For the longest time I used an un-cut door on top of two half-height file cabinets. Nice and wide, nice and long, smooth. Perfect. Couple angle brackets against the fall for support.
When I moved, I thought it was time for a new desk, so I went to IKEA and bought some parts for a modular L-shaped desk with some extentions and rounded edges. I swear, I felt like a construction worker bolting that thing together; it was almost too heavy for me to flip over and move into position, and I'm not small.
Tons of surface area, rock-solid STEEL supports under the surface and for the legs. I could not be happier. Desk easily supports three monitors, machines, and keyboards, with plenty of room to move things about when I have to. Plus my "junk". And when I kneel on it to hang something on the wall, it doesn't sag or groan, not even a little.
Anyways, to sum up: lots of surface area + solid construction = ultimate desk. Done and done.
That's where the GNU model is flawed unfortunately.
The GNU model isn't flawed; it does exactly what it sets out to do. That purpose just happens to have nothing at all to do with money, so it's no surprize that it's not conducive to any particular business model.
Lots of guys put trashcans over their dishes at night so dispatch won't bother them while they're sleeping.
Umm... couldn't they just... you know... turn off the radio?
I'm being a smart-ass, but I'm actually curious. I assume they can't and were forced to go the trashcan route, but I really don't know why. Can you not turn off the dispatch radio in most trucks?
But I can't tell if the fact that 3d works is due to my fast cpu or due to hardware accelleration from the video card. My frame rates are definitely much slower than in windows, so I'm unsure.
Do you have nvidia-glx also emerged? The program 'glxgears' will give you framerate info on pure 3D drawing instructions, and there's another program that starts with 'glx' that dumps info; there's a line that tells you if you're using hardware acceleration or not. 'glxinfo', maybe?
I have a mere geForce2 GTS, and my glxgears framerate went from 90fps to like 1500fps after putting in the nvidia-glx emerge.
On my other machine, with a geForce3, I get better framerates in Everquest running on Winex than I do running it on Windows. So, I'm guessing that you don't have hardware acceleration going on if you're seeing a large difference in the two.
With the possible exception of changing "circles filled in for each item" to "circles punched out of the ballot", to make the device a little cheaper, this is exactly correct. To paraphrase the parent... why is this so hard?
Doug
Re:It is Christmas, give them what they REALLY wan
on
Christmas Bonuses?
·
· Score: 1
Good lord. This is borderline brilliant.
With $1500, or even half that, to spend on in-office perks for myself or the office in general, I'd be a seriously happy boy. I can't seem to get optical mice with scroll wheel for my three machines, or a docking station for my laptop for both work and home, or a flatscreen monitor... all would be possible with a little work-related bonus.
Plus, the side bonuses of not losing a bunch to taxes... you get some pretty happy employees while keeping the money in-house. And the whole "not dependant on the bonus next year" thought is so true.
I can see how employees might be a little bitter about not getting any take-home, though. I think a $500 take-home and a $1000 "license to spend" might be a great compromise.
How do you think Linus or R.M.S. would fair against a volume of lawsuits that wouldn't even make Microsoft flinch? How many developers would risk open source development if there was liability involved?
What liability? Liability involves money changing hands. I pay you for a product, I should be reasonably sure it does what you say it does and doesn't cause me all kinds of damage.
Free software has no liability... use it, or don't. If you do, don't come crying to Linus if it doesn't work like you want it to. You didn't pay him, he never told you it would work to any degree... there's no lawsuit there.
Now, companies like RedHat might be a target, because they do charge for certain services and whatnot. If I pay them money to set up my Linux servers or whatever, I should be reasonably sure they're going to work as designed. If the servers release my company secrets to the world, sure, RedHat should get sued.
There's no way the average open source developer will ever be liable for software they write and give away for free. There's just no contract between them and anybody who uses it, implied or otherwise.
Branding just means to associate a name or image with a product. The association is the key, not the quality of the product. It's not even really about advertising, or trying to push more product, except indirectly.
