We had our kitchen redone a couple years ago. The counter fitters came in, templated our cabinets, and in about a week came back with a custom fabricated counter, complete with sink. It was tricky getting the entire thing into the house, but once they did, fitting it was no problem.
They were a subcontractor, so they were paid by the main kitchen designers. I don't think cash was ever involved, so counterfeiting was not a problem.
Gorgeous bodies are wonderful eye candy, but if the sex organ between the ears is allowed to atrophy, no amount of time in the gym or money spent at the Clinique counter will make a woman interesting OR a good lay.
Yes, looks matter. Yes, hygiene matters. But putting personality first is in no way "settling." Ot if it is, then I've "settled" for eight years of a great marriage (and son) and a better life than I ever thought I'd have.
It's not for nothing that several key CVS developers went on to do Subversion, under the presumption that in order to fix the biggest problems and add the most needed features, it would be easier to do a rewrite from scratch than it would be to continue to modify CVS.
How that product will turn out remains to be seen, but were I thinking of using CVS for any source control, I'd look into SVN first.
What I miss the most (about the mechanics of it, at least) was being able to post my email address and phone number freely. I didn't have to hide behind layers of anonymity just to avoid spam.
On Usenet, if someone 15 years later has a question, the answer is probably still there.
Back in the good old days, we used to warn people not to post anything you wouldn't want your current or future employers or the FBI to read. These days you have to add your mother to that list.
Lucky for me, only some of the most embarrassing drivel I posted to Usenet back in the 80's is available on Google Groups.
Well, eight years, but who's counting? I've seen tapes younger than that lose their oxide. I've seen others physically degrade and get eaten when you try to read them, sometimes taking the drive with them.
OTOH, my father has 40-year-old punch cards that read just fine. (Course, that doesn't scale to terabytes.)
The upshot is that for long-term (>10 years) backup, have a refresh plan in place, where the data is periodically verified, and if necessary, extracted and copied to fresh media. (I have some 15-year-old files I did this to, moving them from QIC tape to CD-R. Nothing was wrong with the tape, but I only have one QIC drive, which could fail at any time.)
For my ultra critical data, I keep a backup of the backup locked in a bank vault.
Over the last 25 years (yes, I'm that old), I've worked in every sort of office arrangement imaginable. Here's why I need an office:
No mindless chatter, cellphone ringtones, speakerphones, etc. from next door or across the room. Drowning it out with headphones is not an acceptable alternative.
A door that closes, for uninterrupted work. Door open, come on in. Door open a crack, knock first. Door closed, don't bother me unless the building's on fire. "Do not disturb" signs across cube openings are not effective.
A door that closes for privacy, for many reasons, not limited to:
Private conversations in person or over the phone.
Catnaps during all-nighters.
Protecting coworkers from having to watch me eat my beef and bean burrito for lunch.
Protecting coworkers from the aftereffects of the beef and bean burrito I had for lunch.
Lighting and temperature to my specifications, not the building owner's.
Freestanding furniture I can arrange however I want.
Less likelihood of books and other things being "borrowed" from my desk.
The best places I worked had private offices, semiprivate offices and cubes, and people's preferences were taken into account. There were a few people who preferred cubes, especially if they could specify the layout, but the vast majority preferred some sort of office.
Because you can get used to cubes (you have to if you want to stay in this business these days), you could argue that the cost savings outweigh the long-term negative effects on productivity. But don't let the cube hardware vendors fool you. it's all about the money, nothing else.
When an old employer of mine moved to cubes five years ago, the back-of-the-envelope rates were $5000/seat for cubes (NICE cubes, 8x12, 6ft walls, and sliding "pocket" doors), $7000/seat for drywall offices, and $9000/seat for moveable-wall offices (all prices include furniture).
You might be able to buy bare cube walls for $1000/seat (esp. secondhand), but someone's gotta put them in, and it all has to be up to code.
