As a non-Mormon, the first time I read the Book of Mormon, Lehi and Nephi kept morphing in my head to "Nehi", a brand of sodas whose grape flavor was a fave of Radar on M*A*S*H.
Yeah, but the most horrifying accent I ever heard was when I took German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville 20 years ago.
"Ahhst dooshlayand isst hayalb so gross wye wayest dooshlayand..."
(BTW, UAH had an excellent German department then, because it was staffed by the relatives of the German scientists who came to Huntsville with Von Braun.)
Not only that, the fax machine that you bought ten years ago probably still works. This is a Big Deal if you're in a country where that fax machine costs two months' pay, and and an even Bigger Deal when it would cost twice as much to dial into an (unreliable) ISP long enough to send a single email than it would to send a fax directly.
Also, in most of the world, the phone lines are crap. A noise burst/phase hit/gain hit that would result in a dropped ISP call often only causes a smudge on a fax transmission.
You forgot the US ethic of finding someone to blame for your own stupidity.
If you drive your Vauxhall around a lowered gate onto a grade crossing and get flattened by the Inter-City 125 ("Wossat?" "Dunno, some odd pinging sound, pay it no mind"), British Rail will remind your next of kin that that's why they put the sodding gates there, so boo-bloody-hoo.
Here in the US, though, if you do the same thing and the Acela dents your Hummer (then derails killing 10 people because NOTHING can survive smashing into a Hummer) you can sue for zillions in damages and mental anguish because Amtrak didn't build gates that couldn't be circumvented SOMEHOW, even if it meant lowering the Hummer onto the tracks by helicopter.
And for pity's sake, if you do have to lay off, don't wrap it in euphemisms ("business planning adjustments affecting 20% of the staff"), and don't condescend by saying, "Well, there are never guarantees of job security".
You didn't hire stupid or naive staff, right? Call it a layoff, explain honestly why you're doing it, and understand that in the absence of guarantees, job security is purely a matter of perception, so it's your job to keep people comfortable with their job situations. If you're offshoring while laying off locally, expect your local employees to see right through this, and prepare to take your lumps.
In other words manage your staff as people, not resources.
My management failed to do these things, which is why I'm starting a new job in two weeks. They cut everybody's pay, claiming that it would prevent further layoffs. Since then, three more engineers (out of 20) have been terminated. When the CEO tried to get me to stay by swearing there would be no more layoffs, do you think I believed him?
In the case of some devices, like low-end printers, a LOT. All a $50 printer knows how to do is move paper and squirt ink. Everything that makes the printer useful, and more importantly, differentiates it from the competition, is embodied in the driver. Without the driver, they wouldn't sell any printers.
For the printer makers, and their razor-thin profit margins, there's not enough of a market to pay to write Linux drivers, and they're not all that eager to open the source for the implementation of their legitimate trade secrets for the OSS community to port their drivers for them.
Right. But this sounds more like a girl thing, where bullying is verbal--rumors, character assassination, etc.
I was a Scrawny Geek(TM), and I got the bejeezus knocked out of me on a regular basis (until I finally learned how to fight). But when I saw what was done to my female counterparts, I was glad all I had to deal with was getting the occasional beatdown. All an asshole jock could hand me was some humiliation and maybe a trip to the hospital.
The girls got utterly destroyed, in ways no physical harm could match.
My theory on this is that from middle through high school, boys form a linear hierarchy of individuals. We're constantly moving up and down on it, usually within a fairly narrow range, within which most boys find their small circle of friends. With few exceptions, each boy is on there somewhere.
Girls form a hierarchy of groups whose position is fairly fixed. The girls within a group are of roughly equal stature, but there might be one or two leaders. A particular girl is either all the way in or all the way out of a particular group, and some are out of all the groups altogether. Very few boys ever have to deal with that level of alienation (and most of the boys I know who were that far off the hierarchy were off by choice).
Having never been female, though, that's just speculation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I SO hope there's a way for us to read the transcript of RMS's deposition.
Boies: Please state your name for the record.
RMS: I am concerned about long-term entrenched confusions such as referring to a version of our GNU OS as 'Linux' and thinking that our work on free software was motivated by the ideas associated with 'open source.' These confusions lead users away from the basic issue: their freedom. By comparison, my name is transitory and almost trivial.
How is it anything but fraudulent to make false public claims regarding the extent of one's ownership of intellectual property then to initiate litigation based on those false claims, causing a baseless runup in stock price which is in turn exploited by the corporate officers for personal financial gain?
The problem is that the places volunteers would least want to map (like the south Bronx) are also the places in which users least want to get lost and would thus need the most accurate mapping.
I'm old enough to remember the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Gas prices went through the roof. At their worst, gas was around $3.00/gal (in today's dollars, and yes, I know that's nothing compared to most of Europe). Pretty nasty when very few cars got over 15mpg.
The problem was that the vast majority of our oil was imported from the Middle East then, so when they stopped shipping there was none to be had at any price, hence the legendary gas lines and odd-even rationing.