The author of the article just thinks that people should see a certain icon and associate that with Mozilla. Moreover, they should be able to see an icon that they've never seen before, for something else in the "Mozilla Suite", and a) know it's from Mozilla, and b) know what tool it represents.
It has nothing to do with Mozilla being a crappy product and the Mozilla Foundation trying to get more people to use it. It's about making Mozilla easier to use, and making sure that people have a clearly defined image and name to attribute their joy when using these great tools.
Kinda hard to tell on SWG's official community how the real player reactions are given the fact that they closed the official forums off to the public.
Ironically, that's precisley the reason they closed the forums to the public: they didn't feel that somebody reading the forums would get a correct feel for how the majority of people who play the game feel about it.
Instead, they're doing a great thing with the forums: they're inviting players to log in and tell them what's wrong with the game. Not only that, but employees chime in to ask questions and stimulate constructive ideas being formed, which they then take back for discussion internally.
I know, everybody cries "So, we're paying to be beta testers!" No, the game is certainly playable and enjoyable as is; you get your money's worth and more. But the fact that they're keeping the "beta" tradition of accepting feedback alive is a huge win for the players, I think.
They just think that people posting in those forums don't actually represent the majority of the people who play the game, and they're absolutely right. Since they're actually encouraging people to talk at length and specifically about some of the issues in the game, reading what's said there would lead one to believe the game was nothing but an unplayable mess. Which it isn't.
How many bills do you get per month? How much time do you spend dealing with them, when they're all pretty much the same thing, every month? Why write out a check for your car payment every month, the same check for the same amount? Shouldn't "computers" free us of crap like this?
PayTrust handles all that. As the parent mentioned, payment rules means that everything gets scheduled automatically; my involvement in the bill-paying process is reading the email that says "Phone bill for $23 scheduled for payment on the 24th." Cool. Delete. It's a dream come true.
Most people who I describe this to complain about last of control. What lack? If a bill is too large, it should be over your auto-pay max and not be automatically scheduled. If it's in error, call up who sent it and have it fixed. You can see the whole scanned bill on-line, immediately, from a link in the email.
You can also set the payment rules to pay the whole amount of the bill, or the "minimum due" amount, if there is one. And you tell it how many days before the due date to pay it. Maybe you like them all to go out a week before they're due; I have all my lead times adjusted so they all get paid on the day of one of my paychecks.
PayTrust will even start expecting when bills will arrive, and send you a warning email if one doesn't arrive. "You normally get a AAA bill near the 5th of the month, but one didn't come this month. Perhaps you should call them to check on this?" And it provides the information you gave on the the payee right there in the email. If there is no problem, just delete it; if this is out of the blue, pick up the phone and call them.
As with most banks, you can also schedule regular payment for those who don't sent an actual bill every month. Car payment, for example.
I recently spent some time "out of it", going through an emotional period. I made it to work every day, but was in a pretty bad way the rest of the time. However, with direct deposit and PayTrust, I never missed a bill, or even thought twice about it. It truly does make your life easier.
4 - That companies do job postings with no intention of filling them.
I saw this from the inside fairly recently. I was the only guy doing my job, and convinced the Powers That Be that there should be somebody else. A req got signed, a listing went up, we interviewed a few people.
Then the interviews stopped. I asked HR what's up, and they said we were in a hiring freeze. I guess I understand, and mentioned that we should probably take the listing down, then. Oh no... that would imply that the company is doing poorly or somesuch.
So, the listing stayed up, and my contact in HR kept telling me how sad it was, people kept calling interested in the position, and they kept being put off but not told that the req was closed.
Actually, your examples don't answer that question. They answer "Have companies done this is the past?" That's a very different question than if they're allowed to do it.
Anonymous doesn't rule out trust, actually, on Freenet. An anonymous poster can still be identified within the system by their unique ID, although I forget what the freenet name for that is. It's the same way that you know any given freesite is being published by the same person and not being hijacked.
So, if a person started publishing RBLs on freenet, and people checked the data closely and over time they proved to always be sound... wouldn't they gain trust, even if they were only an anonymous ID?
