How should "Islam" denounce it? They do not have a Pope, no central religious authority. And it's not like we require random passing Christians to denounce the Catholic boy-rapes every time they are exposed either...
The same way "Christianity" denounces. As a plural majority. The Baptist Church doesn't recognize the Pope. Even the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't speak for all Baptists. But if enough Popes, Patriarchs, Deacons, Elders, etc. etc. etc. speak in chorus, then "Christianity" can be said to oppose (or support) something. Same thing with the Imams of Islam. They don't get a free pass just because the next step up is supposed to be Allah. And ironically, a lot of the violence comes from too many alleged members of the Faithful treating the Prophet (PBUH) as though he some sort of god. Which is violates the informal First Commandment of Islam.
I can't vouch for the GPU or hefty graphics card you're using, but you could do the same thing with lots of heft for under 150watts, including the freaking LCD monitor. There are a number of nice, high stroke CPUs out there that don't need a 500w supply.
Yes, Flight Simulator is a pig. But it seems to like AMD's math over AMDs, and in terms of graphics, I haven't kept up, so can't address that particular piece. Nonetheless, 500w can power a decent electric scooter.
Forgive me. I haven't actually measured the true wattage. I don't have gamer hardware on this box - it's just a bog-standard small form-factor desktop with a mobo graphics card that's so crappy that I've been known to use Remote Desktop in from the Linux box just to preserve my eyes.
All I can say for certain is that it can make the office nice and toasty when I've already got my regular equipment running. Good for January. Not so good for July.
I'd probably do better making a VM out of it and running it on the Linux box, but one of the things that Linux is exactly the opposite of "terrible" for versus Windows is that I cannot just go throwing around Windows VM images around with wild abandon the way I can with Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, etc. Windows has to be licensed and blessed by Redmond.
I'm opposed to oppression of offensive speech because it is so bad that intelligent people learn better why they shouldn't use it when they see it.
It seems odd to question the legitimacy of a person's faith on the basis of whether they translate a phrase a certain way. Kind of like you can't be Jewish if you turned on a light on Shabbat, or you can't be Catholic if you failed to read the Pope's latest proclamation.
Transliteration is not the same thing as translation. "Allah Akhbar" is the generally-accepted transliteration of the Arabic phrase which is generally translated into English as "God is Great". If I was to back-transliterate "Allah hoakbar", the letters would be very different. At best, it's a bad rendition of "Allahu Akbar", which is how it's spoken. Bad renditions typically mean that either the writer is using a dialect (and religions do tend to prefer formal, standardized language), that the writer is illiterate (it does happen), or that the writer is ignorant. Ignorance comes in many flavors, some few of which are Muslim, but likewise many of which are non-Muslim trolls.
I'd be more accommodating, but when you're defending the faith (whatever that faith may be), it's incumbent to do it in a way that does credit to the faith. Something that the 9/11 crowd certainly didn't do.
This is just a rant session about Atom. Someday linux devs will resign themselves to the fact that linux is (somewhat) great for servers and terrible for almost everything else. This will probably get modded as trolling but if I said the opposite thing about MS it would be insightful. In my opinion this entire article is trolling.
Well, excuse me for living.
I boot up Windows for 3 reasons:
1. Tax preparation 2. Diagnosing IE-specific issues 3. Flight Simulator (Yes, I know, there's a flight simulator for Linux, but I like the MS one OK)
Mostly the Windows box is powered off, because those are infrequent occasions and I'd rather not add another 500 watts to the A/C load. All of the day-to-day stuff I do to make a living is running on Linux. If for no other reason that the fact that I'd have to take out a second mortgage to pay for all the Windows equivalents of the databases, software development and text-processing tools that come free with Linux. Or in some cases, free for Linux.
If you said "Linux is terrible for almost everything else" and gave specific examples, you'd be insightful. Given however, that I'm quite happy with at least 2 of the "everything else"s (desktop and Android), lack of specific illustrations makes you a troll.
