This is probably the best way, avoid/ignore any priorities that don't come in from up top.
Even better is not using priorities at all: simply set milestones and allocate people to meet those milestones. If during the weekly meeting one of the dept heads wants something done quick let them fight it out with the dept heads whose pet project is currently underway and will be delayed due to "reduced resources". The impact of "pet project will be delayed by 4 weeks" is much more concrete than "pet project is now a minor priority instead of major".
Business people need to understand that, unless they bring additional resources to the table, they will simply have to wait in line until it is their turn.
But you know what you are looking for, confident that you know what you want and are willing to invest time to weigh all the pro's and con's.
A friend of mine asked about getting a new iPhone or a SGII yesterday on Facebook. After a host of replies he went out and got a SGII. He trusts the opinions of his friends more than the various reviews and technical specs he would find at Google and Amazon.
I do doubt this type of 'search' will impact Google's bottom line though, previously he would simply ask for opinions in person. But I can imagine it would be lucrative to place an iPhone or SGII advertisement next to such a question on Facebook.
Indeed, the providers aren't at fault. It could be said that they didn't put enough effort into the court case, but even that is unfair considering nobody besides BREIN expected this to happen.
You don't have a choice, a company (or person) must comply with a court order, no matter how crazy. The alternative would lead to huge fines and contempt of court. This is the way the law works.
Unless you're the likes of Microsoft of course. In that case a well-placed campaign contribution can help make the problems go away. But with all the faults of the Dutch justice system, I'm glad that bribes are more conspicuous over here.
There's still the high court. It's not a done deal.
This. The Wall is what gives users a reason to go back to Facebook. You don't want to call everyone every day, you choose the people you want to keep informed about, get a look into their lives and know what they are up to without having to bother them.
Of course, MySpace and Friendster had the same but Facebook has both the clean implementation and the reach to keep people hooked. Unless they do something stupid they will remain king of the social networks for quite a while.
concentrate on systems that encourage one time reasonable payment for good ideas that become free, or partially tax subsidize informational works by merit and by vote
I think that such positive (dare I say it) government-rewarded incentives are the only way forward when it comes to rewarding authors for their efforts.
Instead of subsidizing the poor and instead of harming ordinary people who simply share information freely, the government should encourage this sharing and reward the efforts by providing benefits to authors who have made works that all can enjoy. Of course, the question then becomes which authors may benefit from the tax-payers money, but this is a much more positive forward-thinking approach than using said tax-payers money to seek out and penalize individuals.
Marx would be proud, his vision of communism would only work an enlightened society where such a construction would be possible. A society without scarcity.
There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes. It would take several hours; now multiply this by our collective $41/hr salary ($11 for the chairman, $10 for each of the other three) and multiply that by the tens of thousands of election districts across New York State. Where is that money going to come from?
From the money saved by not buying e-voting machines? I doubt purchase and 'support' would cost less than a few hours of your time, evened out over a number of years/elections.
I hate marketing stuff, I hate business stuff, and I really hate "networking".. what I love is building software.
Hear hear!
I've been self-employed for quite a while now. It's brilliant in the good times and less so during the hard times, but overall I wouldn't ever want to be a wage slave. Each their own.
Marketing, networking... I'm terrible in it. Oh I try, and I see my fellow self-employed programmers try. I can fake it pretty well with clients, the suit and slides I can cope with. I've learned to deal with the bullshit and others enjoy my cut-to-the-chase mentality. But I'm terrible in anything with a large group or anything related to marketing.
I'm glad I know non-geeks that are much better in it than I am. For them, they enjoy giving presentations, networking and making folders. They do it with the passion that I have when I'm developing software, and it shows.
So, now I've partnered with one of those people and together we're building up a new business next to our own. It's still early, but we trust each other and we're doing well. There's still bullshit, but we both do the work we enjoy doing and are both prospering.
So for all you wage slaves: keep an open mind. If the corporate bullshit gets too much know that there are ways to do what you enjoy without going to the dark side.
Perhaps people want to reinvent the wheel because they think it simply can be done better?
This is evolution in progress. New things come up, some live, some die. Some old things come back with a different purpose and thrive. The field as a whole keeps getting better and more efficient, sometimes taking a step back but later pushing forward again.
