IANAL, but as I understand it a company can exist as a legal entity (party to contracts, etc) long after it ceases to exist as a functioning business.
Whoever owns the pile of papers that represents the entity that is your former company could easily have a problem with what you are doing.
Check EDGAR and other SEC sources (if a public company) for current contacts. I would assume a lawyer would be required to tell you when you have tried "hard enough" to contact any interested parties.
Go figure? Like it or not, the management responsible for the long-term maintainability of the solution may feel that software development is a distraction from making widgets, selling widgets, or whatever the business purpose of the whole outfit is.
That's the attitude of the management at a place that I have worked, and I can't blame them; in some ways it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you have hack developers who screw up simple intranet web sites, why would you buy off on an ambitious project that required expertise in an open-source toolset?
My loudest CD, hands down, is the Iggy Pop remix of the Stooges "Raw Power" album. David Bowie butchered the original mix, with hardly any bass and tinny guitars. Even then it was a classic. Iggy's version is twice as loud as most other CDs I own, and it rocks hard.
A legislator who takes action solely based on a contribution risks scrutiny and criticism. Therefore the "fig leaf" of a purported benefit to the constituents is a necessary insurance policy.
Whether the benefit to constituents is the prime reason why the legislator acted, or the contribution is what motivated them, can never really be known as long as both are present. Hence the "murky" relationship of money to politics.
Clearly this system benefits the legislators as long as they can depend on industry lobbyists to provide the fig leaf. A legislator who doesn't bother to obtain the fig leaf gets in trouble fast.
Even if there were no money contribution, the fig leaf provides a basis for action and decision that the legislator otherwise might not have. So the industry lobbyist could convince the legislator to act a certain way merely by providing a defensible motivation for the decision; otherwise the legislator might not know what the hell to do. See "unwitting pawn" in your local dictionary.
Some of the comments here are really strange, as if contractors "deserve" (whatever that means) to be treated like regular employees.
When a company decides to use contractors, they are in some cases (not all!) getting a cost savings, both in cash outlay and the ability to use different accounting rules for the expense. If there were no other forces at work, most companies would be 95% contractor.
But there are other forces at work. Employees feel more secure and can afford to be more loyal. Employees also are motivated not to walk out the door when confronted with a nasty coworker or horrible bureaucracy. Companies, believe it or not, want happy employees, even if they don't necessarily want to do what it takes to have them.
Companies want contractors precisely because they can be fired at will. So why have your employees bond with their teammates who could be out the door tomorrow?
If Microsoft gets to treat contractors like employees, they get "virtual employees" who can be counted on for loyalty in exchange for automatic renewal of contracts, all at a cost savings. The illusion of permanence only lasts as long as the profits are rolling in, at which point the contractors get dumped out. Microsoft gets the best of both worlds, the contractors get led down the garden path.
The contractors might feel good up until the day they are fired. But they can be fired at any time, and that is why the are there. Should Microsoft be disguising that fact?
Microsoft is clearly very aggressively managing temps. I'm at a company right now that is at the other end of the spectrum and it is no picnic.
When a company doesn't manage contractors and consultants well, the contracting houses can set up shop inside the company, cultivate close relationships with managers, elbow employees out of the way, and generate business for themselves by cross-pollinating their resources onto related projects. It sucks.
This story presents the temps as the innocent victims, which individually they are. But don't forget that every one of those temps has a big part of their paycheck going to a Volt or Manpower, and those body shop contractor houses don't have anyone's interests in mind but their own.
Is it just me, or is there something odd about people imitating Barry's humor when addressing him? It's like meeting Kissinger and switching to a deep heavily-accented voice, or meeting Marlee Matlin and gesticulating wildly in made-up ESL.
I assume he finds his own humor funny, because it reflects his sense of humor, but he may think Chris Rock is even funnier...
I've read a fair amount of Dave Barry's columns, and he can be very funny, but sometimes he has an off day and he sounds just like the Barry-esque questions that he was asked...forced, dorky, and painfully self-referential.
I know (knew, actually, we're out of touch now) St. Croix's brother quite well (St. Croix is not his birth name). Very interesting family full of inventor-type talent and drive---and ego---but a certain quirkiness and flamboyance too. I believe the laser story based on what I have heard.
In college I worked at a funeral home, and got to see and smell many cremations. I had been a barbecue fan as a teenager. Now I am a vegetarian (for many other reasons as well, but that was sort of a turning point). That sort of sickly sweet charred flesh odor...ick.
