From where I watch (Canada,) a large number of voters in the US seem to be single-issue voters; voting for the candidate who agrees with their view on: polarizing issues snipped
Mod parent up!!!
This is exactly what happened in the election, because other than these hot-button issues the candidates were very similar. They both (and both parties too) were trying to boast about how they support the poor, respect the middle class, how both were tough on terrorism, how they saw taxes as a burden on regular folk, etc, etc. For me personally (a US citizen), it was less a decision based on the candidate and more a decision of what party ideology I believed in more, tax-n-spend liberalism or elimination of civil liberties and corporate cronyism. Hmm...looks like lesser of two evils decision there too.
Besides, who could really be genuinely enthusiastic about FrankenKerry or What-me-worry Alfred E. Bush-man?:-)
Every man is born with a conscience and it is his responsibility to use it. If you choose to participate in an unjust war, you are a murderer plain and simple and not any different than any other armed thug.
I'm sure many would like to believe this, but when one is in the military, a legal order must be followed regardless of one's conscience; if one doesn't like the rules, one should not join.
IANAL, but there are very few reasons why an order can be illegal, possible examples could be orders that violate the Geneva Conventions, involve gross mistreatment of people, or are illegal as defined in the UCMJ.
"Participation in an unjust war" is not an exception for disobeying an order; further it is doubtful that quoting Thoreau will reduce one's sentence at the Court Martial which will certainly be convened, but it can be a reason to request being granted Consciencous Objector status.
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/militarylaw1/a/obey ingorders.htm
In spam kings stories like these, AOL always seems to come up as the spammers favourite target.
AOL really needs to get serious about their spam problem.
Although it's bad practice, I'll feed the troll anyway. Lets make the math easy and approximate some values: with over 20 million subscribers each paying $20 per month, AOL has kajillions at it's disposal. Presumably they could afford to have a larger group than your local ISP to do proper investigations in conjunction with "the proper authorities."
A bunch of Ford models have engines that come in a Flex-fuel version. My '03 Taurus will run on "E85", which is 85% ethanol 15% gasoline. But it doesn't help me much, have you ever seen a gas station advertising E85?? No states in Northeastern US have one (DE, NJ and NY and up), nor Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, or Hawaii. And for instance, in Florida, there is one at Kennedy Space Center, but security probably won't look too kindly at driving up in your Crown Vic to fill up!
Hey, wasn't trying to be mean, I was just going for the joke! Your followup is interesting, the neighborhood service sounds great, cheap internet would be nice. I imaging with 200 people on 4Mbps the response can be pretty slow at times, but still must be faster and more stable than dial-up. My city has both cable and DSL service, but even with the competition the cheapest you can get high-speed is US$30/mo + $5 tax with a 1-year commitment.
Glad to hear the RIAA is getting screwed too, takes a little sting out of all the lawsuits and profiteering they're doing in the US.
Morals and values are great and when don't conflict with survival, or reasonable living conditions, are okay to stand up for....Feeding yourself and your family should take priority over most(all?) beliefs.
Too true! In their 20s, people are all idealistic, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But that same person when they hit their 30s don't really give a sh*t because they've got to get to work on time because their boss is a big pain in the ass and their son is acting up at school and their older daughter is starting to take an interest in boys and their spouse is starting to get bored with their marriage and they have to put two kids thru college with no savings yet and their 401k has tanked and with it any hope of retiring early and the cable bill just went up and their computer is not working so it needs be rebult and... and....
But I still can't figure out why 30-somethings are bitter and disillusioned:-)
lso, my admin-roommate has capped our upward transfer (256 kb/s) at 31 kB/s (not sure why exactly, he said something about transfers being much more stable this way).
Making transfers more stable? Ha-ha, good one, your roomate deserves the FUD award! Assuming you meant k-little-b for both, ore likely he wants to reserve some up bandwidth so his pr0n BitTorrent downloads are not impacted by your surfing:-P
So, some BOFH, overwhelmed by the prospect of repairing the power system, chose another path. He walked over to a failing UPS and simply turned it off. He was the only one with the access to turn it back on, so he had no reason to worry.
