lawyer. Well, what-do-ya-know, I was right. We had our back pay "expidited". I had it within a month.
Little will strike fear into your company more than the dreaded "Department of Labor Audit". (Well, maybe a "software audit"...) If the government has reasonable cause, they'll send a bunch of flunkies over and go through your local HR office with a fine-tooth comb. They'll check every employee over, interview disgruntled employees, and tie up the whole office in a paperwork quagmire. 'T ain't pretty, I bet.
Information is your friend. Fortunately, I had documented almost all of the time I had been on-call. You need documentation to be able to prove your case.
So, I wish you the very best of luck. Read the book, get yourself a lawyer, talk to the Department of Labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the last time I was at Barnes & Noble they had a table featuring "banned" books. (Mind you, this was a couple of months ago.) Nothing too radical, but your usual fare of classics: Farenheit 451, Huckleberry Finn, Wizard of Oz, etc.
-- Yekrats
(Dang, left my flame suit at home. Oh, well.)
It seems like the creators of this system have noble goals, and I appreciate their efforts. It reminds me of Esperanto's Prague Manifesto. "Every language both liberates and imprisons its users, giving them the ability to communicate among themselves but barring them from communication with others."
I think anything that can bring the disparate world together is a good thing. But we woulnd't need technology like this if everyone got off their duff and learned a second language. For the purpose of learning a common second language, Esperanto is ideal. A smart kid like you can learn it in just a few hours of study.
I've used it to communicate with people from Brazil, Korea, and Germany, without having to learn Portuguese, Korean, and German. We just learned a simple middleware language to help us communicate. The Esperanto community offers Free Tutored Courses to help you get started. It's well worth the small investment to become bilingual.
But don't take my word for it. In the words of Tolkein: "My advice to all who have the time or inclination to concern themselves with the international language movement would be, 'Back Esperanto loyally.'"
-- Yekrats
You know you're getting a bit long in the tooth when you beat Nethack on mainframe dummy terminals in the computer lab during the 80s. I guess I'm one of those longtooths. I think it was version 1.[3?] that I beat. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to beat it since.
:-)
Call me a whiner, but I think the damn game is too hard to win. ("Whiner!") Even with careful resource management, knowing all of the tricks, pouring over all of the spoilers, I still can't seem to beat the stupid thing again. Lord knows I've tried.
Too often Nethack will lead you too a impossible situation. You poke your head around a corner and get blasted by a Black Dragon or a major bad-ass demon without recourse. Maybe fairness is overrated in games, but instant death after hours of work isn't fun. Winning Nethack takes truly a herculean effort.
So that's why I don't play it any more. I can't imagine winning without cheating. I sure as heck won't download this version. Well, maybe I'll download it just to look at it, but I'll delete it right after. Honest!
But it doesn't surprise me. Some companies are slimy like that. Heck, it happened a couple of years ago to my wife.
Fortunately for us, the IRS has pretty stringent rules on who is and is not a contractor. If it's called into question, there's 20 Guidelines which the IRS uses to determine if a person is self-employed or an employee.
If you think you're an employee, but your employer dodges their own taxes by handing you a 1099, you can petition the IRS to look into it. Check out Form SS-8.
Well, I'm pretty sure Visa and MasterCard are both 90 days. (I used to work as a credit card customer service representative a few years ago.) However, I don't think a dispute procedure would help here.
This would be a complicated case. If the credit card was in the company's name, then the credit card company should charge it off as a bankruptcy.
If a person used their own personal card to charge things for the company, and the company did not reimburse him, then tough luck. That's like saying, "I bought some stuff for my roommate, and he never paid me back. Can I get those charges taken off my bill?" The card issuer is going to laugh in your face. It won't care if your business or your roommate made the charges. Of course, the second that the word "bankruptcy" is mentioned, the account will likely be frozen, either way.
Best of luck, guys. Sorry to hear the awful news...
-- Yekrats
...with a big freaking security hole in it! Thanks, Microsoft!
Have you seen this film that Disney is so trying to keep out of the public domain? Boy-oh-boy, Steamboat Willie sucks. It is simply a horrible film. For those of you who care, and those of you who don't, here's my synopsis.