If fish complained that there were too many means of propulsion and everyone had to stick with fins we'd never have evolved.
The only alternative to evolution is stagnation. But I'll get off your lawn now.
There can never come a day when the US government cannot pay it's debts, because no matter how bad things get they always have the Option of Last Resort: Print as much money as they need.
Printing money and inflating currencies is the norm, but printing a couple of USD $1TB bills to pay off China would indeed piss off everyone having money. It would be a blessing for (people and countries) debt though.
This is also the reason why Greece doesn't have any options left and why the Euro-zone keeps bailing them out. It's less costly than inflating the Euro with multi-digit inflation rates, which was the pre-Euro way to escape debt.
But when they see some tedious task which would take them hours to solve and they sometimes run into it themselves solved in seconds, now THAT is cool
Talking about tedious tasks, show them how they can automate their homework. Now that WILL get their attention... and probably you'll never be invited again.
By the looks of it Mojolicious does support stuff plain Django doesn't pay much attention to or leaves to the webserver (long polling for instance). Useful!
Then again, Mojolicious doesn't have a built-in ORM or input-validation via forms. Together with URL handling and the request/response loop these are the basic building blocks in Django.
So 'superior in important ways' depends on what you find important. I'm guessing 99% of Django users beg to differ.
I can protest Apple using slave labour in China, and still buy Apple products. I can protest McDonalds destroying rain forest and still buy a Big Mac.
Of course you can. It makes you a hypocrite though. You don't have to buy an iPhone. You don't have to eat a Big Mac.
Totally agree about the financial system though, it's tough to find alternatives in the US. Over here in Europe we have banks that are collective in nature, cooperatives instead of corporations. They have in general weathered the financial storm a lot better than the corporatist banks with their plummeting stock prices and big bonuses.
So 99%: why not start your own, cooperative bank? No one is holding you back, there are alternatives. I guess that's just too damn socialistic for the US.
Note that I used 'over-protective'. It's probably just as well parents being lazy, but the end result is the same regardless.
Using your analogy: children won't learn to swim if their parents steer them away from water.
Those parents might do so because they think it is too risky. They might not want to put in the effort. They might not be able to swim themselves. Regardless of their reasons or how they explain their actions, they are indeed harming their children in the long run.
These books weren't censored, they were challenged by over-protective parents fearing that their children might ask them uncomfortable questions. The books themselves weren't removed (I'd assume successful challenges might not even make it to ALA).
"And Tango Makes Three" got the most challenges. Seriously America, you're worried about two male penguins hatching an egg?
If I or anyone else were to have told such a joke in the middle of last weekend's anniversary markings, or on a forum for those affected by the events and subsequent fall-out, or so forth, that would be a deliberate attempt to cause offence. It would be bullying. A petty crime but a crime all the same, and should be punished.
That's not bullying, it's just being an arse. Punishment is fine: someone being an arse should be banned from such a website, but not incarcerated.
Locking people up merely because they said something others find detestable is a slippery slope. An act that one person might find offensive might not be offensive for someone else. Do we now need a judge to figure out what can be said online and what can't? Do we need a judge to rule where I can say something and where I'm not allowed to say the exact same statement?
No, I'd rather have my free speech and the trolls. Being offensive is not a crime.
But what if we required 2 CAs to agree? 5? 10? It would be up to the admins of the server to decide how many CAs they wanted to use, and users could decide for themselves how many are required to agree in order to consider the cert valid.
Interesting, but all that would do is spur companies to automatically obtain multiple certificates from multiple CAs. If such a system were compromised we'd be in the same situation as now.
Perhaps both avenues are required: Each CA may only service one tld (so a compromise at a.nl CA would not put Iranians at risk via bogus.com certificates, partitioning the trust each CA can give) and extra security by having certificates signed by multiple CAs. You could even image browsers expanding their current flawed color-coding: 2 CAs = yellow, 5 = half-green/half-yellow, 10 = full-green.
But even then the skeptic in me knows that the DigiNotar's of such a system will still be able to screw it up...
We really should be supporting these kinds of companies, not throwing our money at foreign oil/power interests.
Reminds me of Greece's debt and the Eurozone bailing them out: "They're losing enormous amounts of money so we should lend/give them more!". No matter how many subsidies you get, if you depend on them your business model is shaky.
