Why the "C" disclaimer? There is more than one language used in the world, and I still support some code where gotos are necessary, as well as labels. There was a time not many years ago, where I would have 10, 20 or even 40 gotos in a single program I'd write on a daily basis. And it ran faster than probably anything you've ever written. Much of that code still runs today on a billing system billing 100s of millions of dollars annually. All rock solid and untouched for nearly a decade. It just works. I was the lead on the team that converted the system from a mainframe, and the billing programs that once took literally all weekend to run, now run in less than an hour. Context is everything. Granted this is not the goto used to taunt kids with. It's an almost necessary part of the obscure and aging language.
That's why I wrote "used in C, for example." As I stated, I sometimes use a goto and label pair in my C code as an escape from inside the logic of a function to a cleanup routine just before the function exits, similar to how a try/catch exception handler is used in C++ or Java. In assembly? Sure. We can hide the machine code under the guise of a higher level language, but underneath it all every branch of any kind is still implemented as the same JMP opcode that the goto would have been. To not understand that is a dangerous mental trap that many programmers fall into.
What these stick PCs need is a new connector that carrys full HD, 7.1 audio, power to the stick, mouse, keyboard, and remote control commands. Then TVs could include this format, you plug in your CPU stick and viola... your TV can run anything you want. Anyone could write their own TV OS or whatever. Ok kickstarter, kickstart this.
People are very proud of their work, and do not take criticism well. One way is to ask for his advice on your work. In reviewing it, he may pick up some of your ideas and implement them. Be tactful.
The danger of inviting his comments on your code is that he may take it upon himself to teach you the One True Way to code like him. Expect lots of unhelpful advice and a grudge to develop as you do not adopt his ideas.
The correct answer has already been stated above: implement good coding standards and reviews. Getting these done in a way that developers accept without hurt feelings is a fine art. Use the situation as a way to improve the competency of the team, not as a way to single out one poor developer. After getting a working standard in place, then you have a yardstick to measure code quality beyond your own opinion.
If the coworker's coding practices are affecting your work, but is in line with the company's coding standards, either the standards need improving or the problem is you. If you have some sort of OCD that causes you pain to look at his code, then my advice is to stop looking at his code.
On my team if I see a "goto" statement in OOP code, you get a warning. If I see it again you'll find yourself on the short list for dismissal. Blatant and arrogant refusal to conform to best practices in general yields much the same treatment. Your pride had better be worth your job because most dev houses have little tolerance for people that arrogantly refuse to support the team's ability to evolve and maintain the codebase.
Why the "in OOP code" disclaimer? The only place I've ever seen goto sanely used in C, for example, is to implement the equivalent of an exception handler that would have been done with a try/catch in C++. But that is not because of the availability of objects in C++, but rather the exception handling.
I have recently ordered a PCI-E NIC to put away for when I'll need it, but they are not generally available here. I really could not find one. I did find a USB ethernet adaptor that required a 2.4 kernel and would not work on anything newer, but I intend to find a newer one and keep it in my toolbox as well.
But that does not address the issue of no contemporary budget motherboard today being supported / supporting any contemporary Linux distro. Sure there are workarounds and fixes, but the real problem needs to be addressed.
I'm not sure of your claim that no contemporary budget motherboard is being supported, but I really don't know as I haven't been shopping for one in a couple of years. Actually, I've never had a problem with Linux supporting the hardware on any of the 5-6 different machines of different ages that I've installed on in the past 18 months, so your experience is somewhat surprising to me.
Could it be that the motherboard in question is using very new parts? The page on Asus's website that you linked before states it supports Windows 8, which makes me think that maybe the chipsets are quite new. I've had good luck with both Asus and MSI boards in the past; is it possible that selecting a board 6 or 9 months old would give a better result?
What part of the world are you in? I'm in the US, so I could pick up a PCI-E NIC from probably 4 different shops in my city of 75k population, but I probably would order it from Amazon or Newegg anyway. I'm cheap like that...:)
Nonsense. A number of people have noted that various Asus and Gigabyte boards are quite well supported. They have also provided 3rd party sources. I have a couple of Gigabyte boards of my own that I'm very satisfied with.
You might have to do a little homework first but that's hardly a great burden considering that you're obviously building a machine from PARTS.
This whole thing boils down to "I am shopping for motherboards but I am a helpless ninny".
Ready made systems are specifically marketed for people that are unwilling or unable to do the modern equivalent of cracking open a magazine like Consumer Reports.