Mickey is piloting a steamboat ship when old Pete comes to the bridge, roughs Mickey up a bit and tells him to scram. Pete chews some tobacco, doing tricks with the juice, until he splats tobacco juice into his own face. Meanwhile, the boat makes a stop to pick up some farm animals. In doing so, Mickey gets squirted in the face by a cow's udder. The boat leaves without Minnie Mouse (huh? where did she come from?), so Mickey uses a winch to pick her up by her underwear and hauls her onto the deck.
A goat eats Minnie's violin and sheet music, so the mice get the idea to wind his tail like a music box. The goat starts bleating the song "Turkey in the Straw." Then Mickey goes around the ship, torturning all of the animals in time with the music. He pulls piglets' tails to make music; he repeatedly strangles a cat then tosses it by its tail. Old Pete catches him, and tosses him into the potato bin, where Mickey hits a mocking parrot with a potato.
That's where it ends. I'm not making this crap up. It's so awful, it's laughable. This is the precious commodity that Disney is trying to save.
That is so full of crap it's not even funny. Microsoft Office is currently the defacto standard because they've strong-armed corporate stiffs into using their product. They shift their API every few months so that competitors can't make their competing products stable.
Whenever Microsoft changes versions, a flood of corporate numbskulls switch to the latest-greatest version. This encourages their employees to upgrade, otherwise they are "not compatible". Then all their friends start getting uncompatible attachments. I have heard "I have this document that I can't read but I have Microsoft Word." more times than I care to count in my past 6 years as a help-desk tech.
Imitation is a very small part of why people use MS Office. Microsoft's dirty tricks is far more culpable.
--Yekrats
There's a big difference in that your typical code jockey will (should) set up a contract with a client. Both parties agree to certain terms, and those terms are ideally carried out. Both the end-user and the code monkey are protected because of that contract.
The shrinkwrapped click-thrus take away all rights from the consumer and only benefit the company. They take away rights to sell the software (whether you agree to the contract or not). Huh?
Au contraire! I just had a class on UML last semester, and was surprised how useful UML could be. Simple diagrams can be used to show management where you're headed with your ideas. Some of the more complicated diagrams can lay everything out for your code-jockey to do the work. Proper modelling will usually save time and energy on all but the smallest of projects.
An analogy may be drawn from construction. A simple construction project like a shelf may require no modelling. Even I can eyeball a piece of wood and probably craft a pretty decent shelf. (Can you tell I practically failed wood-shop?) However, more complicated projects like a cabinet would require me to write down how I would construct the thing. How complex does a project have to be before one would want to risk NOT modelling?
I've actually used UML since I took the class. I've been playing around with making pinball machines in Visual Pinball lately, and found that UML State Charts are perfect for modelling the states of a pinball table. Not exactly a practical application, but still...
UML can be a very complicated system, but not all of it is necessary all at once. Probably the 20/80 rule applies to it. Learning 20% of UML, will yield about 80% functionality. A little bit of UML can go a long way. Now that I've taken the class, I can't imagine doing OO design without it.
UML is worthy to explore, but I'll agree with the poster on one point: I don't think I trust getting info about it in a "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" book.
--
Basically, they will do no business with you without the sales receipt.
Why is this unreasonable? Why should they exchange merchandise purchased at other stores? *ahem* Of course, you wouldn't do that, but others would.
Because some of us misplace receipts, or have family that replace receipts when giving as a gift. Or have family that live out of town giving gifts.
This happened to me: My mother bought me a shirt as a Christmas gift, which was one size too big. She made the purchase at Target. I wanted to exchange it for the exact same style of shirt with a different size. There was nothing wrong with the shirt that I brought back, and the shirt was obviously purchased from the store. They refused the exchange without a receipt, and my mother had to make the 1-hour trip to bring me the receipt.
I know there are a few people out there that try to defraud retail stores, but I think the percentage is pretty small, and the store writes it off. (It's a tax break!) It doesn't seem worth it to hassle customers this way.
Recently, as of last November, they implemented a new policy for exchanges.
Basically, they will do no business with you without the sales receipt. Even if an item is defective and you want to exchange it, you can't without the receipt. (This sucks if you got something as a present, and the gift-giver lives out of town! This happened to me.)
Furthermore, they do absolutely no exchanges after 90 days, and if something goes on clearance in the meantime, you will only get the clearance price, not the price you paid.
Target's customer service totally sucks, and would be the last place I buy something now. Especially electronics!