The real Islamic people are not bothered by words, because their education level is higher than the fifth grade. If anything should be learned from this it is that education is key to maturity.
Heh, is this like Palin's "real America."
Here's a clue, all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were college educated.
Perhaps the Islamists not bothered by mere words are the ones who, regardless of education, don't take that religion so seriously. Because any cursory reading of the Quran has it repeated to you how all apostates are evil and doomed forever by Allah, and that lying and killing them is no big deal.
Except that (presumably), the WTC wasn't full of apostates. According to the tenets of Islam, Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all "people of the Book" and all equal in the eyes of Allah (well, maybe Muslims are more equal, but whatever). As such, they are not apostates (Muslims who rejected Islam) and that killing any of them is a sin, hence killing roughly 3000 of them is a major sin, especially when the hijackers were armed and prepared for war and the victims were not. These killers were not true Muslims and I don't mean in the "No True Scotsman" way. What they did was not only inexcusable even for "true" Muslims, but if I'm not mistaken, the habits of at least some of these men included vices that anyone who was as pure and holy as they claimed to be would not have indulged in.
Where Islam failed was in failing to denounce this kind of behavior in a way that would leave no doubt in the minds of any future imitators and wannabes that mass murder is the work of Iblis, not of Allah and that in fact it was murder and not jihad. This semi-legitimization of evil in the name of God was not only a smear on the name of Islam; most of the like-minded attacks since then have been in Muslim countries themselves.
If you're going to convince me that you're truly Muslim - or at least decently educated, then you need to be able to transliterate "God is Great" in a way that follows the accepted norms. Maybe you're being dialectical, but Islam is based on classical Arabic, and there's a "proper" way to render that phrase in English. As it is, it makes me wonder if you're truly Muslim or just pouring gasoline on the fire.
As far as I'm concerned, religious displays of violence are major sins, regardless of whether they're Muslim, Christian, or whatever. They're the ultimate in hubris, because they're basically saying that God, the Almighty, is too weak and too feeble to protect Himself, and so must enlist crowds of murderous men to do the job. God, if He is Who you say he is, could do a Sodom-and-Gomorrah on any place in the Universe, or even wipe the entire planet, if he felt the need to defend Himself. We see every day how the Earth and the heavens can be subjected to earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, plagues, meteor swarms - even supernovae. And that 's just in an apparently undirected way. If God can bind Leviathian, those are the least of punishments he could aim at the infidels if that was His desire. These mobs are about as meaningful as if a nest of ants were to rush to my defense against another nest of ants. As the Qur'an states repeatedly: "Let God be the judge".
Likewise, I'm very much opposed to suppression of offensive speech, because if you have faith, you understand that God is too powerful to be overcome by lies. That lies may eclipse the truth, but the truth will eventually prevail. And that the best way to expose lies is to bring them forth into the light of day for all to observe how their details fail, not to suppress them in the hope that no one will believe them.
There are a lot of ideals that America has discarded in the last 30 years or so, but one that we've managed to hold on to is the idea that free speech means free people. In a more authoritarian country, such slanders as this "film trailer" would either become underground "forbidden knowledge" (with all the appeal inherent), or officially sanctioned. Either way, the message would be legitimized. Instead, the controversy enabled by free speech and the freedom to view and dissect this work has exposed the tawdry underpinnings of this scheme and the lack of moral character of those behind it. Instead of undermining Islam, it may, in fact, have done the opposite. We learn a lot about people (and religions, and ideologies) by the calibre of their enemies.
But then they'll cut costs in other places, especially IT since it's a cost center.
One of the biggest fallacies in the whole bean-counting mindset. IT is more commonly a savings center. They've forgotten how much not employing all those Bob Cratchett-types over in the "profit center" helps make that "profit center" more profitable.
Anything that doesn't look like a bean doesn't exist for a bean counter. Nor, for that matter, do any beans that appear outside their computed timeframes or their constricted view of the Universe.