Over the last few years, I've routinely discouraged people from building their own computers. Usually because I worry that they will be coming back to me to support them when they erase their video drivers or can't connect to their neighbor's WiFi. It's much easier for me, (and more humane for them) to just tell them to go to Dell and see what's on sale.
Especially in a business environment, buying something that has been integrated at the vendor, and backed with a warranty is worth more than the $50 they might save or the 10% increase in . Yeah, for a special-purpose box it still makes sense to piece something together, but for an office machine, cherry picking components to get the best "bang for the buck"; 3.0GHz vs. 3.2GHz, Radeon 3300 vs. ATI blah blah blah, it just doesn't matter. It will run a word processor and e-mail, and they can browse the web and print. Computers have long since become just another office machine like a copier or a telephone.
The fact that the OP is even asking this question for a machine he's turning loose into a business environment makes me question his sanity. If it's for a normal office: don't buy parts, buy computers. If it's for a uniquely tech-savvy, Linux-friendly office: you shouldn't need to ask the question, you should know what works and what doesn't.
I know that you're trolling, but there is definitely a push to just 'install Windows' due to the lack of a viable motherboard. If I were a weaker man, and there are plenty of weaker men, installing Windows would be the 'solution'.
For many small businesses, installing Windows would indeed be a fine solution. I like tilting at windmills as much as the next guy, but sometimes the "solution" is to fix or replace the damn tool and get back to business, not start a side project designing a new tool.
About 2006, I interviewed with a small manufacturing company once where the president was quite proud of their "can do" approach to solving problems. Why, their mechanical engineers and drafters even designed and wrote their own drafting program! Sure, it still had some bugs, and some things take a bit longer in their homebrewed system, but it was worth it to have complete control over the whole process. It only took them 9-12 months to get the system up and (mostly) going, too! And most capable drafters only took a few months to get up to speed and learn the workarounds needed to become productive. This was a company that cut and welded sheets of steel, not some corner-case where an off-the-shelf system would have been inadequate.
I just saw Skyfall at a matinee and it was $5.50 per adult, surprise surprise the theater was full which is pretty good for a movie that's been out for 7 weeks.
We have one remaining "second run" theater in town; $3 tickets, and snacks around half what the "real" theaters charge. Skyfall will probably be there next month. How quickly a movie makes it there is seems to be inversely proportional to how good the movie is.
They'd have to give a discount on food as well. At least in the US popcorn and a drink run you as much as the ticket.
We hardly ever buy movie food, we just bring our own. The local (Australia) cinema won't let you bring a backpack or other large bag in (tripping hazard) but they haven't batted an eyelid when we've put the backpack in their lockers and taken in our own popcorn etc. Three of my kids and my wife can't have gluten so buying the food there isn't really an option - too much risk of contamination (who knows what they put in that 'butter'!).
I prefer not to have food at all in the cinema, but when you have young kids it's a great way to keep them still while they get interested in the movie.
This is pretty much a no-go in the US. Most theaters have a "no outside food or drink" policy posted on the door and they try to enforce it-- as the GP stated, a popcorn and drink can easily cost $10-$12 and, being popcorn and sugar water, is a huge profit for them.
The catch-22 is that your relative value on human life makes you an incredibly inappropriate person for making those life-and-death decisions.
There are a million and one reasons why someone might be in your house (or why you might think someone's in your house).
I'm not suggesting being robbed isn't most likely explanation, but it's just stuff. Your stuff is not worth extrajudicial killing someone over.
I agree, no object in my home is worth shooting anyone over. I would not shoot anyone who I thought was just in my home to steal.
If I thought that that person might have harm in mind for one of my family members? Absolutely. Vengeance for a dead family member would not bring them back, and daddy being in prison probably wouldn't help the healing or the financial well-being of the surviving family members. But, if I had the clear option of stopping someone who might harm one of my family, I would rather explain myself to a jury and take my chances rather than live with the results of my inaction. I've seriously pondered that question, and frankly it's moot since my guns are locked in a location that really would do me no good during a home invasion. I've chosen to not have guns readily available in my home, since the odds of someone being shot accidentally are much greater than the odds of my having to face down an armed invader in my home ready to kill my family to steal $300 worth of junk.
As long as you can convince the would-be burglar that my stuff is not worth anyone (him or me) dying for, then I'm all for your plan. Until then, I would prefer the home field advantage of being the shooter rather than the shootee, and as long as the possibility exists in that burglar's mind that just maybe I'm a gun-toting nut with a.45 in my mattress tips the odds in my favor.
