In the current Afghanistan hooha, I've found Dawn (the biggest English-language newspaper in Pakistan) to be excellent. Don't miss the editorials -- what you read here is *not* what you're getting from the US media. Take a look at America Under Siege for an example.
It was used a couple of times in anti-Vietnam war rallies/riots (definitions depend on who you talk to). The rally/riot organizers loathed it -- it turned their nice focused, angry gathering into a party. The stuff is fun.
As the font controls: Changing a font can change how much space a whole block of text takes up, which can fuck up a whole layout. Flash isnt meant for that kind of user control! If the user had control of fonts, it would defeat a lot of the benefits of using flash. (like absolute platform independent control of how your content is gonna look)
Fonts in Flash are irrelevant -- Flash is for illiterates.
Don't believe me? Then why does *every* Flash page I've ever seen have the text in an unreadably tiny, sans-serif font?
Interesting. Thanks for posting an example instead of just pontificating.
Unfortunately, all the examples that they gave come out in about 3 point type. Of course, since it's Flash and not HTML, there's no way to change the type size except by changing the screen resolution. Not worth it.
Hmm. I went back to look at it again and got nothing but a blue rectangle.
Something needs some work. Whether it's that Web page or Flash itself, I don't know. I rather suspect both.
if you have good content, then it look s a hell of a lot better in Flash than it does in a single page of text.
I'm intrigued by this comment. How would Flash improve, say, Slashdot? Slashdot is essentially pages of text, with small, simple graphics.
What would you add? Besides 250KB - 500KB per page of overhead, that is. Animations? Distracts from the text. Better linking? How? Typefaces? I like my defaults, thankyouverymuch. Splash pages? Yeah, I really need a movie at each new page. Programmability? Not in Flash, you don't.
Perhaps you could take something simple like, say, an RFC and do a Flash version to show us how it's better?
AOL could get all the functionality they need with a minimal custom distro and a few extra apps. Take a dozen programmers about six months, for a total cost of about 0.1% of the cost of Red Hat. They also wouldn't have to worry about all the good folks at Red Hat jumping ship.
Biggest problem would be getting it to play nice with Windows. Perhaps they should buy VMWare instead?
Unfortunately, the Big Shots know a lot about how to take over companies, and very little about technical matters.
This is beyond "trying to have a baby in one month". This is more like putting 5900 women in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
No, it's like putting 5900 men in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
Microsoft has consistantly demonstrated a very deep level of cluelessnes in security matters. First, they have to convince their people why security matters. Then they have to figure out how to make code secure, in general. Then they have to rewrite (or at least audit) their entire code base.
About four years ago, I did some network consulting for some folks at the BIA. One of the issues that they were having was (surprise!) security. I made the usual suggestions (firewalls *here*, VPNs *there*, etc, etc).
Guy I was talking to said that this was the kind of stuff that they were trying to do -- but official Department of the Interior security policy was something to the effect of "The people of the United States have paid for all the data on this network. Therefore, any security at all is contrary to our mission. There will be no security." Apparently, this was their reaction to the fact that nobody had any idea exactly what data they had or where it was stored. They didn't want to hear about the BIA's "sensitive" data.
Sheesh!
Note also that the BIA data contains not only the financial and land ownership data, but also extensive medical and genealogical data.
Good riddance. Now, hopefully, they can go back and do it right. Probably, though, they'll just buy a decision from a higher court, or slap a "secure" sticker on the boxes and call them secure.
"Piracy" is a convienient excuse for the record companies when their latest crap album doesn't sell. "Ooh. Piracy".
Watch. When their crap music still doesn't sell when it's copy protected, "Ooh. Evil Hackers broke our copy protection."
Exactly the same thing happened with copy protected floppies for games. Game doesn't sell? Blame it on "pirates".
The real "pirates" run CD factories in East Asia or Central America and make CDs indistinguishable from the originals, 10,000 at a time. "Copy protection" won't even slow those guys down.
Last time I priced CDs in quantity, they were $0.35 each. Perhaps if the record companies charged a fair price for the disks?
The real issue here is, how should authors of creative works be compensated ?
No. The real issue is "how should the owners of creative works be compensated?". Music nowadays (at least for the big labels) is "work for hire". The musicians have no ownership rights to the music. Anything that goes to the creators is a matter of contract negotiations, and, I suspect, creative accounting. (The average musician is no more an accountant than the average accountant is a musician.)
