they need someone to interpret the datafile format in order to write an
"update" statement that saves off a copy of the current pay and then restores it later
Alternately, they could just print a report of the current rates, manually change
everyone, and then change them back a month from now, with around 300 man-hours of
work (which parallelizes almost perfectly, and I hear CA will soon have a great
abundance of minimum-wage labor to do such work).
Not to mention - Who says this project needs to occur in the same language as the
original payroll system? Back in the days of COBOL, programmers tended to use
very simple (often even plaintext - If possibly not ASCII plaintext) flat-file
"databases". Take the system offline at 1am, copy the DB to another machine, and using
a "real" programming language, a good coder could figure out how to make the requested
changes before dawn.
All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine.
Any name but his own. That seems fair, right?
I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
True. But when you "want" your own name, following the same standard template
as 47 million other Verizon customers, it just makes Verizon look like callous
monopoly-abusing bastards to say "No".
Don't defend BS like this - Let Verizon (and the rest) know that we won't
forsake our own names for their convenience, period.
Why does the fact that Bush will be gone in six months mean we have
to stop talking about the crimes he and his administration committed?
It doesn't, and I fully hope to keep hearing about him after Obama
obliterates McBush (no, I don't really like Obama, just stating the obvious)...
Specifically, I don't want to hear about an impeachment that will never happen,
I want to hear about actual federal charges relating to racketeering, election
fraud, and lying to congress. Ideally I'd like to see him hauled before the
Hague for human rights abuses, but I'll settle for Bush sharing a cell with
his new top, Bubba.
He hasn't just destroyed our international image and our economy by ineptness,
he has outright broken both US and international law.
If you're not in a rush to get one of the Atom/Nano based computers,
wait for the next generation
Although the Nano represents a new chip series for Via, they have
dominated the "ultra low power x86 PC-class" market for almost a
decade now. I wouldn't, therefore, call it a fair comparison
to call them both a first gen-chip. The Atom, yes. The Nano...
To put it in terms more familiar to an Intel-dominated market, the
Nano as a "first gen" more closely resembles the P3 vs the P2...
Same basic core with a few modest improvements and running at a
higher clock.
The FP post provides a simple example of my point:
that's 4 watts more than at idle, for about 60 watts total.
...While I currently run two VIA-based systems at home that consume
notable less than that combined when running flat-out.
A truly low-power (yet entirely usable) system depends on more than
just an efficient CPU. If your chipset and GPU and RAM each suck down
more than the CP under load, you may as well splurge a bit on the Watts and go
for a beefier CPU, because you'll never really see the difference in
terms of battery life (or the AC equivalent, UPS runtime).
Simple - Let people drop out after learning the absolute basic literacy
and math skills required to use a cash register at McDonalds (sixth grade,
perhaps), and allocate the "real" educational resources to those who will
actually benefit from it.
And don't come crying about NCLB, the biggest line of "cripple the
strong to make the weak feel better" bullshit to come along since
FDR (yeah, nice touch of irony there, eh?)
I did fairly well in school - At least, as far as getting a real education
goes. My grades sucked for the most part because I loathed school until
the wonderful world of college. I can't help wondering, though, how much
more I could have done if schools functioned more as a supportive
healthy learning environment rather than as a form of institutionalized
baby-sitting complete with a daily gauntlet of physical and emotional
torment by our "peers".
(And no, I don't feel particularly bitter about it - But I will
call a spade a spade, and our current education system quite simply
sucks).
And as the fifth (at least) person to bring up that single game, I'd say you've
all done more to support the FP's point than refute it.
A good, popular puzzle-oriented game stands out enough that many of you thought
to try using it as a counterexample.
A good, popular puzzle-oriented game.
Yeah, you can probably name a few more obscure ones, but that kinda
demonstrates exactly the complaint expressed... For every puzzle game,
you have a handful of MMOs and a few dozen fluffy eye-candy shooters.
Not really a ratio that makes me say "wow, look at the thriving puzzle-oriented
game market!"
Silly n00b... you don't buy an iPhone to make phone calls...