The real danger is the mentally and our total lack of will to deal with them. This guys mother knew and had talked about him burning himself days before the incident. She obviously understood things were very wrong but did nothing. As a society we at most pump people with dangerous mental pathology full of drugs their own doctors hardly know what effect will have and send them back out among us. In probably the majority of cases we do nothing about them at all.
Please don't be so quick to say that his mother "understood things were very wrong but did nothing". What would you have her do? The guy was legally an adult, and she couldn't possibly have kept a 24-hour watch on him.
A very good friend of mine has a son with schizophrenia; people that only he can see tell him what to do. On several occasions, he has traveled over 1,000 miles because imaginary people told him to. Once he was instructed to drive across country to witness the second coming of Christ. Another time he ended up in the middle of Los Angeles and destroyed his cell phone and wallet so that "they" couldn't track him. He was instructed to set his parents' house on fire while they were at work, causing about $100K of damage and forcing the family to move out for about 6 months while it was repaired.
His parents bend over backwards to try and keep an eye on his condition and get him the help that they are able, but the guy's in his mid-twenties; if he doesn't consent to staying in the hospital more than 72 hours, they can't keep him there. He can walk, drive, or ride a bus just like anyone else. Short of keeping him locked in the basement with no shoelaces or metal utensils, what should they do?
My friend once told me that at least when he's in jail (which happens frequently), he can at least sleep knowing where his son is.
Shut down the service, revoke the licenses and stop supporting them. Give them a final warning to be fair and send it to every contact you have with the company.
Bad advice. Once you've gone nuclear, the last thing you need is a paper trail with everyone inside the company. At that point, you let the lawyers handle it, and your lawyer will tell you to STFU and not discuss it. Passing information to the enemy can never help your cause.
In the real world there are deadlines and never enough people on hand, so you don't have time to read every bit documentation for everything. That is perfectly acceptable as long as you are still capable of developing software that is robust and does what the customer wants.
This is why we have testing. It is more cost effective to avoid getting bogged down in making something perfect and instead get it tested as you go, making improvements based on feedback.
How do you develop "software that is robust" without understanding the libraries you are using enough to understand what the range of valid values it accepts and what exceptions it may throw?
Shops that take shortcuts like not gaining an understanding of what they are doing, because "this is why we have testing" are also the type of shops that never have enough time for proper testing.
No offense, but not all workplaces are run the same way, and there certainly are employers who will fire you for taking even one sick day. This doesn't generally happen to people on salary, but it does happen to people who are paid by the hour, especially in jobs where you are easy to replace (such as retail sales and food service.)
Yes, as an office worker bee on salary, it's easy to lose sight of this. Picture an assembly line that requires 20 people to run, where 2 of the workers are routinely calling in sick an hour before their shift starts. Not only is it a huge pain for management to deal with filling the holes, but the other 18 workers who are paid on a piece rate or quota system will be pressuring them to get rid of the deadweight. If the whole of training a replacement consists of "you stand here, put the widget in one of these plastic bags, then put it in the box", there's no reason not to replace them.
Yup. Stay home for a few days, get well and come back when you're not having to take a bottle of drugs to stay upright. 1-3 days is not unreasonable. Your work will still be there.
That's the problem: the work will still be there, along with the other work that has piled up during the 1-3 days absence. If I've got a runny nose and a cough, it's just easier to drag myself into work and keep working rather than catch up next week. If I actually feel sick, then yeah, I'll stay home since I'm going to be mostly worthless at work anyway.
A lower cost of living in even the most rural of areas of the US can't account for a pay disparity like that. Usually the largest factor in what we call "cost of living" is housing, the cost of food, gas, medical care, and other necessities are not that different across the country; Amazon and Wal-Mart deliver nationwide for the same price.
$6100 a month? Shit man, that's lovely. I'm a Network Admin in a midwest community (college educated, certified out the ass for w/e corporate wants, been working in this field for this company for ~4 years, no raises or COL increases), and I make $20k/yr. Take home after taxes/benefits, $1600 a month. Rent is $600. After rest of my bills, I have aprox $250 left a month. $100 of that a month ($25 a week) goes into savings, so 'disposable income' for me is about $150 a month. Whoopee!!
Something in your numbers doesn't add up... $1600 x 12 months = $19,200 take home. You're taking home $19,200 out of a $20,000 gross?
If you're working 40 hours/week for 50 weeks a year, your $20k works out to $10/hour. It doesn't matter what area of the country you're in; unless you're getting equity or some other compensation that's not shown here, you're getting screwed.
