Here is one better: Friend of mine from college. Last name Livshits. The rest of the family changed it to Livshin, he didn't. Of course his first name was Igor so most people got over the Livshits thing.
The classification of exempt and nonexempt employees are defined by a 1970's era law. This article published in the current issue of Inc Magazine goes into great detail. Overtime compensation lawsuits are the new "cash cow" of employment lawsuits. Join the class action early!
IIRC, General Dynamics made some pretty decent money selling $600 toilet seats to the government, though I think that selling free software to the government is infinitely better.
A word about defense contracting, any product you supply the government most likely has a detailed MIL-SPEC (Military Specification). One of the many DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement ) you contractually agree to is documentation of your compliance with any and all specifications. So consider the lowly toilet seat.
There is probably a MIL-SPEC related to acceptable materials - now you need to test and document the source Is it on an combat aircraft - then there are MIL-SPECs relating to the explosive combatibility, breakability, and maximum static charge buildup allowed.
When you start to look at all of the required documentation and testing, and the time involved the price gets up there - especially when the lowley $20/hr technician can be billed to the government at $90/hr ($20 + 300% Overhead + allowable Profit ~7% (of the gross!))
As a point of refernce the MIL-SPEC for a 13in antenna for use in the 420 to 460 megacycles per second range is 7 pages long, and references 10 other MIL-SPECs as well.
The really sad thing is that Home Depot probably has a better profit margin on their toilet seats than General Dynamics did.
FYI the university of houston chemical engineering department does NOT inflate grades. My reactor engineering course had a few Fs, a ton of Cs, and a couple of Bs and As, mainly given to those who were repeating and new the material better. Interesting how the ChemE program here is still ranked pretty high nationally--Not that any of that crap matters to me.
It's that Dr. Balakotaiah, right? I had him as visit Prof one year. Hardest damn class I've ever had. I still have nightmares about his homework sets involving infinite series...
It varies by program. I went to UIUC as well (ChemE '92 Woot!) and A's and B's were the norn until Sr Year. Reactor Design and Analysis in fall semester. That was the course designed to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. They would regularly flunk students in this class. The reason: it was offered once a year only and was required for graduation. If you failed, it was an extra year to graduate or a last minute switch to a chemistry major. Hence weak engineers were culled from the herd before they could do any damage.
Now at the University of Minnesota, the department would crush the students spirit with ChEn5001 (I know, I was a TA for that course several times)
So while there may be some grade inflation in the Sciences and Engineering, there are still gates to keep the rif-raf from getting degrees. In my conversations with hiring managers for Chemical Engineers, the good ones know the weedout classes and also look at the grade received, regardless of GPA.
My brother says the same thing. Of course he's 25 and single.
Let's see if you have the same attidtude when you are married with a two year old child. In case you didn't know, The Sopranos is not appropriate fare for toddlers. And it is not a matter of needing to record the shitty shows, it a matter of the only decent shows being on at times that conflict with being a parent. You get more out of TV because you can watch something decent when you have a half hour after the kid is asleep.
Read a fucking book.
Hey my advice to you is stay single so you can keep posting your wisdom to/. !
Part of the reason people look antennas badly, is that they usually gave crappy reception. Hell, the whole cable industry was succesful because a lot of poeple signed up with the basic cable because they couldn't get decent reception. In theory, the OTA HD signal being digital, many of the old complaints regarding OTA broadcasts should go away, and people will be happy to multiplex the OTA feed with the DirectTV feed in order to enjoy local channels in HD.
I though so too at one time, especially with the $12/month that Tivo charges. But then I went with the DirectTV Tivo, and I pay $4.99 a month - same as to activate another decoder box.
Barriers to adoption of such integrated devices will come mostly from the companies that control the current media types as they will be concerned about losing their current revenue streams
In ten years the the barrier to adoption will be the plethora of remotes and/or multitude of modes in the one Universal remote. I watch my father-in law go batshit everytime he accidentially puts the remote into VCR mode when changing the channel on the cable box.
A good business lawyer is worth his weight in platinum and charges accordingly. The purpose of a contract or license agreement is merely to frame the arguement when it comes time for a lawsuit.
Cynically Speaking, in the end it really doesn't matter.
Even if you have the most airtight legal agreement, if the company you are dealing with is a wretched hive of villainous scum, then they will violate the contract/license at will. Your company will sue, and it will take x years and XXX thousands of dollars to litigate. If your company could not survive if every TD&H has access to your code, you may need to rethink your business model. With information wanting to be free and all, you know.
Re:Old but good light bulb jokes
on
Science Askew
·
· Score: 1
Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Fish.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!
