It is apparent that you have become a full-blown PHB and are out of touch. You want team tradition? Make it beer Thursdays, or better yet, Fridays free at 4 pm tradition. Even if you choose to do nothing good for your employees, please refrain from doing some lame puppet as morale booster. Take the money you'd spend on a puppet and give to employees (even if it's a cent per head). Show that you care about real people, otherwise start a tradition of posting a Dilbert cartoon on your door every day.
1. This is important for all humanity so this is not the case of: it's too complicated, I'll just get a Mac. This is a case of if you build it they will come.
2. He probably wants the verification to happen double blind, without his input which could make things easier to understand but also could make it easier to skip over errors. This simply is a way to nudge each reviewer to think for themselves. We know getting YetAnotherDistro to run SomeDriver is possible, it's just a matter of how. Not so here.
3. Whether or not he is right, this guy _is_ 1337. Think K&R writing a blurb on how some driver is to be written letting you code up the rest.
Nah, you'd just have browser fingerprinting like we have for OS'es. Or maybe some pages would have a "start" wizard: 1. Choose you country / time zone 2. Choose your language 3. Choose your browser 4. Watch this commercial and on to... 5. Content
1. If good crackers go after Linux it will fall. My belief is that the number of exploits is not limited by OS security but by the number and productivity of top crackers.
2. The wide variety of Linux distros with slightly varying kernels is the only thing that makes Linux in general more secure since an attack on one distro may not work on others.
First off, complete usb pocket drives go for $90. Check pricewatch. This is before bulk discounts. Second, $90 for your work. How? I can buy assembled usb drive for $90 and now I just write a little script to format and rawrite the drive. None of this requires any thinking so even in the US it would be a minimum wage job to plug drives into USB and press a button, then package. So more realistically $5 for putting Mandrake on it. If they give you Mandrake support with it then that could be worth $40. So I think a fair price would be: $140 - with Mandrake support $100 - no support Maybe add $10 for Lacie brand name.
Wow, what company is that? 'Cause here's the math: You figure an average employee gets paid $50,000 a year. So 2,000 jobs would be $100,000,000 a year. Thus your CEO makes $200 million a year. That's some salary. In reality the average compensation for CEOs is just below $10 million a year so 50% cut amounts to 100 jobs. The above $10 million number is for CEOs of major corps, so 100 jobs for them is drop in the bucket. If they only fired 100 people a year it would not be felt by the workforce at all (the average salary above is for 1500 largest corps so that's a net loss of 150,000 jobs, whereas the economy can create or lose that many jobs in a month). In short, the problem of CEO overcompensation is a problem onto itself, and should not be confused with the problem of job losses. One could even argue that how CEOs are compensated (stock options) is a far larger problem then how much they are compensated, because CEOs are rewarded for short term thinking.
You say "throw out 100+ years of economic and labor progress" as if it is unthinkable. But that is precisely what is happening. It will only stop happening when the labor market of the entire world tightens up, i.e. when there is enough jobs for the extra 2 billion people from India and China. Indeed it took China 20-30 years to find jobs for half their population and it is unlikely that the entire other half will abandon agriculture so it may only be another 10-20 years before the job market in China stabilizes and wages start growing. India is much more of a caste-based country and they just created a small caste of IT people who are well-off but this is unlikely to bring their entire population into the open job market. Thus the wages in India are already growing. The US seems to be doing all they can to make the dollar weaker effectively lowering US wages, plus they are now really going after China to stop playing tricks with their currencies (Hong-Kong has its own currency with a fixed rate to yuan). If we in the US stop spending so much on social causes (welfare, social security etc) and cut military spending, we will have: a. First a major crisis, due to lower buying capacity of the population followed by... b. Much more competitive employement base.
In short, within the next 20-30 years expect major shifts in economic power toward China followed by more stable US economy. My guess is the US economy will then be to Chinese economy as Japanese economy was to the US economy for much of the late twentieth century. After that expect labor laws across the globe to strengthen again. 50 years from now they may be back to current levels.
1. Buy full Acrobat suite set up printing to pdf, then send pdf's to printer. Now your formatting is safe. This is also the reason why sending docs edited in Word to associates is best done in pdf format. BTW, there are free utilities to print to pdf, such as PDF995 but the output is not very high quality and cannot be searched, so it may be worth it for you or your employer to pay for the Acrobat suite.
2. I don't know what RT is but it sounds like a simple import/export script should do the trick. I am a scientist so I do these in Matlab but it is merely what I am confy with. VBA should let you do this within Office.
Not to say that Office is good but long documents and invoices is where it is supposed to excel.
It's (sic) most useful to catch plural/singular mismatches. It usually tends to say "Fragment" when the sentences get too long, which is useful. Everything else is not worth paying attention to.
