Tell them that you are prefectly satisfied in your current position and do not wish the promotion. If they say that you will be fired if you do not take the position, ask them for good and legal reasons why you might be fired, intimating that they may have to show cause in court at a later date. Make sure you have copies of all your employee reviews (which I am assuming are excellent). Then wait for them to fire you. After they do, select from the dozens of good job offers I am sure await you in the job market.
That was about the time I realized how much I hated the school system. I dropped out of high-school about a year later (and I'm making more money now as a 17 year old Sysadmin than any of my teachers ever have or will).
hehe. Me too. 6 figure income without a high school diploma -- gotta love it. This really just underlines the utter unimportance of what education has become.
Congrats, at the age of 45 you will be doing the exact same thing and making the same salary. If that's what you want, more power to ya.
Would someone explain to me how serial is faster than parallel? I mean parallel is just that, sending multiple bits in parallel, serial is sending single bits in series. I would think that sending less information in series would be much slower than sending more in parallel.
Almost every windows software installation comes with three choices - minimal, normal, custom - Linux Distros should follow suit, perhaps adding a few more options:
1. Minimal should install the basics: the default text shells, X-windows, Netscape, text editors, the default window manager, no dev tools, no servers, no KDE, no Gnome
2. Normal should add: an office productivity apps, a simple web server (not apache), KDE/Gnome. Basically the same stuff you get in a default windows installation.
3. Developer: adds most common languages and development tools, gcc, jdk, perl, etc... - all the window managers, apache with all the common extensions already added in (PHP, mod_perl,
4. Server: DNS server, apache with PHP et al, sendmail (or variants thereof), samba, dial-in, VPN support, etc...
Can someone explain to be why the human hair is the default unit of smallness? Why not a grain of sand? These are common, small, and relatively uniform. Or perhaps the thickness of a sheet of paper?
Well, folding@home is not sponsered by a commercial drug company, and they are publishing their results. Even if it were run by a drug company, so what? Would you rather cough up so money to buy a drug and live? Or not have the drug, save the money and die?
500000 years? what a monumental waste. Why waste your CPU cycles on pie in the sky alien searches or breaking some encryption key you already know can be broken?
Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.
Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.
Jesus H Christ, am I the only one that doesn't give two monkey turds about seeing big, huge massive, eye-candied, screen realestate hogging icons representing all of my files? I mean come on, some of those screen shots show all of 4 files in a window that is presumedly running in at least 800x600 resolution. This is user friendly? I just want to find and launch my files.
These bozo's think that somehow showing a text file's contents in the icon is going to help me find what I want? Yes, maybe if there are two files in a directory, but come on, what if I have a directory with 1000 documents? They are on crack.
I understand the desire to do something different, to strike out in new directions and not create yet another windows explorer or Mac Finder clone, but what they have done instead is create a gross parody of existing user interfaces, ala Aqua.
I think that Eazel will perhaps be marginally more successful that Microsoft's Bob, it looks just about as usable.
Chicago used to have a thriving street car network. It died about the same time all of the other street car systems in other big cities died.
Recently there was an attempt to revive the system, at least in the more touristy downtown areas. The system was deemed impractical, as it would have been ruinously expensive to implement, would have accentuated an already bad traffic situation, would have generated minimal revenue compared to the already existing bus system, and was not projected to draw all that many more tourists to the area ("Gee maw, let's us drive to Chicago and see them thar new fangled street cars" - not gunna happen)
I think DSL is a stillborn technology. It is fundamentally too complex to be rolled out on a wide basis without effectively rebuilding entire local phone systems.
I have been waiting for 3 months for business DSL here in the US, watching the comedy of errors as the reseller miscommunicates with the providers, who miscommunicates with the local telecom. It seems these UK companies are having the same problems with BT.
Yet another book about how the printing press sparked the rennaisance, how original. This seems a rather pedestrian and obvious observation, that I am sure has been written about ad nauseum - do we really need another book about it.
Oh, and Katz really shows me his insight with the little teaser 'perhaps someday someone will write the same of our time...' Wow, Katz's mind just makes all these cool little connections I would never see on my own... Now I know why I continue to masochistically read every one of his articles.
