The buyer's agent normally gets their cut from the seller.
Run, do not walk, from anyone presenting him/herself as a buyer's agent, but being paid by the seller. By definition, the agent's interests then align with the property seller, not yours.
The check needs to come from you, preferably as a retainer + post-close commission, rather than set-fee up front.
I don't know why I always bite on this topic, but you're the lucky one today...sorry.
Specifically, consider the following:
People who can't find jobs programming go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable
and now ask youself--how do said displaced find that "more profitable" job?
Nobody seems to be able to answer this. Certainly not any of our political leadership. Having said your piece, do you have some magic plan?
You say:
Promoting world economics promotes U.S. economics.
Absolutely true, long-run. Short-run however, how do those displaced feed and shelter their families? Not every outsourced worker is 20-something with no dependents. Are these folks just to be left in the lurch in the name of promoting world economics?
Protectionism--big time bad, and the yokels promoting it are pretty short-sighted, true. But not everyone uneasy with global sourcing is a protectionist. Some of us just want to know there's a path forward into this new "world economy". Heck, we'll do the legwork--but there has to be somewhere to go. Bush doesn't have an answer for this. Until he does, he's not serving those people well.
What do you think? Any bigger, better ideas beyond "they'll figure a way out, somehow"?
Seriously. However well they might work on a case-by-case basis for certain individuals, they've promoted the commoditization of technical work as much so or more than outsourcing trends.
Haunted by employer-hired third-party recruiters with little real knowledge of the jobs they are placing people into and no interest beyond placing a warm body in a job and collecting the fee. Or, worse, grabbing a resume and disappearing
Application black holes; your resumes go into, but you get no signal back.
On the back-end, HR resume processor clerks sifting through keyword-scan match reports, having no clue about the work they're trying to place people into.
Job entries filled with vague, often laughably inaccurate descriptions, encouraging as many pseudo-matches to submit themselves for consideration, broadening the applicant pool by orders of magnitude, resulting in headaches all around for potential applicants trying to decipher whether the ad represents something they'd actually be interested in, and interviewers wading through a haystack of poor-quality resumes.
Same job descriptions lacking even a lower limit of a salary band. Applicants, particularly seasoned folks, finally getting in touch with a human at the employer, doing the "salary history tango" with said human, and never hearing back. If it's obviously not going to match on money, and money's important to people, why not let them at least self-exclude?
Boards help employers and recruiters, in that order, not technologists. Whatever you might think (and congrats to those of you who have had good experiences with them), writ large they're harmful to your job-search time and to your long-term professional prospects.
Better to spend your time with one of the bigger-scale social networks such as LinkedIn or such, getting in touch with people who actually know of real work needs and can speak factually of what's expected and the environment in which you'll work. No less work (often more), no guarantees (not that the boards offer any either) but the end goal--a human contact at an employer--is actually attainable.
Not disagreeing with you personally, but for most e-commerce and corporate presence sites this absolutely clashes with the requirements of branding, which does dictate those details, down to the n-th degree.
Given the money, time and effort expended by most companies to build a visually distinctive brand for products, the branding will usually win out over usability and individual control.
Not that this provides an excuse for the many, many sites that don't fall into the above two categories, of course...
Re:Java takes up the COBOL banner 'Java-Correctnes
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
In Java, there are many less right ways to do something.
Freedom of speech, by necessity, includes freedom after speech. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity.
RE: "freedom after speech"--I'd be interested in your thoughts regarding the 100-years or so of legal agonizing over the so-called "yelling fire in a crowded theater" scenario and where this fits in your thinking.
RE: "in the real world, that usually requires anonymity"--I'd also be interested to hear about what constitutes "usually". Actually, of more interest: in your mind, what situations would require one's name to be attached? Any?
The rationale for making the move, according to The Fine Article:
Some countries have been frustrated that the United States and European countries that got on the Internet first gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations with a limited supply to share.
They also want greater assurance that as they come to rely on the Internet more for governmental and other services, their plans won't get derailed by some future U.S. policy.
Regarding available address blocks--right or wrong, those address blocks have been allocated. Unless the UN wants to magically "unallocate" from their current owners and "reallocate" them to other entities in the name of "fairness", it's a fait accompli. Don't expect a bunch of support from the U.S./EU in this regard--why help your potential assassin slip the knife in?
I would, in any circumstance, be interested in qualifying how real this misallocation actually is. The article dropped the ball on that.