$6100 after taxes, health insurance, and 401k contributions
$1550/mo cost of living (50/day food ($15 meal average after tip), public transportation ($4 - $6/day), coffee, $8/pack cigarettes, etc.)
$365 (cable/electric/gas/phone)
$1530 rent
$600/mo for loans/credit card pay offs
$500/mo for car insurance / gas/ tickets (no note)
I'm not hurting, but when you consider that I save around $800/month, and the average cost of a house in SF is $735k, it would take 15 years to have enough money for just the 20% down payment in the present, which by then would be probably only 12% of the total cost of the house. Also you have to consider my rent is really cheap as it is rent controlled. Apartment seekers here are faced with 1 bedroom rents of $2000 and up, and 2 bedrooms at $3k or more, if they can even find a place.. and it is going up even more because of guys like me that aren't completely priced out of getting a place.
125k is OK for me. It's not enough for a person who wants to live in the city and have a social life and doesn't want to live with 5 other people in a 1200 sqft place, and who has aspirations of buying a house here.
I'm not in the SF area, so I'll take your numbers at face value and assume that the $735k house is equivalent to the one you could rent for $3k/month.
With those numbers you would be much better off never buying the house. If you could put 20% down on that $735k house, your mortgage would be $588,000. At 3%, a 30 year mortgage would be about $2500. Your property tax, insurance, and maintenance on the house would put you well above the $3k/month mark, and that's even without considering the $147k down payment that you've invested.
In some places, rent is cheap. If you owned a $735k house, would you rent it out for so little every month?
I am intimately familiar with how much work it takes to do the stuff that these proposals gloss over, and become very annoyed when it is not taken seriously.:-)
Seems like the GP is a believer of the "I don't understand what that guy does, so it must be easy" crowd.
How about implementing just a few of the most common C-library functions in dedicated hardware. For example, atoi(), strlen(), or printf(). Although the software routines are highly optimised, they still take hundreds to thousands of cycles. Dedicated libc functions would require a significant amount of chip die space, BUT, they would be really power-efficient - powered off most of the time, and simply used when needed. Imagine being able to use these functions as single-cycle commands... even if the core ran at 100MHz, the performance would be amazing. Essentially it lets us trade a few hundred thousand transistors (now very cheap) for a few mW (still rather valuable).
Yeah, but how do we decide which functions those are? And why C functions? And once we hard-code those functions into silicon, we have to jump through extra hoops to change their behavior.
All three of your examples make a weak argument for this. atoi() is out of favor, since it doesn't detect errors like the strtol() function does. strlen() has no safety or bounds checking, and printf() is horribly complex.
BTW, some instructions in the x86 family are very specific for things exactly like this already. For your strlen() example, the SCASQ instruction and friends so something oh-so-close.
People doing hiring have to filter. The more applicants per job, the more they have to filter. Lots of people get filtered out for stupid reasons, and as you show here, sometimes its just a bad filter.
When you get down to it...even the degree is a case of bad filtering. They want certain attributes that often come with the degree, but its just a convinenet filter really. I have never held a job that didn't list a degree as a requirement. Clearly, since I don't have one, it never was really a requirement.... the requirement was that I find some way to get passed the filters.
That's why you always throw away a random half of the resumes received for a position... weeds out the unlucky ones.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
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Just Say No To College
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· Score: 4, Funny
It doesn't require much education to work in HR.
Everyone knows that the best HR people are all self-taught college dropouts.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
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Just Say No To College
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· Score: 4, Insightful
and this is a large part of what college teaches.
As an employer, I only wish that were true. I find myself far more amazed by people who self-educated than people who put themselves through college and received crushing debts in return.
Remember, information and education aren't restricted to formal education environments.
So is the point of the "college experience" to produce a well-rounded, educated individual, or a worker bee well-suited to what an employer is looking for. A college education used to be the former, and only the wealthy could afford that luxury.
What I'm hearing from the article and this thread is: "people who get a 4-year degree to become software jockeys are stupid, because they should have had the initiative to self-teach."
Some people who go to college later decide that they would rather spend their time developing software, which they happen to be passionate about and rather good at. It is not surprising that those people are successful at doing what they enjoy and are passionate about, but that doesn't mean that everyone else who stayed in college is a chump.