A: 3. One to hold the giraffe and two to fill the bathtub with pretty colored pebbles.
I think mergers are a different situation than bankrupcy. That said, I think MS does not have a leg to stand on and here is why:
Being in bankrupcy makes all contracts null and void - thats why some employees have to wait for litigation in order to get their back pay
Sale of assets is directed by the court and needs their approval. Rember when the Dot Coms with decent user privacy agreements went on the block- where they swore to never sell your personal information- the information was sold to pay creditors
If I was the purchaser of Bluelight.com, I'd discount my price by the book value of the MS licenses in question and tell MS to go pound sand.
Okay, who on Earth thinks that they should "backup audio cds"?
Until I can take my scratched CD back to Best Buy and get a new copy for the cost of media - since I've already purchased a license to listen to the damn thing - then YES i want to be able to make a backup as is my right under the law.
And on a related topic -- if the stupid CD/Book/game is now longer avaailable because it's "out of print", then all talk of copyright is moot. If I make an unauthorized copy, how is it piracy when the origional isn't avaialble for sale?
Office already support the HTML format pretty well (with some extensions.. ahem) since Office 2000. HTML support works even better in Office XP since it allow you to save the document as "filtered HTML", where Office filters most of the Office-specific tags and attributes at the cost of loosing some information in the document.
Excellent point and true. If you read the documentation, MS Word does not clain to produce HTML for the web only. They claim to produce HTML that would allow for Round-Trip-Processing. Word to Web back into Word without loss of presentation information
It is actually an IR light source. The special dots are printed in an ink that had a high IR reflectivity. Traditional inks don't. So even when you right over the dots with the Ink of your Logitech pen, the camera can still see the dots.
The deal with the paper is that the pattern of dots is unique and no- repeating up to a area about the size of the North America. The business plan behind Annoto is to license sections of that mapspace to companys.
Catalog company X could license 100 sq ft for use in their catalogs - using 2mm at a time for a check box next to each item in their catalog. When you check the box, the pen records those cordinates, when you download the map locations trigger an order form to be filled out on the company's catalog web site. Or 3M could sell POST-IT Faxes - a post-it with a check box to fax, so that when you link your pen with the internet , the message you just scribbled is faxed away.
My only concern with the company is the Cue-Cat esque business model of makeing people have to pass their informtion through the annoto servers to perform anything useful.
Re:I think you're being overly sensitive...
on
Ig Nobels Awarded
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Absolutely. There was the Vetrinarian who one an IgNoble for his research on ear mites. Ear mites occur in cats and dogs and many a pet owner has asked "Can people get ear mites?". This Vet set out to answer the question by attempting to infect himself with ear mites - not once, not twice, but three times.
Bottom line "People can't get ear mites."
The vet actually attended the awards and took the ribbing all in fun.
Back in my grad school days (5 yrs ago) everyone who had supercomputer time was writing in FORTRAN. Just ask yourself, do you want to write a new optimized routine to compute the Cholesky decomposition of a positive definite matrix for a sparse matrix and store the resulting sparse matrix in band compressed form so that you can increase your grid size from 5k to 20k elements -OR- do you grab the linpack routines from http://www.netlib.org/linpack and go have a beer.
Absolutely, hydrogen fuel cells that require pure hydrogen are a net loser on total energy. There are a couple a alteratives though. Work is being done on hydrocarbon processing fuels cells, where the fuel is gasoline or ethanol. The fuel is catalytically reformed into H2 and Co2. The problem is that the some carbon monoxode is formed in the process and the CO poisons the fuel cell membrane.
Another approach is the use ammonia (NH3) as the source. The same autocatalytic reforming trick is used, with the advantage of no CO.
Of course everyone wants the ethonal/gasoline reforming system to work since you could have fuel cell cars on the road with no change to the fuel distribution infrastructure.
I worked in government contracting for the department of defense. It was not a pleasant experience. As a consultant, you had to allow your books to be audited by the DOD and you were limited to a 7% profit margin. I imagine the same applys for government employees - here's your salary and the best raise you can expect is a cost of living adjustment.
(When did the USPO go "For Profit?" Who was in power, albeit not in possession of any higher cognitive abilities?)
It happened during the 90's under Clinton. The USPO discovered that it was raking in the money because of its fees. Everyone (Democrats and Rebuplicans) at the time thought this was great and an example of how goverment services should opperate.
The irony is that while the USPO makes money by granting Patents that take a court decision to get invalidated, it suffers no repercussions for the boneheaded decision to grant the patent in the First Place!
that you're interviewing programmers, aka code monkeys. They might dance, but they will never perform. You'd probably like an engineer or a scientist. How you interview for them is totally different.