Yeah, but what do I do when, after my 19th vente caramel mocchiado, I need to
call 911 to have my heart defibrillated and the "cool" people still
haven't noticed me conspicuously ignoring my iPhone?
Re:Thanks for playing, please try again.
on
The Pragmatic CSO
·
· Score: 1
don't expect that you get to impose your desires on the world
at large just because you consider your morality to be superior.
Corporations, as legal-fictional entities, have no morality.
Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Nero all had "superior" morality to even the most
apparently-benevolent corporation that has ever existed.
So yes, my morality trumps any corporate vision of "progress" in the form
of next quarter's numbers.
Re:Thanks for playing, please try again.
on
The Pragmatic CSO
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Perfect. IT will stand in the way of progress to the end.
"Shareholder value" does NOT equal "Progress".
Repeat as necessary or until dead.
Thanks for playing, please try again.
on
The Pragmatic CSO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not about technology -- it's about business.
No.
The entire IT world currently exists for its own sake. The business world
has discovered they can use it, to some extent, but let's not take that too
far in ascribing a raison d'etre to all things tech.
We have computers because geeks like toys. In order to afford more toys, we
whore ourselves out to the business world... But the relationship ends there.
If we can help our employers make more shiny colorful reports measuring how much money
we waste on blue vs green widget paint, great, good for them (and the landfills).
If not... I can't speak for everyone on Slashdot, but at the end of the day, I go
home and do my best not to think about work.
Yet, I still go home, fire up
my PC, and continue improving the very skills that make me valuable to my employer
(I'll skip the obvious gaming and porn jokes here). I, as I believe of most geeks,
do it for its own sake, because I love technology and toys - Not because I
have some BS "compelling business case" to dedicate much of my life to technology
for the gain of CEOs who wouldn't give me the time of day to spit on me if they
came across me dying in the desert.
I don't even know what the fuck any of that stuff you just said even means
Do you understand what it means to say that the CPU in your desktop has a 14-stage execution pipeline? That it has a TLB
hit rate over 98%? That it has a double-pumped ALU?
Based on that description? No.
Whether or not you understand the specs has no relation to commercial viability. As you say, you (or Joe Average)
only care how it will affect your frame rate in the latest FPS.
Cheating, as the author suggests, is a bad idea. The company is doing this for a reason...
to protect themselves from extra BS when they get sued.
Right - The company does it to protect the company. Not the individual
employees.
So when they get sued more than 180 days after product launch for a fatal flaw (as in, it
kills people) in Widget2008, the lead engineer can't prove that he warned management
about the problem and they chose to ignore it.
I'll second the "alternative MUA" approach. Have they configured POP, or IMAP, or
even OWA? Connect and bulk-download.
Or, even given no other options - how about simply forwarding
everything to yourself at an external account?
Extraordinary claims... require extraordinary proof. Regrettably, there is none.
True - Except, in an infinite (or "pretty damned big", anyway) universe, I would
call it a far more "extraordinary claim" to say that we alone rose up from
our home planet's primordial ooze to eventually escape the local gravity-well.
Of course, that doesn't mean this guy has all his screws properly tightened, but
before writing someone off for claiming the improbably, ask yourself which case
you consider more improbable.
Or land their crates safely after traveling for billions of miles, or
at least crash somewhere else but in the middle of nowhere, midwest USA.
I know, right? Why, just imagine, if you can, a civilization that has the
ability to launch things out into space, sending a craft all the way to another
planet, only to have it crash due to some absurd oversight such as, oh, say, a
Metric-to-Imperial measurement conversion or the like!
Sheer absurdity, I tell you!
Seriously - Aliens, if they do exist, do not count as infallible techno-gods
come to save us from ourselves. They most likely have similar flaws to our
own, and have simply made it a few centuries further along than we have.
I wonder if AT&T will turn off my voicemail service if I ask them to.
Probably not - Companies generally resist disabling "nuisance" features (and especially
ones that they can nickle-and-dime you for).