Which illustrates an axiom I've seen too many times (and occasionally facilitated), that sometimes things have to completely and utterly fail before they will get attention needed to be fixed. A perfect example: There is a system with a database with tons of bad data, or buggy web code, or flaky server, etc. But, because of your daily support, to the users it works well and they always question the need to spend money on a system that works for them. Is there a formal/Dilbert-ian name for this?
I guess this is a corollary to the observation that the better you support your users, the less they will do for themselves.
I think that this is exactly the parent's point, that techies don't know how to relate to "regular people." For instance, with men the biggest single area of common interest seems to be sports, yet it's not mentioned at all in your conversation starters. I love sitting down and watching a good (American) football game or even Cricket. But for me, there are a lot more interesting things to do than to read the sports section daily or to memorize stats like how the Yankees pitching staff does against lefty batters or by how many points the AFC has beaten the NFC in the superbowl. The only reason I even think about these things is to have conversation starters with people who don't/won't talk about AMD vs Intel, the latest MAME release, why Linux will/won't take over the desktop, or my latest microcontroller project. Superbowl? Yeah, I'll watch it intently and really enjoy it, but after a month I'll forget the final score and I'll forget at least one team that played in time for Superbowl XLI.
Now, f*cking with people while your talking sounds fun and shows a degree of sophistication in your knowledge and analysis of the meta-level of a conversation, which most people are not even aware of, but you gotta admit that it may not be the best strategy to "win friends and influence people" in social situations!
Dear Ask Slashdot: I am currently an Agnostic, but I've read a lot about this "Jesus" thing on the internet and it sounds really cool!! Although I don't plan to now, I would like the option to sin, and I would prefer something that keeps my weekends free because I really like to sleep in. I've read a little bit about Catholicism and it seems interesting, and I've looked at Judiasm, but I think I would have a problem fasting for a whole day even though eight days of gifs would be neat. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction!
====
Will we actually see this on Ask Slashdot? Well, why not have a real religious argument, that would probably be less controversial than what IDE to choose!!
Well, as long as your boss doesn't say anything about it... besides, you can always get your coworkers ear plugs.
Personally, I don't think the Model:M is that loud-- but maybe I'm ust used to it.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I'd been using my M at work for a few months and decided to try something new, so I was bringing it back home. Well, on my way out one of my coworkers said "thank god you're getting rid of that damn thing, it was so loud." No time like the present, Dumbass.
An hour to create a bug-tracking db in Access? yeah right. Even with the overly-optimistic estimates (you must be a coder!), it's 45 minutes longer than an Excel solution would take. Poop on Microsoft stuff all you want, but sometimes the best tool for the job is a sucky but easy-to-use one. Excel works particularly well when (only when?) one developer is changing data.
Short and sweet: If in Windows, use Excel for bug tracking. It's quick and easy, no installation required (except for the app), features can be added if needed, and nobody has to know about it.
For version control, you can't beat subversion, it can be set up in about 15-30 minutes in Unix, Linux, or Windows, and it's dead easy to use.
Are there better tools? Sure, but none are this simple, and when your (short-sighted) boss gets on your case, you can honestly tell him it took only 30 minutes to set up.
Unbelievable! They're slow for fraud, but God forbid you have something that may possibly be infringing. They're faster than stink on shit when companies want your listings stopped that allegedly violate their VeRO program. I can see when a craft, for instance, has wording 'Just like Transformers' or "Similar to ", but some companies hound you for a mention like 'compatible with xyz'.
But, maybe like the Government (both Legislative and Executve branches!), they do what Big Business wants, regardless of what is important to Joe Consumer.
I just resigned from work also. I put in my 2 weeks and kept working as usual up until the end. And the day I left, they already started talking bad about me to all other employees.