I'm currently on flexible-time my employers requires 7.5hour per day for 5 days a week. I must be in between core hours 9:30 to 4:30...
That's flextime? By my count, that range is seven of your 7.5 hours of daily work. So, you have the choice of getting in between 9 and 9:30, and of leaving between 4:30 and 5? Wow. Dude. Go crazy with that.
You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.
I actually agree with you, but a couple points of interest:
Cars cost 20 or more times what a new computer costs, so the analogy doesn't quite hold.
The average ownership of a car in America lasts just over three years. People do trade in their cars to lease/buy a new one every 3 to 5 years.
With Windows, your choices are FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS.
Is this really the true, final answer? Every phat production Windows server in the world is running NTFS?
I thought NT and/or 2000 was supposed to have some cool modular filesystem layer, with a dev kit and everything, to make developing filesystems easier. Is that not true? If it is true, why has nobody 'ported' some of the better open-source filesystems to Windows?
Maybe I'm giving Windows too much credit, but it seems that those three choices can't be the ONLY ones.
People spend so much time and effort on MMORPGs that they should allow people to actually make a little money.
What?
How does that logically follow? Just because I spend a lot of time and effort on something, somebody should give me money for it?
We get paid money when we perform services or produce goods for other people. Oftentimes that does require a lot of time and effort, sure. But don't mistake the time and effort as the reason we're paid; it's the service or good.
I spend maybe twenty hours per week reading books, maybe ten watching TV, and maybe another twenty playing an MMORPG. I do each of these things for fun; indeed, I actually pay money to be able to indulge in them.
Nobody but myself benefits from me partaking in those activities; therefore, I should not expect to be given any money for doing them.
Okay, this strikes a nerve with me. The parent poster is absolutely correct.
What's with it today with people feeling beholden to their bosses and companies so much? So many of my coworkers explain the very minutia of their personal lives when they have to leave an hour early, or something. Or when the company wipes your machine with XP and tells you to come in on Saturday to make it usable for Monday, they just roll over and do it.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned or something, but I don't play that game. When I have to leave early, I just tell my boss I'm leaving early, I have something I have to do. Once, I was asked what, and I said, "It's a personal matter."
When I was told to come in on Saturday to re-install things on my computer, I told them I was unavailable that weekend to do that, I'll have to deal with it Monday. Nobody asked why I was unavailable, but if they had, the answer would have been, "Well, I'll be busy NOT BEING AT WORK all weekend."
Seriously, people. Your boss doesn't own you. Your WORK doesn't own you. Put in your eight hours a day, and go away. Don't give them your cell phone number, unless they're paying for it, and think carefully before you allow that. Don't feel you have to justify yourself in order to not be at work. Make those eight hours you do put in damn good ones, and you're not in danger of losing your job, and then those eight hours are all they can ask of you.
I disagree with this. My current mouse has a little side-to-side play in the scroll wheel, and when I'm not clicking or scrolling, I rock it back and forth all the time. Sure, I'm not exerting a lot of force, but if the sideways motion is pretty easy to do, it really shouldn't be a problem.
Abstracting life like a game can actually be helpful, since trying to distill the "rules" and come up with ways to cheat them, circumvent them or efficiently obey them can be a fun and rewarding challenge.
This is, in fact, quite deep. This is EXACTLY how rational people should approach life. As another poster wittily noted, what we wouldn't give for a rulebook to this game of life! Finding out the rules, in terms of action and consequence, only makes you a better 'player'. You can play by them wisely, or break them where appropriate, when the gain is large enough.
But without some idea of the rules, you're just flailing about. "Button mashing" may work for Mortal Kombat, but not in life.
I met a girl at a party for a friend of a friend's boyfriend, or something. Turns out she was a big EQ player, and since I had always wanted to try the game, went out and got it that night and played it for a few months.
My point being, the girl was really cute, and I know for a fact that she was playing a girl in EQ. What's the world coming to?