Regarding policy--fine and good; certainly the same worry the U.S. has of others managing the 'net. So what entity would anyone entrust to fairly balance policy to everyone's satisfaction? No entity, not even the almighty U.N., is going to pass everyone's smell test (just ask the Israeli government what they think of the U.N., for example). And given the organization's legendary slowness in framing and publicizing policy on anything, how would these other countries be helped at all?
And wouldn't the U.S. want the same assurance that a bunch of African and Asian countries with their own agendas and suspicions of the "Great Corporatic Hedonist" isn't going to gang up and derail their own plans, via death-by-governing-committee?
Also, as with the address space, I'd be interested in details on some of these initiatives that have been derailed by U.S. governance policy. Again, the article fans, unfortunately.
A move would solve neither of these concerns.
Re:It's embarrasing to see the WSJ doing this
on
A Review of the iPod nano
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· Score: 2, Informative
If the WSJ is caving, they've been headed down the road for quite some time. Mossberg has been doing technology review columns for as long as I've been reading the WSJ (8 years now), probably before then.
He's no shill either--he'll freely and frequently criticize problems or missing functionality. The tech dev community comes in for frequent bashing, primarily due to their (IHO) utter cluelessness regarding usability. He'll also point out "good but could be better" things as well. Ars Technica he isn't, but he's way,way up from, say, PC Week.
Lee Gomes has been doing a similar type of column, focused more on Internet/cyberspace than gadgets, in the WSJ. for some time.
Both columns are (IMO) well-written, topical and substantive. You could do a lot worse than them.
Are we reading the same news sources? The military has been mobilized, to the degree it can legally be. The Navy is sending ships with water and supplies, as well as a hospital tender. The A.C.E. is in full-blown Apollo 13 mode, trying to figure out how to use mega-size sandbags, shipping containers and the odd barge to plug the levee breaks. They're doing everything they can to support local relief and the Louisiana National Guard. If the governors want to declare martial law, the Army proper can go in, and I'm sure they're well-aware of that. No one is standing around with their thumbs up their butts right now.
We rallied for war after 9/11, why the f can't we rally for piece, rally for safety, rally for those 1.5 million homeless pople across 5 states down there and work to make a difference for all?
Why not indeed? And who says that isn't already happening? Or does the CinC need to be standing behind a Red Cross lectern for a "rally" to take place? You can't turn on a TV, open a paper, or view a web page right now without a reference to how individuals can help, either via work or money. And good on it, for being that way.
9/11 he was there within 15 hours, 8/29/05 8/29/05 he says he might show up by friday?
They don't need the president down there right now. They need a levee plugged, roads cleared, supplies, medicine and on-the-ground help.
There will be a time and place for symbology. That time is not now; now the living need to be protected, the dead accounted for and conditions stabilized to the point where cleanup and support can begin.
I'm no huge fan of our CinC, but for anyone to suggest he's not doing the job he can (or should), is not only opportunistic sniping, it's ignorant.
Ptooey. What do you expect him to do--pile sandbags?
FEMA has been mobilized. Disaster spending has been authorized. What other "significant" work do you expect him to do?
He'll probably visit at some point; but, right now, do you really want the circus of a presidential visit on top of the war zone that is the gulf coast? Better to stay out of the way and let the disaster relief people do what they need to do first.
...quit your sanctimonious carping about "parenting skills".
I'm perfectly happy to actively parent my children, thank you. I would be a bit more effective in my use of time if I didn't have to bit-level scan the freaking game disks looking for little zingers left in by the media companies but never mentioned nor accounted for, before feeling comfortable letting my kid play it. What's the point of a rating system then? Yet Rockstar agreed to play by one. Apparently, pretty lazily.
Of course, with your mindset, even if I did Google everyone of my kids' games, you'd complain about what a facist, untrusting authoritarian parent I am, wouldn't you?
And your 'R'-rated movie anology? Ludicrous. A better analogy would be if, after accompanying my kids to a R-rated movie, we sit down and, 10 minutes in, the lost reel of "Debbie Does Dallas" appears.
If you're going to bother adhering to a rating system, at least try to play by the rules you're accepting, however grudgingly. Is the rating system inconvenient for Rockstar (and other media companies)? Probably. Is it an absolute barrier to doing work? Hell, no. Deal with it--they'd still do quite fine, without the simulated shagging.
I'm quite comfortable letting my kids experience anything they're prepared to handle. But they're not prepared to handle everything they might actually be exposed to, at any given age. And if you believe that they can, regardless of age and credulity, you're either not a parent or you're a fool.