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Why the "C" disclaimer? There is more than one language used in the world, and I still support some code where gotos are necessary, as well as labels. There was a time not many years ago, where I would have 10, 20 or even 40 gotos in a single program I'd write on a daily basis. And it ran faster than probably anything you've ever written. Much of that code still runs today on a billing system billing 100s of millions of dollars annually. All rock solid and untouched for nearly a decade. It just works. I was the lead on the team that converted the system from a mainframe, and the billing programs that once took literally all weekend to run, now run in less than an hour. Context is everything. Granted this is not the goto used to taunt kids with. It's an almost necessary part of the obscure and aging language.
That's why I wrote "used in C, for example." As I stated, I sometimes use a goto and label pair in my C code as an escape from inside the logic of a function to a cleanup routine just before the function exits, similar to how a try/catch exception handler is used in C++ or Java. In assembly? Sure. We can hide the machine code under the guise of a higher level language, but underneath it all every branch of any kind is still implemented as the same JMP opcode that the goto would have been. To not understand that is a dangerous mental trap that many programmers fall into.
What these stick PCs need is a new connector that carrys full HD, 7.1 audio, power to the stick, mouse, keyboard, and remote control commands. Then TVs could include this format, you plug in your CPU stick and viola... your TV can run anything you want. Anyone could write their own TV OS or whatever. Ok kickstarter, kickstart this.
How about an HDMI connector with Ethernet? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Version_1.4. The connector is the easy part.
People are very proud of their work, and do not take criticism well. One way is to ask for his advice on your work. In reviewing it, he may pick up some of your ideas and implement them. Be tactful.
The danger of inviting his comments on your code is that he may take it upon himself to teach you the One True Way to code like him. Expect lots of unhelpful advice and a grudge to develop as you do not adopt his ideas.
The correct answer has already been stated above: implement good coding standards and reviews. Getting these done in a way that developers accept without hurt feelings is a fine art. Use the situation as a way to improve the competency of the team, not as a way to single out one poor developer. After getting a working standard in place, then you have a yardstick to measure code quality beyond your own opinion.
If the coworker's coding practices are affecting your work, but is in line with the company's coding standards, either the standards need improving or the problem is you. If you have some sort of OCD that causes you pain to look at his code, then my advice is to stop looking at his code.
On my team if I see a "goto" statement in OOP code, you get a warning. If I see it again you'll find yourself on the short list for dismissal. Blatant and arrogant refusal to conform to best practices in general yields much the same treatment. Your pride had better be worth your job because most dev houses have little tolerance for people that arrogantly refuse to support the team's ability to evolve and maintain the codebase.
Why the "in OOP code" disclaimer? The only place I've ever seen goto sanely used in C, for example, is to implement the equivalent of an exception handler that would have been done with a try/catch in C++. But that is not because of the availability of objects in C++, but rather the exception handling.
I have recently ordered a PCI-E NIC to put away for when I'll need it, but they are not generally available here. I really could not find one. I did find a USB ethernet adaptor that required a 2.4 kernel and would not work on anything newer, but I intend to find a newer one and keep it in my toolbox as well.
But that does not address the issue of no contemporary budget motherboard today being supported / supporting any contemporary Linux distro. Sure there are workarounds and fixes, but the real problem needs to be addressed.
I'm not sure of your claim that no contemporary budget motherboard is being supported, but I really don't know as I haven't been shopping for one in a couple of years. Actually, I've never had a problem with Linux supporting the hardware on any of the 5-6 different machines of different ages that I've installed on in the past 18 months, so your experience is somewhat surprising to me.
Could it be that the motherboard in question is using very new parts? The page on Asus's website that you linked before states it supports Windows 8, which makes me think that maybe the chipsets are quite new. I've had good luck with both Asus and MSI boards in the past; is it possible that selecting a board 6 or 9 months old would give a better result?
What part of the world are you in? I'm in the US, so I could pick up a PCI-E NIC from probably 4 different shops in my city of 75k population, but I probably would order it from Amazon or Newegg anyway. I'm cheap like that... :)
I havent ran into a nic that didnt work in linux in over a decade, again where are they getting this crazy garbage from? a back alley in Wuhan?
Wouldn't surprise me. Here is the piece of garbage, if you're interested:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8H61M_LX_R20/
Note that there isn't even a PCI slot to plug a different network card into!
PCI slots have been legacy for what, 5 years now? Look for a PCI-E or USB Ethernet adapter.
Nonsense. A number of people have noted that various Asus and Gigabyte boards are quite well supported. They have also provided 3rd party sources. I have a couple of Gigabyte boards of my own that I'm very satisfied with.