Seraphine (Seraphime? Seraphim?), if you're out there... I'm talking about you. =)
Completely true. I got a job once because during the interview, I was asked about something I didn't know about; I'd never even heard of it. I immediately told the guy that I wasn't familiar with that, and asked what it was similar to. He said he made it up to see how I would respond, and I was hired shortly afterwards.
In all cases, you will gain much respect if you show a) that you know how much you don't know, and b) that you're willing to learn. You'll win jobs, friends, girls, the whole sh-bang. Mark my works.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! Mr Nishi's Trace Buster Buster Buster!
I'm telling you all, The Big Hit is a completely underrated movie.
Doug
Amen, brother!
For the longest time I used an un-cut door on top of two half-height file cabinets. Nice and wide, nice and long, smooth. Perfect. Couple angle brackets against the fall for support.
When I moved, I thought it was time for a new desk, so I went to IKEA and bought some parts for a modular L-shaped desk with some extentions and rounded edges. I swear, I felt like a construction worker bolting that thing together; it was almost too heavy for me to flip over and move into position, and I'm not small.
Tons of surface area, rock-solid STEEL supports under the surface and for the legs. I could not be happier. Desk easily supports three monitors, machines, and keyboards, with plenty of room to move things about when I have to. Plus my "junk". And when I kneel on it to hang something on the wall, it doesn't sag or groan, not even a little.
Anyways, to sum up: lots of surface area + solid construction = ultimate desk. Done and done.
Doug
The GNU model isn't flawed; it does exactly what it sets out to do. That purpose just happens to have nothing at all to do with money, so it's no surprize that it's not conducive to any particular business model.
Doug
Umm... couldn't they just... you know... turn off the radio?
I'm being a smart-ass, but I'm actually curious. I assume they can't and were forced to go the trashcan route, but I really don't know why. Can you not turn off the dispatch radio in most trucks?
Doug
Do you have nvidia-glx also emerged? The program 'glxgears' will give you framerate info on pure 3D drawing instructions, and there's another program that starts with 'glx' that dumps info; there's a line that tells you if you're using hardware acceleration or not. 'glxinfo', maybe?
I have a mere geForce2 GTS, and my glxgears framerate went from 90fps to like 1500fps after putting in the nvidia-glx emerge.
On my other machine, with a geForce3, I get better framerates in Everquest running on Winex than I do running it on Windows. So, I'm guessing that you don't have hardware acceleration going on if you're seeing a large difference in the two.
Doug
With the possible exception of changing "circles filled in for each item" to "circles punched out of the ballot", to make the device a little cheaper, this is exactly correct. To paraphrase the parent... why is this so hard?
Doug
Good lord. This is borderline brilliant.
With $1500, or even half that, to spend on in-office perks for myself or the office in general, I'd be a seriously happy boy. I can't seem to get optical mice with scroll wheel for my three machines, or a docking station for my laptop for both work and home, or a flatscreen monitor... all would be possible with a little work-related bonus.
Plus, the side bonuses of not losing a bunch to taxes... you get some pretty happy employees while keeping the money in-house. And the whole "not dependant on the bonus next year" thought is so true.
I can see how employees might be a little bitter about not getting any take-home, though. I think a $500 take-home and a $1000 "license to spend" might be a great compromise.
Doug
What liability? Liability involves money changing hands. I pay you for a product, I should be reasonably sure it does what you say it does and doesn't cause me all kinds of damage.
Free software has no liability... use it, or don't. If you do, don't come crying to Linus if it doesn't work like you want it to. You didn't pay him, he never told you it would work to any degree... there's no lawsuit there.
Now, companies like RedHat might be a target, because they do charge for certain services and whatnot. If I pay them money to set up my Linux servers or whatever, I should be reasonably sure they're going to work as designed. If the servers release my company secrets to the world, sure, RedHat should get sued.
There's no way the average open source developer will ever be liable for software they write and give away for free. There's just no contract between them and anybody who uses it, implied or otherwise.
Doug
This isn't true at all.
Branding just means to associate a name or image with a product. The association is the key, not the quality of the product. It's not even really about advertising, or trying to push more product, except indirectly.