Of course, none of that matters. Cubes suck. The cube makers tout the "open plan", as if it's some Lego-block thing you can rework every time there's a reorg, but in reality, how often does that happen? In practice, they set up the cubes in mathematically perfect grids, and never change anything. DeMarco and Lister were right. The primary goal of cubes, like prisons, is maximum containment at minimum cost.
I think you and I are about the same in age and experience. Also preferences. I hated the overhead of running my own shop too, and went the employee route. Even as a contractor I prefer W-4 hourly; let them do the paperwork, and let me have close enough to a traditional employer that the mortgage company doesn't balk, but still an hour's pay for an hour's work. I also have the young child!
Anyway, you're exactly right. A contract is a contract, and I thought it was slimy of the Microsoft contractors to go back after the fact and claim they were entitled to more than they got. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that lawsuit did more to hurt the contracting business than anything Microsoft ever did to the contractors themselves.
Somewhere else in this mess, people were talking about forming unions. I thought about that for awhile, not to protect workers against clients, but to protect workers against contract houses. I almost never got treated badly by any client, but I got screwed royally by contract houses early on, and even after I knew what to watch out for, they never stopped trying.
If there was a union (or some other collective negotiating vehicle), then you could do things like make it mandatory that the contract house disclose what they're billing the client for your time, and accept a minimum percentage of that which must be paid to you--no more them keeping 75% of your $80/hr and telling you your $5000 life insurance and two weeks' vacation cost them that much to provide. (Obviously, no experienced contractor would get suckered into that but there are a lot of inexperienced ones out there.)
Another thing I tried many times to get written into my contract, and never could, was that after 40 hours, my rate would go up in proportion to the fixed costs the contract house incurred that were amortized over a 40 hour week and dropped to zero beyond that, e.g., accounting costs. They could still keep their net profit percentage; I just wanted the overhead they were no longer incurring.
Oh well. Maybe I'll try again for that the next time I contract.
It depends on what they are willing to sign, and what you are willing to sign
True, but often, the only thing they're willing to sign is their own "take it or leave it" contract, with no negotiation over anything but the rate.
There's another layer on top of that for large clients. Often times they'll have a "preferred vendor" list containing maybe a dozen large contract houses. If you're not coming through one of those, there'll be a huge amount of additional paperwork, and approvals will have to be given at much higher levels. You'll have to get some high-level manager (two or three levels above the hiring manager) to sign a "sole source" letter agreeing to hire you because they can't find anyone suitable from any of the preferred vendors.
Getting your company onto the preferred vendor list if you're not a huge contract house is next to impossible. You have to demonstrate a certain amount of pre-existing billing, and you have to show that less than a certain percentage of your billing comes from that client. You also have to agree to send all your contractors in on the client's unaltered boilerplate contract.
That's the back half, the contract between the contract house and the client. Then there's the contract between you and the contract house. Here's where the screws really get turned. Again, they have a boilerplate contract they expect you to sign, with no room for substantive alteration. In addition to the "get up, wash up and show up" clauses, they make you agree not to solicit or accept employment in any form from "any current or potential client" of theirs for some period of time (usually a year) after you stop contracting through them. Of course, just about any company is a "potential client", thus you've effectively signed away your right to earn a living. (This is almost never enforced; it's just poker.)
Contracting is a shark-infested world, but if you can work within it, you can make boatloads of money and avoid a lot of big company BS.
If this is the company from which you recently made a highly publicized departure, I have to say that your local management was being paranoid.
In our organization, we were never that cold. When anything imprtant happened to a contractor, he or she was treated no differently from an employee.
When we had to make it apparent that contractors were a different species from FTEs, we did it only in symbolic but insubstantial ways, such as excluding contractors from the meetings where Carly^H^H^H^H^Hour president made the quarterly earnings announcements, even though nothing confidential was disclosed at those meetings, and they took place at the exact minute the same information was made available to the public.
The Microsoft suit definitely made life nasty for contractors, but conscientious management can minimize that. It's only the PHBs that make the contractors park in the next county, sit on milk crates, and bring in their own oxygen.
I'd be annoyed if my schedule, etc. were deleted. I'd be devastated if it turned out my TiVo could be 0wnz0red even after making sure my firewall was set right.