If it's a question of when, not if, your company or country fails it's best to fail early. Bankruptcy is painful but it gives everyone involved a fresh start. Delaying the inevitable only makes it more painful in the end. Hopefully a slimmed-down company that does make a profit will rise from the ashes.
Found myself in the same boat a while back. Small-screen ereaders are cheap but rather awful for reading regular PDFs, large-screen ereaders are pricey but you can fit a single page on it.
In the end I went for a Pocketbook 902. They're cheaper than the other 10" ereaders and handle PDF/PS very well, together with a host of other formats and supports wifi+bluetooth. I've read a bundle of papers and a few ebooks on it over the summer and haven't regretted it, in spite of the manufacturer being unknown and the software being 'ok'. It runs on an ancient version of Android but you wouldn't recognize it from the UI.
Note-taking on it is next to impossible though (no touchscreen). If that's a key feature for you you might want to look at their premium model, a hacked DX or the Iliad.
I have a 10" Android tablet too (I splurged on gadgets, sue me) but I find reading on it not a lot more comfortable than on a regular monitor. Reading a quick paper is fine, it's great for couch-surfing and handles anything you can throw at it, but if you're expecting to read for hours on end I'd go for the Pocketbook.
Doing so hurts mozilla. userdefined search engines dont pay the bills.
I think mozilla could have used those $85m to fund a search engine of their own, that would avoid their reliance on google and make a much better investment than all those UI designers who keep breaking firefox.
KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.
Having used Xfce (since back when Gnome 2 came out) I agree with you: Xfce has always been the bastion of Gnome refugees.
Olivier Fourdan deserves a lot of credit: Xfce has a slow-but-steady approach for those of us that think a desktop environment should keep out of the way and let us work. Throughout the last 10 years he and his team has made massive changes to Xfce4 without impacting existing user's workflow.
I think the only change in my day-to-day desktop since 2001 has been adding a notification area (which naturally is optional) and Thunar (before Xfce was always lacking a good filemanager).
How much more expensive would gas have to be before we stop seeing one-person-occupied SUVs? $5/gal? $10/gal? And how many people would lose their jobs and livelihood if we did that? All so the one-man-in-an-SUV commuters can barrel along at 80mph getting 7mpg.
Over here in NL we're nearly at $10/gal, and most of Europe is between $7 and $9. Just came back from Spain where the prices are "only" $7/gal, those kinds of prices are a relief when you're driving 4000 miles.
These prices do work and make people get smaller, more efficient cars (like the Citroen C1, 50-60mpg). 7mpg simply isn't affordable for a daily commute or even a holiday with 4: you'll be paying $5k for a 4000-mile trip on gas alone.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably the best way, avoid/ignore any priorities that don't come in from up top.
Even better is not using priorities at all: simply set milestones and allocate people to meet those milestones. If during the weekly meeting one of the dept heads wants something done quick let them fight it out with the dept heads whose pet project is currently underway and will be delayed due to "reduced resources". The impact of "pet project will be delayed by 4 weeks" is much more concrete than "pet project is now a minor priority instead of major".
Business people need to understand that, unless they bring additional resources to the table, they will simply have to wait in line until it is their turn.
But you know what you are looking for, confident that you know what you want and are willing to invest time to weigh all the pro's and con's.
A friend of mine asked about getting a new iPhone or a SGII yesterday on Facebook. After a host of replies he went out and got a SGII. He trusts the opinions of his friends more than the various reviews and technical specs he would find at Google and Amazon.
I do doubt this type of 'search' will impact Google's bottom line though, previously he would simply ask for opinions in person. But I can imagine it would be lucrative to place an iPhone or SGII advertisement next to such a question on Facebook.
Indeed, the providers aren't at fault. It could be said that they didn't put enough effort into the court case, but even that is unfair considering nobody besides BREIN expected this to happen.
You don't have a choice, a company (or person) must comply with a court order, no matter how crazy. The alternative would lead to huge fines and contempt of court. This is the way the law works.
Unless you're the likes of Microsoft of course. In that case a well-placed campaign contribution can help make the problems go away. But with all the faults of the Dutch justice system, I'm glad that bribes are more conspicuous over here.
