I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so I went thru a handful of nasty hurricanes, including two Cat 5s. Here's what I would do if I had to spend any time in a disaster area like that:
1. You want it, you carry it. Assume there is nothing available. That means stock up on asthma medicine, painkillers, contact lenses, whatever it is that YOU need. This is before you worry about what to bring to others.
2. Footgear: Ideally you should be wearing sturdy waterproof footgear, boots if possible. Sneakers are a no-no. You can easily twist an ankle stepping over debris, and a nail will pierce thru your sneaker soles as if it is not even there. Plus you don't want to get your feet wet in that kind of environment. Carry extra socks and foot powder too.
3. You can't carry too many batteries or too many ziploc bags.
4. Carry some wet wipes, these are very handy and can be used for many things. Get a couple packs with something like aloe vera and a couple with clorox, lysol, etc.
5. Flood areas, especially in the south, have terrible mosquito control issues. Repellent sucks but still beats the alternative.
6. Unless you have solid housing arrangements, that is, unless you know you are sleeping at an air conditioned room, find a mosquito net. Sure, it will be hot as hell, but I would rather be hot and without bug bites.
7. Fluids! Unless specifically arranged for, you have to assume there is no drinking water available. When Hurricane Hugo struck Puerto Rico in 1989 I had to drink warm coke for about 5 days. We had plenty of stuff to drink, but we were told to not trust water, period.
In my case the worst was the lack of electricity and potable water. Our house was hurricane-proof, so if it flooded all we had to do was hose down the walls (cement) and floors (marble), repaint and replace furniture and appliances. That means that once the flooding receded we could go back to clean the house and make it habitable again instead of having to stay at a shelter and risk getting sick.
Studying engineering is just too damn hard. While your buddies are out pledging and drunk out of their gurds, you are cracking the books. You don't sleep at all, and all of this while you keep reading how your labor sector is getting hit by offshoring.
Your friends in liberal arts are having the time of their lives and you are living on 2-3 hours of sleep. If you are not an engineering (or science) major you will take much simpler math and natural science base courses. Back in my school we used to call these the "poet" courses. For example, somebody will bitch about a calculus test, and you would automatically ask if it was real calculus or poets' calculus.
Sometimes the curriculum makes no sense. Waste two semesters learning engineering mechanics statics only to me told "well shit, remember all you learned in statics? it was a crock of shit. You have to relearn it but with deformable objects." This is after you already had the proper physics and calculus background to understand the whole picture. Or maybe the first introduction to programming course is in Fortran WATFIV instead of something relevant to the market today, like C++, Java, etc.
My hat is off to anyone that survives a mechanical engineering curriculum and sticks around in the field.
Don't walk, RUN, and find yourself a lawyer. You just hit jackpot and you need to protect it beyond the IANAL hordes here at Slashdot.
Beyond that, the only recommendation that I can give you is to make some kind of provision to protect your employer from getting in trouble down the road while using your IP. Say you work for him for a few years, then you move on and lucky you, somebody buys your IP at a handsome premium. You don't want your ex-employer to get screwed by the new owner of the IP. For example, he may still be using the works you generated.
What I would do is this: in exchange for the oh-so-wildly-generous offer to allow me to own the IP for my hard work while under employment, I would be happy to grant this nice guy a limited license that allows him perpetual use of the works as is. He can use them until they are obsolete, he gets no support, etc. And he won't get harrassed by the new owner of the IP.
Now, I don't have to do this, but what the hell, it does not cost me anything.
Please mod up parent. Aqua Data Studio is a very damn good application, and the developer is extremely responsive. It is common to have him hang out in the support newsgroup for hours at a time, walking people thru things even if it is obvious they are too lazy/dumb/etc. to follow the documentation and FAQs. Between Aqua Data Studio (which btw runs on pretty much anything that can run Java) and phpMyAdmin, you should be able to do almost 99% of whatever it is that you need. The other 1%? RTFM and use the CLI.