Absolutely!! Too often companies think that their processes and requirement gathering methods are so complete, that all they need are code monkeys. I'd trade 5 code monkeys for the 1 programmer who notices that the requirements are inconsistent and brings it to the attention of the Project Manager with a proposed solution!! Companies need Problem Solvers not monkeys.
Except in sales. Sales need more monkeys - especially ones that have their own organ grinder!
A very long time. The best my monkeys have written to date is Too be or not two bee..
Bad monkeys.
I'm holding out for the redneck version: Given enough time and shotgun ammunition,a group of rednecks will eventually product the great works of literature in braille on highway signs.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one better: Friend of mine from college.
Last name Livshits.
The rest of the family changed it to Livshin, he didn't. Of course his first name was Igor so most people got over the Livshits thing.
The classification of exempt and nonexempt employees are defined by a 1970's era law. This article published in the current issue of Inc Magazine goes into great detail. Overtime compensation lawsuits are the new "cash cow" of employment lawsuits. Join the class action early!
A word about defense contracting, any product you supply the government most likely has a detailed MIL-SPEC (Military Specification). One of the many DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement ) you contractually agree to is documentation of your compliance with any and all specifications. So consider the lowly toilet seat.
There is probably a MIL-SPEC related to acceptable materials - now you need to test and document the source
Is it on an combat aircraft - then there are MIL-SPECs relating to the explosive combatibility, breakability, and maximum static charge buildup allowed.
When you start to look at all of the required documentation and testing, and the time involved the price gets up there - especially when the lowley $20/hr technician can be billed to the government at $90/hr ($20 + 300% Overhead + allowable Profit ~7% (of the gross!))
As a point of refernce the MIL-SPEC for a 13in antenna for use in the 420 to 460 megacycles per second range is 7 pages long, and references 10 other MIL-SPECs as well.
The really sad thing is that Home Depot probably has a better profit margin on their toilet seats than General Dynamics did.
FYI the university of houston chemical engineering department does NOT inflate grades. My reactor engineering course had a few Fs, a ton of Cs, and a couple of Bs and As, mainly given to those who were repeating and new the material better. Interesting how the ChemE program here is still ranked pretty high nationally--Not that any of that crap matters to me.
It's that Dr. Balakotaiah, right? I had him as visit Prof one year. Hardest damn class I've ever had. I still have nightmares about his homework sets involving infinite series...
Now at the University of Minnesota, the department would crush the students spirit with ChEn5001 (I know, I was a TA for that course several times)
So while there may be some grade inflation in the Sciences and Engineering, there are still gates to keep the rif-raf from getting degrees. In my conversations with hiring managers for Chemical Engineers, the good ones know the weedout classes and also look at the grade received, regardless of GPA.
My brother says the same thing. Of course he's 25 and single.
/. !
Let's see if you have the same attidtude when you are married with a two year old child. In case you didn't know, The Sopranos is not appropriate fare for toddlers. And it is not a matter of needing to record the shitty shows, it a matter of the only decent shows being on at times that conflict with being a parent. You get more out of TV because you can watch something decent when you have a half hour after the kid is asleep.
Read a fucking book.
Hey my advice to you is stay single so you can keep posting your wisdom to
Part of the reason people look antennas badly, is that they usually gave crappy reception. Hell, the whole cable industry was succesful because a lot of poeple signed up with the basic cable because they couldn't get decent reception. In theory, the OTA HD signal being digital, many of the old complaints regarding OTA broadcasts should go away, and people will be happy to multiplex the OTA feed with the DirectTV feed in order to enjoy local channels in HD.
I though so too at one time, especially with the $12/month that Tivo charges. But then I went with the DirectTV Tivo, and I pay $4.99 a month - same as to activate another decoder box.
In ten years the the barrier to adoption will be the plethora of remotes and/or multitude of modes in the one Universal remote. I watch my father-in law go batshit everytime he accidentially puts the remote into VCR mode when changing the channel on the cable box.
Cynically Speaking, in the end it really doesn't matter.
Even if you have the most airtight legal agreement, if the company you are dealing with is a wretched hive of villainous scum, then they will violate the contract/license at will. Your company will sue, and it will take x years and XXX thousands of dollars to litigate. If your company could not survive if every TD&H has access to your code, you may need to rethink your business model. With information wanting to be free and all, you know.A: Fish.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!
A: 3. One to hold the giraffe and two to fill the bathtub with pretty colored pebbles.
Kids these days...
Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design
by Michael J. Hernandez
Best book I've found for someone wanting to learn the basics of design. Covers normalization, referential integrity - the works.
