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User: matria

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  1. Re:Startup or frat party? on Ask Slashdot: Joining a Startup As an Older Programmer? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I worked for a startup like this, pure software (a website). When I started, there were ~80 employees in one office. Within two years this grew to over 400 employees in three offices, with regular outings, breakfasts, etc etc which I never attended, except for one breakfast that was held at a fancy hotel within walking distance of my home.

    At one point, my department manager "volunteered" us to work on the weekend. He was quite surprised when all but one or two of us were not at all agreeable.

    During the third year, the layoffs started. My department manager was in the first wave of layoffs, and the poor young man was actually in tears from the shock. By the end, after the fourth wave of layoffs when I specifically asked to be laid off since I couldn't handle the stresses in the office any more, there were around ~60 employees left, and the owners sold out for several hundred million dollars. The site did go on to become a part of a very large corporate web presence, but in a different country.

    It was all done deliberately, to build the business, then "downsize" until the bottom line looked good, then sell. Meanwhile, young people had gotten married, started families, bought homes. All based on this huge lie. During one of the performance reviews, just before the layoffs began, everyone was asked "do you believe in (x company)?" Not being young and inexperienced in corporate behavior, and having researched the owner's previous start-up behavior, I baldly said "No". Their long-promised IP (I'd been given 2,500 of their vaporware shares in an effort to persuade me to stay) didn't happen until just a few weeks before the sale.

    In four years they had burned through $70,000,000 in venture capital.

  2. Re:Useless bullshit on Mathematicians Devise Typefaces Based On Problems of Computational Geometry · · Score: 1

    Well. This got me curious, so I did some research and found that there are, indeed, such fonts. Thank you for your attitude. If you hadn't felt that such a thing was useless because you didn't happen to see a use for it yourself, I wouldn't have been irritated enough to go looking. You see, that was the reason why my father, then my husband, kept me from ever getting my hands on a computer until he decided he could use one after all.

  3. Re:Useless bullshit on Mathematicians Devise Typefaces Based On Problems of Computational Geometry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oh really? I would find such a thing extremely useful in creating knitting and other needlework designs. There is a fairly standard set of images for creating pattern charts, but a font representing these stitches would be even better - no need for the usually Windows-only pattern creation software that uses these standardized images.

  4. Nothing new on Kids Can Swipe a Screen But Can't Use LEGOs · · Score: 1

    Nearly 40 years ago one of my kids' Kindergarten teachers told me she was getting more and more kids in her classes that didn't know how to hold a pencil or how to use a crayon, and couldn't handle a simple over-sized 6-piece puzzle. Also more and more of the boys were just running out the door to pee in the yard instead of using the bathroom.

  5. Re:It's a good service on 44% of Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted · · Score: 1

    I'm certainly notified of any interesting developments in fields I'm interested in and follow, with links provided so I can follow up if I want to. It has to a large degree replaces newsgroups and mailing lists in those areas. I occasionally even "tweet" any new things I've done in those same areas, and have a handful (78 as of last check) of reasonably dedicated followers. While it's by no means a replacement for various blogs and forums I frequent, it's a good notifier that there's something interesting going on. Also helps when at conventions I want to find out which pub everybody in the other hotel is going to for the evening ;)

  6. Re:I wonder on 44% of Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted · · Score: 1

    Oops... I hadn't even noticed that I wasn't logged in when making the previous comment! My eyes are getting worse all the time.

  7. Re:What if you don't like beer? on To Reduce the Health Risk of Barbecuing Meat, Just Add Beer · · Score: 1

    Use it as a hair rinse or setting gel. Works great, and believe it or not it doesn't leave an odor.

  8. Re:Bunk! on To Reduce the Health Risk of Barbecuing Meat, Just Add Beer · · Score: 1

    My father-in-law in Lubbock, Texas ate back-yard barbeque almost every day, and despised what he called "rabbit food" - that is, anything green. Grilled meat, mashed potatoes, and bread-and-butter and beer pretty much made up his diet. He died of stomach cancer before his 55th birthday. Anecdotal, yes, but the agony of the last few months of his life was educational, and the rest of the family has taken care to eat a better diet since then.

  9. Re:Slashdot unusable at work on How a 'Seismic Cloak' Could Slow Down an Earthquake · · Score: 1

    AdBlock rule |http://slashdot.org/*.mp3?*

  10. Re:Blah Blah Blah on Red Team, Blue Team: the Only Woman On the Team · · Score: 1

    Yes. Girls were not allowed to take certain classes. Girls in other male-dominated classes were harassed to the point of having to drop out of the class, thus reinforcing the position that obviously girls just can't do the work. The entire community would make it socially awkward for the parents of a girl taking an interest in "male" occupations. Frequently remarks were made about the only reason a girl would want to go into something like that was to chase the boys. Parents would forbid girls to study or even engage in such activities as a hobby. I was personally told that working with computers was "not something for girls to do", unless I wanted to take typing or data entry classes. My father slapped me when I pointed out that Ada Lovelace was a woman. Not everybody grows up in a liberal, open-minded environment - and I grew up in California. Look at the media. How often is it portrayed that women who are serious about any non-traditional feminine interests are either "butches" or "bitches".

  11. /rdb on Ask Slashdot: Command Line Interfaces -- What Is Out There? · · Score: 2

    /rdb - definitely not free, but a fascinating use of the shell and shell extensions as a database management system. Don't know if it's even still available. The NoSQL developer Carlo Strozzi said that he was inspired by it. Used to be at http://www.rsw.com./ An excellent white paper, "The UNIX Shell As a Fourth Generation Language" describes it, and there was a book too - "Unix Relational Database Management". I used it nearly 20 years ago for a retirement home's database when their DOS/dBase system broke down. Slackware Linux version 1 ran fine on their old PC. In fact, that was my first Linux kernel compilation.