As for the SQL Server Enterprise Manager, it was a turd in 6.5, less of a turd in 7.0 and then got worse in 2000. The improvements added to Enterprise Manager for the jump from 7 to 20000 were pretty damn good, but they are offset by bullshit mickey mouse Jscript interface errors that have no place in a database management application. This sucks because the SQL Server Query Analyzer only got better and has none of these weird Jscript issues.
For those of you stuck in the Oracle world (and cursing the Oracle provided tools), you may want to check out Benthic (http://www.benthicsoftware.com/), they have been publishing very nice and inexpensive shareware apps that work more or less like the SQL Server Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyzer.
I have had jobs where I had to put up with a lot of crap. The pay was always reasonable, never too crazy. The hours usually sucked, and as a norm most of the first line supervisors were clueles. Since the pay was just reasonable it fell under the "I don't get paid enough for this shit" category, so once these became unbearable, I moved on.
There have also been a couple of jobs that fall under the "damn, I *do* get paid enough to put up with shit." In that case the pay and benefits are a bit higher than usual, so you put up with the crap in the job for as long as you can hack it.
Of course, once in a lifetime you get that one job where you get paid well, people listen to you and you can pretty much get away with murder. Hell, you might even get lucky and end up working for a first line supervisor that is not an idiot. If you are one of the very few lucky bastards in this position, STFU and try to get as much as you want out of it.
1. Foam padded laptop sleeve 2. Titanium powerbook 3. Firewire drive 4. Small CD binder 5. Torx screwdriver 6. Micro screwdriver set 7. Eyeglass cleaner fluid, cloth and eyeglass hard case. 8. Small change pouch (bus still not compatible with DC metro rail smart cards, damn them!) 9. Hardcover book (currently David Silva's Mark of the Assassin) 10. Small pouch with pain killers and prescription drugs 11. Leatherman pocket knife 12. AA and AAA batteries 13. Dead 5GB iPod (bad battery, bad firewire plug, no warranty but qualifies for class action $50 gimme) 14. Dead 20 GB click-wheel iPod (dead but still in warranty) 15. Sony earbuds 16. Business cards 17. Sony DSC-T1 digital camera 18. Spare memory stick duo pro plus adapter 19. ethernet cable 20. Riccola cough drops 21. Spare keys 22. pay stubs 23. usb->ps/2 mice plug 24. Spare apple power supply prongs 25. iPod case 26. Firewire and USB2 cables
Very true. If that guy bought a small townhouse and/or condo in a metro area 5 yrs or so ago, he probably made a killing when he sold it to move out to the middle of nowhere. Hell, he probably paid off that 7 acre farm already, so all he has to worry about is property tax and utilities.
I used to feel the same way until I got a second programmer on board and he was well-versed on PHP from the object-oriented side. Sure, it is a web-based application and there is no state, but the OO approach can save you a hell of a lot of trouble. Done right it saves you a lot in redundancies, plus as long as you don't mess with your interfaces you can work on the object itself without messing the pages that use it.
Imagine an online community. Your user profile keeps 10-20 bits of information about each user (name, email, etc.). In the procedural world, you would need:
1. User signup page 2. User profile page, so users can edit their own profile. 3. User management page, so site admins can moderate their membership.
Each of these sections has its own sql commands, logic, etc. Of you have half a clue you will at least write some functions to centralize some of that code, but it is still procedural.
Now, think OO. You can make a user class, and the class has methods to add/edit and list users. YOu still end up with the same pages:
1. User signup page 2. User profile page, so users can edit their own profile. 3. User management page, so site admins can moderate their membership.
The main difference is that these are much smaller, because there is no redundancy. The user signup page only has to grab the proper form fields and send them to the user object, which knows how to validate the user and add it. The user profile page works the same, it only has enough code to pull the user profile thru the object, and pulls the submitted form values and sends them back to the object. The admin pages work the same way, except that from the admin pages you have access to more methods within the object.