I don't know, do you want to post to Slashdot while driving 60 mph? You don't? Come on, we came up with such a great name for it: "telematics"! It's so useful, because if we say "internet in your car" people usually start laughing at us. "Telematics" sounds so much more...uh...uh...I don't know, just BETTER. Come on---you could bid on a closing auction while backing out of your driveway! Doesn't that sound SAFE?
Unskilled Labor != Trustworthy Drug Transporter
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 1
My first reaction to this was that some unskilled person could do this job easily and that this must be some hospital administrator's way to avoid hiring another prospective union member.
Then I thought about it: how much do you have to pay to hire someone who can be trusted not to steal some of the Ritalin, Percocet, etc. that they are carrying?
So the key feature of this robot is that as a silicon-based entity those drugs just don't have any appeal. Put some WD-40 in its drawer and I bet it would duck into the nearest utility closet first chance it gets.
I wouldn't call this delegation proper---the problem being that LDAP has overridden the generic term with their goofy concept.
What you are really talking about is authorization, right? Storing an application's permissions set out in LDAP generates exactly this problem. Yes, that's what LDAP is supposed to enable, but just coz it's there doesn't mean you should use it.
You're saying to use chaining for delegation to a local application-specific directory, allowing for local administration of the DS. Instead, what about using LDAP for authentication and identity mapping, and then writing your own application permissions map (perhaps even using LDAP, but using the app to link the two, not chaining) with an admin interface? More work but it will be much easier to administer.
Pointers are NOT unsafe. However, there are several "safety" problems with pointers in C. A different language that allowed the use of pointers could avoid these problems.
1. Untyped pointers (void*): I can create a generic pointer that prevents the compiler from enforcing type safety. Not a good practice for general-purpose code, but sometimes it is required.
2. Pointer arithmetic. Arrays are handled as pointer+offset; this can lead to problems when array size is ignored or miscalculated.
3. Mixing of data pointers and code pointers. The fact that I can take a function pointer and store it in a void * creates flexibility but also problems. The compiler is prevented from protecting the function pointers.
Java uses "references" which are just fancy pointers but you can easily find the pointer value that the VM is using at runtime. It's just that you can't do anything useful with it in your application.
Dja ever notice that certain technologies always get taught using similar examples?
* OO. Standard example is Shape superclass and Square/Circle/etc subclass. Also Vehicle and Car Truck, which opens up the door to teach composition and aggregation (of Engine and Wheel objects)
* Use cases. As you say, soda machine is a classic. Also ATM, and I've seen coffee maker, plus alarm clock for event diagrams.
* Web. Always a shopping cart. ALWAYS.
* Others?
Jeez, can't we just retire this particular MS zinger? It's ancient and not even very pithy---regular users NEVER have a problem with the start button. Spock might, which could explain why Slashdot users do.
So everyone hates LDAP and the tools suck, except for Microsoft's. I have a related question:
What successful strategies have you employed for maintaining large user databases/directories in a heterogenous environment?
1. NIS/YP plus ActiveDirectory/NT Domain plus RACF/TopSecret plus ?????, along with a bunch of scripts to maintain synchronization?
2. Something else?
Absolutely correct on learning Java before C++. I did that (by accident, really) and it seems to have given me a different perspective on the languages than I would otherwise have.
I appreciated templates and the STL much more after having worked with Java's container classes; I appreciate the simplicity of Java's handling of class constants after dealing with the many ways to initialize class constants in C++.
Java is sometimes derided as a toy, but people should remember that warty languages get that way with age. So far Java has done OK but I suspect in 5 years it will look different after some goofy attempts to add things like generic types.
I'd definitely agree with that. I'd also add that the number of jobs for true "Computer Scientists" is dwarfed by the much greater number of jobs for "IT workers" who, after all, wrote most of the code in all the applications you use every day. Yes, writing compilers and optimized language parsers and such will be much easier with a CS degree. But writing most application code doesn't require it.
I have warning phobia but MS makes it really tough for me to have warning-free code. Here's what I have to do to get vanilla (and very legal) STL code to compile without L3 warnings under VC6:
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but as I understand it a company can exist as a legal entity (party to contracts, etc) long after it ceases to exist as a functioning business.
Whoever owns the pile of papers that represents the entity that is your former company could easily have a problem with what you are doing.
Check EDGAR and other SEC sources (if a public company) for current contacts. I would assume a lawyer would be required to tell you when you have tried "hard enough" to contact any interested parties.
