Wrong. You have to ask someone to stop doing something, and they have to continue doing it, for it to be sexual harassment.
Wrong wrong. The offender doesn't even have to know he (or she) has offended anyone. The way harrassment (sexual and other) policies are written at many companies, "harrassment" is defined as any behavior that someone else thinks is harrassing. Regardless of how innocently it was intended, regardless of whether the offender was asked to stop.
ObWarStory: I was fired from my last position for "harrassment". You see, I posted a link on our intranet "general chat" forum to a movie review that happened to contain an ethnic slur. (It was a very funny review, and I'd considered it humorous usage in a "Blazing Saddles" kind of way.) When HR questioned me about it I was shocked. It was a humorous article, which I presented for its humor value. I honestly never meant to offend. I offered to do whatever was necessary to put things right; public apology, private apology, whatever. No good. I was summarily canned. Not only didn't I get a chance to apologize, I never even found out who I offended. Just, "pack your things and get out." (And, after seeking real legal counsel, I found I had no grounds for action against the company.)
Anyway, harrassment is in the eye of the one offended. Maybe not in terms of the law, but probably according to whatever employee handbook a company has.
That said, I really don't know what to say to this guy. Going to HR may result in his boss getting fired with no recourse, which would be a bad thing if she's otherwise a good manager. But he certainly shouldn't have to put up with it, either. If he's afraid of repercussions talking to her directly about it, maybe he could go to her boss and mention it.
According to Dr. Science, "SPAM" is an acronym for "Scientifically Produced Animal Matter". And can you doubt him? After all, he has a Master's degree -- In science!
Dude, the word you're looking for is "word". How many bits in a word? Depends on the CPU. But a byte is 8 bits on everything I've ever seen. Even the old clunky mainframes use "word" to mean the basic unit of storage, and don't use "byte" at all if 8-bit quantities aren't relevant.
(Gotta love the old Sperry-1100 with its 36-bit word...)
Now, for bonus points... In C, how big is a 'char'? How about a 'short' or a 'long'?
Or maybe it's just because the previews sucked. In the first one I saw the Hulk was such a cheesy CGI figure. The lighting didn't even match the rest of the scene. I hope it was an unfinished effects shot, but I'm certainly not going to spend my money to find out.
Blender? My friends and I just use a large bowl and a wooden spoon. One pours in the LN2 while another stirs like mad (but not hard enough to slosh outside the bowl).
Liquid oxygen also makes good ice cream, and is generally more fun to play with...:-)
You can even use dry ice. Again, one person stirs the bowl while another one grates the dry ice with a cheese grater. This method actually produces mildly carbonated ice cream, which is kind of weird.
Ah, the things you can do with cryogenic liquid. Winecicles. An inverted scotch-on-the-rocks (freeze the scotch, drop the cubes into a glass of water). Everclear crystals. And my favorite: frozen atomic cherries.
My feeling has always been that if I'm consistently working more than 40-odd hours a week then the company needs to hire someone extra. However, I'm perfectly happy to work (unpaid) overtime when necessary.
This works to my benefit. My empolyer knows that I'll be there when he needs me, so he doesn't much care when I'm there during lighter times. "Comp time" is a great equalizer. Even during times of normal workload, my hours are very flexible and I have the option of working from home when I want. Nothing better than working with a group who trusts each other.
This has paid out in some tangible ways as well. Last year, after working particularly hard to get some projects done on time, the entire engineering group (all 5 of us; it's a small shop!) was given a week extra paid vacation, plus a performance bonus.
To the original poster, try to negotiate some sort of compensation. You guys are being asked to put in more than double time for 4-6 weeks. It's not unreasonable to expect something in return for the effort. Since the project will be finished a month before your original deadline, ask for a month paid time off. This way the company will keep the customer and the employees happy at the same time. Also ask that the company pick up the tab for things you can't do around your homes. Simple things: hire a gardener to keep your lawns maintained for the duration. Hire someone to do the shopping or handyman projects or whatever it is you'd normally do around the house in your free hours. Remind them that they're not simply inconveniencing you, but your spouses and families as well.