And yes, smarty is teh bomb. The only thing we lack with smarty is exceptions. If you use smarty with php 5 you don't get template errors displayed on screen, instead you just get a blank screen, which is aggravating as hell. We are fed up enough with it that we are about to go ahead and hack smarty to use exceptions of it detects php 5, and then we'll send the code back to the smarty folks to see if they feel like adding the code to the main branch.
This cannot be stressed enough: throwing more bodies into the problem only makes the project last longer.
It gets worse when outsiders above the project (say, a division manager that is not paying attention to the status reports) decide to listen to hearsay and water cooler talk and use that as criteria to bring more people in:
"The guys in the break room are bitching about the project, we need to bring more php programmers."
Next thing you know, this head guy is talking to everyone except the actual team that knows what is going on.
This happened to us less than a month before delivery. For real. We found by accident that the boss was concerned and was getting ready to shop around for extra PHP people. Small problem: we were not having PHP problems. Our problem was a hosed CVS repository, which is what we were overheard bitching about while making coffee in the break room.
When we told the boss that there was nothing wrong with the code and we were less than two days behind our schedule (which is much more agressive than his) he almost shit a brick.
The lesson? Don't bitch about technical stuff unless it is a controlled environment. We now keep our bitching for our daily walk to pick up lunch. The odds of someone from the office overhearing us and getting half of the information are pretty much nil.
BTW, the boss still came up with a good idea for bringing extra people, since programmers are not needed. He thinks we can bring temps just to do grunt work like filling a bunch of web forms, etc.
Re:The terrible Secret of Space
on
Top 10 Web Fads
·
· Score: 1
The programmer as an artist, not as a technician
on
Is Programming Art?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have been programming for about 17 years and my background is mechanical engineering. For many years I saw programming as the kind of thing a technician does. A technician is a guy of at least some intelligence with the proper training and experience. He gets the job done. The funny thing is that as years passed I never changed my basic opinion on the job as a whole.
Then one day my boss was chewing my ass off for God knows why, and he complained that the problem with programmers is that they are artists and that opens a huge can of worms. We argued about it for a while but he left me convinced that yes, real programmers are artists, not technicians.
When was the last time you read a bit of hacked together code that looked so nasty that it made you smile? Sure, it looked like hell, but it got the job done. You could probably recognize who actually wrote that particular piece of code because eventually the great programmers develop their own particular style.
When was the last time you read a tiny little bit of code, a really small function that did just one lousy little thing, but not only it did the job, but it took you a split second to figure out what the hell the programmer was thinking when he/she wrote it? That's art.
If programming was purely technical, then we would never get into the zone in the middle of the god damn night, or solve a problem while in the can or taking a shower.
Sure, Kodak is stopping production, but they are not the only ones that make quality B&W photo paper. Ever heard of Ilford?
When the news came out a couple days ago I thought it was a shame since I used to develop my own B&W film, but quickly realized that even back then I was scanning my films. I almost never printed them so at least in my particular case there is no real loss.
And sure, we got digital, but in over 5 years shooting digital I am still not too happy with my B&W results. It is nice to know that I can grab a manual camera and shoot some Kodak PLUS-X 125 if I feel like it.
The masters (as resume fodder) is only useful if you are aiming for a middle-to-senior level position, and the degree can be a tie-breaker between you and other applicants. If you are looking for entry level jobs the masters will actually hurt you.
If you do get hired, you will have plenty of time to update your employee records with the masters degree and HR won't even bother telling your department boss. Once you're in, that's it. Nobody gives a crap unless it is a very specialized field that demands that degree as condition for employment.
When prospective employers scan resumes (I got a lot of experience doing this while trying to recruit my own employees), most like to compare years of actual work experience against formal education. A guy that has been working for 5 years and has a bachelors degree will weigh in more than a guy that a guy with a masters (or worse, a PhD) with zero to two years of practical experience.
Of course, we make sure to check for people that kept working and going to school at the same time. Anyone that manages to finish a masters or a doctorate and kept the same job deserves to be hired!
Looking at the iMac G5, I can't see why not. I mean, that things almost a laptop already!