ObTopic: The HMO feature I like the best is being able to transfer between two TiVos in the same house (how long before someone hacks that?). The problem is that I have a Series 2 with a lifetime subscription, and a Series 1 from which I took the subscription, and I don't want HMO enough to pay $300 or whatever for another series 2 TiVo, plus another $300 or whatever for another subscription, plus another $150 for two HMOs ($100 for the first one, $50 for the second).
There are very small battery powered pumps that can fit in her purse that work great.
My wife would beg to differ. Get a Medela Pump-In-Style or something equivalent. The battery powered ones are lame, and the hand-powered ones are lame AND they give you RSI. If your wife is planning on working outside the house while still breastfeeding, the Pump-In-Style is your best bet because it's the most portable of the "hardcore" breast pumps (best price I know of is from Baby Love Products).
However, resist the urge to register for something like that for the baby shower, if you're doing the registy thing. Rent a hospital-grade pump for the first month or two to make sure Mom and baby are really into the breastfeeding thing. Except for a particular pump by Ameda, breast pumps are not intended to be resold after use.
If your wife/partner/whatever needs more information, let me know and I'll put her in touch with my wife, who has encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff.
Not quite. in the context of the preceding sentence,
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow.
where clearly multiple people are being talked about, the second sentence should be:
This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmers themselves and for the organisations that profit by their labors.
Not only do each sentence's subject and verb need to agree in number, the whole thing does. In fact, it could be argued that the first sentence should read:
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter mental states where things just flow.
Anyway, to get back on topic, pluralizing is often the least clumsy way to remove gender-specific pronouns. Although the pedants say it should never be used, the passive voice is probably the second least clumsy way to do this.
The other reason you need testers separate from developers is that they are inherently at cross-purposes: The developer wants to prove that the code works, the tester wants to prove that it doesn't. One brain can't think in both those modes at the same time.
You left out the best part: If, say, user-ticketmaster@domain.tld (now, why would I pick that as an example?) starts getting spam, create a file called.qmail-ticketmaster in your home directory containing the single line
|exit 100
The 100 exit status causes all mail to that address to bounce, not just get sent to/dev/null. And a bounce is the most reliable way to get off a spam list. AFAIK, qmail is the only MTA that allows user-level control of bounces like this.
Slashdot Mirror
We had our kitchen redone a couple years ago. The counter fitters came in, templated our cabinets, and in about a week came back with a custom fabricated counter, complete with sink. It was tricky getting the entire thing into the house, but once they did, fitting it was no problem.
They were a subcontractor, so they were paid by the main kitchen designers. I don't think cash was ever involved, so counterfeiting was not a problem.
You're at the top of your class. You aced your SATs. Your IQ is 99.5th percentile. In the college you're going to, do you know what they call that?
"Average."
Man, did I get my ass handed to me in college after coasting through high school.
Gorgeous bodies are wonderful eye candy, but if the sex organ between the ears is allowed to atrophy, no amount of time in the gym or money spent at the Clinique counter will make a woman interesting OR a good lay.
Yes, looks matter. Yes, hygiene matters. But putting personality first is in no way "settling." Ot if it is, then I've "settled" for eight years of a great marriage (and son) and a better life than I ever thought I'd have.
If you really want to keep them guessing, throw in a pinch of cornstarch.
How that product will turn out remains to be seen, but were I thinking of using CVS for any source control, I'd look into SVN first.
What I miss the most (about the mechanics of it, at least) was being able to post my email address and phone number freely. I didn't have to hide behind layers of anonymity just to avoid spam.
What I don't miss is bang-path email.
Back in the good old days, we used to warn people not to post anything you wouldn't want your current or future employers or the FBI to read. These days you have to add your mother to that list.
Lucky for me, only some of the most embarrassing drivel I posted to Usenet back in the 80's is available on Google Groups.
200+ speculative comments about video games being made into movies and not one AYB mention!