There's a reason these companies came to the government: they could not get private sector financing. Why not? Most likely, because they have no convincing business case.
That's because in this day and age, a "convincing business case" isn't "Give me funding for R&D and I can probably exceed your wildest expectations eventually", it's "We'll give you a guaranteed 6 billion dollar payback next quarter". Corporations have all but abandoned long-term thinking and speculative research in pursuit of the largest profit in the shortest interval.
Governments, for all their faults, are not expected to show a profit (and, in fact, if they do, it probably means there's something amiss), don't live from quarter-to-quarter, and are therefore at liberty to pour money down assorted ratholes knowing that few of them will pan out. AND, when something does, they'll then unload whatever discoveries have been made to private enterprise.
It may not be the best solution around, but it's better than any of the alternatives.
Certs are an indicator that someone can learn information in a formal setting.
Not always. A lot of certs are cram-and-barf and all they really indicate is that you can hold the information necessary to pass the test long enough to pass the test. Many of the better-known certs never require any formal setting at all. And all too frequently, the information necessary to pass the test is not the information that the daily job requires. I've seen too many practice exams that focus on obscure features, decoding code that's so awful that in real life, the person inheriting it would be more likely to ignore it and rewrite it (after assaulting the original author), or revelling in quirks best left alone.
Holding a lot of certs indicates that you have an aptitude for acquiring certs, but that's not a position that's commonly hired for.
The only certs that really impressed me were the RHCE and CCNA, and that's because they closely mimic the kind of things people actually do on a routine basis and hence need to be able to do well.
Conversely, I've never seen a programming cert that impressed me, because an industrial-grade real-world software system isn't something you can whip up in a 2-hour test session - anything realistic would take weeks or longer (despite what the boss/users think). The only "cert" I'd accept for that would be experience. And people have been known to fudge on the experience.
And really...? Having a new adapter is going to somehow harm the enviornment?!?!
[rolls eyes]...Really......?
Really.
The idea is not to have a drawerful of one-off adapters and connectors, which is where we were before the mini- and micro-usb connectors became common currency. You save the environment by not having to manufacture and supply new cables with each new device, you save it again by only needing as many adapters and cables as you actively use, and finally, you save it by being able to retain and re-use these cables and adapters long after the original device has been retired/broken.
Small steps, agreed, but every little bit helps. And even if they didn't, I'd be for it just because I've got enough cables and adapters stuffed in my equipment drawers as it is.
Does that mean this is not a general purpose computing machine? If that's true, then I think there's all sorts of legal problems ahead of them.
I believe there's certain loopholes in various laws to allow loopholes for general purpose computing hardware.
I don't think there's legal issues. I'd hate to think that only general purpose computing machines were legal.
On the other hand, Windows is (allegedly) a general-purpose OS, so I'd expect that a CPU running Windows would work best if it was a general-purpose CPU.
Firstly, because there would have to be an awfully compelling reason for me to buy into a less-powerful platform if I could get a more-powerful one relatively easily.
Secondly, because Microsoft has a long history of "interface of the month" types of technologies, so even if you're using the hardware only for Windows, you'd want as much flexibility as possible - they're good enough at breaking things on general-purpose hardware without adding limitations into the mix.
Coding is all well and good, but a lot of what makes me (allegedly) superior comes from having read other people's code.
I feel sorry for you. The code I got to read was mostly OS source code, not street-grade applications slop. OS code - at least until Microsoft took over - was held to a much higher standard. You couldn't just CTRL+ALT+DELETE a mainframe because bad OS code went haywire.
Actually most code other people write and that it is expected that you read in your day job is mostly utter shit. This is because most developers don't care about the code they write, they just want to get a good evaluation for the time spent writing feature X, so if they can just copy and paste or better, steal from a coworker, good.
And given this, would you blame a programmer for switching jobs if there are job offers for better salaries, if at the same time companies prefer to hire immigrant developers and to outsource development to India? Isn't it the same?