So slapdash, abruptly-changing API architectures, shoddy programming blind to wreaking systemic havoc via unconsidered side effects, and "documentation via Google" are somehow excusable when hosted on commodity hardware?
Ptooey
Grandparent is complaining that what passes for "modern" is one step above "make it up as you go" and, ITOFHO, he's got a point.
What will happen is that online sites will steer their business to ad providers who are capable of ad placements that don't drive J. Random User to install/activate ad blockers.
The website "buyers" couldn't care less about who provides the ads, as long as they: a) don't have Enron-esque legal or social blackmarks on their resume, b) make placing the ads relatively painless for the buyer, c) deliver results. Some ad service or services will qualify on all of the above, and will see an uptick in business as result.
Consumers will still want the website content, it will still be profitable to providers to offer the content--it'll just take some changes in how the blurbs are presented. Nothing changes for the principals in this process. Lots changes for the middlemen (ad-providers). To which I say: tough darts, guys.
Instead of ranting, maybe DC should re-consider their presentation model using the above criteria. Or maybe our long-suffering DC exec is tacitly admitting that the presentation model,as is, will continue to decline and has been reduced to spawning FUD in the hopes that it slows the decline. Not that that's ever been done before, of course....
Sounds like what DC really needs is a creativity infusion, not a reduction in ad-blocker use. Good luck, folks.
Having worked with a couple of specifically-focused VC's (content management) before, they show a strong preference for people referred to them by mutually-known acquaintances. Rationale being that these third parties have/will do a bit of filtering before referring them on. Most have no lack of ideas sitting on their desk; they don't have a lot of time to do sanity-checking and even basic background research for the various segments the entrepreneur wants to operate in. The obvious BS can be thrown out pretty quickly (and it is indeed pretty obvious). Everything else kind of waits around, unless it has a champion pushing it, preferably one with some kind of track record with the VC.
I actually asked a few of them about whether this was a common trait or their own idiosyncracy; based on their comments, this would appear to be SOP througout their community.
So you can take your chances with cold-calling. However, your time would probably be better spent networking with entrepreneurial types, IMHO.
NDA--agree with the parent. Lots of legal and practical headaches associated with an NDA, the biggest being that the VC can't (legally, at least) sanity-check the idea with his/her brain trust under NDA. Don't bother. If you're truly paranoid, don't try to approach VC's with a track record of funding potential competitors.
I do also concur with the parent that there's lots more money available to be put in play now than in the last few years. So get out and start schmoozing, inventors!
You speak pretty authoritatively for someone who left 10 years ago. Care to provide chapter and verse on any of this, particularly the high school hell you describe?
FWIW, Keyes registered address was in the south 'burbs (South Holland, if I recall correctly), as those of us who actually had to live through the fiasco know. In truth, Alan seemed to spend most of his time in Illinois giving news conferences downtown or at O'Hare, so whatever his address was, it was probably irrelevant. Given that he got whalloped more than 2:1 in the Naperville townships, I'd say he probably wouldn't have considered it his base.
Incidentally, same election shows Dubya carrying the township by ~3.5K votes out of 39K cast. They've certainly got their conservatives there, but it's a bit more balanced than you apparently think.
The moral here? Find some more constructive way to vent your high-school angst. For others actually thinking this guy's picture is accurate, just...no, it isn't.
(For the record, yes, the library idea is pretty foolish.)
(Also...yes, I am probably getting way too steamed over this. But to see this modded "Informative" is ridiculous. At least some of the other ranting here on 'Da Dot is semi-entertaining at times...)
In the first Naperville neighborhood I lived in, the Chicago Housing Authority had a plan to build mixed-income housing.
I'm familiar with the area--what neigborhood was this? And what say would the Chicago Housing Authority, an entity based in a city 35 miles and one county eastward of Naperville, have in how it was developed? I can't imagine Naperville or DuPage County for that matter, giving a fig what any Chicago governmental group "wanted" to do.
My bet, OTOH, would be that an org unwilling to upgrade hardware, etc. to support full-blown XP, for whatever reason, is probably not going to be ponying up for the latest/greatest Office. What I'd want in that situation is an OS that provides somewhat better contemporary peripheral hardware support, as well as closing off some of the more egregious security/performance holes of the early OS, while letting me run Office 95/97 and other long-in-the-tooth apps in peace.
The $65MM question for MS in this case is how many of these older apps will be broken by XP, hence forcing an unwanted upgrade.
A few of the packages could use a little bit of help on the documentation front. JXPath (at least for me) comes to mind quickly. Great package, just a bit hard to get the conceptual grasp around.