You can, however, usually set the number of rings before it goes to voicemail... And
very few people will actually wait 12 rings just to leave a message (and if
they do, you might want to actually take the call).
So, the reason for the reporting is "Most CIOs we interviewed expect to reduce expenditures for contractors and discretionary IT spending".
Or, put another way, "Most CIOs want OMGPonies to push those icky red numbers into the black".
It sounds great to say you plan to slash one of the biggest non-revenue departments on your books.
That goes up in smoke the second the CIO realizes they can't even change their own printer toner,
much less manage to do more "complex" tasks such as regular upgrades or proper backups.
And that doesn't even touch on "real" work, such as in-house app development. When we go
there, the CIO may as well say that he plans to boost 3rd quarter revenue by striking oil on a
large asteroid captured via the gravitational pull of the 2nd quarter's red ink.
Suggestions have also been made to inform users that their
browser is out of date.
Why? I know I run an out-of-date browser (FF1.5), and just
don't care. For that matter, it annoyed me when FF
tried to update itself (and refused to take "no" for an answer), to
the point that I blocked its update site in my hosts file.
The computer industry (and I say this as part of it) has a disease - We
insist on always having the latest-and-greatest version of everything,
despite already having something "good enough". Now, I'll lead the pack
in bitching about stupid or stubborn users, but in this case, I can
certainly sympathize with them... Stop forcing updates on us that have
no (apparent) use except making a higher number appear in the "about"
dialog.
Of course, if a really impressive new feature appears, I'll gladly
upgrade to get it; But in the browser world, we haven't seen any
really useful new features in a looooooong time.
The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,
I see two possibilities there...
First, he could have made up numbers. Absolutely unforgivable, and we should all break out the tar and feathers.
However, if reputable scientists have reproduced his work, even with his direct involvement,
then he has accomplished something interesting (even if not necessarily what he believes).
Be sure to clean up high-status people if they are drivelling on, while doing verbatim quotes from teenagers, poor people, etc.
"Umms", "ahhs", and restatements reflect an ongoing coherent thought process occuring behind the scenes,
and that the speaker intends to pick the right words to express their thoughts. Most listeners would
tend to filter those out of what we remember hearing (unless excessive) anyway, so redacting them from quotes
doesn't really count as dishonest.
Simple grammatical flaws as number and tense agreement reflect outright sloppy thought processes, and should
remain in a quote to indicate the poor mental state of the source.
This has nothing to do with race, wealth, or age. Elitist, perhaps, but let's not make it into
more than that. To put it another way, we clean up quotes for people who know enough to appreciate
the change; We leave them verbatum (and in this case, the normal use of "sic" just would not
even come close to adequate) when people don't know enough to feel ashamed of what they've said.
Try answering the question without assuming that we
managed to avoid having to go back to the stone age due
to war, plague, famine, etc.
In that case, who cares?
They won't have the ability to get 500ft underground, to penetrate
10ft thick steel/concrete walls, or to open the individual
containment vessels (designed to withstand a cargo aircraft crash).
You don't need to worry about both ends of the question. Either future
people will know what they've found, or won't have the ability to find
or access it.
And even if they could - If we end up reverting to a stone
age culture, we really don't deserve to share this planet,
so let 'em all die of radiation poisoning from playing with the
pretty glowy powder.
there's been a steady conversion of addresses in my contact list to "@gmail.com".
People are moving to GMail as their primary mail accounts
As have I - But that has no bearing on whether or not people give GMail their real names. I know
I sure as hell didn't, despite using that account for a number of legitimate purposes,
including professional contacts.
And as a bonus, anyone foolish enough to spam me under a name I give to a random website actually helps
my spam filtering, because I never give my real name. If someone sends "Petrov L. Aster" (as just one
example I might use for my Slashdot handle) a notice that he has an inheritance from a Nigerian uncle, that message
doesn't even make it to my "once a month quick look through non-whitelisted garbage" folder - it meets a hard blacklist
and goes straight to/dev/null.