When I resigned from my last job, I gave less than 2 weeks notice, last day was Wednesday instead of Friday. At the time, my manager said that he was not happy about it but was still "OK" with it. I come to find out later that he was incredibly pissed off about those two lousy stinking days. And, since I knew I was leaving ahead of time (just waiting for a bonus to be paid), I was already working on cleanup and the other crap one does when leaving, which I pointed out as well.
The point? Not much except that no matter how hard you try, some people will find something to be angry about.
This has happened to me before. I dont understand it. But it always seems that employers want to make you look like the bad guy for leaving.
Come on, this one's easy, it's "shoot the messenger"! By blaming you, they send the message that the reason for the departure is with the employee. To not blame you would be to admit that they were the part of the reason for your departure.
For me, the lack of a good RPG (Oblivion), the fact that I already own a reasonably good (6800GT) PC and a media PC (6800 vanilla) but dont have a Hi-Def TV; all have conspired to leave me feeling rather unexcited regarding this launch....The games, the media functionality (the DRM)....its all just so much of the same.
Ok, let me get this straight, you own $2-3k in PCs and yet you're not excited about a console? Shocker! With these two systems it shouldn't be a surprise that it all seems "just so much of the same".
Really, go now before your company's stinginess brings you down too.
There's a reason why Terabyte storage arrays for commercial applications cost a lot of money, and why consulting services from IBM, EMC, Hitachi, etc. have the huge per-hour cost. If you/your management can't see that, you really have no business being there. Sure, anyone can throw a JBOD RAID together for a thousand bucks, but I wouldn't trust anything more important than MP3s to it.
Yahoo does NOT require you to buy any other services in order to buy a domain at 2.99/yr. I just checked and I could complete a full 5-year domain registration for $14.95.
I stand corrected, I guess I mis-read the fine print, tkx.
So, do you work for GoDaddy or just volunteer for them ?
Actually, since you asked, yes, they pay me quite handsomely to troll slashdot, usenet, and blogs to spread my/our FUD. My official title is, "Spreader of New User Fertilizer," but around the office they call me "Sir Spreader-NUF". You should try working here, I especially enjoy working with the "go-daddy chick" (from the Superbowl commercial), she's actually the VP of Technology. No problem when meetings run long if she is attending!!
...tell them they can have any two of these options: (A) fast, (B) cheap, (C) good. Chances are, they will understand that a quality implementation takes more time. If they choose (A) and (B) anyway, start resume polishing, the company probably won't be around long anyway.
I guess you haven't been developing software too long. Companies always always always pick A & B. Always. Examples? Take a look at most shrink-wrapped software out there. Internal enterprise software has bugs as well.
Why? People (and businesses) don't want to pay for perfect code nor can they afford the time that perfect code takes. Sometimes "good enough" really is good enough, don't forget the 80/20 rule. Most businesses can work just fine with some bugs in the code if (and it's a big if) they're known and sufficient work-arounds exist, as most businesses are not launching satellites into orbit or building medical devices, where the cost of mistakes is enormous (although software bugs have plagued both of these too).
Don't misunderstand me, reasonable care must be taken in development, but not too many supervisors nor managers can justify an x-month slip in the project because "I'm making the software better quality" if there's no business justification for it.
Is this caving in? I prefer to call it "pragmatism", you gotta dance to the tune the piper is playing, not what you think they should. When the person signing the paychecks says "ship it, I'm aware of bug X," you'd better ship it or have a damn good reason ($$ related, preferrably) why it can't be shipped.
Yeah, the domain is cheap at 2.99/year, but only when you buy hosting as well, which runs at around $10/month. $120/yr for a domain name is hardly cheap. But, GoDaddy does (or at least did) offer cheap domain names and mail forwarding inexpensively. And there's always pobox.com for life-long e-mail addresses.
As some have said already, and many more will, a Wiki works well for unstructured knowledge. We had one where I worked last and it was good for brain dumps. Unfortunately, people mostly brain-dumped when they were leaving the company or they were very bored or were looking for something to help procrastinate. We even used it to keep track of on-call schedules.