I think mergers are a different situation than bankrupcy. That said, I think MS does not have a leg to stand on and here is why:
Being in bankrupcy makes all contracts null and void - thats why some employees have to wait for litigation in order to get their back pay
Sale of assets is directed by the court and needs their approval. Rember when the Dot Coms with decent user privacy agreements went on the block- where they swore to never sell your personal information- the information was sold to pay creditors
If I was the purchaser of Bluelight.com, I'd discount my price by the book value of the MS licenses in question and tell MS to go pound sand.
Until I can take my scratched CD back to Best Buy and get a new copy for the cost of media - since I've already purchased a license to listen to the damn thing - then YES i want to be able to make a backup as is my right under the law.
And on a related topic -- if the stupid CD/Book/game is now longer avaailable because it's "out of print", then all talk of copyright is moot. If I make an unauthorized copy, how is it piracy when the origional isn't avaialble for sale?
Excellent point and true. If you read the documentation, MS Word does not clain to produce HTML for the web only. They claim to produce HTML that would allow for Round-Trip-Processing. Word to Web back into Word without loss of presentation information
It is actually an IR light source. The special dots are printed in an ink that had a high IR reflectivity. Traditional inks don't. So even when you right over the dots with the Ink of your Logitech pen, the camera can still see the dots.
I solved it too! But the lameness filter prevents me from posting.
The deal with the paper is that the pattern of dots is unique and no- repeating up to a area about the size of the North America. The business plan behind Annoto is to license sections of that mapspace to companys.
Catalog company X could license 100 sq ft for use in their catalogs - using 2mm at a time for a check box next to each item in their catalog. When you check the box, the pen records those cordinates, when you download the map locations trigger an order form to be filled out on the company's catalog web site. Or 3M could sell POST-IT Faxes - a post-it with a check box to fax, so that when you link your pen with the internet , the message you just scribbled is faxed away.
My only concern with the company is the Cue-Cat esque business model of makeing people have to pass their informtion through the annoto servers to perform anything useful.
Absolutely. There was the Vetrinarian who one an IgNoble for his research on ear mites. Ear mites occur in cats and dogs and many a pet owner has asked "Can people get ear mites?". This Vet set out to answer the question by attempting to infect himself with ear mites - not once, not twice, but three times.
Bottom line "People can't get ear mites."
The vet actually attended the awards and took the ribbing all in fun.
Back in my grad school days (5 yrs ago) everyone who had supercomputer time was writing in FORTRAN. Just ask yourself, do you want to write a new optimized routine to compute the Cholesky decomposition of a positive definite matrix for a sparse matrix and store the resulting sparse matrix in band compressed form so that you can increase your grid size from 5k to 20k elements -OR- do you grab the linpack routines from http://www.netlib.org/linpack and go have a beer.
At the University of Minnesota beer usually won.
Absolutely, hydrogen fuel cells that require pure hydrogen are a net loser on total energy. There are a couple a alteratives though. Work is being done on hydrocarbon processing fuels cells, where the fuel is gasoline or ethanol. The fuel is catalytically reformed into H2 and Co2. The problem is that the some carbon monoxode is formed in the process and the CO poisons the fuel cell membrane.
Another approach is the use ammonia (NH3) as the source. The same autocatalytic reforming trick is used, with the advantage of no CO.
Of course everyone wants the ethonal/gasoline reforming system to work since you could have fuel cell cars on the road with no change to the fuel distribution infrastructure.
I worked in government contracting for the department of defense. It was not a pleasant experience. As a consultant, you had to allow your books to be audited by the DOD and you were limited to a 7% profit margin. I imagine the same applys for government employees - here's your salary and the best raise you can expect is a cost of living adjustment.
It happened during the 90's under Clinton. The USPO discovered that it was raking in the money because of its fees. Everyone (Democrats and Rebuplicans) at the time thought this was great and an example of how goverment services should opperate.
The irony is that while the USPO makes money by granting Patents that take a court decision to get invalidated, it suffers no repercussions for the boneheaded decision to grant the patent in the First Place!
Absolutely!! Too often companies think that their processes and requirement gathering methods are so complete, that all they need are code monkeys. I'd trade 5 code monkeys for the 1 programmer who notices that the requirements are inconsistent and brings it to the attention of the Project Manager with a proposed solution!! Companies need Problem Solvers not monkeys.
Except in sales. Sales need more monkeys - especially ones that have their own organ grinder!
Bad monkeys.
I'm holding out for the redneck version: Given enough time and shotgun ammunition,a group of rednecks will eventually product the great works of literature in braille on highway signs.