Today, the Arabs could close the valve completely, and while it'd still be a huge PITA, we get a lot less of our oil from there, and we know a lot more about conservation than we did 30 years ago, so life would go on.
Normal motor and head noise are nothing on the annoyance scale compared to that buzzy, flangey aging-drive bearing noise. What do you do about that, short of tossing the drive?
There is actually a very good reason to benchmark on slow or deliberately pessimized hardware: The blink-of-an-eye test.
Many tests can be run 10,000 times to get good macroscopic benchmarks. But there are others (e.g., process startup) that can only be run singly, and if the amount of time (or other resource) it takes to do it is below the resolution of whatever you're using to measure it, you end up with meaningless results:
$ time true
real 0m0.00s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.00s
On slow hardware there are fewer cases of this, so although you could design more elaborate tests to avoid this problem, old slow hardware is a cheap effective workaround.
CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.
What the article did not say was whether that was the same "Internet" we all use, or a specially built edge network.
Yeah, it was such a retarded way of thinking that Novell was wildly successful, dominating their market for a decade. How STUPID they must all have been. Thank you for warning the rest of the business world not to make that mistake.
What do you think, that the primary shareholders were all uninvolved VCs like some sock-puppet startup? Upper management were the largest shareholders, so they were putting their money where their collective mouth was.
Pair programming is "the knob turned to 10" on code reviews.
As a sound technician, I know that turning the knob to 10 isn't necessarily what you want. Take an ugly sound and turn it to 10 and you now have an ugly, loud and distorted sound.
As a kernel programmer (being a good instance of a system where no one person can know everything), I know that the best code reviews are done by teams of engineers who look at the code from different points of view.
In addition to people who can easily find common coding errors, you also want people who can spot locking and semaphore problems, backwards-compatibility breakage, subtle interactions with other subsystems, use of deprecated interfaces, etc.
If I'm a file system programmer paired up with another file system programmer (because we're doing file system work), then we're liable to have a lot of the same blind spots, so there are whole classes of bugs that can leak through.
"Thank you for finding that off-by-one error. Now I know that the spinlock I'm holding forever is the correct one."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised The Register got this one wrong.
As a non-Mormon, the first time I read the Book of Mormon, Lehi and Nephi kept morphing in my head to "Nehi", a brand of sodas whose grape flavor was a fave of Radar on M*A*S*H.
My player cannot read this scratched DVD
Chim chiminee chim chiminee, chim chim charoo
I'll put it on eBay and sell it to you!
Yeah, but the most horrifying accent I ever heard was when I took German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville 20 years ago.
"Ahhst dooshlayand isst hayalb so gross wye wayest dooshlayand..."
(BTW, UAH had an excellent German department then, because it was staffed by the relatives of the German scientists who came to Huntsville with Von Braun.)
Not only that, the fax machine that you bought ten years ago probably still works. This is a Big Deal if you're in a country where that fax machine costs two months' pay, and and an even Bigger Deal when it would cost twice as much to dial into an (unreliable) ISP long enough to send a single email than it would to send a fax directly.
Also, in most of the world, the phone lines are crap. A noise burst/phase hit/gain hit that would result in a dropped ISP call often only causes a smudge on a fax transmission.
Yeah, the Yellow Pages.
You forgot the US ethic of finding someone to blame for your own stupidity.
If you drive your Vauxhall around a lowered gate onto a grade crossing and get flattened by the Inter-City 125 ("Wossat?" "Dunno, some odd pinging sound, pay it no mind"), British Rail will remind your next of kin that that's why they put the sodding gates there, so boo-bloody-hoo.
Here in the US, though, if you do the same thing and the Acela dents your Hummer (then derails killing 10 people because NOTHING can survive smashing into a Hummer) you can sue for zillions in damages and mental anguish because Amtrak didn't build gates that couldn't be circumvented SOMEHOW, even if it meant lowering the Hummer onto the tracks by helicopter.
And for pity's sake, if you do have to lay off, don't wrap it in euphemisms ("business planning adjustments affecting 20% of the staff"), and don't condescend by saying, "Well, there are never guarantees of job security".
You didn't hire stupid or naive staff, right? Call it a layoff, explain honestly why you're doing it, and understand that in the absence of guarantees, job security is purely a matter of perception, so it's your job to keep people comfortable with their job situations. If you're offshoring while laying off locally, expect your local employees to see right through this, and prepare to take your lumps.
In other words manage your staff as people, not resources.
My management failed to do these things, which is why I'm starting a new job in two weeks. They cut everybody's pay, claiming that it would prevent further layoffs. Since then, three more engineers (out of 20) have been terminated. When the CEO tried to get me to stay by swearing there would be no more layoffs, do you think I believed him?
Look one level deeper.
Indian companies are responding to rising wages and labor shortages by offshoring to countries that are even cheaper.
In the case of some devices, like low-end printers, a LOT. All a $50 printer knows how to do is move paper and squirt ink. Everything that makes the printer useful, and more importantly, differentiates it from the competition, is embodied in the driver. Without the driver, they wouldn't sell any printers.