And especially, go pick up Edward Yourdon's book "Death March". It has a lot of good ideas on how to compensate employees who put their lives on hold to successfully pull of projects like this.
Longfeather writes "Tukwila, Washington's cash-strapped Foster High School may have to turn down US$43,000 worth of free PCs because of a Mac-only IT policy already in place. Read here(1) and here(2)." Surely some school would be willing to bend (or rethink) policy rather than turn away new computers.
If the terms "PC" and "Mac" were swapped in this story, would the comments would be the opposite of what they are now? More power to the loyal Mac school, refusing the "free" PCs that Microsoft is offering so they can infiltrate and overrun the district!
Why bother? There are plenty of nice, dressy loafers on the market...
IMHO, both good penmanship and the ability to tie a bow knot are destined for obsolescence. They're simply not needed by the majority of our society any more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! How many of you can churn butter? Tie knots other than bow knots, and know which to use when? Whittle? Perform basic carpentry, or masonry? Care for and ride a horse? Tan leather?
Tons of skills which used to be part of everyday life have fallen into disuse, simply because most people don't need to do them any more. And tons of new skills are aquired to fit the new needs. It's called progress.
Back a few years now, when I worked for a company programming console games, someone suggested that we make a game with add-on capabilities. As I recall, it was going to be a PlayStation game in which you could build your own monsters. The add-ons were to be new monsters and monster parts. We had to come up with a way to distribute the add-ons. One idea was to store them on memory cards. Another was to put them in the main game, and only distribute the unlock codes on the cards.
I'd argued against the unlock codes. I figured that players would be pissed when they found out that all the "add-on" parts were on the disc that they had already paid for, but were locked away until they paid extra for a key. Actually buying new content is psychologically different from paying again to unlock something you already have, even if the end result is the same. For example, how many of you would have felt cheated if, say, C&C had had expansion maps on the main disc which you had to buy an unlock code for? But how many of you happily plunked down another $25 each for the expansion packs?
The monster game was never made, but I'm happy to see that at least some gamers feel cheated, just as I'd predicted.
On the other hand, if the routine were LGPL, the company could use and benefit from it, [...]
Probably not, if you're statically linking in the LGPL code. Section (6) of the LGPL
states that if you statically link an LGPL work you must provide your own "work that uses the Library" in source or object form, such that the end-user could modify the LGPL code and re-link with your application.
On top of that, you must also include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable. Thus, any makefiles or custom shell scripts must be provided along with your object code.
Even if this isn't going to give advantage to your competitors, it's a major pain in the ass for you. You now have a bunch of extra deliverables (the LGPL source, your objects, your makefiles and custom tools) that you have to give your customer. You also have to test this package, to be sure that they can modify the LGPL code and re-link properly.
You don't have all these hassles if you're dynamically linking, but that's not always an option. Embedded systems are almost always statically linked, for example.
Sorry. It's way too much to go through unless you're going to make your own code open source as well. But then, that's the whole point of the FSF, isn't it? Y'know, for a group claiming to promote "free as in freedom", they certainly place a lot of restrictions on you...
I hear you. My first computer, in my senior year of high school, was the Apple//e. Paid for it myself, and didn't have any money left over for software. So I sat down with the AppleSoft BASIC manual and wrote (after "hello, world") a text editor. Okay, I admit it was an abomination of a program. But it worked well enough to tide me over until I got enough money to buy AppleWriter.
And now my 5yo has his very own 900MHz PC. *sigh* Kids these days.
Don't forget how Bugs Bunny and other cartoons turned all of us into deranged killers, ready to drop anvils on people. Or how D&D turned us into spell-casting Satanists.
I have two boys, 10 and 5. For the most part, I let them play the same games I play. My only concern is for foul language. No, I'm not afraid that hearing naughty words is going to warp them, I just don't want them repeating choice Duke Nukem quotes at school.