As an employee and student of Purdue, the recent "raids" have been completely ignored by all local media. The only coverage I've seen was from national sources: Wired, etc. Who was raided?
:-), a tiny joint satellite campus shared between Indiana University and Purdue. I'm sure the spin-doctors changed it, because IUPUI doesn't have the name-recognition that Purdue has. I don't think IUPUI is known to anyone outside of Indiana.
The site mentions a raid occuring in Indianapolis, IN, but Purdue's main campus is in West Lafayette, IN. I don't know of any Purdue campuses in Indianapolis other than IUPUI (pronounced EEyoo-POOey
1. Earth and Sky: Designed to be an interactive fiction version of issue 1 of a super hero comic book. Fun stuff, if you're into the super hero genre.
2. Moments Out of Time: A time travel story, allowing a character to go back in time before an apocolypse and record data for the future. You start the game, choosing from a collection of gadgetry to help you on your mission.
3. No Time To Squeal: Please, no jokes about the title for a second or two. This story (though a bit linear) packs an emotional whallop about a husband, his very pregnant wife, and his psychotic business associate.
Kudos to all of the authors. Personally, I think it was a pretty good year for the IF Comp, but some will argue with me on that point.
Hey there, for those of us too lazy or modem-impaired to download the games, they are available via Telnet at telnet://chungkuo.org . (BBS account setup required, but worth it.)
They've not only got this year's competition playable (at least the ones playable sans graphics) but appear to have all past years' games, as well as many other Interactive Fiction goodies.
Cheerio,
Yekrats
Au contraire! If you take a look at last year's results you'll find that the votes are pretty much spread across the spectrum, with most of the voting looking pretty normalized (non-skewed) to my statistical eye. (Ooh, pretty charts!) In fact, considering the relatively small sample size, it seems to be a very normal distribution! (That link for the paranoid: http://www.ifcomp.org/comp00/detailed-results.htm
Speaking as one of the authors of the competition, I do not mind the voting system. If you enter the contest, you are subject to the whims of both geniuses and trolls. However, enough people vote, that I think it balances things out. No, it may not be completely fair... (Name a voting system that is.) But I think it's fair enough that it just doesn't matter.
This argument has been rehashed on rec.*.int-fiction several times in the past few years, yet we always come back to the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Honestly, this seems like the sort of law that will be largely ignored, that is, until a MegaCorporation want to bitchslap someone they don't like. It won't be the first time a Corporation has bought and abused a law to create their own private mafia.
Listen, Disney, you greedy sons-of-bitches: The only way you'll get Linux off my computer is to pry it out of my cold dead hard drive.
Deford argued that we shouldn't worry about testing athletes for drugs, because many Olympians do it anyway. Drugs are becoming incresingly more difficult to detect, and increasingly being used by athletes. Even when drugs aren't detected, even the mere speculation of drugs can sully an athlete (like in Lance Armstrong's case.) If we want a level playing field, he suggests, don't test for drugs.
*[A Sports Illustrated link on /.? The age of the apocolypse is here, I think...]
Yes, we have a severe effect on the amount of carbon dioxide, and currently there is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than ever in the history of the earth. The ppm of CO2 is skyrocketing off the charts.
This may not be totally bad. The show mentioned that CO2 makes great plant fertilizer. Plants grow much better under high-CO2 atmospheres. Really, the coal industry funded a major study showing that CO2 in the atmosphere isn't such a bad thing! The bad news is, well, I wouldn't want to live in Florida.
Arts, 22%
Adult, 11%
Saying "spam is free speech" is like saying "I, posing as you, using your neighbor's phone card, calling some guy in California to sell him a penile enhancement tool which he doesn't want" is free speech.
The best strategy I can see for limiting spam is ending the open relays. I don't see any legitimate use for an open relay. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Never, never, never reply to a spammer. Replying to a spammer is the best way a spammer has to verify that your address is fresh, and there's a live body on the end of the email address. Frankly, I'm surprised you don't receive much more spam.
Once spammers have proven your address to be live, your email address is much more valuable, and you can expect spam for years to come. My old email address from 10+ years ago (which was unactivated for 7 years) still recieves weekly spam.
The only way I've been able to make a dent in the amount of spam that I recieve, is through SpamCop. Some may disagree with its tactics or methods, but it does much of the drudgework of parsing forged headers and complaining to the proper authorities for me quickly and easily. Plus there are free and for-pay versions. Worth a look-see.