None of the money that you pay for a CD goes directly to the musicians. (Unless, of course, you listen to indie bands, like sensible people.) It goes to the label, who determines how much the band gets.
What's the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one.
The author is assuming that, if the users weren't "stealing" (rhetoric 101: apply perjorative terms to things you don't like) bandwidth, they would be buying it for whatever the seller cares to charge. Doesn't work that way. There are many things that I get free (the vast majority of Webpages I look at, for instance) that I wouldn't be willing to pay anything at all for.
And certainly, no one had fully imagined that the resources shared by a single, wirelessly-networked residence would also be shared among other devices, at other residences, within 300 feet.
This is simply a failure of market research. The cable providers assumed that the "typical" user would look at graphics-heavy news sites (cnn.com or suchlike) and send a bit of e-mail, and that would be it. When the "typical" household has Mom watching movie trailers, Dad looking at pr0n, and the kids swapping MP3s, it's no wonder that the pipe gets jammed. Instead of saying "Oops!" and figuring out how to deal with it, they want to go back and cram the usage pattern into their marketing model.
Basically, the whole thing is a marketing error, compounded by abysmal ignorance of things Internet on the part of the cable providers. There are any number of technical fixes that don't involve dealing with anything behind the firewall. Unfortunately, this is "too much like work" for the cable providers.
... for the SOAP protocol is that Microsoft's ActiveX services use a portmapper to get dynamic port numbers for their services. Needless to say, this is absolute hell to try to run through a firewall with anything resembling security.
Hence SOAP. You piggyback your ActiveX control onto another service (HTTP) that uses a single port. Smart admins will use something other than port 80; we know how many of *those* there are.
There is also the problem that firewall admins tend to take their job seriously -- they know that if anything nasty gets into the network, they'll get blamed for it. They tend to be *very* conservitave. Web admins don't -- most of them think that the worst that can happen if they get hacked is that they'll get pitchers of nekkid wimmen on the corporate homepage. They don't care. *Much* easier to deal with web admins than firewall admins. Lotsa places will even let you have your own web server if you promise to be nice.
1. The "locked down" machine is used only for e-mail, memo writing, and other such administriva. Real development is done only on a separate "development" machine, for which the IT department takes no responsibility.
Let's face it. If you're doing something wonky, you don't want to wipe out your main machine. Reloading a development machine from local backups is something that most of us get real good at....
If you're developing embedded code, you'll have to do this anyway.
2. Your definition of "development" is limited. You write the code, maybe write little unit test programs, and then pass it off to the "integration and test" department. They get to build install programs and such.
It'll work, if you have a very rigidly defined design and everybody sticks religiously to the defined APIs. This is the "software factory" approach. Fine, if you're working on a well- understood, well- specified problem, and everybody is working well within their area of expertise.
Note that at best, this just moves the lockdown problem to another group.
3. You're not developing "real programs". If you're doing, say, Perl scripts, then you might get around the restrictions by claiming that they're "only data".
Anyway, Bad Idea in general. I'll bet we all have our favorite "ditzy little utilities" that we carry around with us. IT can be very rude about such things....
the DMCA... would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself.
EXCUSE ME?
He releases software under the GPL, right? And the most respected people in the field have said that the GPL is Evil and will destroy the whole field and will pollute our Precious Bodily Fluids, right?
He'll be a "legitimate programmer" just as soon as the FSF hands out as many bribes^Wcampaign contributions as Microsoft.
While we're at it, why don't we just make breathing a felony, punishible by up to life in prison? After all, it would only be used against Bad Guys, and save a lot of money on paperwork.
And my pet peeve: No unsigned data types. Java is completely useless as a system programming language without them.
Java is completely useless as a systems programming language anyway. So is any other language that depends on heap-allocated data structures. (Assumig compiled code. "Systems programming" with a virtual machine is a contradiction in terms.)
Systems programming depends on having deterministic runtime. "new" and "free" type operations are simply not deterministic. Their execution time depends on what else is going on at the time.
A bit of definition -- device drivers are "systems programs". Mailer daemons are not "systems programs", they're background applications.