Both my boys know the difference between game violence and real violence. And there's nothing like a little deathmatch to promote father-son bonding! (The older one can kick my ass at Unreal Tournament!) As a parent I'm especially fond of cooperative multiplayer games, though. It's fun to team up against the bad guys. Even the 5yo can get into the monster-killing action in Diablo II or Heretic when he has lots of back-up support.
See my sig. There are far more subtle messages lurking even in kiddie games...
Yeah, but it was a pretty sweet piece of hardware for the time. IMHO the magic of Be was the BeBox, not the user interface. Gotta love that geek port! I was really hoping it'd become the next Amiga.
Instead, it just skipped the "success" stage and went straight to Amiga's "defunct" stage. *sigh*
Agilent and Tektronix (and probably others) have been using Win9x in their oscilloscopes and analyzers for years now. The truly "embedded" part is running on a separate CPU on a PCI card. Windows is simply used as a front-end to render the user interface.
It seems like a win all the way around. These companies can focus on what they do best, which is high-speed data aquisition and analysis. They don't need to get into GUI design. They can use off-the-shelf parts for the chassis and peripherals. And end-users don't have to figure out some obscure UI like on the older equipment.
Windows is reasonably solid, as long as you're not mucking around with DLLs by installing new software. Typically these devices ship with the app pre-installed, and nothing else is ever run.
I still don't think I'd trust it for an unattended (eg, ATM) application, though.
Regarding games the problem is one of violence and generalized lack of imagination from the part fo the game makers. It seems like they are addicted to violence in the first place, to make it a possible choice to beat and kill women and be rewarded for it, in spite of the amount of domestic violence everywhere, is frankly crass and irresponsible.
You're right. To be responsible they should only reward you for beating and killing men. White men. White heterosexual men. White heterosexual middle-class men. Because we all know that they're the source of all the problems in this world!
Why watermarking? Just superimpose a visible time/date stamp and a frame sequence number on the image before encoding it. That gets to be pretty tough to edit around, especially if you can do something like encrypting a hash of each frame (including the superimposed numbers) separate from the video.
It's not impossible to fake, but it'd be very, very tough. If you can actually stream the hash data out of the squad car on the fly (or at least within minutes of the video being taken) it'd completely impossible to fake without access to the physically secure hash database back at the station. Not to mention the off-site backups...
I've been using SVG as a good intermediate format, much like you would PPM in the raster world. I've been having to transmogrify Adobe Illustrator files into something that can be imported to a printed circuit board layout program. The file gets saved as a bitmap (to flatten it; haven't figured out how to flatten it in the vector domain), autotraced into SVG, and then run through a Perl script to convert beziers to line segments and output it in PCAD's file format. I chose SVG simply because it's more-or-less human-readable and still very easy to parse programatically.
It's a nice format, but I'm afraid it'll lose out to Flash on the web. It'll have a fighting chance if the major browsers would support SVG natively.
Java is one way to go. The NetBeans IDE is open-source and cross-platform. It has a GUI builder, but I admit I haven't used it yet. All my Java has been console stuff so far.
Or, try using JavaScript in a browser. No, really. You can use HTML and DOM to make a nifty quick'n'dirty GUI, with JavaScript to back it up. I've done this when I've needed to write tools that must run on stock Windows PCs (can't install Perl or Sun's JVM; just my app). Works great, except for the MS-isms in the IE DOM.
This has been my argument against the whole Bluetooth "It all just works together!" philosophy from the get-go. Yeah, it's great that I can access my stuff from any computer, but how do I keep other people from accessing my stuff as well? Your comment about a keystroke logger on a public terminal is another excellent security risk.