Go figure? Like it or not, the management responsible for the long-term maintainability of the solution may feel that software development is a distraction from making widgets, selling widgets, or whatever the business purpose of the whole outfit is.
That's the attitude of the management at a place that I have worked, and I can't blame them; in some ways it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you have hack developers who screw up simple intranet web sites, why would you buy off on an ambitious project that required expertise in an open-source toolset?
My loudest CD, hands down, is the Iggy Pop remix of the Stooges "Raw Power" album. David Bowie butchered the original mix, with hardly any bass and tinny guitars. Even then it was a classic. Iggy's version is twice as loud as most other CDs I own, and it rocks hard.
A legislator who takes action solely based on a contribution risks scrutiny and criticism. Therefore the "fig leaf" of a purported benefit to the constituents is a necessary insurance policy.
Whether the benefit to constituents is the prime reason why the legislator acted, or the contribution is what motivated them, can never really be known as long as both are present. Hence the "murky" relationship of money to politics.
Clearly this system benefits the legislators as long as they can depend on industry lobbyists to provide the fig leaf. A legislator who doesn't bother to obtain the fig leaf gets in trouble fast.
Even if there were no money contribution, the fig leaf provides a basis for action and decision that the legislator otherwise might not have. So the industry lobbyist could convince the legislator to act a certain way merely by providing a defensible motivation for the decision; otherwise the legislator might not know what the hell to do. See "unwitting pawn" in your local dictionary.
And a Unisys is a cheesy attempt to run a Microsoft OS on a many-proc box.
Some of the comments here are really strange, as if contractors "deserve" (whatever that means) to be treated like regular employees.
When a company decides to use contractors, they are in some cases (not all!) getting a cost savings, both in cash outlay and the ability to use different accounting rules for the expense. If there were no other forces at work, most companies would be 95% contractor.
But there are other forces at work. Employees feel more secure and can afford to be more loyal. Employees also are motivated not to walk out the door when confronted with a nasty coworker or horrible bureaucracy. Companies, believe it or not, want happy employees, even if they don't necessarily want to do what it takes to have them.
Companies want contractors precisely because they can be fired at will. So why have your employees bond with their teammates who could be out the door tomorrow?
If Microsoft gets to treat contractors like employees, they get "virtual employees" who can be counted on for loyalty in exchange for automatic renewal of contracts, all at a cost savings. The illusion of permanence only lasts as long as the profits are rolling in, at which point the contractors get dumped out. Microsoft gets the best of both worlds, the contractors get led down the garden path.
The contractors might feel good up until the day they are fired. But they can be fired at any time, and that is why the are there. Should Microsoft be disguising that fact?
Microsoft is clearly very aggressively managing temps. I'm at a company right now that is at the other end of the spectrum and it is no picnic.
When a company doesn't manage contractors and consultants well, the contracting houses can set up shop inside the company, cultivate close relationships with managers, elbow employees out of the way, and generate business for themselves by cross-pollinating their resources onto related projects. It sucks.
This story presents the temps as the innocent victims, which individually they are. But don't forget that every one of those temps has a big part of their paycheck going to a Volt or Manpower, and those body shop contractor houses don't have anyone's interests in mind but their own.
Is it just me, or is there something odd about people imitating Barry's humor when addressing him? It's like meeting Kissinger and switching to a deep heavily-accented voice, or meeting Marlee Matlin and gesticulating wildly in made-up ESL.
I assume he finds his own humor funny, because it reflects his sense of humor, but he may think Chris Rock is even funnier...
I've read a fair amount of Dave Barry's columns, and he can be very funny, but sometimes he has an off day and he sounds just like the Barry-esque questions that he was asked...forced, dorky, and painfully self-referential.
A well-reasoned and insightful post like that will get you *nowhere* on Slashdot... :)
Ah, the magic word: "Patent"
ECC algorithms have all sorts of submarine patents and prior art that have prevented widespread adoption. Sun's donation does not change that.
Too bad, coz ECC is way cool. I did a digital signature app with Certicom ECC that resulted in 42-byte signatures.
Take whatever tarragon you are about to use, and halve it. Repeat until you reach the correct amount, namely zero.
Tarragon might be useful in a homeopathic remedy, but anywhere else I think it is disgusting. Maybe the plant looks nice, I don't know.
I know (knew, actually, we're out of touch now) St. Croix's brother quite well (St. Croix is not his birth name). Very interesting family full of inventor-type talent and drive---and ego---but a certain quirkiness and flamboyance too. I believe the laser story based on what I have heard.
If anyone can do this, St. Croix probably can.