Most companies outsource without knowing if they are going to save a dime. Most probably they won't. But they simply make a bet. No manager has ever been fired for trying to reduce cost, even if costs skyrocket as a result, since the manager first proposes the cost cut, but the ones who approve are the board of directors in all cases, and they never admit being wrong.
You'll get no argument from me. I am quite familiar with the "Just Git 'er Dun!" edict. Been there, didn't do it very well, got fired. It wasn't like the code needed to be good quality. It was merely processing people's financial accounts.
For a Republican congress to pass anything, all they need is a simple majority.
301 to 118 is hardly "a simple majority".
For a Democratic congress to pass anything requires a super-majority.
For the existing Senate, all it took to block passage of this extension was one person. One person is hardly a super-majority. I don't need to bother looking up whether the Senate is Democrat or Republican controlled, if all it takes is one it doesn't matter.
That's a pretty strong clue that one person could have stopped this before, and not a single Democrat could muster up the ability. Your rants about those awful Republicans are ignoring a large number of other, non-Republican guilty parties.
Obama is another story, though.
Obama is the same old story, rewarmed and rehashed and doing the same things, under the banner "Hope and Change". How could anyone see his pick for VP and not know that it would be four more years of the same old politics? And now the banner "You Hope we can Change what we didn't Change during our first four years."
Your math is all wrong. When I said "simple majority", I was referring to the makeup of the Congress when the bills are passed, not what it is at the moment or at any other moment that happens to be convenient to convey a false level of power.
Actually a bank note QR code wouldn't hold a URL at all. QR codes encode arbitrary strings. Unless they're incredibly dumb implementing it the worst that would happen is it mistaking a serial number for a phone number and trying to call it. Not much chance of a scanner getting infected trying that!
They're incredibly dumb. The QR code would probably become the infection string for a SQL Injection attack on the bank's servers.
Wow, glad the men and women of the American Revolutionary didn't think that way. For that matter anyone that has fought for a peoples freedom against oppression.
How sad that you feel that life and freedom are not possible at the same time.
I, too, heard the voices of Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin when I read that.
How we have fallen. A lecherous old womanizer and his friends risked torture and death all so that they could bequeath a nation to spineless cowards who run around chanting "USA! USA! USA!" and then beg the government to take all their freedom so that the big mean terrorists won't eat them.
Not only has Obama and Dems (don't forget the house was Nancy's) failed to roll back anything of Bush/Cheney, they expanded the powers.
For a Republican congress to pass anything, all they need is a simple majority. Republicans march in lock-step like Red Square on May Day.
For a Democratic congress to pass anything requires a super-majority. Enough votes to override the massed Republicans and the breakaway Democrats. Like Will Rogers said: "I belong to no organized political party, I am a Democrat".
Obama is another story, though. Sure, he's skinnier, darker, more capable of coherent speech. But dangit, sometimes it's hard to tell W's not still in the Oval Office. They even both have the same ears!
Historically, there were 3 reasons for using assembler.
1. You needed access to instructions or hardware that weren't accessible via higher-level mechanisms. 2. You needed performance that compiled code could not provide. 3. You needed access to OS functions (back when the OS functions weren't generally accessible in a format friendly to high-level languages.
I've seen compilers that could kludge their way around item #1, but I never liked the concept myself. If you're going to do assembler, do assembler.
Early compilers were pretty brute-force and the code they generated was only minimally optimized, if at all. That changed with a vengeance circa 1985 when I started encountering compilers that not only took optimization seriously, they re-optimized the entire program at a massive scale each time you re-compiled. It's not that I couldn't do the same - just that I couldn't hold my job and do it, since what a compiler could do in milliseconds would require literally weeks of re-coding in assembler. The situation only got worse when pipelined architectures were introduced and you could no longer accurately determine how long it would take to process an instruction by simple arithmetic applied without knowledge of the current pipleline context.
Item #3 is mostly a non-issue now, since most modern-day OS's come with a decent set of high-level interface libraries.