There's still the high court. It's not a done deal.
This. The Wall is what gives users a reason to go back to Facebook. You don't want to call everyone every day, you choose the people you want to keep informed about, get a look into their lives and know what they are up to without having to bother them.
Of course, MySpace and Friendster had the same but Facebook has both the clean implementation and the reach to keep people hooked. Unless they do something stupid they will remain king of the social networks for quite a while.
I think that such positive (dare I say it) government-rewarded incentives are the only way forward when it comes to rewarding authors for their efforts.
Instead of subsidizing the poor and instead of harming ordinary people who simply share information freely, the government should encourage this sharing and reward the efforts by providing benefits to authors who have made works that all can enjoy. Of course, the question then becomes which authors may benefit from the tax-payers money, but this is a much more positive forward-thinking approach than using said tax-payers money to seek out and penalize individuals.
Marx would be proud, his vision of communism would only work an enlightened society where such a construction would be possible. A society without scarcity.
Not holding my breath...
From the money saved by not buying e-voting machines? I doubt purchase and 'support' would cost less than a few hours of your time, evened out over a number of years/elections.
Another vote for Hamilton, the Void series was awesome.
Hear hear!
I've been self-employed for quite a while now. It's brilliant in the good times and less so during the hard times, but overall I wouldn't ever want to be a wage slave. Each their own.
Marketing, networking... I'm terrible in it. Oh I try, and I see my fellow self-employed programmers try. I can fake it pretty well with clients, the suit and slides I can cope with. I've learned to deal with the bullshit and others enjoy my cut-to-the-chase mentality. But I'm terrible in anything with a large group or anything related to marketing.
I'm glad I know non-geeks that are much better in it than I am. For them, they enjoy giving presentations, networking and making folders. They do it with the passion that I have when I'm developing software, and it shows.
So, now I've partnered with one of those people and together we're building up a new business next to our own. It's still early, but we trust each other and we're doing well. There's still bullshit, but we both do the work we enjoy doing and are both prospering.
So for all you wage slaves: keep an open mind. If the corporate bullshit gets too much know that there are ways to do what you enjoy without going to the dark side.
And the reviewer's book has the same publisher as this book (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media). How blatantly obvious can a shill be?
At least Taco would have the decency to not state that the reviewer is also an author...
Perhaps people want to reinvent the wheel because they think it simply can be done better?
This is evolution in progress. New things come up, some live, some die. Some old things come back with a different purpose and thrive. The field as a whole keeps getting better and more efficient, sometimes taking a step back but later pushing forward again.
If fish complained that there were too many means of propulsion and everyone had to stick with fins we'd never have evolved.
The only alternative to evolution is stagnation. But I'll get off your lawn now.
Printing money and inflating currencies is the norm, but printing a couple of USD $1TB bills to pay off China would indeed piss off everyone having money. It would be a blessing for (people and countries) debt though.
This is also the reason why Greece doesn't have any options left and why the Euro-zone keeps bailing them out. It's less costly than inflating the Euro with multi-digit inflation rates, which was the pre-Euro way to escape debt.
Your use of future tense surprises me.
Talking about tedious tasks, show them how they can automate their homework. Now that WILL get their attention... and probably you'll never be invited again.
By the looks of it Mojolicious does support stuff plain Django doesn't pay much attention to or leaves to the webserver (long polling for instance). Useful!
Then again, Mojolicious doesn't have a built-in ORM or input-validation via forms. Together with URL handling and the request/response loop these are the basic building blocks in Django.
So 'superior in important ways' depends on what you find important. I'm guessing 99% of Django users beg to differ.
Of course you can. It makes you a hypocrite though. You don't have to buy an iPhone. You don't have to eat a Big Mac.
Totally agree about the financial system though, it's tough to find alternatives in the US. Over here in Europe we have banks that are collective in nature, cooperatives instead of corporations. They have in general weathered the financial storm a lot better than the corporatist banks with their plummeting stock prices and big bonuses.
So 99%: why not start your own, cooperative bank? No one is holding you back, there are alternatives. I guess that's just too damn socialistic for the US.
Note that I used 'over-protective'. It's probably just as well parents being lazy, but the end result is the same regardless.