Seriously, what advantage does internet faxing have over email? Email is fast and open-ended. It can handle any type of file format. It can be secured, tracked, provides return reciept
Thought experiment -- I have a paper that you have to sign and return to me. There are three ways to do it:
Snail mail: I mail it to you; your sign it and send it back. Simple. Takes the better part of a week unless we're talking international. All bets are off then.
FAX: I stuff it in the FAX. You sign it and FAX it right back. If you are waiting for it, the elapsed time is measured in minutes, even if it's international.
E-mail: If it's in a format that you can edit, and if you have a digitized copy of your signature, you can simply paste it in. If not, you have to print it out (sorry about that 400 page manual in the queue), sign it, scan it (be sure to check that the scanned version is readable), and mail the file back. Hope you're not on a slow dialup line; those image files can get big.
The signature problem is why I'm going out later to buy a new FAX machine. There's this client on the other side of the Atlantic....
PS -- Secured I'll give you (but just try to get a non-techie to use PGP!). Tracked and return receipt? Only using proprietary extensions that do not work as required. (ie, you can refuse to send a receipt). But then, you have none of the above with a FAX anyway.
I have had to deal with dozens of binary protocols that do the same thing as ASN.1, and do it worse.
As to comparisons, XML and ASN.1 are designed for different jobs. Designing a Web page in ASN.1 would be ridiculous. Sending (say) telemetry data encoded in XML is equally ridiculous. I can believe that *data* transmissions could be 100 times larger in XML than in ASN.1. You have the header, DTD, some namespace delcarations, and a bunch of nested tags, just to express a couple of numbers.
Problem is, XML is one of the latest forms of fairy dust that Management has latched onto. "Sprinkle this on your project and it will fly!" So programs have XML grafted onto them anywhere it might fit.
A particularly cute example is SOAP (Microsoft's firewall-bypass protocol) It's going to be fun to watch people try to squeeze some performance out of a SOAP based system that tries to do something interactive.
As to the ISO, yeah, they're seriously obnoxious. They tend to go off into their own little world, redefine standard terminology so they're incomprehensible to outsiders, and come up with stuff that can't be implemented. (Nobody uses ASN.1 -- it's unimplementable. When people talk about using ASN.1 for something real, they're talking about a subset. A subset, of course, cannot claim conformance to the standard.) The crowning insult, of course, is that they fund the organization by selling the standards. Hey, it's a standard -- you *have* to buy it!
"It's all in knowing what wrench to use to pound in the screw."
management is perfect. Makes sense from their viewpoint -- their customers are managers.
HOWEVER:
1. High level techies are difficult people. This is a fact of life. Get used to it. If you can't manage difficult people, get out of the tech field and get into banking, insurance, or some other nice boring industry that values conformance over performance.
2. Did any of the managers in their little stories *tell* their prima donnas how much they were valued? Only one they mentioned was the "turnaround" story....
3. Threatening techies with losing their job is, in many cases, the *last* thing you want to do. The ones you really can't replace will start sending out resumes and the ones you'd really like to get rid of will start digging in.
4. You have to make sure the right person is in the right job. In particular, some people are just not natural team players. If you try to make them "work with the team", you won't accomplish anything and you'll just make everybody miserable. Also, some people simply shouldn't be allowed around customers or brass.
5. Take a good look at *why* some people are ignoring the rules. Fixed hours (ususlly starting at an ungodly hour of the morning), dress codes (neckties are actively hazardous in machine rooms), endless meetings that consist of mostly pep talks, and suchlike are simply made to be ignored. Make sure your rules make sense from some angle other than "policy".
6. If a person really doesn't fit in, you have to decide if they are really worth that much. Is it worth losing the rest of your staff to keep your prima donna? Also, there are some things that simply can't be tolerated -- theft and assult come to mind. If you can't fire somebody, it's time to get out of management.
7. Above all, no matter how much management may bluster and threaten, nine men can't make a baby in a month. Remember this the next time somebody tries to sell you on replacing your prima donnas with a flock of H1Bs.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
Reason: depending on who you believe, somewhere between $1.6e6 and $6e6 in campaign contributions. Considerably more than Enron.
Remember the Golden Rule. The antitrust case against Microsoft is dead.
In the current Afghanistan hooha, I've found Dawn (the biggest English-language newspaper in Pakistan) to be excellent. Don't miss the editorials -- what you read here is *not* what you're getting from the US media. Take a look at America Under Siege for an example.