The author of the article just thinks that people should see a certain icon and associate that with Mozilla. Moreover, they should be able to see an icon that they've never seen before, for something else in the "Mozilla Suite", and a) know it's from Mozilla, and b) know what tool it represents.
It has nothing to do with Mozilla being a crappy product and the Mozilla Foundation trying to get more people to use it. It's about making Mozilla easier to use, and making sure that people have a clearly defined image and name to attribute their joy when using these great tools.
Doug
Eww.
Seriously, people, please dispense with any reference to bodily fluids on keyboards on Slashdot. That's just not right.
Thank you.
Doug
Ironically, that's precisley the reason they closed the forums to the public: they didn't feel that somebody reading the forums would get a correct feel for how the majority of people who play the game feel about it.
Instead, they're doing a great thing with the forums: they're inviting players to log in and tell them what's wrong with the game. Not only that, but employees chime in to ask questions and stimulate constructive ideas being formed, which they then take back for discussion internally.
I know, everybody cries "So, we're paying to be beta testers!" No, the game is certainly playable and enjoyable as is; you get your money's worth and more. But the fact that they're keeping the "beta" tradition of accepting feedback alive is a huge win for the players, I think.
They just think that people posting in those forums don't actually represent the majority of the people who play the game, and they're absolutely right. Since they're actually encouraging people to talk at length and specifically about some of the issues in the game, reading what's said there would lead one to believe the game was nothing but an unplayable mess. Which it isn't.
Doug
PayTrust is the best thing.
How many bills do you get per month? How much time do you spend dealing with them, when they're all pretty much the same thing, every month? Why write out a check for your car payment every month, the same check for the same amount? Shouldn't "computers" free us of crap like this?
PayTrust handles all that. As the parent mentioned, payment rules means that everything gets scheduled automatically; my involvement in the bill-paying process is reading the email that says "Phone bill for $23 scheduled for payment on the 24th." Cool. Delete. It's a dream come true.
Most people who I describe this to complain about last of control. What lack? If a bill is too large, it should be over your auto-pay max and not be automatically scheduled. If it's in error, call up who sent it and have it fixed. You can see the whole scanned bill on-line, immediately, from a link in the email.
You can also set the payment rules to pay the whole amount of the bill, or the "minimum due" amount, if there is one. And you tell it how many days before the due date to pay it. Maybe you like them all to go out a week before they're due; I have all my lead times adjusted so they all get paid on the day of one of my paychecks.
PayTrust will even start expecting when bills will arrive, and send you a warning email if one doesn't arrive. "You normally get a AAA bill near the 5th of the month, but one didn't come this month. Perhaps you should call them to check on this?" And it provides the information you gave on the the payee right there in the email. If there is no problem, just delete it; if this is out of the blue, pick up the phone and call them.
As with most banks, you can also schedule regular payment for those who don't sent an actual bill every month. Car payment, for example.
I recently spent some time "out of it", going through an emotional period. I made it to work every day, but was in a pretty bad way the rest of the time. However, with direct deposit and PayTrust, I never missed a bill, or even thought twice about it. It truly does make your life easier.
Doug
I saw this from the inside fairly recently. I was the only guy doing my job, and convinced the Powers That Be that there should be somebody else. A req got signed, a listing went up, we interviewed a few people.
Then the interviews stopped. I asked HR what's up, and they said we were in a hiring freeze. I guess I understand, and mentioned that we should probably take the listing down, then. Oh no... that would imply that the company is doing poorly or somesuch.
So, the listing stayed up, and my contact in HR kept telling me how sad it was, people kept calling interested in the position, and they kept being put off but not told that the req was closed.
Sucks.
Doug
As opposed to just being moderately unique?
Doug
Actually, your examples don't answer that question. They answer "Have companies done this is the past?" That's a very different question than if they're allowed to do it.
Doug
Anonymous doesn't rule out trust, actually, on Freenet. An anonymous poster can still be identified within the system by their unique ID, although I forget what the freenet name for that is. It's the same way that you know any given freesite is being published by the same person and not being hijacked.