Assembly language is not totally obsolete, but it's more like Fortran. Virtually essential for certain kinds of work, and (mostly) not that important for most people. It's worth knowing, but you can actually do yourself more harm than good with it now that CPUs and compilers are designed with optimizations based on the way that assembly-ignorant people code.
Nobody is asking you to lie, they're asking you to jump through a hoop.
Actually, I could name some names in a certain Fortune 50 company who in fact, did press me to lie. At the time, I had something like 10 years experience with SQL, including 5 with PostgreSQL, 5 with MySQL, and some Oracle. But I didn't have the mandatory 5 years DB2 and the filter-bots wouldn't pass with out DB2 so they pushed me to alter the résumé.
Often, if you don't lie, you'll never get past the automated sorting mechanisms in HR and your application will never even be seen by a human being. The degree filter is a major one, but there's usually just enough automated buzzword filtering to ensure that the statistical likelihood of an actual honest person matching is vanishingly small.
It's why I've always been hired through direct internal connections instead of via HR.
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How should "Islam" denounce it? They do not have a Pope, no central religious authority. And it's not like we require random passing Christians to denounce the Catholic boy-rapes every time they are exposed either...
The same way "Christianity" denounces. As a plural majority. The Baptist Church doesn't recognize the Pope. Even the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't speak for all Baptists. But if enough Popes, Patriarchs, Deacons, Elders, etc. etc. etc. speak in chorus, then "Christianity" can be said to oppose (or support) something. Same thing with the Imams of Islam. They don't get a free pass just because the next step up is supposed to be Allah. And ironically, a lot of the violence comes from too many alleged members of the Faithful treating the Prophet (PBUH) as though he some sort of god. Which is violates the informal First Commandment of Islam.
I can't vouch for the GPU or hefty graphics card you're using, but you could do the same thing with lots of heft for under 150watts, including the freaking LCD monitor. There are a number of nice, high stroke CPUs out there that don't need a 500w supply.
Yes, Flight Simulator is a pig. But it seems to like AMD's math over AMDs, and in terms of graphics, I haven't kept up, so can't address that particular piece. Nonetheless, 500w can power a decent electric scooter.
Forgive me. I haven't actually measured the true wattage. I don't have gamer hardware on this box - it's just a bog-standard small form-factor desktop with a mobo graphics card that's so crappy that I've been known to use Remote Desktop in from the Linux box just to preserve my eyes.
All I can say for certain is that it can make the office nice and toasty when I've already got my regular equipment running. Good for January. Not so good for July.
I'd probably do better making a VM out of it and running it on the Linux box, but one of the things that Linux is exactly the opposite of "terrible" for versus Windows is that I cannot just go throwing around Windows VM images around with wild abandon the way I can with Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, etc. Windows has to be licensed and blessed by Redmond.
I'm opposed to oppression of offensive speech because it is so bad that intelligent people learn better why they shouldn't use it when they see it.
It seems odd to question the legitimacy of a person's faith on the basis of whether they translate a phrase a certain way. Kind of like you can't be Jewish if you turned on a light on Shabbat, or you can't be Catholic if you failed to read the Pope's latest proclamation.
Transliteration is not the same thing as translation. "Allah Akhbar" is the generally-accepted transliteration of the Arabic phrase which is generally translated into English as "God is Great". If I was to back-transliterate "Allah hoakbar", the letters would be very different. At best, it's a bad rendition of "Allahu Akbar", which is how it's spoken. Bad renditions typically mean that either the writer is using a dialect (and religions do tend to prefer formal, standardized language), that the writer is illiterate (it does happen), or that the writer is ignorant. Ignorance comes in many flavors, some few of which are Muslim, but likewise many of which are non-Muslim trolls.
I'd be more accommodating, but when you're defending the faith (whatever that faith may be), it's incumbent to do it in a way that does credit to the faith. Something that the 9/11 crowd certainly didn't do.