Software: moin-moin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/. It worked well enough, easy to install, and it was easy to set up credentials and permissions for groups on the diretory and page level for editing and even visibility. It's easy to get in and make simple changes to the code and there's a bunch of modules available of varying quality, though.
Funny anecdote, our group's manager pulled a Lundberg: "I uhh like the program and it works well, but is there a WYSIWYG editor for it?" [Although somewhat idiosyncratic, Wiki markup is trivial to learn and use, HTML looks like C++ in comparison.]
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up!!!
This is exactly what happened in the election, because other than these hot-button issues the candidates were very similar. They both (and both parties too) were trying to boast about how they support the poor, respect the middle class, how both were tough on terrorism, how they saw taxes as a burden on regular folk, etc, etc. For me personally (a US citizen), it was less a decision based on the candidate and more a decision of what party ideology I believed in more, tax-n-spend liberalism or elimination of civil liberties and corporate cronyism. Hmm...looks like lesser of two evils decision there too.
Besides, who could really be genuinely enthusiastic about FrankenKerry or What-me-worry Alfred E. Bush-man? :-)
"Participation in an unjust war" is not an exception for disobeying an order; further it is doubtful that quoting Thoreau will reduce one's sentence at the Court Martial which will certainly be convened, but it can be a reason to request being granted Consciencous Objector status. http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/militarylaw1/a/obey ingorders.htm
Here's hoping they get some "hard time" in one of our pound-you-in-the-ass prisons!
ObLinks: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/flextech.shtml/ and http://www.e85fuel.com/
Glad to hear the RIAA is getting screwed too, takes a little sting out of all the lawsuits and profiteering they're doing in the US.
Too true! In their 20s, people are all idealistic, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But that same person when they hit their 30s don't really give a sh*t because they've got to get to work on time because their boss is a big pain in the ass and their son is acting up at school and their older daughter is starting to take an interest in boys and their spouse is starting to get bored with their marriage and they have to put two kids thru college with no savings yet and their 401k has tanked and with it any hope of retiring early and the cable bill just went up and their computer is not working so it needs be rebult and ... and ....
But I still can't figure out why 30-somethings are bitter and disillusioned :-)
I guess this is a corollary to the observation that the better you support your users, the less they will do for themselves.
I think that this is exactly the parent's point, that techies don't know how to relate to "regular people." For instance, with men the biggest single area of common interest seems to be sports, yet it's not mentioned at all in your conversation starters. I love sitting down and watching a good (American) football game or even Cricket. But for me, there are a lot more interesting things to do than to read the sports section daily or to memorize stats like how the Yankees pitching staff does against lefty batters or by how many points the AFC has beaten the NFC in the superbowl. The only reason I even think about these things is to have conversation starters with people who don't/won't talk about AMD vs Intel, the latest MAME release, why Linux will/won't take over the desktop, or my latest microcontroller project. Superbowl? Yeah, I'll watch it intently and really enjoy it, but after a month I'll forget the final score and I'll forget at least one team that played in time for Superbowl XLI.
Now, f*cking with people while your talking sounds fun and shows a degree of sophistication in your knowledge and analysis of the meta-level of a conversation, which most people are not even aware of, but you gotta admit that it may not be the best strategy to "win friends and influence people" in social situations!
And, since you are not married, is it going to be stuffed with only Sci-Fi Network shows, ripped movie DVDs, and top-quality pr0n?
Dear Ask Slashdot: I am currently an Agnostic, but I've read a lot about this "Jesus" thing on the internet and it sounds really cool!! Although I don't plan to now, I would like the option to sin, and I would prefer something that keeps my weekends free because I really like to sleep in. I've read a little bit about Catholicism and it seems interesting, and I've looked at Judiasm, but I think I would have a problem fasting for a whole day even though eight days of gifs would be neat. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction!
====
Will we actually see this on Ask Slashdot? Well, why not have a real religious argument, that would probably be less controversial than what IDE to choose!!