Let's see... maybe because the sonofabitch weights 25 pounds? http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html has the 20" at 25.2 pounds. I got one iMac G5 20" at home and five at the office and "almost a laptop" doesn't cut it.
1. Your employer is *not* entitled to advance notice of your departure (unless this is spelled out in a contract). 2. You are *not* entitled to advance notice of your firing (unless this would mean the employer is in violation of a labor law).
That's it, just two exceptions. If your contract does not specify a notice period, and a penalty for not doing so, you are clean. If your state laws don't force them to, your employers can wait until the very last second to tell you that you are fired or laid off.
The 2-week notice is a common courtesy, less than two weeks is too drastic and will hint at a less than friendly departure. More than two weeks will make the whole thing akward.
It is not your responsibility to find your replacement before you leave. The only thing you really owe them is a resignation letter so they can CYA. Give them thanks for the X years of great employment and for the camaraderie or whatever.
We all know it is all a lie, but you are trying to leave in good terms and that letter will stick around for a while. Next time somebody calls HR to verify your employment, you'll get lucky and the person that answers the call won't know you. She'll pull your file and read the letter and won't hesitate to tell them that sure, you worked X years there but moved on because of whatever. If there is no letter she'll ask around and eventually she'll make it to your boss, who may or not be bitter about it. You fill the blanks.
I am guessing that by "adequate" the author meant "it does most of what I want Office to do without having to pay for it."
Once you paid for Office there is very little motivation to use OO as long as you are still using the OS for which you bought your Office license. That is the problem I have, I already bought Office v.X for OS X, why should I even bother to mess with OO?
Like I said, the fault was mine, not OSX. Had I bothered to read the distribution notes the grief factor would have gone down by at least one order of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so I went thru a handful of nasty hurricanes, including two Cat 5s. Here's what I would do if I had to spend any time in a disaster area like that:
1. You want it, you carry it. Assume there is nothing available. That means stock up on asthma medicine, painkillers, contact lenses, whatever it is that YOU need. This is before you worry about what to bring to others.
2. Footgear: Ideally you should be wearing sturdy waterproof footgear, boots if possible. Sneakers are a no-no. You can easily twist an ankle stepping over debris, and a nail will pierce thru your sneaker soles as if it is not even there. Plus you don't want to get your feet wet in that kind of environment. Carry extra socks and foot powder too.
3. You can't carry too many batteries or too many ziploc bags.
4. Carry some wet wipes, these are very handy and can be used for many things. Get a couple packs with something like aloe vera and a couple with clorox, lysol, etc.
5. Flood areas, especially in the south, have terrible mosquito control issues. Repellent sucks but still beats the alternative.
6. Unless you have solid housing arrangements, that is, unless you know you are sleeping at an air conditioned room, find a mosquito net. Sure, it will be hot as hell, but I would rather be hot and without bug bites.
7. Fluids! Unless specifically arranged for, you have to assume there is no drinking water available. When Hurricane Hugo struck Puerto Rico in 1989 I had to drink warm coke for about 5 days. We had plenty of stuff to drink, but we were told to not trust water, period.
In my case the worst was the lack of electricity and potable water. Our house was hurricane-proof, so if it flooded all we had to do was hose down the walls (cement) and floors (marble), repaint and replace furniture and appliances. That means that once the flooding receded we could go back to clean the house and make it habitable again instead of having to stay at a shelter and risk getting sick.
Studying engineering is just too damn hard. While your buddies are out pledging and drunk out of their gurds, you are cracking the books. You don't sleep at all, and all of this while you keep reading how your labor sector is getting hit by offshoring.
Your friends in liberal arts are having the time of their lives and you are living on 2-3 hours of sleep. If you are not an engineering (or science) major you will take much simpler math and natural science base courses. Back in my school we used to call these the "poet" courses. For example, somebody will bitch about a calculus test, and you would automatically ask if it was real calculus or poets' calculus.