Well, eight years, but who's counting? I've seen tapes younger than that lose their oxide. I've seen others physically degrade and get eaten when you try to read them, sometimes taking the drive with them.
OTOH, my father has 40-year-old punch cards that read just fine. (Course, that doesn't scale to terabytes.)
The upshot is that for long-term (>10 years) backup, have a refresh plan in place, where the data is periodically verified, and if necessary, extracted and copied to fresh media. (I have some 15-year-old files I did this to, moving them from QIC tape to CD-R. Nothing was wrong with the tape, but I only have one QIC drive, which could fail at any time.)
For my ultra critical data, I keep a backup of the backup locked in a bank vault.
That would be one SUCKY housing market.
.3X in improvements. Paid mortgage down. Refinanced. Current value $2X. Equity: 60%.
Data point (my house): Paid $X 6 years ago. Equity: 10%. Put in
Ordinary fuckin' people, I hate 'em.
The best places I worked had private offices, semiprivate offices and cubes, and people's preferences were taken into account. There were a few people who preferred cubes, especially if they could specify the layout, but the vast majority preferred some sort of office.
Because you can get used to cubes (you have to if you want to stay in this business these days), you could argue that the cost savings outweigh the long-term negative effects on productivity. But don't let the cube hardware vendors fool you. it's all about the money, nothing else.
You WISH.
When an old employer of mine moved to cubes five years ago, the back-of-the-envelope rates were $5000/seat for cubes (NICE cubes, 8x12, 6ft walls, and sliding "pocket" doors), $7000/seat for drywall offices, and $9000/seat for moveable-wall offices (all prices include furniture).
You might be able to buy bare cube walls for $1000/seat (esp. secondhand), but someone's gotta put them in, and it all has to be up to code.
Of course, none of that matters. Cubes suck. The cube makers tout the "open plan", as if it's some Lego-block thing you can rework every time there's a reorg, but in reality, how often does that happen? In practice, they set up the cubes in mathematically perfect grids, and never change anything. DeMarco and Lister were right. The primary goal of cubes, like prisons, is maximum containment at minimum cost.
I think you and I are about the same in age and experience. Also preferences. I hated the overhead of running my own shop too, and went the employee route. Even as a contractor I prefer W-4 hourly; let them do the paperwork, and let me have close enough to a traditional employer that the mortgage company doesn't balk, but still an hour's pay for an hour's work. I also have the young child!
Anyway, you're exactly right. A contract is a contract, and I thought it was slimy of the Microsoft contractors to go back after the fact and claim they were entitled to more than they got. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that lawsuit did more to hurt the contracting business than anything Microsoft ever did to the contractors themselves.
Somewhere else in this mess, people were talking about forming unions. I thought about that for awhile, not to protect workers against clients, but to protect workers against contract houses. I almost never got treated badly by any client, but I got screwed royally by contract houses early on, and even after I knew what to watch out for, they never stopped trying.
If there was a union (or some other collective negotiating vehicle), then you could do things like make it mandatory that the contract house disclose what they're billing the client for your time, and accept a minimum percentage of that which must be paid to you--no more them keeping 75% of your $80/hr and telling you your $5000 life insurance and two weeks' vacation cost them that much to provide. (Obviously, no experienced contractor would get suckered into that but there are a lot of inexperienced ones out there.)
Another thing I tried many times to get written into my contract, and never could, was that after 40 hours, my rate would go up in proportion to the fixed costs the contract house incurred that were amortized over a 40 hour week and dropped to zero beyond that, e.g., accounting costs. They could still keep their net profit percentage; I just wanted the overhead they were no longer incurring.
Oh well. Maybe I'll try again for that the next time I contract.
True, but often, the only thing they're willing to sign is their own "take it or leave it" contract, with no negotiation over anything but the rate.
There's another layer on top of that for large clients. Often times they'll have a "preferred vendor" list containing maybe a dozen large contract houses. If you're not coming through one of those, there'll be a huge amount of additional paperwork, and approvals will have to be given at much higher levels. You'll have to get some high-level manager (two or three levels above the hiring manager) to sign a "sole source" letter agreeing to hire you because they can't find anyone suitable from any of the preferred vendors.