You might have to do a little homework first but that's hardly a great burden considering that you're obviously building a machine from PARTS.
This whole thing boils down to "I am shopping for motherboards but I am a helpless ninny".
Ready made systems are specifically marketed for people that are unwilling or unable to do the modern equivalent of cracking open a magazine like Consumer Reports.
Over the last few years, I've routinely discouraged people from building their own computers. Usually because I worry that they will be coming back to me to support them when they erase their video drivers or can't connect to their neighbor's WiFi. It's much easier for me, (and more humane for them) to just tell them to go to Dell and see what's on sale.
Especially in a business environment, buying something that has been integrated at the vendor, and backed with a warranty is worth more than the $50 they might save or the 10% increase in . Yeah, for a special-purpose box it still makes sense to piece something together, but for an office machine, cherry picking components to get the best "bang for the buck"; 3.0GHz vs. 3.2GHz, Radeon 3300 vs. ATI blah blah blah, it just doesn't matter. It will run a word processor and e-mail, and they can browse the web and print. Computers have long since become just another office machine like a copier or a telephone.
The fact that the OP is even asking this question for a machine he's turning loose into a business environment makes me question his sanity. If it's for a normal office: don't buy parts, buy computers. If it's for a uniquely tech-savvy, Linux-friendly office: you shouldn't need to ask the question, you should know what works and what doesn't.
...or just install a real OS.
I know that you're trolling, but there is definitely a push to just 'install Windows' due to the lack of a viable motherboard. If I were a weaker man, and there are plenty of weaker men, installing Windows would be the 'solution'.
For many small businesses, installing Windows would indeed be a fine solution. I like tilting at windmills as much as the next guy, but sometimes the "solution" is to fix or replace the damn tool and get back to business, not start a side project designing a new tool.
About 2006, I interviewed with a small manufacturing company once where the president was quite proud of their "can do" approach to solving problems. Why, their mechanical engineers and drafters even designed and wrote their own drafting program! Sure, it still had some bugs, and some things take a bit longer in their homebrewed system, but it was worth it to have complete control over the whole process. It only took them 9-12 months to get the system up and (mostly) going, too! And most capable drafters only took a few months to get up to speed and learn the workarounds needed to become productive. This was a company that cut and welded sheets of steel, not some corner-case where an off-the-shelf system would have been inadequate.
I politely declined their below-average salary.
I just saw Skyfall at a matinee and it was $5.50 per adult, surprise surprise the theater was full which is pretty good for a movie that's been out for 7 weeks.
We have one remaining "second run" theater in town; $3 tickets, and snacks around half what the "real" theaters charge. Skyfall will probably be there next month. How quickly a movie makes it there is seems to be inversely proportional to how good the movie is.
They'd have to give a discount on food as well. At least in the US popcorn and a drink run you as much as the ticket.
We hardly ever buy movie food, we just bring our own. The local (Australia) cinema won't let you bring a backpack or other large bag in (tripping hazard) but they haven't batted an eyelid when we've put the backpack in their lockers and taken in our own popcorn etc. Three of my kids and my wife can't have gluten so buying the food there isn't really an option - too much risk of contamination (who knows what they put in that 'butter'!).
I prefer not to have food at all in the cinema, but when you have young kids it's a great way to keep them still while they get interested in the movie.
This is pretty much a no-go in the US. Most theaters have a "no outside food or drink" policy posted on the door and they try to enforce it-- as the GP stated, a popcorn and drink can easily cost $10-$12 and, being popcorn and sugar water, is a huge profit for them.
The catch-22 is that your relative value on human life makes you an incredibly inappropriate person for making those life-and-death decisions.
There are a million and one reasons why someone might be in your house (or why you might think someone's in your house).
I'm not suggesting being robbed isn't most likely explanation, but it's just stuff. Your stuff is not worth extrajudicial killing someone over.
I agree, no object in my home is worth shooting anyone over. I would not shoot anyone who I thought was just in my home to steal.
If I thought that that person might have harm in mind for one of my family members? Absolutely. Vengeance for a dead family member would not bring them back, and daddy being in prison probably wouldn't help the healing or the financial well-being of the surviving family members. But, if I had the clear option of stopping someone who might harm one of my family, I would rather explain myself to a jury and take my chances rather than live with the results of my inaction. I've seriously pondered that question, and frankly it's moot since my guns are locked in a location that really would do me no good during a home invasion. I've chosen to not have guns readily available in my home, since the odds of someone being shot accidentally are much greater than the odds of my having to face down an armed invader in my home ready to kill my family to steal $300 worth of junk.