"Instant banana peel" has been around since 1972.
It was used a couple of times in anti-Vietnam war rallies/riots (definitions depend on who you talk to). The rally/riot organizers loathed it -- it turned their nice focused, angry gathering into a party. The stuff is fun.
As the font controls: Changing a font can change how much space a whole block of text takes up, which can fuck up a whole layout. Flash isnt meant for that kind of user control! If the user had control of fonts, it would defeat a lot of the benefits of using flash. (like absolute platform independent control of how your content is gonna look)
Fonts in Flash are irrelevant -- Flash is for illiterates.
Don't believe me? Then why does *every* Flash page I've ever seen have the text in an unreadably tiny, sans-serif font?
Interesting. Thanks for posting an example instead of just pontificating.
Unfortunately, all the examples that they gave come out in about 3 point type. Of course, since it's Flash and not HTML, there's no way to change the type size except by changing the screen resolution. Not worth it.
Hmm. I went back to look at it again and got nothing but a blue rectangle.
Something needs some work. Whether it's that Web page or Flash itself, I don't know. I rather suspect both.
if you have good content, then it look s a hell of a lot better in Flash than it does in a single page of text.
I'm intrigued by this comment. How would Flash improve, say, Slashdot? Slashdot is essentially pages of text, with small, simple graphics.
What would you add? Besides 250KB - 500KB per page of overhead, that is. Animations? Distracts from the text. Better linking? How? Typefaces? I like my defaults, thankyouverymuch. Splash pages? Yeah, I really need a movie at each new page. Programmability? Not in Flash, you don't.
Perhaps you could take something simple like, say, an RFC and do a Flash version to show us how it's better?
I assume you cleared out your desk, and then announced that you were available as a consultant? At, of course, three times your salary?
They're gonna get somebody new to write a custom protocol implementation in three weeks? Yeah, right.
Been there, done that, no fun.
Don't forget the telepathic interface and the DWIM (Do What I Mean) debugger.
Red Hat's market capatalization is about $1.45e9.
AOL could get all the functionality they need with a minimal custom distro and a few extra apps. Take a dozen programmers about six months, for a total cost of about 0.1% of the cost of Red Hat. They also wouldn't have to worry about all the good folks at Red Hat jumping ship.
Biggest problem would be getting it to play nice with Windows. Perhaps they should buy VMWare instead?
Unfortunately, the Big Shots know a lot about how to take over companies, and very little about technical matters.
This is beyond "trying to have a baby in one month". This is more like putting 5900 women in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
No, it's like putting 5900 men in a room and trying to get a baby in one hour.
Microsoft has consistantly demonstrated a very deep level of cluelessnes in security matters. First, they have to convince their people why security matters. Then they have to figure out how to make code secure, in general. Then they have to rewrite (or at least audit) their entire code base.
I'm not holding my breath.
Excuse me?
These have all been making money for years.
"But", you say, "The quality deteriorates with these copy methods."
Franlky, consumers don't care squat about audio or video quality. This little fact is what killed Betamax and laser disks, and will soon kill HDTV.
I invesigated Comcast cable a while back, as I'm out of range for DSL. Their terms of service were, in a word, unacceptable.
I suspect that you could get away with practically anything as long as nobody complained and you didn't generate too much traffic.
Oh, as to their "business solution"? DSL. Not an option. Near as I can tell, there is no such thing as "business class cable" Internet.
No high-speed internet for me. Sigh.
About four years ago, I did some network consulting for some folks at the BIA. One of the issues that they were having was (surprise!) security. I made the usual suggestions (firewalls *here*, VPNs *there*, etc, etc).
Guy I was talking to said that this was the kind of stuff that they were trying to do -- but official Department of the Interior security policy was something to the effect of "The people of the United States have paid for all the data on this network. Therefore, any security at all is contrary to our mission. There will be no security." Apparently, this was their reaction to the fact that nobody had any idea exactly what data they had or where it was stored. They didn't want to hear about the BIA's "sensitive" data.
Sheesh!
Note also that the BIA data contains not only the financial and land ownership data, but also extensive medical and genealogical data.
Good riddance. Now, hopefully, they can go back and do it right. Probably, though, they'll just buy a decision from a higher court, or slap a "secure" sticker on the boxes and call them secure.