Slashdot Mirror
they need someone to interpret the datafile format in order to write an "update" statement that saves off a copy of the current pay and then restores it later
Alternately, they could just print a report of the current rates, manually change everyone, and then change them back a month from now, with around 300 man-hours of work (which parallelizes almost perfectly, and I hear CA will soon have a great abundance of minimum-wage labor to do such work).
Not to mention - Who says this project needs to occur in the same language as the original payroll system? Back in the days of COBOL, programmers tended to use very simple (often even plaintext - If possibly not ASCII plaintext) flat-file "databases". Take the system offline at 1am, copy the DB to another machine, and using a "real" programming language, a good coder could figure out how to make the requested changes before dawn.
All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine.
Any name but his own. That seems fair, right?
I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
True. But when you "want" your own name, following the same standard template as 47 million other Verizon customers, it just makes Verizon look like callous monopoly-abusing bastards to say "No".
Don't defend BS like this - Let Verizon (and the rest) know that we won't forsake our own names for their convenience, period.
Why does the fact that Bush will be gone in six months mean we have to stop talking about the crimes he and his administration committed?
It doesn't, and I fully hope to keep hearing about him after Obama obliterates McBush (no, I don't really like Obama, just stating the obvious)...
Specifically, I don't want to hear about an impeachment that will never happen, I want to hear about actual federal charges relating to racketeering, election fraud, and lying to congress. Ideally I'd like to see him hauled before the Hague for human rights abuses, but I'll settle for Bush sharing a cell with his new top, Bubba.
He hasn't just destroyed our international image and our economy by ineptness, he has outright broken both US and international law.
"Sex, sex, sex, that's all they think about!"
Well, in fairness, "arrest" and "intox" also appear twice... So they also care about getting drunk and enjoying a bit of the ol' ultraviolence...
If you're not in a rush to get one of the Atom/Nano based computers, wait for the next generation
...While I currently run two VIA-based systems at home that consume
notable less than that combined when running flat-out.
Although the Nano represents a new chip series for Via, they have dominated the "ultra low power x86 PC-class" market for almost a decade now. I wouldn't, therefore, call it a fair comparison to call them both a first gen-chip. The Atom, yes. The Nano... To put it in terms more familiar to an Intel-dominated market, the Nano as a "first gen" more closely resembles the P3 vs the P2... Same basic core with a few modest improvements and running at a higher clock.
The FP post provides a simple example of my point:
that's 4 watts more than at idle, for about 60 watts total.
A truly low-power (yet entirely usable) system depends on more than just an efficient CPU. If your chipset and GPU and RAM each suck down more than the CP under load, you may as well splurge a bit on the Watts and go for a beefier CPU, because you'll never really see the difference in terms of battery life (or the AC equivalent, UPS runtime).
is someone designing bots for a CS class?
Put simply - Yes.
How Do You Fix Education?
Simple - Let people drop out after learning the absolute basic literacy and math skills required to use a cash register at McDonalds (sixth grade, perhaps), and allocate the "real" educational resources to those who will actually benefit from it.
And don't come crying about NCLB, the biggest line of "cripple the strong to make the weak feel better" bullshit to come along since FDR (yeah, nice touch of irony there, eh?)
I did fairly well in school - At least, as far as getting a real education goes. My grades sucked for the most part because I loathed school until the wonderful world of college. I can't help wondering, though, how much more I could have done if schools functioned more as a supportive healthy learning environment rather than as a form of institutionalized baby-sitting complete with a daily gauntlet of physical and emotional torment by our "peers".
(And no, I don't feel particularly bitter about it - But I will call a spade a spade, and our current education system quite simply sucks).
That's why Portal was so wildly unpopular, right?
And as the fifth (at least) person to bring up that single game, I'd say you've all done more to support the FP's point than refute it.
A good, popular puzzle-oriented game stands out enough that many of you thought to try using it as a counterexample.
A good, popular puzzle-oriented game.
Yeah, you can probably name a few more obscure ones, but that kinda demonstrates exactly the complaint expressed... For every puzzle game, you have a handful of MMOs and a few dozen fluffy eye-candy shooters. Not really a ratio that makes me say "wow, look at the thriving puzzle-oriented game market!"