An hour to create a bug-tracking db in Access? yeah right. Even with the overly-optimistic estimates (you must be a coder!), it's 45 minutes longer than an Excel solution would take. Poop on Microsoft stuff all you want, but sometimes the best tool for the job is a sucky but easy-to-use one. Excel works particularly well when (only when?) one developer is changing data.
For version control, you can't beat subversion, it can be set up in about 15-30 minutes in Unix, Linux, or Windows, and it's dead easy to use.
Are there better tools? Sure, but none are this simple, and when your (short-sighted) boss gets on your case, you can honestly tell him it took only 30 minutes to set up.
But, maybe like the Government (both Legislative and Executve branches!), they do what Big Business wants, regardless of what is important to Joe Consumer.
When I resigned from my last job, I gave less than 2 weeks notice, last day was Wednesday instead of Friday. At the time, my manager said that he was not happy about it but was still "OK" with it. I come to find out later that he was incredibly pissed off about those two lousy stinking days. And, since I knew I was leaving ahead of time (just waiting for a bonus to be paid), I was already working on cleanup and the other crap one does when leaving, which I pointed out as well.
The point? Not much except that no matter how hard you try, some people will find something to be angry about.
Come on, this one's easy, it's "shoot the messenger"! By blaming you, they send the message that the reason for the departure is with the employee. To not blame you would be to admit that they were the part of the reason for your departure.-ed
There's a reason why Terabyte storage arrays for commercial applications cost a lot of money, and why consulting services from IBM, EMC, Hitachi, etc. have the huge per-hour cost. If you/your management can't see that, you really have no business being there. Sure, anyone can throw a JBOD RAID together for a thousand bucks, but I wouldn't trust anything more important than MP3s to it.
Actually, since you asked, yes, they pay me quite handsomely to troll slashdot, usenet, and blogs to spread my/our FUD. My official title is, "Spreader of New User Fertilizer," but around the office they call me "Sir Spreader-NUF". You should try working here, I especially enjoy working with the "go-daddy chick" (from the Superbowl commercial), she's actually the VP of Technology. No problem when meetings run long if she is attending!!
I guess you haven't been developing software too long. Companies always always always pick A & B. Always. Examples? Take a look at most shrink-wrapped software out there. Internal enterprise software has bugs as well.
Why? People (and businesses) don't want to pay for perfect code nor can they afford the time that perfect code takes. Sometimes "good enough" really is good enough, don't forget the 80/20 rule. Most businesses can work just fine with some bugs in the code if (and it's a big if) they're known and sufficient work-arounds exist, as most businesses are not launching satellites into orbit or building medical devices, where the cost of mistakes is enormous (although software bugs have plagued both of these too).
Don't misunderstand me, reasonable care must be taken in development, but not too many supervisors nor managers can justify an x-month slip in the project because "I'm making the software better quality" if there's no business justification for it.
Is this caving in? I prefer to call it "pragmatism", you gotta dance to the tune the piper is playing, not what you think they should. When the person signing the paychecks says "ship it, I'm aware of bug X," you'd better ship it or have a damn good reason ($$ related, preferrably) why it can't be shipped.
Yeah, the domain is cheap at 2.99/year, but only when you buy hosting as well, which runs at around $10/month. $120/yr for a domain name is hardly cheap. But, GoDaddy does (or at least did) offer cheap domain names and mail forwarding inexpensively. And there's always pobox.com for life-long e-mail addresses.
Software: moin-moin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/. It worked well enough, easy to install, and it was easy to set up credentials and permissions for groups on the diretory and page level for editing and even visibility. It's easy to get in and make simple changes to the code and there's a bunch of modules available of varying quality, though.
Funny anecdote, our group's manager pulled a Lundberg: "I uhh like the program and it works well, but is there a WYSIWYG editor for it?" [Although somewhat idiosyncratic, Wiki markup is trivial to learn and use, HTML looks like C++ in comparison.]