This is just a rant session about Atom. Someday linux devs will resign themselves to the fact that linux is (somewhat) great for servers and terrible for almost everything else. This will probably get modded as trolling but if I said the opposite thing about MS it would be insightful. In my opinion this entire article is trolling.
Well, excuse me for living.
I boot up Windows for 3 reasons:
1. Tax preparation
2. Diagnosing IE-specific issues
3. Flight Simulator (Yes, I know, there's a flight simulator for Linux, but I like the MS one OK)
Mostly the Windows box is powered off, because those are infrequent occasions and I'd rather not add another 500 watts to the A/C load. All of the day-to-day stuff I do to make a living is running on Linux. If for no other reason that the fact that I'd have to take out a second mortgage to pay for all the Windows equivalents of the databases, software development and text-processing tools that come free with Linux. Or in some cases, free for Linux.
If you said "Linux is terrible for almost everything else" and gave specific examples, you'd be insightful. Given however, that I'm quite happy with at least 2 of the "everything else"s (desktop and Android), lack of specific illustrations makes you a troll.
Heh, is this like Palin's "real America."
Here's a clue, all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were college educated.
Perhaps the Islamists not bothered by mere words are the ones who, regardless of education, don't take that religion so seriously. Because any cursory reading of the Quran has it repeated to you how all apostates are evil and doomed forever by Allah, and that lying and killing them is no big deal.
Except that (presumably), the WTC wasn't full of apostates. According to the tenets of Islam, Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all "people of the Book" and all equal in the eyes of Allah (well, maybe Muslims are more equal, but whatever). As such, they are not apostates (Muslims who rejected Islam) and that killing any of them is a sin, hence killing roughly 3000 of them is a major sin, especially when the hijackers were armed and prepared for war and the victims were not. These killers were not true Muslims and I don't mean in the "No True Scotsman" way. What they did was not only inexcusable even for "true" Muslims, but if I'm not mistaken, the habits of at least some of these men included vices that anyone who was as pure and holy as they claimed to be would not have indulged in.
Where Islam failed was in failing to denounce this kind of behavior in a way that would leave no doubt in the minds of any future imitators and wannabes that mass murder is the work of Iblis, not of Allah and that in fact it was murder and not jihad. This semi-legitimization of evil in the name of God was not only a smear on the name of Islam; most of the like-minded attacks since then have been in Muslim countries themselves.
They have only themselves to blame.
If you're going to convince me that you're truly Muslim - or at least decently educated, then you need to be able to transliterate "God is Great" in a way that follows the accepted norms. Maybe you're being dialectical, but Islam is based on classical Arabic, and there's a "proper" way to render that phrase in English. As it is, it makes me wonder if you're truly Muslim or just pouring gasoline on the fire.
As far as I'm concerned, religious displays of violence are major sins, regardless of whether they're Muslim, Christian, or whatever. They're the ultimate in hubris, because they're basically saying that God, the Almighty, is too weak and too feeble to protect Himself, and so must enlist crowds of murderous men to do the job. God, if He is Who you say he is, could do a Sodom-and-Gomorrah on any place in the Universe, or even wipe the entire planet, if he felt the need to defend Himself. We see every day how the Earth and the heavens can be subjected to earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, plagues, meteor swarms - even supernovae. And that 's just in an apparently undirected way. If God can bind Leviathian, those are the least of punishments he could aim at the infidels if that was His desire. These mobs are about as meaningful as if a nest of ants were to rush to my defense against another nest of ants. As the Qur'an states repeatedly: "Let God be the judge".
Likewise, I'm very much opposed to suppression of offensive speech, because if you have faith, you understand that God is too powerful to be overcome by lies. That lies may eclipse the truth, but the truth will eventually prevail. And that the best way to expose lies is to bring them forth into the light of day for all to observe how their details fail, not to suppress them in the hope that no one will believe them.