Anyone for whom English ain't no native language (like myself) occasionally finds good suggestions from Word grammar checker. It is indeed a feature I sorely miss when using Linux office products. That and the inability to get complicated Word forms with locked tables and precise alignments to render right. Oh, and VB macros are (pure ass but) unavoidable when you deal with gov'ment forms.
If someone thinks this troll is for real, and they do not know the meaning of "tautology", look it up on dictionary.com:
1. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy. 2. An instance of such repetition. 3. An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement "Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow".
Your first sentence is a tautology. You could also say that this computer, if constantly updated with newest PC internals and maintained in working order will continue to work and wnot be obsolete for many years to come.
Not sure what you mean. A USB enclosure would add maybe $20-$30 per HDD. So with IDE you get about $200/250Gb. If you bargain shop you can slash it down to $150/250Gb. So your Terabyte on a striped and mirrored RAID config (none of that puny RAID5) is of order $1200. If you are willing to settle for RAID5 then it's cheaper still.
For most people, this would be a backup system, so performance doesn't matter. In fact, most people would be fine with software RAID. This is where IDE shines.
I got rid of my desktop and wanted to also to get rid of my TV and luve entirely off my laptop. So I got AverMedia to watch occasional TV like world cup soccer but it will be unused for months at a time. In any case here goes:
Picture is fine, rather crisp though the UHF antenna connection is made with an extra cable which looks flimsy. Sound does not go through USB but comes out the audio jack and you can run it into your microphone jack in your laptop to get sound. This sucks as the sound often lags, esp. if you are taxing you laptop. You can run headphones and such off the jack directly which is a bit better. In most cases audio/video sink is good enough as to not bother me. For once a year use it is good. The software sucks ass. It is not very intuitive (I spent many minutes looking for how to adjust sound) and some options are hidden in main config screen where they should be directly accessible. The worst part about AverMedia is that it powers off of USB so every time you put your laptop to sleep it shuts off and you have to unplug and replug the cable to get it to start grabbing frames again. Pain in the... So to sum up: AverMedia does what I want and I do not regret buying it but if you watch TV on a regular basis then stay away from this crap.
You are kind of right in that gold does form alloys with most solders but that is usually a problem for high-temperature solders. Something like Indium will wet clean gold even at room temperature so if you coat your leads in gold and use Indium solder you wouldn't need any flux and only mildest of heating. Alloying under these conditions should not be a problem. The self-healing nature of Indium junctions should make such solder joints more resistant to fatigue than normal joints. Now if peeling components off the board is an issue then glue their casings to the board.
Another thought: you could leave the leads just plain copper. Now before assembly you swipe all leads with Nitric acid or something similar and rinse (all this in inert atmosphere of course). Now solder the board without flux and the whole thing is ready to be exposed to air.
So can someone enlighten me: why not use materials that are soft and non-reactive? In my experience coating leads with gold works fine, why all this tin, lead, nickel crap when gold on copper works well already? Likewise, why use lead-based solders when indium is so nice to use: it wets metals easily, it wets itself and it is soft so solder joints would actually heal themselves at room temperature if cracks appeared for some reason? You could also use gallium as solder with similar benefits, though it becomes liquid just above room temperature so you would want to use an alloy.
1. If anything I think anonimity of reviewers needs to be strengthened. Currently, you can guess who your reviewer is by the style of response, what issues the person raises etc. This allows the submitter to taylor response to the reviewer, i.e. it becomes a game of salesmanship. This is hard to fix but the point I am making is that it should go the other way: less personal more objective.
2. Scientific logic is that it is better to not publish than publish something uncertain. So the assinine reviewers are the price you pay for a working peer review system. Ain't nuthin you can do about it, much like getting off on a technicality is a feature of our justice system.
3. There are so many journals that the issue of stupid or stubborn reviewers should not deter a good paper from being published, you just have to try a few times. It is also possible to publish your work in conference proceedings where the review is a lot more lax. In short, insofar as we ignore the career-building aspect of publishing in a prestigeous journal, a good paper can be made public in so many ways as to be almost irrepressible.
4. If your goal is career-building, then you have to deal with gatekeepers, no matter what the system. I suspect the current system is not too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
It is apparent that you have become a full-blown
PHB and are out of touch. You want team tradition?
Make it beer Thursdays, or better yet, Fridays
free at 4 pm tradition. Even if you choose to do
nothing good for your employees, please refrain
from doing some lame puppet as morale booster.
Take the money you'd spend on a puppet and give to
employees (even if it's a cent per head). Show that
you care about real people, otherwise start a
tradition of posting a Dilbert cartoon on your door
every day.
1. This is important for all humanity so this is not
the case of: it's too complicated, I'll just get a
Mac. This is a case of if you build it they will
come.
2. He probably wants the verification to happen
double blind, without his input which could make
things easier to understand but also could make it
easier to skip over errors. This simply is a way
to nudge each reviewer to think for themselves.