Using your analogy: children won't learn to swim if their parents steer them away from water.
Those parents might do so because they think it is too risky. They might not want to put in the effort. They might not be able to swim themselves. Regardless of their reasons or how they explain their actions, they are indeed harming their children in the long run.
Someone please mod AC up.
These books weren't censored, they were challenged by over-protective parents fearing that their children might ask them uncomfortable questions. The books themselves weren't removed (I'd assume successful challenges might not even make it to ALA).
"And Tango Makes Three" got the most challenges. Seriously America, you're worried about two male penguins hatching an egg?
That's not bullying, it's just being an arse. Punishment is fine: someone being an arse should be banned from such a website, but not incarcerated.
Locking people up merely because they said something others find detestable is a slippery slope. An act that one person might find offensive might not be offensive for someone else. Do we now need a judge to figure out what can be said online and what can't? Do we need a judge to rule where I can say something and where I'm not allowed to say the exact same statement?
No, I'd rather have my free speech and the trolls. Being offensive is not a crime.
A MeeGo phone would have prevented the plane from ever being built in the first place.
Interesting, but all that would do is spur companies to automatically obtain multiple certificates from multiple CAs. If such a system were compromised we'd be in the same situation as now.
Perhaps both avenues are required: Each CA may only service one tld (so a compromise at a .nl CA would not put Iranians at risk via bogus .com certificates, partitioning the trust each CA can give) and extra security by having certificates signed by multiple CAs. You could even image browsers expanding their current flawed color-coding: 2 CAs = yellow, 5 = half-green/half-yellow, 10 = full-green.
But even then the skeptic in me knows that the DigiNotar's of such a system will still be able to screw it up...
Reminds me of Greece's debt and the Eurozone bailing them out: "They're losing enormous amounts of money so we should lend/give them more!". No matter how many subsidies you get, if you depend on them your business model is shaky.
If it's a question of when, not if, your company or country fails it's best to fail early. Bankruptcy is painful but it gives everyone involved a fresh start. Delaying the inevitable only makes it more painful in the end. Hopefully a slimmed-down company that does make a profit will rise from the ashes.
Found myself in the same boat a while back. Small-screen ereaders are cheap but rather awful for reading regular PDFs, large-screen ereaders are pricey but you can fit a single page on it.
In the end I went for a Pocketbook 902. They're cheaper than the other 10" ereaders and handle PDF/PS very well, together with a host of other formats and supports wifi+bluetooth. I've read a bundle of papers and a few ebooks on it over the summer and haven't regretted it, in spite of the manufacturer being unknown and the software being 'ok'. It runs on an ancient version of Android but you wouldn't recognize it from the UI.
Note-taking on it is next to impossible though (no touchscreen). If that's a key feature for you you might want to look at their premium model, a hacked DX or the Iliad.
I have a 10" Android tablet too (I splurged on gadgets, sue me) but I find reading on it not a lot more comfortable than on a regular monitor. Reading a quick paper is fine, it's great for couch-surfing and handles anything you can throw at it, but if you're expecting to read for hours on end I'd go for the Pocketbook.
Doing so hurts mozilla. userdefined search engines dont pay the bills.
I think mozilla could have used those $85m to fund a search engine of their own, that would avoid their reliance on google and make a much better investment than all those UI designers who keep breaking firefox.
Having used Xfce (since back when Gnome 2 came out) I agree with you: Xfce has always been the bastion of Gnome refugees.
Olivier Fourdan deserves a lot of credit: Xfce has a slow-but-steady approach for those of us that think a desktop environment should keep out of the way and let us work. Throughout the last 10 years he and his team has made massive changes to Xfce4 without impacting existing user's workflow.
I think the only change in my day-to-day desktop since 2001 has been adding a notification area (which naturally is optional) and Thunar (before Xfce was always lacking a good filemanager).
Over here in NL we're nearly at $10/gal, and most of Europe is between $7 and $9. Just came back from Spain where the prices are "only" $7/gal, those kinds of prices are a relief when you're driving 4000 miles.
These prices do work and make people get smaller, more efficient cars (like the Citroen C1, 50-60mpg). 7mpg simply isn't affordable for a daily commute or even a holiday with 4: you'll be paying $5k for a 4000-mile trip on gas alone.