There are a lot of ideals that America has discarded in the last 30 years or so, but one that we've managed to hold on to is the idea that free speech means free people. In a more authoritarian country, such slanders as this "film trailer" would either become underground "forbidden knowledge" (with all the appeal inherent), or officially sanctioned. Either way, the message would be legitimized. Instead, the controversy enabled by free speech and the freedom to view and dissect this work has exposed the tawdry underpinnings of this scheme and the lack of moral character of those behind it. Instead of undermining Islam, it may, in fact, have done the opposite. We learn a lot about people (and religions, and ideologies) by the calibre of their enemies.
Nothing like hitting one's head in the wall, repeatedly, to drive a point home. :-)
But then they'll cut costs in other places, especially IT since it's a cost center.
One of the biggest fallacies in the whole bean-counting mindset. IT is more commonly a savings center. They've forgotten how much not employing all those Bob Cratchett-types over in the "profit center" helps make that "profit center" more profitable.
Anything that doesn't look like a bean doesn't exist for a bean counter. Nor, for that matter, do any beans that appear outside their computed timeframes or their constricted view of the Universe.
Where I work there are dozens of COBOL programmers, it's abanking system, very old.
Unlike IE, COBOL is a standards-compliant platform designed for a long lifespan.
I know a dude who did it in 12.
Don't believe him. He's just messing with your head.
There's a reason these companies came to the government: they could not get private sector financing. Why not? Most likely, because they have no convincing business case.
That's because in this day and age, a "convincing business case" isn't "Give me funding for R&D and I can probably exceed your wildest expectations eventually", it's "We'll give you a guaranteed 6 billion dollar payback next quarter". Corporations have all but abandoned long-term thinking and speculative research in pursuit of the largest profit in the shortest interval.
Governments, for all their faults, are not expected to show a profit (and, in fact, if they do, it probably means there's something amiss), don't live from quarter-to-quarter, and are therefore at liberty to pour money down assorted ratholes knowing that few of them will pan out. AND, when something does, they'll then unload whatever discoveries have been made to private enterprise.
It may not be the best solution around, but it's better than any of the alternatives.
Certs are an indicator that someone can learn information in a formal setting.
Not always. A lot of certs are cram-and-barf and all they really indicate is that you can hold the information necessary to pass the test long enough to pass the test. Many of the better-known certs never require any formal setting at all. And all too frequently, the information necessary to pass the test is not the information that the daily job requires. I've seen too many practice exams that focus on obscure features, decoding code that's so awful that in real life, the person inheriting it would be more likely to ignore it and rewrite it (after assaulting the original author), or revelling in quirks best left alone.
Holding a lot of certs indicates that you have an aptitude for acquiring certs, but that's not a position that's commonly hired for.
The only certs that really impressed me were the RHCE and CCNA, and that's because they closely mimic the kind of things people actually do on a routine basis and hence need to be able to do well.
Conversely, I've never seen a programming cert that impressed me, because an industrial-grade real-world software system isn't something you can whip up in a 2-hour test session - anything realistic would take weeks or longer (despite what the boss/users think). The only "cert" I'd accept for that would be experience. And people have been known to fudge on the experience.
And really...? Having a new adapter is going to somehow harm the enviornment?!?!
[rolls eyes]...Really......?
Really.
The idea is not to have a drawerful of one-off adapters and connectors, which is where we were before the mini- and micro-usb connectors became common currency. You save the environment by not having to manufacture and supply new cables with each new device, you save it again by only needing as many adapters and cables as you actively use, and finally, you save it by being able to retain and re-use these cables and adapters long after the original device has been retired/broken.
Small steps, agreed, but every little bit helps. And even if they didn't, I'd be for it just because I've got enough cables and adapters stuffed in my equipment drawers as it is.
Peak IPv4 or Peak Underwear, That is the Question!
2. ???
3. Profit!
The Gnomes strike again!
Don't mix speed and distance.
Hey, I can do the Kessel Run in 17 parsecs!
Does that mean this is not a general purpose computing machine? If that's true, then I think there's all sorts of legal problems ahead of them.
I believe there's certain loopholes in various laws to allow loopholes for general purpose computing hardware.