Go see Requiem for a Dream. It has a Wayans brother in it who does a REALLY good job
I was blown away by Marlon Wayan's performance in Requiem. Truly suprising. Other than the fact that I was seriously depressed for the rest of the day, it was a damned good movie.
Cygwin has a large based of Linux/GNU utils and programs that have already been ported. I recompiled GTK+ and gimp for cygwin without having to change a single line of code - so cygwin is a relatively mature environment.
I am actually amazed the New Scientist published this kind of crap. There is absolutely no evidence that this things is 'reactionless' (even the doofus that made the things admits that). Read the last sentence of the article "It's a definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net force," he says. "There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address." Well duh.
Would people just get over it, repeat after me, 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'.
Now, I am not at all amazed that slashdot picked this up.
Yes, electromagnetic fields can carry momentum. But why go to such elaborate lengths just to generate an EM field? Just shine a laser out the back of the space craft - much simpler.
There is only so much anti-aliasing will do to correct bad fonts.
In windows, all of the true type fonts I use look great without anti-aliasing. If you want beautiful fonts in X windows use an X server that supports true type fonts.
On win2k I have had the same browser instance up for weeks. Never had IE 5.5 crash once on me.
I have tried mozilla many many many times. The last time I got ahold of what I thought was a very high quality mozilla build. Did hotmail, did SSL, did java, everything looks great. So I order a plane ticket online at expedia - It crashed as soon as I hit the 'Buy this ticket' button. No more chances for mozilla/netscape.
What will you do, write the program in a relatively inefficient language, or one that will let you keep your job?:) Go ahead, try saying to your boss, "Yeah, can we spend another 200k to double our server capacity so that I can use the programming language I'm most comfortable with, and so that I don't need to get my hands dirty?"
Yes, that's exactly what you say. They will save more in the long run. I'd love to see a comparison of the long term costs of maintaining a site developed entirely in C versus a site using ASP or JSP or Perl or *insert lanaguage of the day here*. But hey, that site written in C will run blazingly fast on a 486 - congrats.
One last thing to all you HR people. As an IC Every time I look for a job I mention desiring 4 weeks of vacation. I get looks like I am from mars. Its not a negotiable benefit, and no one seems to think its a reasonable request. If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
This is one of the big things that keeps me in contracting. I have a lot more leverage with clients for time off. If there is a slow period between projects, what do they care, let me have two weeks off, they do not have to pay me.
Also, between contracts I can take as much time off as I want.
What I would love to see is more jobs (W2 employee) offered as hourly positions. Then time off just becomes a project management issue. December is going to be very slow? The project manager lets you take it off, if you are willing to forego the income (maybe this income loss was offset by extra hours earlier in the year).
Yes, there are some kludges using subspaces, but fundamentally each document stored is a static document.
Suppose I don't care about storing versions of my web site? Suppose I change prices on my products on a daily basis and I cannot afford to have a single straggling copy of a web page with the wrong price on it? Suppose I have to absolutely positively guarantee that every portion of my web site is viewable to every user who visits?
There are just some things freenet will never do well.
That said, when is someone going to come up with some good solutions for mirroring and distributing dynamic content?
Instead of clicking on a reply link, you write a counter-argument or suppliment to a piece by another author and upload it. If its well-written and informative, then it will presumably be passed around by lots of people and spread through Freenet. Which would also (in theory) create interest in other pieces on the same subject....
Yes, I am sure something like slashdot could be built within freenet - but the end user experience would be radically different. I could not respond to your response as quickly as I am today - heck, I might not even see your response. It just would not be the same.
Look at Usenet, it is distributed, and some people have attempted to build status and moderating systems into it all using smart clients (as another respondent suggested) but it still produces nothing like the experience of the real slashdot or other discusssion based web sites.
There are some services that a distributed system with the current communication limitations of the internet cannot provide.
Ian wants to basically replace the web with freenet and has said as much. But what he doesn't get is that he is not going to replace the web as we know it with static documents (which is all freenet serves up).
Come on, how could a web site like slashdot possibily exist in freenet? It couldn't. It is simply too dynamic, too frequently updated, and reliant on a coherent and consistent database of comments and articles that simply cannot exist in a distributed network.