Silly n00b... you don't buy an iPhone to make phone calls...
Yeah, but what do I do when, after my 19th vente caramel mocchiado, I need to call 911 to have my heart defibrillated and the "cool" people still haven't noticed me conspicuously ignoring my iPhone?
don't expect that you get to impose your desires on the world at large just because you consider your morality to be superior.
Corporations, as legal-fictional entities, have no morality.
Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Nero all had "superior" morality to even the most apparently-benevolent corporation that has ever existed.
So yes, my morality trumps any corporate vision of "progress" in the form of next quarter's numbers.
Perfect. IT will stand in the way of progress to the end.
"Shareholder value" does NOT equal "Progress".
Repeat as necessary or until dead.
It's not about technology -- it's about business.
No.
The entire IT world currently exists for its own sake. The business world has discovered they can use it, to some extent, but let's not take that too far in ascribing a raison d'etre to all things tech.
We have computers because geeks like toys. In order to afford more toys, we whore ourselves out to the business world... But the relationship ends there. If we can help our employers make more shiny colorful reports measuring how much money we waste on blue vs green widget paint, great, good for them (and the landfills). If not... I can't speak for everyone on Slashdot, but at the end of the day, I go home and do my best not to think about work.
Yet, I still go home, fire up my PC, and continue improving the very skills that make me valuable to my employer (I'll skip the obvious gaming and porn jokes here). I, as I believe of most geeks, do it for its own sake, because I love technology and toys - Not because I have some BS "compelling business case" to dedicate much of my life to technology for the gain of CEOs who wouldn't give me the time of day to spit on me if they came across me dying in the desert.
I don't even know what the fuck any of that stuff you just said even means
Do you understand what it means to say that the CPU in your desktop has a 14-stage execution pipeline? That it has a TLB hit rate over 98%? That it has a double-pumped ALU?
Based on that description? No.
Whether or not you understand the specs has no relation to commercial viability. As you say, you (or Joe Average) only care how it will affect your frame rate in the latest FPS.
Cheating, as the author suggests, is a bad idea. The company is doing this for a reason... to protect themselves from extra BS when they get sued.
Right - The company does it to protect the company. Not the individual employees.
So when they get sued more than 180 days after product launch for a fatal flaw (as in, it kills people) in Widget2008, the lead engineer can't prove that he warned management about the problem and they chose to ignore it.
I'll second the "alternative MUA" approach. Have they configured POP, or IMAP, or even OWA? Connect and bulk-download.
Or, even given no other options - how about simply forwarding everything to yourself at an external account?
Extraordinary claims... require extraordinary proof. Regrettably, there is none.
True - Except, in an infinite (or "pretty damned big", anyway) universe, I would call it a far more "extraordinary claim" to say that we alone rose up from our home planet's primordial ooze to eventually escape the local gravity-well.
Of course, that doesn't mean this guy has all his screws properly tightened, but before writing someone off for claiming the improbably, ask yourself which case you consider more improbable.
Or land their crates safely after traveling for billions of miles, or at least crash somewhere else but in the middle of nowhere, midwest USA.
I know, right? Why, just imagine, if you can, a civilization that has the ability to launch things out into space, sending a craft all the way to another planet, only to have it crash due to some absurd oversight such as, oh, say, a Metric-to-Imperial measurement conversion or the like!
Sheer absurdity, I tell you!
Seriously - Aliens, if they do exist, do not count as infallible techno-gods come to save us from ourselves. They most likely have similar flaws to our own, and have simply made it a few centuries further along than we have.
I wonder if AT&T will turn off my voicemail service if I ask them to.
Probably not - Companies generally resist disabling "nuisance" features (and especially ones that they can nickle-and-dime you for).
You can, however, usually set the number of rings before it goes to voicemail... And very few people will actually wait 12 rings just to leave a message (and if they do, you might want to actually take the call).
So, the reason for the reporting is "Most CIOs we interviewed expect to reduce expenditures for contractors and discretionary IT spending".