As long as you can convince the would-be burglar that my stuff is not worth anyone (him or me) dying for, then I'm all for your plan. Until then, I would prefer the home field advantage of being the shooter rather than the shootee, and as long as the possibility exists in that burglar's mind that just maybe I'm a gun-toting nut with a .45 in my mattress tips the odds in my favor.
I was running late for work today and realized I forgot to do laundry over the weekend.
The only thing left to do was put my full body kevlar on over my "Venom" costume.
Fortunately, I work for a bunch of blind people.
So, why bother dressing?
The real danger is the mentally and our total lack of will to deal with them. This guys mother knew and had talked about him burning himself days before the incident. She obviously understood things were very wrong but did nothing. As a society we at most pump people with dangerous mental pathology full of drugs their own doctors hardly know what effect will have and send them back out among us. In probably the majority of cases we do nothing about them at all.
Please don't be so quick to say that his mother "understood things were very wrong but did nothing". What would you have her do? The guy was legally an adult, and she couldn't possibly have kept a 24-hour watch on him.
A very good friend of mine has a son with schizophrenia; people that only he can see tell him what to do. On several occasions, he has traveled over 1,000 miles because imaginary people told him to. Once he was instructed to drive across country to witness the second coming of Christ. Another time he ended up in the middle of Los Angeles and destroyed his cell phone and wallet so that "they" couldn't track him. He was instructed to set his parents' house on fire while they were at work, causing about $100K of damage and forcing the family to move out for about 6 months while it was repaired.
His parents bend over backwards to try and keep an eye on his condition and get him the help that they are able, but the guy's in his mid-twenties; if he doesn't consent to staying in the hospital more than 72 hours, they can't keep him there. He can walk, drive, or ride a bus just like anyone else. Short of keeping him locked in the basement with no shoelaces or metal utensils, what should they do?
My friend once told me that at least when he's in jail (which happens frequently), he can at least sleep knowing where his son is.
Everyone has to sleep sometime.
Shut down the service, revoke the licenses and stop supporting them. Give them a final warning to be fair and send it to every contact you have with the company.
Bad advice. Once you've gone nuclear, the last thing you need is a paper trail with everyone inside the company. At that point, you let the lawyers handle it, and your lawyer will tell you to STFU and not discuss it. Passing information to the enemy can never help your cause.
In the real world there are deadlines and never enough people on hand, so you don't have time to read every bit documentation for everything. That is perfectly acceptable as long as you are still capable of developing software that is robust and does what the customer wants.
This is why we have testing. It is more cost effective to avoid getting bogged down in making something perfect and instead get it tested as you go, making improvements based on feedback.
How do you develop "software that is robust" without understanding the libraries you are using enough to understand what the range of valid values it accepts and what exceptions it may throw?
Shops that take shortcuts like not gaining an understanding of what they are doing, because "this is why we have testing" are also the type of shops that never have enough time for proper testing.
No offense, but not all workplaces are run the same way, and there certainly are employers who will fire you for taking even one sick day. This doesn't generally happen to people on salary, but it does happen to people who are paid by the hour, especially in jobs where you are easy to replace (such as retail sales and food service.)
Yes, as an office worker bee on salary, it's easy to lose sight of this.
Picture an assembly line that requires 20 people to run, where 2 of the workers are routinely calling in sick an hour before their shift starts. Not only is it a huge pain for management to deal with filling the holes, but the other 18 workers who are paid on a piece rate or quota system will be pressuring them to get rid of the deadweight. If the whole of training a replacement consists of "you stand here, put the widget in one of these plastic bags, then put it in the box", there's no reason not to replace them.
Yup. Stay home for a few days, get well and come back when you're not having to take a bottle of drugs to stay upright. 1-3 days is not unreasonable. Your work will still be there.
That's the problem: the work will still be there, along with the other work that has piled up during the 1-3 days absence. If I've got a runny nose and a cough, it's just easier to drag myself into work and keep working rather than catch up next week. If I actually feel sick, then yeah, I'll stay home since I'm going to be mostly worthless at work anyway.
I guess you might live in a very rural area.
A lower cost of living in even the most rural of areas of the US can't account for a pay disparity like that. Usually the largest factor in what we call "cost of living" is housing, the cost of food, gas, medical care, and other necessities are not that different across the country; Amazon and Wal-Mart deliver nationwide for the same price.