So, if a person started publishing RBLs on freenet, and people checked the data closely and over time they proved to always be sound... wouldn't they gain trust, even if they were only an anonymous ID?
Doug
That's flextime? By my count, that range is seven of your 7.5 hours of daily work. So, you have the choice of getting in between 9 and 9:30, and of leaving between 4:30 and 5? Wow. Dude. Go crazy with that.
Doug
I actually agree with you, but a couple points of interest:
Doug
Is this really the true, final answer? Every phat production Windows server in the world is running NTFS?
I thought NT and/or 2000 was supposed to have some cool modular filesystem layer, with a dev kit and everything, to make developing filesystems easier. Is that not true? If it is true, why has nobody 'ported' some of the better open-source filesystems to Windows?
Maybe I'm giving Windows too much credit, but it seems that those three choices can't be the ONLY ones.
Doug
What?
How does that logically follow? Just because I spend a lot of time and effort on something, somebody should give me money for it?
We get paid money when we perform services or produce goods for other people. Oftentimes that does require a lot of time and effort, sure. But don't mistake the time and effort as the reason we're paid; it's the service or good.
I spend maybe twenty hours per week reading books, maybe ten watching TV, and maybe another twenty playing an MMORPG. I do each of these things for fun; indeed, I actually pay money to be able to indulge in them.
Nobody but myself benefits from me partaking in those activities; therefore, I should not expect to be given any money for doing them.
Doug
Okay, this strikes a nerve with me. The parent poster is absolutely correct.
What's with it today with people feeling beholden to their bosses and companies so much? So many of my coworkers explain the very minutia of their personal lives when they have to leave an hour early, or something. Or when the company wipes your machine with XP and tells you to come in on Saturday to make it usable for Monday, they just roll over and do it.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned or something, but I don't play that game. When I have to leave early, I just tell my boss I'm leaving early, I have something I have to do. Once, I was asked what, and I said, "It's a personal matter."
When I was told to come in on Saturday to re-install things on my computer, I told them I was unavailable that weekend to do that, I'll have to deal with it Monday. Nobody asked why I was unavailable, but if they had, the answer would have been, "Well, I'll be busy NOT BEING AT WORK all weekend."
Seriously, people. Your boss doesn't own you. Your WORK doesn't own you. Put in your eight hours a day, and go away. Don't give them your cell phone number, unless they're paying for it, and think carefully before you allow that. Don't feel you have to justify yourself in order to not be at work. Make those eight hours you do put in damn good ones, and you're not in danger of losing your job, and then those eight hours are all they can ask of you.
Doug
I disagree with this. My current mouse has a little side-to-side play in the scroll wheel, and when I'm not clicking or scrolling, I rock it back and forth all the time. Sure, I'm not exerting a lot of force, but if the sideways motion is pretty easy to do, it really shouldn't be a problem.
Doug
This is, in fact, quite deep. This is EXACTLY how rational people should approach life. As another poster wittily noted, what we wouldn't give for a rulebook to this game of life! Finding out the rules, in terms of action and consequence, only makes you a better 'player'. You can play by them wisely, or break them where appropriate, when the gain is large enough.
But without some idea of the rules, you're just flailing about. "Button mashing" may work for Mortal Kombat, but not in life.
Doug
I met a girl at a party for a friend of a friend's boyfriend, or something. Turns out she was a big EQ player, and since I had always wanted to try the game, went out and got it that night and played it for a few months.
My point being, the girl was really cute, and I know for a fact that she was playing a girl in EQ. What's the world coming to?
Seraphine (Seraphime? Seraphim?), if you're out there... I'm talking about you. =)
Doug
Completely true. I got a job once because during the interview, I was asked about something I didn't know about; I'd never even heard of it. I immediately told the guy that I wasn't familiar with that, and asked what it was similar to. He said he made it up to see how I would respond, and I was hired shortly afterwards.
In all cases, you will gain much respect if you show a) that you know how much you don't know, and b) that you're willing to learn. You'll win jobs, friends, girls, the whole sh-bang. Mark my works.
Doug