Freenet will be a boon for the archival of static and infrequently updated content and web sites, but for anything more dynamic, freenet fails to offer a solution - and as such will nicely complement, but never replace the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell them that you are prefectly satisfied in your current position and do not wish the promotion. If they say that you will be fired if you do not take the position, ask them for good and legal reasons why you might be fired, intimating that they may have to show cause in court at a later date. Make sure you have copies of all your employee reviews (which I am assuming are excellent). Then wait for them to fire you. After they do, select from the dozens of good job offers I am sure await you in the job market.
Then sue the pants off your previous employer.
-josh
hehe. Me too. 6 figure income without a high school diploma -- gotta love it. This really just underlines the utter unimportance of what education has become.
Congrats, at the age of 45 you will be doing the exact same thing and making the same salary. If that's what you want, more power to ya.
-josh
Would someone explain to me how serial is faster than parallel? I mean parallel is just that, sending multiple bits in parallel, serial is sending single bits in series. I would think that sending less information in series would be much slower than sending more in parallel.
What am I missing?
-josh
Almost every windows software installation comes with three choices - minimal, normal, custom - Linux Distros should follow suit, perhaps adding a few more options:
1. Minimal should install the basics: the default text shells, X-windows, Netscape, text editors, the default window manager, no dev tools, no servers, no KDE, no Gnome
2. Normal should add: an office productivity apps, a simple web server (not apache), KDE/Gnome. Basically the same stuff you get in a default windows installation.
3. Developer: adds most common languages and development tools, gcc, jdk, perl, etc... - all the window managers, apache with all the common extensions already added in (PHP, mod_perl,
4. Server: DNS server, apache with PHP et al, sendmail (or variants thereof), samba, dial-in, VPN support, etc...
5. Custom: anything you want.
I see, sort of a laymen's metric system...
1 Megatruck = Texas
1 human hair = 1 pico Texas
It all makes sense to me now...
Can someone explain to be why the human hair is the default unit of smallness? Why not a grain of sand? These are common, small, and relatively uniform. Or perhaps the thickness of a sheet of paper?
-josh
Well, folding@home is not sponsered by a commercial drug company, and they are publishing their results. Even if it were run by a drug company, so what? Would you rather cough up so money to buy a drug and live? Or not have the drug, save the money and die?
-josh
Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.
Folding@Home
Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.
Jesus H Christ, am I the only one that doesn't give two monkey turds about seeing big, huge massive, eye-candied, screen realestate hogging icons representing all of my files? I mean come on, some of those screen shots show all of 4 files in a window that is presumedly running in at least 800x600 resolution. This is user friendly? I just want to find and launch my files.
These bozo's think that somehow showing a text file's contents in the icon is going to help me find what I want? Yes, maybe if there are two files in a directory, but come on, what if I have a directory with 1000 documents? They are on crack.
I understand the desire to do something different, to strike out in new directions and not create yet another windows explorer or Mac Finder clone, but what they have done instead is create a gross parody of existing user interfaces, ala Aqua.
I think that Eazel will perhaps be marginally more successful that Microsoft's Bob, it looks just about as usable.
-josh
Chicago used to have a thriving street car network. It died about the same time all of the other street car systems in other big cities died.
Recently there was an attempt to revive the system, at least in the more touristy downtown areas. The system was deemed impractical, as it would have been ruinously expensive to implement, would have accentuated an already bad traffic situation, would have generated minimal revenue compared to the already existing bus system, and was not projected to draw all that many more tourists to the area ("Gee maw, let's us drive to Chicago and see them thar new fangled street cars" - not gunna happen)
-josh
I think DSL is a stillborn technology. It is fundamentally too complex to be rolled out on a wide basis without effectively rebuilding entire local phone systems.
I have been waiting for 3 months for business DSL here in the US, watching the comedy of errors as the reseller miscommunicates with the providers, who miscommunicates with the local telecom. It seems these UK companies are having the same problems with BT.
Yet another book about how the printing press sparked the rennaisance, how original. This seems a rather pedestrian and obvious observation, that I am sure has been written about ad nauseum - do we really need another book about it.
Oh, and Katz really shows me his insight with the little teaser 'perhaps someday someone will write the same of our time...' Wow, Katz's mind just makes all these cool little connections I would never see on my own... Now I know why I continue to masochistically read every one of his articles.