And if these things can talk to each other, just think of the wonderful viruses that will be written. I'm walking through the airport and my Personal Server catches cyber-SARS from some random stranger's PS.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong wrong. The offender doesn't even have to know he (or she) has offended anyone. The way harrassment (sexual and other) policies are written at many companies, "harrassment" is defined as any behavior that someone else thinks is harrassing. Regardless of how innocently it was intended, regardless of whether the offender was asked to stop.
ObWarStory: I was fired from my last position for "harrassment". You see, I posted a link on our intranet "general chat" forum to a movie review that happened to contain an ethnic slur. (It was a very funny review, and I'd considered it humorous usage in a "Blazing Saddles" kind of way.) When HR questioned me about it I was shocked. It was a humorous article, which I presented for its humor value. I honestly never meant to offend. I offered to do whatever was necessary to put things right; public apology, private apology, whatever. No good. I was summarily canned. Not only didn't I get a chance to apologize, I never even found out who I offended. Just, "pack your things and get out." (And, after seeking real legal counsel, I found I had no grounds for action against the company.)
Anyway, harrassment is in the eye of the one offended. Maybe not in terms of the law, but probably according to whatever employee handbook a company has.
That said, I really don't know what to say to this guy. Going to HR may result in his boss getting fired with no recourse, which would be a bad thing if she's otherwise a good manager. But he certainly shouldn't have to put up with it, either. If he's afraid of repercussions talking to her directly about it, maybe he could go to her boss and mention it.
According to Dr. Science, "SPAM" is an acronym for "Scientifically Produced Animal Matter". And can you doubt him? After all, he has a Master's degree -- In science!
I'd also recommend Heretic. My 5yo loves killing monsters with me. Doomsday is a great Windows port of Doom, Heretic, and their direct descendants.
Dude, the word you're looking for is "word". How many bits in a word? Depends on the CPU. But a byte is 8 bits on everything I've ever seen. Even the old clunky mainframes use "word" to mean the basic unit of storage, and don't use "byte" at all if 8-bit quantities aren't relevant.
(Gotta love the old Sperry-1100 with its 36-bit word...)
Now, for bonus points... In C, how big is a 'char'? How about a 'short' or a 'long'?
Or maybe it's just because the previews sucked. In the first one I saw the Hulk was such a cheesy CGI figure. The lighting didn't even match the rest of the scene. I hope it was an unfinished effects shot, but I'm certainly not going to spend my money to find out.
Bring back Lou Ferrigno!
Blender? My friends and I just use a large bowl and a wooden spoon. One pours in the LN2 while another stirs like mad (but not hard enough to slosh outside the bowl).
Liquid oxygen also makes good ice cream, and is generally more fun to play with... :-)
You can even use dry ice. Again, one person stirs the bowl while another one grates the dry ice with a cheese grater. This method actually produces mildly carbonated ice cream, which is kind of weird.
Ah, the things you can do with cryogenic liquid. Winecicles. An inverted scotch-on-the-rocks (freeze the scotch, drop the cubes into a glass of water). Everclear crystals. And my favorite: frozen atomic cherries.
Don't rush me. I'm working on it!
My feeling has always been that if I'm consistently working more than 40-odd hours a week then the company needs to hire someone extra. However, I'm perfectly happy to work (unpaid) overtime when necessary.
This works to my benefit. My empolyer knows that I'll be there when he needs me, so he doesn't much care when I'm there during lighter times. "Comp time" is a great equalizer. Even during times of normal workload, my hours are very flexible and I have the option of working from home when I want. Nothing better than working with a group who trusts each other.
This has paid out in some tangible ways as well. Last year, after working particularly hard to get some projects done on time, the entire engineering group (all 5 of us; it's a small shop!) was given a week extra paid vacation, plus a performance bonus.
To the original poster, try to negotiate some sort of compensation. You guys are being asked to put in more than double time for 4-6 weeks. It's not unreasonable to expect something in return for the effort. Since the project will be finished a month before your original deadline, ask for a month paid time off. This way the company will keep the customer and the employees happy at the same time. Also ask that the company pick up the tab for things you can't do around your homes. Simple things: hire a gardener to keep your lawns maintained for the duration. Hire someone to do the shopping or handyman projects or whatever it is you'd normally do around the house in your free hours. Remind them that they're not simply inconveniencing you, but your spouses and families as well.