Other packages (functors, for example), would probably benefit from much more extensive examples demonstrating their power and flexibility in providing elegant solutions for certain classes of problems.
Neither of the above are best accomplished via the Javadocs--well-written, probing dissections of solution applications would be more useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent advice, except for...
The buyer's agent normally gets their cut from the seller.
Run, do not walk, from anyone presenting him/herself as a buyer's agent, but being paid by the seller. By definition, the agent's interests then align with the property seller, not yours.
The check needs to come from you, preferably as a retainer + post-close commission, rather than set-fee up front.
I don't know why I always bite on this topic, but you're the lucky one today...sorry.
Specifically, consider the following:
People who can't find jobs programming go on to find other kinds of jobs, those that are more profitable
and now ask youself--how do said displaced find that "more profitable" job?
Nobody seems to be able to answer this. Certainly not any of our political leadership. Having said your piece, do you have some magic plan?
You say:
Promoting world economics promotes U.S. economics.
Absolutely true, long-run. Short-run however, how do those displaced feed and shelter their families? Not every outsourced worker is 20-something with no dependents. Are these folks just to be left in the lurch in the name of promoting world economics?
Protectionism--big time bad, and the yokels promoting it are pretty short-sighted, true. But not everyone uneasy with global sourcing is a protectionist. Some of us just want to know there's a path forward into this new "world economy". Heck, we'll do the legwork--but there has to be somewhere to go. Bush doesn't have an answer for this. Until he does, he's not serving those people well.
What do you think? Any bigger, better ideas beyond "they'll figure a way out, somehow"?
Boards help employers and recruiters, in that order, not technologists. Whatever you might think (and congrats to those of you who have had good experiences with them), writ large they're harmful to your job-search time and to your long-term professional prospects.
Better to spend your time with one of the bigger-scale social networks such as LinkedIn or such, getting in touch with people who actually know of real work needs and can speak factually of what's expected and the environment in which you'll work. No less work (often more), no guarantees (not that the boards offer any either) but the end goal--a human contact at an employer--is actually attainable.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
Not disagreeing with you personally, but for most e-commerce and corporate presence sites this absolutely clashes with the requirements of branding, which does dictate those details, down to the n-th degree.
Given the money, time and effort expended by most companies to build a visually distinctive brand for products, the branding will usually win out over usability and individual control.
Not that this provides an excuse for the many, many sites that don't fall into the above two categories, of course...
In Java, there are many less right ways to do something.
And some examples would be...?
Freedom of speech, by necessity, includes freedom after speech. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity.
RE: "freedom after speech"--I'd be interested in your thoughts regarding the 100-years or so of legal agonizing over the so-called "yelling fire in a crowded theater" scenario and where this fits in your thinking.
RE: "in the real world, that usually requires anonymity"--I'd also be interested to hear about what constitutes "usually". Actually, of more interest: in your mind, what situations would require one's name to be attached? Any?
Take a trip to Dubai or Seychelles. Hook up with the right crowd and you can make 6 figures easily.
Nice lucre, but I bet the health insurance is lousy.
Probably no 401(k) matching, either.
Cheap b***rds!
The rationale for making the move, according to The Fine Article:
Some countries have been frustrated that the United States and European countries that got on the Internet first gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations with a limited supply to share.
They also want greater assurance that as they come to rely on the Internet more for governmental and other services, their plans won't get derailed by some future U.S. policy.
Regarding available address blocks--right or wrong, those address blocks have been allocated. Unless the UN wants to magically "unallocate" from their current owners and "reallocate" them to other entities in the name of "fairness", it's a fait accompli. Don't expect a bunch of support from the U.S./EU in this regard--why help your potential assassin slip the knife in?
I would, in any circumstance, be interested in qualifying how real this misallocation actually is. The article dropped the ball on that.
Regarding policy--fine and good; certainly the same worry the U.S. has of others managing the 'net. So what entity would anyone entrust to fairly balance policy to everyone's satisfaction? No entity, not even the almighty U.N., is going to pass everyone's smell test (just ask the Israeli government what they think of the U.N., for example). And given the organization's legendary slowness in framing and publicizing policy on anything, how would these other countries be helped at all?
And wouldn't the U.S. want the same assurance that a bunch of African and Asian countries with their own agendas and suspicions of the "Great Corporatic Hedonist" isn't going to gang up and derail their own plans, via death-by-governing-committee?
Also, as with the address space, I'd be interested in details on some of these initiatives that have been derailed by U.S. governance policy. Again, the article fans, unfortunately.