"Piracy" is a convienient excuse for the record companies when their latest crap album doesn't sell. "Ooh. Piracy".
Watch. When their crap music still doesn't sell when it's copy protected, "Ooh. Evil Hackers broke our copy protection."
Exactly the same thing happened with copy protected floppies for games. Game doesn't sell? Blame it on "pirates".
The real "pirates" run CD factories in East Asia or Central America and make CDs indistinguishable from the originals, 10,000 at a time. "Copy protection" won't even slow those guys down.
Last time I priced CDs in quantity, they were $0.35 each. Perhaps if the record companies charged a fair price for the disks?
The real issue here is, how should authors of creative works be compensated ?
No. The real issue is "how should the owners of creative works be compensated?". Music nowadays (at least for the big labels) is "work for hire". The musicians have no ownership rights to the music. Anything that goes to the creators is a matter of contract negotiations, and, I suspect, creative accounting. (The average musician is no more an accountant than the average accountant is a musician.)
None of the money that you pay for a CD goes directly to the musicians. (Unless, of course, you listen to indie bands, like sensible people.) It goes to the label, who determines how much the band gets.
Bingo!! Give the man a C-gar!
The academic stuff that I've seen, in addition to what AC says above:
Note to academics:
What's the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one.
The author is assuming that, if the users weren't "stealing" (rhetoric 101: apply perjorative terms to things you don't like) bandwidth, they would be buying it for whatever the seller cares to charge. Doesn't work that way. There are many things that I get free (the vast majority of Webpages I look at, for instance) that I wouldn't be willing to pay anything at all for.
And certainly, no one had fully imagined that the resources shared by a single, wirelessly-networked residence would also be shared among other devices, at other residences, within 300 feet.
This is simply a failure of market research. The cable providers assumed that the "typical" user would look at graphics-heavy news sites (cnn.com or suchlike) and send a bit of e-mail, and that would be it. When the "typical" household has Mom watching movie trailers, Dad looking at pr0n, and the kids swapping MP3s, it's no wonder that the pipe gets jammed. Instead of saying "Oops!" and figuring out how to deal with it, they want to go back and cram the usage pattern into their marketing model.
Basically, the whole thing is a marketing error, compounded by abysmal ignorance of things Internet on the part of the cable providers. There are any number of technical fixes that don't involve dealing with anything behind the firewall. Unfortunately, this is "too much like work" for the cable providers.
... for the SOAP protocol is that Microsoft's ActiveX services use a portmapper to get dynamic port numbers for their services. Needless to say, this is absolute hell to try to run through a firewall with anything resembling security.
Hence SOAP. You piggyback your ActiveX control onto another service (HTTP) that uses a single port. Smart admins will use something other than port 80; we know how many of *those* there are.
There is also the problem that firewall admins tend to take their job seriously -- they know that if anything nasty gets into the network, they'll get blamed for it. They tend to be *very* conservitave. Web admins don't -- most of them think that the worst that can happen if they get hacked is that they'll get pitchers of nekkid wimmen on the corporate homepage. They don't care. *Much* easier to deal with web admins than firewall admins. Lotsa places will even let you have your own web server if you promise to be nice.
As to what it can lead to, check out RFC 3093, Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP)
you do one of he following:
....
....
1. The "locked down" machine is used only for e-mail, memo writing, and other such administriva. Real development is done only on a separate "development" machine, for which the IT department takes no responsibility.
Let's face it. If you're doing something wonky, you don't want to wipe out your main machine. Reloading a development machine from local backups is something that most of us get real good at
If you're developing embedded code, you'll have to do this anyway.
2. Your definition of "development" is limited. You write the code, maybe write little unit test programs, and then pass it off to the "integration and test" department. They get to build install programs and such.
It'll work, if you have a very rigidly defined design and everybody sticks religiously to the defined APIs. This is the "software factory" approach. Fine, if you're working on a well- understood, well- specified problem, and everybody is working well within their area of expertise.
Note that at best, this just moves the lockdown problem to another group.
3. You're not developing "real programs". If you're doing, say, Perl scripts, then you might get around the restrictions by claiming that they're "only data".
Anyway, Bad Idea in general. I'll bet we all have our favorite "ditzy little utilities" that we carry around with us. IT can be very rude about such things
the DMCA ... would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself.
EXCUSE ME?