And especially, go pick up Edward Yourdon's book "Death March". It has a lot of good ideas on how to compensate employees who put their lives on hold to successfully pull of projects like this.
If the terms "PC" and "Mac" were swapped in this story, would the comments would be the opposite of what they are now? More power to the loyal Mac school, refusing the "free" PCs that Microsoft is offering so they can infiltrate and overrun the district!
Discuss.
Why bother? There are plenty of nice, dressy loafers on the market...
IMHO, both good penmanship and the ability to tie a bow knot are destined for obsolescence. They're simply not needed by the majority of our society any more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! How many of you can churn butter? Tie knots other than bow knots, and know which to use when? Whittle? Perform basic carpentry, or masonry? Care for and ride a horse? Tan leather?
Tons of skills which used to be part of everyday life have fallen into disuse, simply because most people don't need to do them any more. And tons of new skills are aquired to fit the new needs. It's called progress.
Back a few years now, when I worked for a company programming console games, someone suggested that we make a game with add-on capabilities. As I recall, it was going to be a PlayStation game in which you could build your own monsters. The add-ons were to be new monsters and monster parts. We had to come up with a way to distribute the add-ons. One idea was to store them on memory cards. Another was to put them in the main game, and only distribute the unlock codes on the cards.
I'd argued against the unlock codes. I figured that players would be pissed when they found out that all the "add-on" parts were on the disc that they had already paid for, but were locked away until they paid extra for a key. Actually buying new content is psychologically different from paying again to unlock something you already have, even if the end result is the same. For example, how many of you would have felt cheated if, say, C&C had had expansion maps on the main disc which you had to buy an unlock code for? But how many of you happily plunked down another $25 each for the expansion packs?
The monster game was never made, but I'm happy to see that at least some gamers feel cheated, just as I'd predicted.
Probably not, if you're statically linking in the LGPL code. Section (6) of the LGPL states that if you statically link an LGPL work you must provide your own "work that uses the Library" in source or object form, such that the end-user could modify the LGPL code and re-link with your application.
On top of that, you must also include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable. Thus, any makefiles or custom shell scripts must be provided along with your object code.
Even if this isn't going to give advantage to your competitors, it's a major pain in the ass for you. You now have a bunch of extra deliverables (the LGPL source, your objects, your makefiles and custom tools) that you have to give your customer. You also have to test this package, to be sure that they can modify the LGPL code and re-link properly.
You don't have all these hassles if you're dynamically linking, but that's not always an option. Embedded systems are almost always statically linked, for example.
Sorry. It's way too much to go through unless you're going to make your own code open source as well. But then, that's the whole point of the FSF, isn't it? Y'know, for a group claiming to promote "free as in freedom", they certainly place a lot of restrictions on you...
I hear you. My first computer, in my senior year of high school, was the Apple //e. Paid for it myself, and didn't have any money left over for software. So I sat down with the AppleSoft BASIC manual and wrote (after "hello, world") a text editor. Okay, I admit it was an abomination of a program. But it worked well enough to tide me over until I got enough money to buy AppleWriter.
And now my 5yo has his very own 900MHz PC. *sigh* Kids these days.
Don't forget how Bugs Bunny and other cartoons turned all of us into deranged killers, ready to drop anvils on people. Or how D&D turned us into spell-casting Satanists.
I have two boys, 10 and 5. For the most part, I let them play the same games I play. My only concern is for foul language. No, I'm not afraid that hearing naughty words is going to warp them, I just don't want them repeating choice Duke Nukem quotes at school.