Sometimes the curriculum makes no sense. Waste two semesters learning engineering mechanics statics only to me told "well shit, remember all you learned in statics? it was a crock of shit. You have to relearn it but with deformable objects." This is after you already had the proper physics and calculus background to understand the whole picture. Or maybe the first introduction to programming course is in Fortran WATFIV instead of something relevant to the market today, like C++, Java, etc.
My hat is off to anyone that survives a mechanical engineering curriculum and sticks around in the field.
Don't walk, RUN, and find yourself a lawyer. You just hit jackpot and you need to protect it beyond the IANAL hordes here at Slashdot.
Beyond that, the only recommendation that I can give you is to make some kind of provision to protect your employer from getting in trouble down the road while using your IP. Say you work for him for a few years, then you move on and lucky you, somebody buys your IP at a handsome premium. You don't want your ex-employer to get screwed by the new owner of the IP. For example, he may still be using the works you generated.
What I would do is this: in exchange for the oh-so-wildly-generous offer to allow me to own the IP for my hard work while under employment, I would be happy to grant this nice guy a limited license that allows him perpetual use of the works as is. He can use them until they are obsolete, he gets no support, etc. And he won't get harrassed by the new owner of the IP.
Now, I don't have to do this, but what the hell, it does not cost me anything.
My favorite pet peeve is that half the times dbcc_shrinkfile and dbcc_shrinkdatabase are placebos, they don't do a damn thing.
Please mod up parent. Aqua Data Studio is a very damn good application, and the developer is extremely responsive. It is common to have him hang out in the support newsgroup for hours at a time, walking people thru things even if it is obvious they are too lazy/dumb/etc. to follow the documentation and FAQs. Between Aqua Data Studio (which btw runs on pretty much anything that can run Java) and phpMyAdmin, you should be able to do almost 99% of whatever it is that you need. The other 1%? RTFM and use the CLI.
As for the SQL Server Enterprise Manager, it was a turd in 6.5, less of a turd in 7.0 and then got worse in 2000. The improvements added to Enterprise Manager for the jump from 7 to 20000 were pretty damn good, but they are offset by bullshit mickey mouse Jscript interface errors that have no place in a database management application. This sucks because the SQL Server Query Analyzer only got better and has none of these weird Jscript issues.
For those of you stuck in the Oracle world (and cursing the Oracle provided tools), you may want to check out Benthic (http://www.benthicsoftware.com/), they have been publishing very nice and inexpensive shareware apps that work more or less like the SQL Server Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyzer.
I have had jobs where I had to put up with a lot of crap. The pay was always reasonable, never too crazy. The hours usually sucked, and as a norm most of the first line supervisors were clueles. Since the pay was just reasonable it fell under the "I don't get paid enough for this shit" category, so once these became unbearable, I moved on.
There have also been a couple of jobs that fall under the "damn, I *do* get paid enough to put up with shit." In that case the pay and benefits are a bit higher than usual, so you put up with the crap in the job for as long as you can hack it.
Of course, once in a lifetime you get that one job where you get paid well, people listen to you and you can pretty much get away with murder. Hell, you might even get lucky and end up working for a first line supervisor that is not an idiot. If you are one of the very few lucky bastards in this position, STFU and try to get as much as you want out of it.
Currently in my timbuk2 messenger bag:
1. Foam padded laptop sleeve
2. Titanium powerbook
3. Firewire drive
4. Small CD binder
5. Torx screwdriver
6. Micro screwdriver set
7. Eyeglass cleaner fluid, cloth and eyeglass hard case.
8. Small change pouch (bus still not compatible with DC metro rail smart cards, damn them!)
9. Hardcover book (currently David Silva's Mark of the Assassin)
10. Small pouch with pain killers and prescription drugs
11. Leatherman pocket knife
12. AA and AAA batteries
13. Dead 5GB iPod (bad battery, bad firewire plug, no warranty but qualifies for class action $50 gimme)
14. Dead 20 GB click-wheel iPod (dead but still in warranty)
15. Sony earbuds
16. Business cards
17. Sony DSC-T1 digital camera
18. Spare memory stick duo pro plus adapter
19. ethernet cable
20. Riccola cough drops
21. Spare keys
22. pay stubs
23. usb->ps/2 mice plug
24. Spare apple power supply prongs
25. iPod case
26. Firewire and USB2 cables
I'm was not an octogenarian you insensitive clod, I died at 79, not 80.