In college I worked at a funeral home, and got to see and smell many cremations. I had been a barbecue fan as a teenager. Now I am a vegetarian (for many other reasons as well, but that was sort of a turning point). That sort of sickly sweet charred flesh odor...ick.
I don't know, do you want to post to Slashdot while driving 60 mph? You don't? Come on, we came up with such a great name for it: "telematics"! It's so useful, because if we say "internet in your car" people usually start laughing at us. "Telematics" sounds so much more...uh...uh...I don't know, just BETTER. Come on---you could bid on a closing auction while backing out of your driveway! Doesn't that sound SAFE?
My first reaction to this was that some unskilled person could do this job easily and that this must be some hospital administrator's way to avoid hiring another prospective union member.
Then I thought about it: how much do you have to pay to hire someone who can be trusted not to steal some of the Ritalin, Percocet, etc. that they are carrying?
So the key feature of this robot is that as a silicon-based entity those drugs just don't have any appeal. Put some WD-40 in its drawer and I bet it would duck into the nearest utility closet first chance it gets.
I wouldn't call this delegation proper---the problem being that LDAP has overridden the generic term with their goofy concept.
What you are really talking about is authorization, right? Storing an application's permissions set out in LDAP generates exactly this problem. Yes, that's what LDAP is supposed to enable, but just coz it's there doesn't mean you should use it.
You're saying to use chaining for delegation to a local application-specific directory, allowing for local administration of the DS. Instead, what about using LDAP for authentication and identity mapping, and then writing your own application permissions map (perhaps even using LDAP, but using the app to link the two, not chaining) with an admin interface? More work but it will be much easier to administer.
Pointers are NOT unsafe. However, there are several "safety" problems with pointers in C. A different language that allowed the use of pointers could avoid these problems.
1. Untyped pointers (void*): I can create a generic pointer that prevents the compiler from enforcing type safety. Not a good practice for general-purpose code, but sometimes it is required.
2. Pointer arithmetic. Arrays are handled as pointer+offset; this can lead to problems when array size is ignored or miscalculated.
3. Mixing of data pointers and code pointers. The fact that I can take a function pointer and store it in a void * creates flexibility but also problems. The compiler is prevented from protecting the function pointers.
Java uses "references" which are just fancy pointers but you can easily find the pointer value that the VM is using at runtime. It's just that you can't do anything useful with it in your application.
Dja ever notice that certain technologies always get taught using similar examples?
* OO. Standard example is Shape superclass and Square/Circle/etc subclass. Also Vehicle and Car Truck, which opens up the door to teach composition and aggregation (of Engine and Wheel objects)
* Use cases. As you say, soda machine is a classic. Also ATM, and I've seen coffee maker, plus alarm clock for event diagrams.
* Web. Always a shopping cart. ALWAYS.
* Others?
Jeez, can't we just retire this particular MS zinger? It's ancient and not even very pithy---regular users NEVER have a problem with the start button. Spock might, which could explain why Slashdot users do.
We already know that Slashdot readers don't understand that HTML != XML.
So if HTML == XML, and UML is like XML, then isn't UML like HTML? And what about HXUTML?
Thank you! Time to type my "shadowed" password in so I can post...
So everyone hates LDAP and the tools suck, except for Microsoft's. I have a related question:
What successful strategies have you employed for maintaining large user databases/directories in a heterogenous environment?
1. NIS/YP plus ActiveDirectory/NT Domain plus RACF/TopSecret plus ?????, along with a bunch of scripts to maintain synchronization?
2. Something else?
Absolutely correct on learning Java before C++. I did that (by accident, really) and it seems to have given me a different perspective on the languages than I would otherwise have.
I appreciated templates and the STL much more after having worked with Java's container classes; I appreciate the simplicity of Java's handling of class constants after dealing with the many ways to initialize class constants in C++.
Java is sometimes derided as a toy, but people should remember that warty languages get that way with age. So far Java has done OK but I suspect in 5 years it will look different after some goofy attempts to add things like generic types.
I'd definitely agree with that. I'd also add that the number of jobs for true "Computer Scientists" is dwarfed by the much greater number of jobs for "IT workers" who, after all, wrote most of the code in all the applications you use every day. Yes, writing compilers and optimized language parsers and such will be much easier with a CS degree. But writing most application code doesn't require it.
I have warning phobia but MS makes it really tough for me to have warning-free code. Here's what I have to do to get vanilla (and very legal) STL code to compile without L3 warnings under VC6:
#pragma warning(disable:4786)
Blech!!!