-josh
I was blown away by Marlon Wayan's performance in Requiem. Truly suprising. Other than the fact that I was seriously depressed for the rest of the day, it was a damned good movie.
-josh
Cygwin has a large based of Linux/GNU utils and programs that have already been ported. I recompiled GTK+ and gimp for cygwin without having to change a single line of code - so cygwin is a relatively mature environment.
-josh
I am actually amazed the New Scientist published this kind of crap. There is absolutely no evidence that this things is 'reactionless' (even the doofus that made the things admits that). Read the last sentence of the article "It's a definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net force," he says. "There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address." Well duh.
Would people just get over it, repeat after me, 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'.
Now, I am not at all amazed that slashdot picked this up.
-josh
Yes, electromagnetic fields can carry momentum. But why go to such elaborate lengths just to generate an EM field? Just shine a laser out the back of the space craft - much simpler.
-josh
(posted with mozilla 0.6)
There is only so much anti-aliasing will do to correct bad fonts.
In windows, all of the true type fonts I use look great without anti-aliasing. If you want beautiful fonts in X windows use an X server that supports true type fonts.
-josh
On win2k I have had the same browser instance up for weeks. Never had IE 5.5 crash once on me.
I have tried mozilla many many many times. The last time I got ahold of what I thought was a very high quality mozilla build. Did hotmail, did SSL, did java, everything looks great. So I order a plane ticket online at expedia - It crashed as soon as I hit the 'Buy this ticket' button. No more chances for mozilla/netscape.
-josh
Yes, that's exactly what you say. They will save more in the long run. I'd love to see a comparison of the long term costs of maintaining a site developed entirely in C versus a site using ASP or JSP or Perl or *insert lanaguage of the day here*. But hey, that site written in C will run blazingly fast on a 486 - congrats.
-josh
This is one of the big things that keeps me in contracting. I have a lot more leverage with clients for time off. If there is a slow period between projects, what do they care, let me have two weeks off, they do not have to pay me. Also, between contracts I can take as much time off as I want.
What I would love to see is more jobs (W2 employee) offered as hourly positions. Then time off just becomes a project management issue. December is going to be very slow? The project manager lets you take it off, if you are willing to forego the income (maybe this income loss was offset by extra hours earlier in the year).
Come on, my tiny little consulting company (one guy) could afford a .biz domain. I am no 800lb gorilla.
One of the problems with slashdot is that everyone here thinks like a poor student... Oh wait...
-josh
Yes, there are some kludges using subspaces, but fundamentally each document stored is a static document.
Suppose I don't care about storing versions of my web site? Suppose I change prices on my products on a daily basis and I cannot afford to have a single straggling copy of a web page with the wrong price on it? Suppose I have to absolutely positively guarantee that every portion of my web site is viewable to every user who visits?
There are just some things freenet will never do well.
That said, when is someone going to come up with some good solutions for mirroring and distributing dynamic content?
-josh
Yes, I am sure something like slashdot could be built within freenet - but the end user experience would be radically different. I could not respond to your response as quickly as I am today - heck, I might not even see your response. It just would not be the same.
Look at Usenet, it is distributed, and some people have attempted to build status and moderating systems into it all using smart clients (as another respondent suggested) but it still produces nothing like the experience of the real slashdot or other discusssion based web sites.
There are some services that a distributed system with the current communication limitations of the internet cannot provide.
-josh
Ian wants to basically replace the web with freenet and has said as much. But what he doesn't get is that he is not going to replace the web as we know it with static documents (which is all freenet serves up).
Come on, how could a web site like slashdot possibily exist in freenet? It couldn't. It is simply too dynamic, too frequently updated, and reliant on a coherent and consistent database of comments and articles that simply cannot exist in a distributed network.
Freenet will be a boon for the archival of static and infrequently updated content and web sites, but for anything more dynamic, freenet fails to offer a solution - and as such will nicely complement, but never replace the web.
-josh
CG people don't get cold, so why should they need clothes? Clothing I just a technological anachronism when it comes to CG.
Now, if all the CG characters were naked you'd have a lot more hair to animate... So perhaps this isn't much of a solution.
-josh