We know getting YetAnotherDistro to run SomeDriver
is possible, it's just a matter of how. Not so here.
3. Whether or not he is right, this guy _is_ 1337.
Think K&R writing a blurb on how some driver is to
be written letting you code up the rest.
You sir are the man. Thanks.
Nah, you'd just have browser fingerprinting like
we have for OS'es. Or maybe some pages would have
a "start" wizard:
1. Choose you country / time zone
2. Choose your language
3. Choose your browser
4. Watch this commercial and on to...
5. Content
All I am saying is that heterogeneous environments
are generally more secure. No need to go overboard
here.
Oh well, I guess I just fed a troll.
1. If good crackers go after Linux it will fall.
My belief is that the number of exploits is not
limited by OS security but by the number and
productivity of top crackers.
2. The wide variety of Linux distros with slightly
varying kernels is the only thing that makes
Linux in general more secure since an attack on one
distro may not work on others.
First off, complete usb pocket drives go for $90.
Check pricewatch. This is before bulk discounts.
Second, $90 for your work. How? I can buy assembled
usb drive for $90 and now I just write a little
script to format and rawrite the drive. None of
this requires any thinking so even in the US it
would be a minimum wage job to plug drives into
USB and press a button, then package. So more
realistically $5 for putting Mandrake on it.
If they give you Mandrake support with it then that
could be worth $40. So I think a fair price would be:
$140 - with Mandrake support
$100 - no support
Maybe add $10 for Lacie brand name.
Wow, what company is that?
'Cause here's the math:
You figure an average employee gets paid $50,000 a
year. So 2,000 jobs would be $100,000,000 a year.
Thus your CEO makes $200 million a year. That's
some salary.
In reality the average compensation for CEOs is just
below $10 million a year so 50% cut amounts to
100 jobs. The above $10 million number is for CEOs
of major corps, so 100 jobs for them is drop in the
bucket. If they only fired 100 people a year
it would not be felt by the workforce at all
(the average salary above is for 1500 largest
corps so that's a net loss of 150,000 jobs,
whereas the economy can create or lose that
many jobs in a month).
In short, the problem of CEO overcompensation is
a problem onto itself, and should not be confused
with the problem of job losses. One could even
argue that how CEOs are compensated (stock options)
is a far larger problem then how much they are
compensated, because CEOs are rewarded for short
term thinking.
You say "throw out 100+ years of economic and labor
progress" as if it is unthinkable. But that is
precisely what is happening. It will only stop
happening when the labor market of the entire
world tightens up, i.e. when there is enough
jobs for the extra 2 billion people from India and
China. Indeed it took China 20-30 years to find
jobs for half their population and it is unlikely
that the entire other half will abandon agriculture
so it may only be another 10-20 years before the job
market in China stabilizes and wages start growing.
India is much more of a caste-based country and
they just created a small caste of IT people who
are well-off but this is unlikely to bring their
entire population into the open job market. Thus
the wages in India are already growing.
The US seems to be doing all they can to make the
dollar weaker effectively lowering US wages, plus
they are now really going after China to stop
playing tricks with their currencies (Hong-Kong
has its own currency with a fixed rate to yuan).
If we in the US stop spending so much on social
causes (welfare, social security etc) and cut
military spending, we will have:
a. First a major crisis, due to lower buying
capacity of the population
followed by...
b. Much more competitive employement base.
In short, within the next 20-30 years expect
major shifts in economic power toward China
followed by more stable US economy. My guess is
the US economy will then be to Chinese economy
as Japanese economy was to the US economy for
much of the late twentieth century.
After that expect labor laws across the globe to
strengthen again. 50 years from now they may be
back to current levels.
1. Buy full Acrobat suite set up printing to pdf,
then send pdf's to printer. Now your formatting
is safe. This is also the reason why sending docs
edited in Word to associates is best done in pdf
format. BTW, there are free utilities to print to
pdf, such as PDF995 but the output is not very
high quality and cannot be searched, so it may be
worth it for you or your employer to pay for
the Acrobat suite.
2. I don't know what RT is but it sounds like a
simple import/export script should do the trick.
I am a scientist so I do these in Matlab but it
is merely what I am confy with. VBA should let you
do this within Office.
Not to say that Office is good but long documents
and invoices is where it is supposed to excel.
It's (sic) most useful to catch plural/singular
mismatches. It usually tends to say "Fragment"
when the sentences get too long, which is useful.
Everything else is not worth paying attention to.
Anyone for whom English ain't no native language
(like myself) occasionally finds good suggestions
from Word grammar checker. It is indeed a feature
I sorely miss when using Linux office products.
That and the inability to get complicated Word
forms with locked tables and precise alignments
to render right. Oh, and VB macros are (pure ass
but) unavoidable when you deal with gov'ment
forms.