  12. Re:Use public DNS on How One Man Fought His ISP's Bad Behavior and Won · · Score: 1

    Rather amusing. The six top recommended servers were exactly those posted above.

  13. Re:Use public DNS on How One Man Fought His ISP's Bad Behavior and Won · · Score: 1

    Thank you very much! Over the years I have gotten many useful apps and utilities from posts like this.

  14. Re:Use public DNS on How One Man Fought His ISP's Bad Behavior and Won · · Score: 1

    Well that was interesting. I don't know exactly what was going on, but when I changed by router's DNS from the default (ISP-provided) to one of these, there was a startling improvement in initial page load speeds for several sites that I checked.

  15. Learning typing skills on Ask Slashdot: Will You Start Your Kids On Classic Games Or Newer Games? · · Score: 2

    All three of my boys learned to touch-type quite well playing the old Hero's Quest game. So there is definitely some benefit at least to the old text-based games. "Pick up rock" "Throw rock" and the faster you got at typing the better you took out the monsters.

  16. Re:They named a country after a bird? on Prime Minister Wiretapped — Vast Corruption Upending Turkey's Government · · Score: 1

    Actually it is fully named "taregol hodu", meaning Indian chicken. If you can find any country in the world where there isn't rampant corruption and bribery and other shenanigans, I'd like to hear about it. Try reading the Miami news for a while.

  17. Re:Difficult Subject, but here's some advice on Ask Slashdot: Working With Others, As a Schizophrenic Developer? · · Score: 1

    Maybe because I'm a woman who got sick of being abused by men who never matured beyond puberty. I shall hope that you were joking here, but I've had to deal with all too many men who would say such things in all seriousness. Like my father, "that's not something for girls to do" or my school counselors, "you'd be more comfortable taking typing or home economics" - actually girls at that time and place weren't allowed in the woodworking or auto mechanics shop classes and the new "computer" classes, mostly data entry, were kind of iffy - or my first husband, "what do you need something like that for". The owner of the shop where I bought the parts to build my first PC told me to go home and knit booties for my grandchild. Six months later he offered me a job. Since then, I've been working with men - and women - who have respect for my capabilities as if I were a real person instead of a penis accessory.

  18. Re:Difficult Subject, but here's some advice on Ask Slashdot: Working With Others, As a Schizophrenic Developer? · · Score: 4, Informative

    I hired a woman with mental health problems to work in my computer shop. I told her that as far as I was concerned it was no different than if she were diabetic and needed to take medication to control her blood sugar. Unfortunately she did not keep her doctor's appointments, even though I ended up marking them on the shop whiteboard and reminding her, and she did not take her medication regularly. After eight or nine months, and some pretty unhappy clients, I had to let her go. She was very bitter and tried to cause problems. So I can understand why many firms might be reluctant to hire someone with such an issue.

  19. Re:I lost weight the old fashioned way on Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them? · · Score: 1

    I never had a television, but I remember a Beverly Hillbillies episode I saw at my grandparent's house, something about "Doctor Granny", The granny ended up "office-sitting" for a doctor, and told one overweight woman to get some tennis shoes and walk, and another one who had trouble sleeping to get down and scrub her floors. Everyone was horrified, except the two women who found the advice to work.

  20. Re:"three-pronged trailer hitch"? on Man In Tesla Model S Fire Explains What Happened · · Score: 1

    There are "three-point" trailer hitches; they are triangular with two points attached to the towing vehicle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkH4UW2r3ew

  21. Re:Uh oh... on PHP.net Compromised · · Score: 1

    No.

  22. Re:A.k.a shell scripts on Has Flow-Based Programming's Time Arrived? · · Score: 2
  23. Re:The Age of Three on How Data Analytics In Education Could Create a New Class of Haves and Have-nots · · Score: 1

    Indeed. My first two read fluently by the time they were 4 - I read beyond high-school level in the first grade - and aside from attitude problems did quite well in school. The third wasn't able to read, so I put him in a pre-school, which did nothing for him. By the time he was in first grade, the teachers were making snarky remarks about his home environment. Apparently they missed the part about his siblings' abilities, with one of them even in the gifted and talented program. He was finally diagnosed with learning disabilities after two miserable years of fighting the system, after he was also diagnosed with a mild form of epilepsy, and in spite of barely passing most of his elementary and middle school classes and failing the rest, was judged "not disabled enough" to get any special help other than what I could give him. We persevered, and he finally went on to make the Dean's list in a local community college, majoring in accounting of all things, and manages a large health food store's warehouses, while one of his brothers didn't even finish high school and runs a forklift in a Rubbermaid warehouse thanks to his wife's parents' influence, and the other who was in the gifted and talented program ended up flipping pizza dough.

  24. Re:Kink Tut's murderer found... on Court Orders Retrial In Google Maps-Related Murder Case · · Score: 1

    Just don't try it in Texas.

  25. Physical breaches of security on Most Veterans Administration Data Breaches From Paper Documents Not PCs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed. Some years ago I worked in the medical records (excuse me... Health Information Services) department of a clinic with the University of Miami. More than once I saw a doctor leaving the building on his way home with a bag full of medical records. This was quite illegal. And, of course, our department got blamed when the patient came in and his records could not be found.