A move would solve neither of these concerns.
If the WSJ is caving, they've been headed down the road for quite some time. Mossberg has been doing technology review columns for as long as I've been reading the WSJ (8 years now), probably before then.
He's no shill either--he'll freely and frequently criticize problems or missing functionality. The tech dev community comes in for frequent bashing, primarily due to their (IHO) utter cluelessness regarding usability. He'll also point out "good but could be better" things as well. Ars Technica he isn't, but he's way,way up from, say, PC Week.
Lee Gomes has been doing a similar type of column, focused more on Internet/cyberspace than gadgets, in the WSJ. for some time.
Both columns are (IMO) well-written, topical and substantive. You could do a lot worse than them.
He can mobilize the military and be a leader.
Are we reading the same news sources? The military has been mobilized, to the degree it can legally be. The Navy is sending ships with water and supplies, as well as a hospital tender. The A.C.E. is in full-blown Apollo 13 mode, trying to figure out how to use mega-size sandbags, shipping containers and the odd barge to plug the levee breaks. They're doing everything they can to support local relief and the Louisiana National Guard. If the governors want to declare martial law, the Army proper can go in, and I'm sure they're well-aware of that. No one is standing around with their thumbs up their butts right now.
We rallied for war after 9/11, why the f can't we rally for piece, rally for safety, rally for those 1.5 million homeless pople across 5 states down there and work to make a difference for all?
Why not indeed? And who says that isn't already happening? Or does the CinC need to be standing behind a Red Cross lectern for a "rally" to take place? You can't turn on a TV, open a paper, or view a web page right now without a reference to how individuals can help, either via work or money. And good on it, for being that way.
9/11 he was there within 15 hours, 8/29/05 8/29/05 he says he might show up by friday?
They don't need the president down there right now. They need a levee plugged, roads cleared, supplies, medicine and on-the-ground help.
There will be a time and place for symbology. That time is not now; now the living need to be protected, the dead accounted for and conditions stabilized to the point where cleanup and support can begin.
I'm no huge fan of our CinC, but for anyone to suggest he's not doing the job he can (or should), is not only opportunistic sniping, it's ignorant.
Ptooey. What do you expect him to do--pile sandbags?
FEMA has been mobilized. Disaster spending has been authorized. What other "significant" work do you expect him to do?
He'll probably visit at some point; but, right now, do you really want the circus of a presidential visit on top of the war zone that is the gulf coast? Better to stay out of the way and let the disaster relief people do what they need to do first.
Grind your axe on something that makes sense.
...quit your sanctimonious carping about "parenting skills".
I'm perfectly happy to actively parent my children, thank you. I would be a bit more effective in my use of time if I didn't have to bit-level scan the freaking game disks looking for little zingers left in by the media companies but never mentioned nor accounted for, before feeling comfortable letting my kid play it. What's the point of a rating system then? Yet Rockstar agreed to play by one. Apparently, pretty lazily.
Of course, with your mindset, even if I did Google everyone of my kids' games, you'd complain about what a facist, untrusting authoritarian parent I am, wouldn't you?
And your 'R'-rated movie anology? Ludicrous. A better analogy would be if, after accompanying my kids to a R-rated movie, we sit down and, 10 minutes in, the lost reel of "Debbie Does Dallas" appears.
If you're going to bother adhering to a rating system, at least try to play by the rules you're accepting, however grudgingly. Is the rating system inconvenient for Rockstar (and other media companies)? Probably. Is it an absolute barrier to doing work? Hell, no. Deal with it--they'd still do quite fine, without the simulated shagging.
I'm quite comfortable letting my kids experience anything they're prepared to handle. But they're not prepared to handle everything they might actually be exposed to, at any given age. And if you believe that they can, regardless of age and credulity, you're either not a parent or you're a fool.
What does Windows have "going against it" that would be fundamental barriers to achieving the above?
So slapdash, abruptly-changing API architectures, shoddy programming blind to wreaking systemic havoc via unconsidered side effects, and "documentation via Google" are somehow excusable when hosted on commodity hardware?
Ptooey
Grandparent is complaining that what passes for "modern" is one step above "make it up as you go" and, ITOFHO, he's got a point.
I find your lack of faith disturbing...
What will happen is that online sites will steer their business to ad providers who are capable of ad placements that don't drive J. Random User to install/activate ad blockers.