Basically, there are four types of employees that can be made exempt: Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Salespeople. We computer guys fall into the Professional group.
To be an Exempt Professional (quoting the DOL site) one must perform (1) Work requiring knowledge of an advance type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a general academic education and from an apprenticeship, and from training in the performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes...
or (4) Work that requires theoretical and practical application of highly-specialized knowledge in computer systems analysis, programming, and software engineering, and who is employed and engaged in these activities as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer, or other similarly skilled worker in the computer software field. (This fourth item has some strings attached.)
(Clauses (2) and (3) don't pertain to us.)
If we are in a "learned profession" that is considered professional exempt, then (from the DOL) "The ``learned'' professions are described in Sec. 541.3(a)(1) as those requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study as distinguished from a general academic education and from an apprenticeship and from training in the performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes.
I also found where the department of labor states that exempt employees must "excercise discretion and independent judgement." The DOL cites an example that a computer programmer who makes the preparations, writes the code, and completes a project would be considered exempt. It also said that a junior programmer, or one that just does the flowcharting for a programmer would not be considered exempt, because they are not working independently. An exempt worker must show that they make these sorts of independent decisions "customarily and regularly."
(Yekrats)
Wow, your situation is so similar to what happened to me three years ago, it's almost as if I wrote it myself. Here's the scoop on how I got my own back pay.
I used to work for a major financial institution in their IT office, and like you, I was an hourly employee forced to work after hours on-call work. ("It's part of the job," they said.) Well, I had an inkling it wasn't right, but I didn't argue. Nor did I question it, until the on-call time became oppressive. Since taking the job, we went from being a 8am-10pm shop with one location to a 24/7 shop with multiple locations nationally. It became common to recieve three or four calls during the night. The employer also changed us from hourly to salary employees to avoid paying us overtime.
Then I picked up a very good book at my local library: Every Employee's Guide to the Law. I highly recommend it!
Please read the book for a better description... But to sum up, there are two kinds of employees: Hourly and Salaried. Hourly employees *must* be paid at least time-and-a-half overtime pay. Period. They can't be compensated with "comp time" or bribed with Rice Krispy Treats. No, as I understand it, the employer must pay 1.5 x Hourly Pay for every hour worked overtime during a week. That little poster in the break room just about sums it up. To compensate for less (or not at all, like some posters are infering) is illegal.
If you're on-call, you get hours for everything you do for the company, but not necessarily for waiting around for the beeper to go off. So, if during the night you get called at 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., and work a half an hour on each, you've worked 1 hour of overtime.
There are pretty strict rules for who can be an Salaried employee. Basically, someone has to have "advanced training" (ie. college degree) or else fit into certain classes of employee. (Managerial or secretarial). If you are a salaried employee, you are the whippin' boy of your employer. They can do anything... ask you to work any amount of time, and it's your job to do it with a smile. Since I did not have a computer degree, and the job was formerly an hourly position, I was made an salaried employee illegally.
I'd advise checking with the US Department of Labor closest to you. There's probably one in your state. You can have questions answered without "turning them in." You can even request a complaint form. Have it ready, in case things go awry.
In the US, we have whistleblower laws to protect people from employers who try to punish those that turn them in for wrongdoings. If the thought of losing your job concerns you, you can turn them in anonymously. You have some leverage on your side. If an employer is sued for breaking this law, they generally pay through the nose. I forget the exact figures.
However, I spoke to my employer one on one about the law, and about my findings. I went armed with information, I backed up my evidence, and my manager took the information to H.R., who talked to the corporate lawyer. Well, what-do-ya-know, I was right. We had our back pay "expidited". I had it within a month.
Little will strike fear into your company more than the dreaded "Department of Labor Audit". (Well, maybe a "software audit"...) If the government has reasonable cause, they'll send a bunch of flunkies over and go through your local HR office with a fine-tooth comb. They'll check every employee over, interview disgruntled employees, and tie up the whole office in a paperwork quagmire. 'T ain't pretty, I bet.
Information is your friend. Fortunately, I had documented almost all of the time I had been on-call. You need documentation to be able to prove your case.
So, I wish you the very best of luck. Read the book, get yourself a lawyer, talk to the Department of Labor.
--HTH, Yekrats