Laptop... Ebay...
If someone thinks this troll is for real,
and they do not know the meaning of
"tautology", look it up on dictionary.com:
1. Needless repetition of the same sense in
different words; redundancy.
2. An instance of such repetition.
3. An empty or vacuous statement composed of
simpler statements in a fashion that makes it
logically true whether the simpler statements
are factually true or false; for example, the
statement "Either it will rain tomorrow or it
will not rain tomorrow".
Your first sentence is a tautology. You could also
say that this computer, if constantly updated with
newest PC internals and maintained in working
order will continue to work and wnot be obsolete
for many years to come.
I tried to stress it with the hardest words I could
think of. It failed "homoousios" for instance.
Not sure what you mean. A USB enclosure would add
maybe $20-$30 per HDD. So with IDE you get about
$200/250Gb. If you bargain shop you can slash it
down to $150/250Gb. So your Terabyte on a striped
and mirrored RAID config (none of that puny RAID5)
is of order $1200. If you are willing to settle
for RAID5 then it's cheaper still.
For most people, this would be a backup system, so
performance doesn't matter. In fact, most people
would be fine with software RAID. This is where
IDE shines.
sink => sync
ouch. Sorry again...
I got rid of my desktop and wanted to also to get
...
rid of my TV and luve entirely off my laptop.
So I got AverMedia to watch occasional TV like
world cup soccer but it will be unused for months
at a time. In any case here goes:
Picture is fine, rather crisp though the UHF antenna
connection is made with an extra cable which looks
flimsy.
Sound does not go through USB but comes out the
audio jack and you can run it into your
microphone jack in your laptop to get sound. This
sucks as the sound often lags, esp. if you are
taxing you laptop. You can run headphones and such
off the jack directly which is a bit better. In
most cases audio/video sink is good enough as to
not bother me. For once a year use it is good.
The software sucks ass. It is not very intuitive
(I spent many minutes looking for how to adjust
sound) and some options are hidden in main
config screen where they should be directly
accessible.
The worst part about AverMedia is that it powers
off of USB so every time you put your laptop to
sleep it shuts off and you have to unplug and
replug the cable to get it to start grabbing frames
again. Pain in the
So to sum up: AverMedia does what I want and I do
not regret buying it but if you watch TV on a
regular basis then stay away from this crap.
So long as I can edit firewall settings I would
support mandatory default reverse firewalls for
any equipment that so much as touches IP.
Ok, no need for acids - just scrape the leads
before soldering to remove oxide. So long as you do
it in a non-oxidizing atmosphere you should be
fine.
You are kind of right in that gold does form
alloys with most solders but that is usually a
problem for high-temperature solders. Something
like Indium will wet clean gold even at room
temperature so if you coat your leads in gold
and use Indium solder you wouldn't need any flux
and only mildest of heating. Alloying under
these conditions should not be a problem.
The self-healing nature of Indium junctions
should make such solder joints more resistant to
fatigue than normal joints.
Now if peeling components off the board is an
issue then glue their casings to the board.
Another thought: you could leave the leads just
plain copper. Now before assembly you swipe all
leads with Nitric acid or something similar and
rinse (all this in inert atmosphere of course).
Now solder the board without flux and the whole
thing is ready to be exposed to air.
So can someone enlighten me: why not use materials
that are soft and non-reactive? In my experience
coating leads with gold works fine, why all this
tin, lead, nickel crap when gold on copper works
well already? Likewise, why use lead-based solders
when indium is so nice to use: it wets metals
easily, it wets itself and it is soft so solder
joints would actually heal themselves at room
temperature if cracks appeared for some reason?
You could also use gallium as solder with similar
benefits, though it becomes liquid just above room
temperature so you would want to use an alloy.
1. If anything I think anonimity of reviewers needs
to be strengthened. Currently, you can guess who
your reviewer is by the style of response, what
issues the person raises etc. This allows the
submitter to taylor response to the reviewer, i.e.
it becomes a game of salesmanship. This is hard to
fix but the point I am making is that it should
go the other way: less personal more objective.
2. Scientific logic is that it is better to not
publish than publish something uncertain. So the
assinine reviewers are the price you pay for a
working peer review system. Ain't nuthin you can
do about it, much like getting off on a technicality
is a feature of our justice system.
3. There are so many journals that the issue of
stupid or stubborn reviewers should not deter a
good paper from being published, you just have to
try a few times. It is also possible to publish
your work in conference proceedings where the
review is a lot more lax. In short, insofar as we
ignore the career-building aspect of publishing
in a prestigeous journal, a good paper can be made
public in so many ways as to be almost
irrepressible.
4. If your goal is career-building, then you have
to deal with gatekeepers, no matter what the
system. I suspect the current system is not too
bad.