Very true. If that guy bought a small townhouse and/or condo in a metro area 5 yrs or so ago, he probably made a killing when he sold it to move out to the middle of nowhere. Hell, he probably paid off that 7 acre farm already, so all he has to worry about is property tax and utilities.
Mah boss is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
I used to feel the same way until I got a second programmer on board and he was well-versed on PHP from the object-oriented side. Sure, it is a web-based application and there is no state, but the OO approach can save you a hell of a lot of trouble. Done right it saves you a lot in redundancies, plus as long as you don't mess with your interfaces you can work on the object itself without messing the pages that use it.
Imagine an online community. Your user profile keeps 10-20 bits of information about each user (name, email, etc.). In the procedural world, you would need:
1. User signup page
2. User profile page, so users can edit their own profile.
3. User management page, so site admins can moderate their membership.
Each of these sections has its own sql commands, logic, etc. Of you have half a clue you will at least write some functions to centralize some of that code, but it is still procedural.
Now, think OO. You can make a user class, and the class has methods to add/edit and list users. YOu still end up with the same pages:
1. User signup page
2. User profile page, so users can edit their own profile.
3. User management page, so site admins can moderate their membership.
The main difference is that these are much smaller, because there is no redundancy. The user signup page only has to grab the proper form fields and send them to the user object, which knows how to validate the user and add it. The user profile page works the same, it only has enough code to pull the user profile thru the object, and pulls the submitted form values and sends them back to the object. The admin pages work the same way, except that from the admin pages you have access to more methods within the object.
And yes, smarty is teh bomb. The only thing we lack with smarty is exceptions. If you use smarty with php 5 you don't get template errors displayed on screen, instead you just get a blank screen, which is aggravating as hell. We are fed up enough with it that we are about to go ahead and hack smarty to use exceptions of it detects php 5, and then we'll send the code back to the smarty folks to see if they feel like adding the code to the main branch.
This cannot be stressed enough: throwing more bodies into the problem only makes the project last longer.
It gets worse when outsiders above the project (say, a division manager that is not paying attention to the status reports) decide to listen to hearsay and water cooler talk and use that as criteria to bring more people in:
"The guys in the break room are bitching about the project, we need to bring more php programmers."
Next thing you know, this head guy is talking to everyone except the actual team that knows what is going on.
This happened to us less than a month before delivery. For real. We found by accident that the boss was concerned and was getting ready to shop around for extra PHP people. Small problem: we were not having PHP problems. Our problem was a hosed CVS repository, which is what we were overheard bitching about while making coffee in the break room.
When we told the boss that there was nothing wrong with the code and we were less than two days behind our schedule (which is much more agressive than his) he almost shit a brick.
The lesson? Don't bitch about technical stuff unless it is a controlled environment. We now keep our bitching for our daily walk to pick up lunch. The odds of someone from the office overhearing us and getting half of the information are pretty much nil.
BTW, the boss still came up with a good idea for bringing extra people, since programmers are not needed. He thinks we can bring temps just to do grunt work like filling a bunch of web forms, etc.
Here's the original:
http://newgrounds.com/portal/view/33440
Here's the site of the author:
http://www.jonathonrobinson.com/
Or http://politics.slashdot.org/
I have been programming for about 17 years and my background is mechanical engineering. For many years I saw programming as the kind of thing a technician does. A technician is a guy of at least some intelligence with the proper training and experience. He gets the job done. The funny thing is that as years passed I never changed my basic opinion on the job as a whole.
Then one day my boss was chewing my ass off for God knows why, and he complained that the problem with programmers is that they are artists and that opens a huge can of worms. We argued about it for a while but he left me convinced that yes, real programmers are artists, not technicians.