For the printer makers, and their razor-thin profit margins, there's not enough of a market to pay to write Linux drivers, and they're not all that eager to open the source for the implementation of their legitimate trade secrets for the OSS community to port their drivers for them.
Right. But this sounds more like a girl thing, where bullying is verbal--rumors, character assassination, etc.
I was a Scrawny Geek(TM), and I got the bejeezus knocked out of me on a regular basis (until I finally learned how to fight). But when I saw what was done to my female counterparts, I was glad all I had to deal with was getting the occasional beatdown. All an asshole jock could hand me was some humiliation and maybe a trip to the hospital.
The girls got utterly destroyed, in ways no physical harm could match.
My theory on this is that from middle through high school, boys form a linear hierarchy of individuals. We're constantly moving up and down on it, usually within a fairly narrow range, within which most boys find their small circle of friends. With few exceptions, each boy is on there somewhere.
Girls form a hierarchy of groups whose position is fairly fixed. The girls within a group are of roughly equal stature, but there might be one or two leaders. A particular girl is either all the way in or all the way out of a particular group, and some are out of all the groups altogether. Very few boys ever have to deal with that level of alienation (and most of the boys I know who were that far off the hierarchy were off by choice).
Having never been female, though, that's just speculation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Data point: You can make US$13.75/hour mopping the floors of New York City subway cars.
Boies: Please state your name for the record.
RMS: I am concerned about long-term entrenched confusions such as referring to a version of our GNU OS as 'Linux' and thinking that our work on free software was motivated by the ideas associated with 'open source.' These confusions lead users away from the basic issue: their freedom. By comparison, my name is transitory and almost trivial.
How is it anything but fraudulent to make false public claims regarding the extent of one's ownership of intellectual property then to initiate litigation based on those false claims, causing a baseless runup in stock price which is in turn exploited by the corporate officers for personal financial gain?
The problem is that the places volunteers would least want to map (like the south Bronx) are also the places in which users least want to get lost and would thus need the most accurate mapping.
Been there, done that.
I'm old enough to remember the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Gas prices went through the roof. At their worst, gas was around $3.00/gal (in today's dollars, and yes, I know that's nothing compared to most of Europe). Pretty nasty when very few cars got over 15mpg.
The problem was that the vast majority of our oil was imported from the Middle East then, so when they stopped shipping there was none to be had at any price, hence the legendary gas lines and odd-even rationing.
Today, the Arabs could close the valve completely, and while it'd still be a huge PITA, we get a lot less of our oil from there, and we know a lot more about conservation than we did 30 years ago, so life would go on.
Normal motor and head noise are nothing on the annoyance scale compared to that buzzy, flangey aging-drive bearing noise. What do you do about that, short of tossing the drive?
Many tests can be run 10,000 times to get good macroscopic benchmarks. But there are others (e.g., process startup) that can only be run singly, and if the amount of time (or other resource) it takes to do it is below the resolution of whatever you're using to measure it, you end up with meaningless results:
$ time true
real 0m0.00s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.00s
On slow hardware there are fewer cases of this, so although you could design more elaborate tests to avoid this problem, old slow hardware is a cheap effective workaround.
So much for "Happy Birthday"...
CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.
What the article did not say was whether that was the same "Internet" we all use, or a specially built edge network.
I thought telemarketing to cellphones was illegal for exactly that reason, the same as junk faxes.
Yeah, it was such a retarded way of thinking that Novell was wildly successful, dominating their market for a decade. How STUPID they must all have been. Thank you for warning the rest of the business world not to make that mistake.
What do you think, that the primary shareholders were all uninvolved VCs like some sock-puppet startup? Upper management were the largest shareholders, so they were putting their money where their collective mouth was.
It's not that there should be no profit. It's that the profit should be distributed fairly, not just handed to a few people at the top.
When I worked for Novell 10 years ago, a poster on the wall summed it up nicely:
Our Priorities
Keep that in mind and it makes you think really hard before firing your current people in order to hire cheap labor somewhere else.
You'd think that if UAH could power a plane with a laser, they could figure out how to BUILD BIGGER FREAKIN' DORM ROOMS!
As a sound technician, I know that turning the knob to 10 isn't necessarily what you want. Take an ugly sound and turn it to 10 and you now have an ugly, loud and distorted sound.
As a kernel programmer (being a good instance of a system where no one person can know everything), I know that the best code reviews are done by teams of engineers who look at the code from different points of view.
In addition to people who can easily find common coding errors, you also want people who can spot locking and semaphore problems, backwards-compatibility breakage, subtle interactions with other subsystems, use of deprecated interfaces, etc.
If I'm a file system programmer paired up with another file system programmer (because we're doing file system work), then we're liable to have a lot of the same blind spots, so there are whole classes of bugs that can leak through.
"Thank you for finding that off-by-one error. Now I know that the spinlock I'm holding forever is the correct one."