Both my boys know the difference between game violence and real violence. And there's nothing like a little deathmatch to promote father-son bonding! (The older one can kick my ass at Unreal Tournament!) As a parent I'm especially fond of cooperative multiplayer games, though. It's fun to team up against the bad guys. Even the 5yo can get into the monster-killing action in Diablo II or Heretic when he has lots of back-up support.
See my sig. There are far more subtle messages lurking even in kiddie games...
Yeah, but it was a pretty sweet piece of hardware for the time. IMHO the magic of Be was the BeBox, not the user interface. Gotta love that geek port! I was really hoping it'd become the next Amiga.
Instead, it just skipped the "success" stage and went straight to Amiga's "defunct" stage. *sigh*
Agilent and Tektronix (and probably others) have been using Win9x in their oscilloscopes and analyzers for years now. The truly "embedded" part is running on a separate CPU on a PCI card. Windows is simply used as a front-end to render the user interface.
It seems like a win all the way around. These companies can focus on what they do best, which is high-speed data aquisition and analysis. They don't need to get into GUI design. They can use off-the-shelf parts for the chassis and peripherals. And end-users don't have to figure out some obscure UI like on the older equipment.
Windows is reasonably solid, as long as you're not mucking around with DLLs by installing new software. Typically these devices ship with the app pre-installed, and nothing else is ever run.
I still don't think I'd trust it for an unattended (eg, ATM) application, though.
You're right. To be responsible they should only reward you for beating and killing men. White men. White heterosexual men. White heterosexual middle-class men. Because we all know that they're the source of all the problems in this world!
Why watermarking? Just superimpose a visible time/date stamp and a frame sequence number on the image before encoding it. That gets to be pretty tough to edit around, especially if you can do something like encrypting a hash of each frame (including the superimposed numbers) separate from the video.
It's not impossible to fake, but it'd be very, very tough. If you can actually stream the hash data out of the squad car on the fly (or at least within minutes of the video being taken) it'd completely impossible to fake without access to the physically secure hash database back at the station. Not to mention the off-site backups...
Spoken like someone who hasn't coded much assembly...
BASIC? We used to dream of BASIC! :-)
I've been using SVG as a good intermediate format, much like you would PPM in the raster world. I've been having to transmogrify Adobe Illustrator files into something that can be imported to a printed circuit board layout program. The file gets saved as a bitmap (to flatten it; haven't figured out how to flatten it in the vector domain), autotraced into SVG, and then run through a Perl script to convert beziers to line segments and output it in PCAD's file format. I chose SVG simply because it's more-or-less human-readable and still very easy to parse programatically.
It's a nice format, but I'm afraid it'll lose out to Flash on the web. It'll have a fighting chance if the major browsers would support SVG natively.
Don't forget Duke Nukem 3D. And, for that satisfying visceral 2D-platform game deathmatch, nothing tops Abuse.
Old games, sure, but still a lot of fun.
Java is one way to go. The NetBeans IDE is open-source and cross-platform. It has a GUI builder, but I admit I haven't used it yet. All my Java has been console stuff so far.
Or, try using JavaScript in a browser. No, really. You can use HTML and DOM to make a nifty quick'n'dirty GUI, with JavaScript to back it up. I've done this when I've needed to write tools that must run on stock Windows PCs (can't install Perl or Sun's JVM; just my app). Works great, except for the MS-isms in the IE DOM.
It might even be a good article, too, if the font were large enough to read!!
Whyinthehell do webmasters do stupid crap like this?
This has been my argument against the whole Bluetooth "It all just works together!" philosophy from the get-go. Yeah, it's great that I can access my stuff from any computer, but how do I keep other people from accessing my stuff as well? Your comment about a keystroke logger on a public terminal is another excellent security risk.
And if these things can talk to each other, just think of the wonderful viruses that will be written. I'm walking through the airport and my Personal Server catches cyber-SARS from some random stranger's PS.
Ha. I ran X on a 386/40 with 8MB RAM and a Hercules monochrome card.
Of course, I only did it once. It had to swap just to blank the screen.