Or, put another way, "Most CIOs want OMGPonies to push those icky red numbers into the black".
It sounds great to say you plan to slash one of the biggest non-revenue departments on your books. That goes up in smoke the second the CIO realizes they can't even change their own printer toner, much less manage to do more "complex" tasks such as regular upgrades or proper backups.
And that doesn't even touch on "real" work, such as in-house app development. When we go there, the CIO may as well say that he plans to boost 3rd quarter revenue by striking oil on a large asteroid captured via the gravitational pull of the 2nd quarter's red ink.
Suggestions have also been made to inform users that their browser is out of date.
Why? I know I run an out-of-date browser (FF1.5), and just don't care. For that matter, it annoyed me when FF tried to update itself (and refused to take "no" for an answer), to the point that I blocked its update site in my hosts file.
The computer industry (and I say this as part of it) has a disease - We insist on always having the latest-and-greatest version of everything, despite already having something "good enough". Now, I'll lead the pack in bitching about stupid or stubborn users, but in this case, I can certainly sympathize with them... Stop forcing updates on us that have no (apparent) use except making a higher number appear in the "about" dialog.
Of course, if a really impressive new feature appears, I'll gladly upgrade to get it; But in the browser world, we haven't seen any really useful new features in a looooooong time.
The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,
I see two possibilities there...
First, he could have made up numbers. Absolutely unforgivable, and we should all break out the tar and feathers.
However, if reputable scientists have reproduced his work, even with his direct involvement, then he has accomplished something interesting (even if not necessarily what he believes).
Be sure to clean up high-status people if they are drivelling on, while doing verbatim quotes from teenagers, poor people, etc.
"Umms", "ahhs", and restatements reflect an ongoing coherent thought process occuring behind the scenes, and that the speaker intends to pick the right words to express their thoughts. Most listeners would tend to filter those out of what we remember hearing (unless excessive) anyway, so redacting them from quotes doesn't really count as dishonest.
Simple grammatical flaws as number and tense agreement reflect outright sloppy thought processes, and should remain in a quote to indicate the poor mental state of the source.
This has nothing to do with race, wealth, or age. Elitist, perhaps, but let's not make it into more than that. To put it another way, we clean up quotes for people who know enough to appreciate the change; We leave them verbatum (and in this case, the normal use of "sic" just would not even come close to adequate) when people don't know enough to feel ashamed of what they've said.
Try answering the question without assuming that we managed to avoid having to go back to the stone age due to war, plague, famine, etc.
In that case, who cares?
They won't have the ability to get 500ft underground, to penetrate 10ft thick steel/concrete walls, or to open the individual containment vessels (designed to withstand a cargo aircraft crash).
You don't need to worry about both ends of the question. Either future people will know what they've found, or won't have the ability to find or access it.
And even if they could - If we end up reverting to a stone age culture, we really don't deserve to share this planet, so let 'em all die of radiation poisoning from playing with the pretty glowy powder.
Ok...so I only see this as an issue for people trying to hide their identity for something nefarious.
So then, do you prefer we call you "db", or "Mr. 32"?
there's been a steady conversion of addresses in my contact list to "@gmail.com". People are moving to GMail as their primary mail accounts
/dev/null.
As have I - But that has no bearing on whether or not people give GMail their real names. I know I sure as hell didn't, despite using that account for a number of legitimate purposes, including professional contacts.
And as a bonus, anyone foolish enough to spam me under a name I give to a random website actually helps my spam filtering, because I never give my real name. If someone sends "Petrov L. Aster" (as just one example I might use for my Slashdot handle) a notice that he has an inheritance from a Nigerian uncle, that message doesn't even make it to my "once a month quick look through non-whitelisted garbage" folder - it meets a hard blacklist and goes straight to
A decent encoder should have dropped all those 1ms duration waves due to masking.
a 1ms pulse (if you mean rise, 1ms hold, fall) corresponds to 500hz - Pretty much smack dab in the middle of the human auditory range.
Any encoder that filtered that out would most likely only appeal to bats and insects, who don't tend to write all that much audio processing code.