$6100 a month? Shit man, that's lovely. I'm a Network Admin in a midwest community (college educated, certified out the ass for w/e corporate wants, been working in this field for this company for ~4 years, no raises or COL increases), and I make $20k/yr. Take home after taxes/benefits, $1600 a month. Rent is $600. After rest of my bills, I have aprox $250 left a month. $100 of that a month ($25 a week) goes into savings, so 'disposable income' for me is about $150 a month. Whoopee!!
Something in your numbers doesn't add up... $1600 x 12 months = $19,200 take home. You're taking home $19,200 out of a $20,000 gross?
If you're working 40 hours/week for 50 weeks a year, your $20k works out to $10/hour. It doesn't matter what area of the country you're in; unless you're getting equity or some other compensation that's not shown here, you're getting screwed.
Monthly, $125k for me is:
I'm not hurting, but when you consider that I save around $800/month, and the average cost of a house in SF is $735k, it would take 15 years to have enough money for just the 20% down payment in the present, which by then would be probably only 12% of the total cost of the house. Also you have to consider my rent is really cheap as it is rent controlled. Apartment seekers here are faced with 1 bedroom rents of $2000 and up, and 2 bedrooms at $3k or more, if they can even find a place .. and it is going up even more because of guys like me that aren't completely priced out of getting a place.
125k is OK for me. It's not enough for a person who wants to live in the city and have a social life and doesn't want to live with 5 other people in a 1200 sqft place, and who has aspirations of buying a house here.
I'm not in the SF area, so I'll take your numbers at face value and assume that the $735k house is equivalent to the one you could rent for $3k/month.
With those numbers you would be much better off never buying the house. If you could put 20% down on that $735k house, your mortgage would be $588,000. At 3%, a 30 year mortgage would be about $2500. Your property tax, insurance, and maintenance on the house would put you well above the $3k/month mark, and that's even without considering the $147k down payment that you've invested.
In some places, rent is cheap. If you owned a $735k house, would you rent it out for so little every month?
I am intimately familiar with how much work it takes to do the stuff that these proposals gloss over, and become very annoyed when it is not taken seriously. :-)
Seems like the GP is a believer of the "I don't understand what that guy does, so it must be easy" crowd.
How about implementing just a few of the most common C-library functions in dedicated hardware. For example, atoi(), strlen(), or printf(). Although the software routines are highly optimised, they still take hundreds to thousands of cycles. Dedicated libc functions would require a significant amount of chip die space, BUT, they would be really power-efficient - powered off most of the time, and simply used when needed. Imagine being able to use these functions as single-cycle commands... even if the core ran at 100MHz, the performance would be amazing. Essentially it lets us trade a few hundred thousand transistors (now very cheap) for a few mW (still rather valuable).
Yeah, but how do we decide which functions those are? And why C functions? And once we hard-code those functions into silicon, we have to jump through extra hoops to change their behavior.
All three of your examples make a weak argument for this. atoi() is out of favor, since it doesn't detect errors like the strtol() function does. strlen() has no safety or bounds checking, and printf() is horribly complex.
BTW, some instructions in the x86 family are very specific for things exactly like this already. For your strlen() example, the SCASQ instruction and friends so something oh-so-close.
People doing hiring have to filter. The more applicants per job, the more they have to filter. Lots of people get filtered out for stupid reasons, and as you show here, sometimes its just a bad filter.
When you get down to it...even the degree is a case of bad filtering. They want certain attributes that often come with the degree, but its just a convinenet filter really. I have never held a job that didn't list a degree as a requirement. Clearly, since I don't have one, it never was really a requirement.... the requirement was that I find some way to get passed the filters.
That's why you always throw away a random half of the resumes received for a position... weeds out the unlucky ones.
It doesn't require much education to work in HR.
Everyone knows that the best HR people are all self-taught college dropouts.
and this is a large part of what college teaches.
As an employer, I only wish that were true. I find myself far more amazed by people who self-educated than people who put themselves through college and received crushing debts in return.
Remember, information and education aren't restricted to formal education environments.
So is the point of the "college experience" to produce a well-rounded, educated individual, or a worker bee well-suited to what an employer is looking for. A college education used to be the former, and only the wealthy could afford that luxury.
What I'm hearing from the article and this thread is: "people who get a 4-year degree to become software jockeys are stupid, because they should have had the initiative to self-teach."
Some people who go to college later decide that they would rather spend their time developing software, which they happen to be passionate about and rather good at. It is not surprising that those people are successful at doing what they enjoy and are passionate about, but that doesn't mean that everyone else who stayed in college is a chump.