Getting your company onto the preferred vendor list if you're not a huge contract house is next to impossible. You have to demonstrate a certain amount of pre-existing billing, and you have to show that less than a certain percentage of your billing comes from that client. You also have to agree to send all your contractors in on the client's unaltered boilerplate contract.
That's the back half, the contract between the contract house and the client. Then there's the contract between you and the contract house. Here's where the screws really get turned. Again, they have a boilerplate contract they expect you to sign, with no room for substantive alteration. In addition to the "get up, wash up and show up" clauses, they make you agree not to solicit or accept employment in any form from "any current or potential client" of theirs for some period of time (usually a year) after you stop contracting through them. Of course, just about any company is a "potential client", thus you've effectively signed away your right to earn a living. (This is almost never enforced; it's just poker.)
Contracting is a shark-infested world, but if you can work within it, you can make boatloads of money and avoid a lot of big company BS.
If this is the company from which you recently made a highly publicized departure, I have to say that your local management was being paranoid.
In our organization, we were never that cold. When anything imprtant happened to a contractor, he or she was treated no differently from an employee.
When we had to make it apparent that contractors were a different species from FTEs, we did it only in symbolic but insubstantial ways, such as excluding contractors from the meetings where Carly^H^H^H^H^Hour president made the quarterly earnings announcements, even though nothing confidential was disclosed at those meetings, and they took place at the exact minute the same information was made available to the public.
The Microsoft suit definitely made life nasty for contractors, but conscientious management can minimize that. It's only the PHBs that make the contractors park in the next county, sit on milk crates, and bring in their own oxygen.
They already have dry-powder shampoo. You get it at pet stores. It will make your coat shiny and healthy.
I'd be annoyed if my schedule, etc. were deleted. I'd be devastated if it turned out my TiVo could be 0wnz0red even after making sure my firewall was set right.
ObTopic: The HMO feature I like the best is being able to transfer between two TiVos in the same house (how long before someone hacks that?). The problem is that I have a Series 2 with a lifetime subscription, and a Series 1 from which I took the subscription, and I don't want HMO enough to pay $300 or whatever for another series 2 TiVo, plus another $300 or whatever for another subscription, plus another $150 for two HMOs ($100 for the first one, $50 for the second).
My wife would beg to differ. Get a Medela Pump-In-Style or something equivalent. The battery powered ones are lame, and the hand-powered ones are lame AND they give you RSI. If your wife is planning on working outside the house while still breastfeeding, the Pump-In-Style is your best bet because it's the most portable of the "hardcore" breast pumps (best price I know of is from Baby Love Products).
However, resist the urge to register for something like that for the baby shower, if you're doing the registy thing. Rent a hospital-grade pump for the first month or two to make sure Mom and baby are really into the breastfeeding thing. Except for a particular pump by Ameda, breast pumps are not intended to be resold after use.
If your wife/partner/whatever needs more information, let me know and I'll put her in touch with my wife, who has encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff.
Of course, most of those never get watched.
Like ER.
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow.
where clearly multiple people are being talked about, the second sentence should be: This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmers themselves and for the organisations that profit by their labors.
Not only do each sentence's subject and verb need to agree in number, the whole thing does. In fact, it could be argued that the first sentence should read: When creative people work on making something new, they often enter mental states where things just flow.
Anyway, to get back on topic, pluralizing is often the least clumsy way to remove gender-specific pronouns. Although the pedants say it should never be used, the passive voice is probably the second least clumsy way to do this.
Hint: ***sniiiffff***
The other reason you need testers separate from developers is that they are inherently at cross-purposes: The developer wants to prove that the code works, the tester wants to prove that it doesn't. One brain can't think in both those modes at the same time.
|exit 100
The 100 exit status causes all mail to that address to bounce, not just get sent to /dev/null. And a bounce is the most reliable way to get off a spam list. AFAIK, qmail is the only MTA that allows user-level control of bounces like this.