The website "buyers" couldn't care less about who provides the ads, as long as they: a) don't have Enron-esque legal or social blackmarks on their resume, b) make placing the ads relatively painless for the buyer, c) deliver results. Some ad service or services will qualify on all of the above, and will see an uptick in business as result.
Consumers will still want the website content, it will still be profitable to providers to offer the content--it'll just take some changes in how the blurbs are presented. Nothing changes for the principals in this process. Lots changes for the middlemen (ad-providers). To which I say: tough darts, guys.
Instead of ranting, maybe DC should re-consider their presentation model using the above criteria. Or maybe our long-suffering DC exec is tacitly admitting that the presentation model,as is, will continue to decline and has been reduced to spawning FUD in the hopes that it slows the decline. Not that that's ever been done before, of course....
Sounds like what DC really needs is a creativity infusion, not a reduction in ad-blocker use. Good luck, folks.
Having worked with a couple of specifically-focused VC's (content management) before, they show a strong preference for people referred to them by mutually-known acquaintances. Rationale being that these third parties have/will do a bit of filtering before referring them on. Most have no lack of ideas sitting on their desk; they don't have a lot of time to do sanity-checking and even basic background research for the various segments the entrepreneur wants to operate in. The obvious BS can be thrown out pretty quickly (and it is indeed pretty obvious). Everything else kind of waits around, unless it has a champion pushing it, preferably one with some kind of track record with the VC.
I actually asked a few of them about whether this was a common trait or their own idiosyncracy; based on their comments, this would appear to be SOP througout their community.
So you can take your chances with cold-calling. However, your time would probably be better spent networking with entrepreneurial types, IMHO.
NDA--agree with the parent. Lots of legal and practical headaches associated with an NDA, the biggest being that the VC can't (legally, at least) sanity-check the idea with his/her brain trust under NDA. Don't bother. If you're truly paranoid, don't try to approach VC's with a track record of funding potential competitors.
I do also concur with the parent that there's lots more money available to be put in play now than in the last few years. So get out and start schmoozing, inventors!
Nah--the daemon would be OK in an extreme-heat environment.
Is this comment supposed to be an opinion or literature?
You probably needn't have worried. Route 59 is about 8 miles of strip malls now.
You speak pretty authoritatively for someone who left 10 years ago. Care to provide chapter and verse on any of this, particularly the high school hell you describe?
FWIW, Keyes registered address was in the south 'burbs (South Holland, if I recall correctly), as those of us who actually had to live through the fiasco know. In truth, Alan seemed to spend most of his time in Illinois giving news conferences downtown or at O'Hare, so whatever his address was, it was probably irrelevant. Given that he got whalloped more than 2:1 in the Naperville townships, I'd say he probably wouldn't have considered it his base.
Incidentally, same election shows Dubya carrying the township by ~3.5K votes out of 39K cast. They've certainly got their conservatives there, but it's a bit more balanced than you apparently think.
The moral here? Find some more constructive way to vent your high-school angst. For others actually thinking this guy's picture is accurate, just...no, it isn't.
(For the record, yes, the library idea is pretty foolish.)
(Also...yes, I am probably getting way too steamed over this. But to see this modded "Informative" is ridiculous. At least some of the other ranting here on 'Da Dot is semi-entertaining at times...)
In the first Naperville neighborhood I lived in, the Chicago Housing Authority had a plan to build mixed-income housing.
I'm familiar with the area--what neigborhood was this? And what say would the Chicago Housing Authority, an entity based in a city 35 miles and one county eastward of Naperville, have in how it was developed? I can't imagine Naperville or DuPage County for that matter, giving a fig what any Chicago governmental group "wanted" to do.
...which may/may not be a valid assumption.
My bet, OTOH, would be that an org unwilling to upgrade hardware, etc. to support full-blown XP, for whatever reason, is probably not going to be ponying up for the latest/greatest Office. What I'd want in that situation is an OS that provides somewhat better contemporary peripheral hardware support, as well as closing off some of the more egregious security/performance holes of the early OS, while letting me run Office 95/97 and other long-in-the-tooth apps in peace.
The $65MM question for MS in this case is how many of these older apps will be broken by XP, hence forcing an unwanted upgrade.
A few of the packages could use a little bit of help on the documentation front. JXPath (at least for me) comes to mind quickly. Great package, just a bit hard to get the conceptual grasp around.
Other packages (functors, for example), would probably benefit from much more extensive examples demonstrating their power and flexibility in providing elegant solutions for certain classes of problems.
Neither of the above are best accomplished via the Javadocs--well-written, probing dissections of solution applications would be more useful.