When was the last time you read a bit of hacked together code that looked so nasty that it made you smile? Sure, it looked like hell, but it got the job done. You could probably recognize who actually wrote that particular piece of code because eventually the great programmers develop their own particular style.
When was the last time you read a tiny little bit of code, a really small function that did just one lousy little thing, but not only it did the job, but it took you a split second to figure out what the hell the programmer was thinking when he/she wrote it? That's art.
If programming was purely technical, then we would never get into the zone in the middle of the god damn night, or solve a problem while in the can or taking a shower.
Sure, Kodak is stopping production, but they are not the only ones that make quality B&W photo paper. Ever heard of Ilford?
When the news came out a couple days ago I thought it was a shame since I used to develop my own B&W film, but quickly realized that even back then I was scanning my films. I almost never printed them so at least in my particular case there is no real loss.
And sure, we got digital, but in over 5 years shooting digital I am still not too happy with my B&W results. It is nice to know that I can grab a manual camera and shoot some Kodak PLUS-X 125 if I feel like it.
Don't put the masters in your resume.
The masters (as resume fodder) is only useful if you are aiming for a middle-to-senior level position, and the degree can be a tie-breaker between you and other applicants. If you are looking for entry level jobs the masters will actually hurt you.
If you do get hired, you will have plenty of time to update your employee records with the masters degree and HR won't even bother telling your department boss. Once you're in, that's it. Nobody gives a crap unless it is a very specialized field that demands that degree as condition for employment.
When prospective employers scan resumes (I got a lot of experience doing this while trying to recruit my own employees), most like to compare years of actual work experience against formal education. A guy that has been working for 5 years and has a bachelors degree will weigh in more than a guy that a guy with a masters (or worse, a PhD) with zero to two years of practical experience.
Of course, we make sure to check for people that kept working and going to school at the same time. Anyone that manages to finish a masters or a doctorate and kept the same job deserves to be hired!
Let's see... maybe because the sonofabitch weights 25 pounds? http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html has the 20" at 25.2 pounds. I got one iMac G5 20" at home and five at the office and "almost a laptop" doesn't cut it.
I am deeply grateful for your vote.
INAL but:
1. Your employer is *not* entitled to advance notice of your departure (unless this is spelled out in a contract).
2. You are *not* entitled to advance notice of your firing (unless this would mean the employer is in violation of a labor law).
That's it, just two exceptions. If your contract does not specify a notice period, and a penalty for not doing so, you are clean. If your state laws don't force them to, your employers can wait until the very last second to tell you that you are fired or laid off.
The 2-week notice is a common courtesy, less than two weeks is too drastic and will hint at a less than friendly departure. More than two weeks will make the whole thing akward.
It is not your responsibility to find your replacement before you leave. The only thing you really owe them is a resignation letter so they can CYA. Give them thanks for the X years of great employment and for the camaraderie or whatever.
We all know it is all a lie, but you are trying to leave in good terms and that letter will stick around for a while. Next time somebody calls HR to verify your employment, you'll get lucky and the person that answers the call won't know you. She'll pull your file and read the letter and won't hesitate to tell them that sure, you worked X years there but moved on because of whatever. If there is no letter she'll ask around and eventually she'll make it to your boss, who may or not be bitter about it. You fill the blanks.
I just noticed Fugu also takes advantage of it. It will show you a list of all Macs in your subnet that have remote logins thru SSH enabled.
I am guessing that by "adequate" the author meant "it does most of what I want Office to do without having to pay for it."
Once you paid for Office there is very little motivation to use OO as long as you are still using the OS for which you bought your Office license. That is the problem I have, I already bought Office v.X for OS X, why should I even bother to mess with OO?
Is the real goal to come out with a great OS? Or is it to kill Microsoft?
Ever heard that BSD is for geeks that love Unix, while Linux is for geeks that hate Microsoft?
Like I said, the fault was mine, not OSX. Had I bothered to read the distribution notes the grief factor would have gone down by at least one order of magnitude.
Great find, I wonder what are their plans to move MySQL to 4.1.x and PHP to 5.