He releases software under the GPL, right? And the most respected people in the field have said that the GPL is Evil and will destroy the whole field and will pollute our Precious Bodily Fluids, right?
He'll be a "legitimate programmer" just as soon as the FSF hands out as many bribes^Wcampaign contributions as Microsoft.
While we're at it, why don't we just make breathing a felony, punishible by up to life in prison? After all, it would only be used against Bad Guys, and save a lot of money on paperwork.
Java is completely useless as a systems programming language anyway. So is any other language that depends on heap-allocated data structures. (Assumig compiled code. "Systems programming" with a virtual machine is a contradiction in terms.)
Systems programming depends on having deterministic runtime. "new" and "free" type operations are simply not deterministic. Their execution time depends on what else is going on at the time.
A bit of definition -- device drivers are "systems programs". Mailer daemons are not "systems programs", they're background applications.
Seriously, what advantage does internet faxing have over email? Email is fast and open-ended. It can handle any type of file format. It can be secured, tracked, provides return reciept
Thought experiment -- I have a paper that you have to sign and return to me. There are three ways to do it:
The signature problem is why I'm going out later to buy a new FAX machine. There's this client on the other side of the Atlantic ....
PS -- Secured I'll give you (but just try to get a non-techie to use PGP!). Tracked and return receipt? Only using proprietary extensions that do not work as required. (ie, you can refuse to send a receipt). But then, you have none of the above with a FAX anyway.
are condemned to repeat it. Badly.
I have had to deal with dozens of binary protocols that do the same thing as ASN.1, and do it worse.
As to comparisons, XML and ASN.1 are designed for different jobs. Designing a Web page in ASN.1 would be ridiculous. Sending (say) telemetry data encoded in XML is equally ridiculous. I can believe that *data* transmissions could be 100 times larger in XML than in ASN.1. You have the header, DTD, some namespace delcarations, and a bunch of nested tags, just to express a couple of numbers.
Problem is, XML is one of the latest forms of fairy dust that Management has latched onto. "Sprinkle this on your project and it will fly!" So programs have XML grafted onto them anywhere it might fit.
A particularly cute example is SOAP (Microsoft's firewall-bypass protocol) It's going to be fun to watch people try to squeeze some performance out of a SOAP based system that tries to do something interactive.
As to the ISO, yeah, they're seriously obnoxious. They tend to go off into their own little world, redefine standard terminology so they're incomprehensible to outsiders, and come up with stuff that can't be implemented. (Nobody uses ASN.1 -- it's unimplementable. When people talk about using ASN.1 for something real, they're talking about a subset. A subset, of course, cannot claim conformance to the standard.) The crowning insult, of course, is that they fund the organization by selling the standards. Hey, it's a standard -- you *have* to buy it!
"It's all in knowing what wrench to use to pound in the screw."
management is perfect. Makes sense from their viewpoint -- their customers are managers.
....
HOWEVER:
1. High level techies are difficult people. This is a fact of life. Get used to it. If you can't manage difficult people, get out of the tech field and get into banking, insurance, or some other nice boring industry that values conformance over performance.
2. Did any of the managers in their little stories *tell* their prima donnas how much they were valued? Only one they mentioned was the "turnaround" story
3. Threatening techies with losing their job is, in many cases, the *last* thing you want to do. The ones you really can't replace will start sending out resumes and the ones you'd really like to get rid of will start digging in.
4. You have to make sure the right person is in the right job. In particular, some people are just not natural team players. If you try to make them "work with the team", you won't accomplish anything and you'll just make everybody miserable. Also, some people simply shouldn't be allowed around customers or brass.
5. Take a good look at *why* some people are ignoring the rules. Fixed hours (ususlly starting at an ungodly hour of the morning), dress codes (neckties are actively hazardous in machine rooms), endless meetings that consist of mostly pep talks, and suchlike are simply made to be ignored. Make sure your rules make sense from some angle other than "policy".
6. If a person really doesn't fit in, you have to decide if they are really worth that much. Is it worth losing the rest of your staff to keep your prima donna? Also, there are some things that simply can't be tolerated -- theft and assult come to mind. If you can't fire somebody, it's time to get out of management.
7. Above all, no matter how much management may bluster and threaten, nine men can't make a baby in a month. Remember this the next time somebody tries to sell you on replacing your prima donnas with a flock of H1Bs.
--