I don't think there's legal issues. I'd hate to think that only general purpose computing machines were legal.
On the other hand, Windows is (allegedly) a general-purpose OS, so I'd expect that a CPU running Windows would work best if it was a general-purpose CPU.
Firstly, because there would have to be an awfully compelling reason for me to buy into a less-powerful platform if I could get a more-powerful one relatively easily.
Secondly, because Microsoft has a long history of "interface of the month" types of technologies, so even if you're using the hardware only for Windows, you'd want as much flexibility as possible - they're good enough at breaking things on general-purpose hardware without adding limitations into the mix.
(for when there is no wind)
'no wind' is a local phenomenon. if there's no wind here, you can be sure that if you move 300 miles in any direction, you will find wind there.
Straight up?
Coding is all well and good, but a lot of what makes me (allegedly) superior comes from having read other people's code.
I feel sorry for you. The code I got to read was mostly OS source code, not street-grade applications slop. OS code - at least until Microsoft took over - was held to a much higher standard. You couldn't just CTRL+ALT+DELETE a mainframe because bad OS code went haywire.
Actually most code other people write and that it is expected that you read in your day job is mostly utter shit. This is because most developers don't care about the code they write, they just want to get a good evaluation for the time spent writing feature X, so if they can just copy and paste or better, steal from a coworker, good.
And given this, would you blame a programmer for switching jobs if there are job offers for better salaries, if at the same time companies prefer to hire immigrant developers and to outsource development to India? Isn't it the same?
Most companies outsource without knowing if they are going to save a dime. Most probably they won't. But they simply make a bet. No manager has ever been fired for trying to reduce cost, even if costs skyrocket as a result, since the manager first proposes the cost cut, but the ones who approve are the board of directors in all cases, and they never admit being wrong.
You'll get no argument from me. I am quite familiar with the "Just Git 'er Dun!" edict. Been there, didn't do it very well, got fired. It wasn't like the code needed to be good quality. It was merely processing people's financial accounts.
For a Republican congress to pass anything, all they need is a simple majority.
301 to 118 is hardly "a simple majority".
For a Democratic congress to pass anything requires a super-majority.
For the existing Senate, all it took to block passage of this extension was one person. One person is hardly a super-majority. I don't need to bother looking up whether the Senate is Democrat or Republican controlled, if all it takes is one it doesn't matter.
That's a pretty strong clue that one person could have stopped this before, and not a single Democrat could muster up the ability. Your rants about those awful Republicans are ignoring a large number of other, non-Republican guilty parties.
Obama is another story, though.
Obama is the same old story, rewarmed and rehashed and doing the same things, under the banner "Hope and Change". How could anyone see his pick for VP and not know that it would be four more years of the same old politics? And now the banner "You Hope we can Change what we didn't Change during our first four years."
Your math is all wrong. When I said "simple majority", I was referring to the makeup of the Congress when the bills are passed, not what it is at the moment or at any other moment that happens to be convenient to convey a false level of power.
Actually a bank note QR code wouldn't hold a URL at all. QR codes encode arbitrary strings. Unless they're incredibly dumb implementing it the worst that would happen is it mistaking a serial number for a phone number and trying to call it. Not much chance of a scanner getting infected trying that!
They're incredibly dumb. The QR code would probably become the infection string for a SQL Injection attack on the bank's servers.
It seems to me we need to work to get the third party doctrine changed. It has no relevancy in anyones lives in the 21st century.
If successfull the governement will begin to loose court cases on constitutional grounds and be forced to stop.
Read it and weep:
...
Of course you'd believe that. The amendment that nullifies that for affairs of National Security is Classified.
My freedom is worth nothing if I am dead.
Wow, glad the men and women of the American Revolutionary didn't think that way. For that matter anyone that has fought for a peoples freedom against oppression.
How sad that you feel that life and freedom are not possible at the same time.
I, too, heard the voices of Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin when I read that.
How we have fallen. A lecherous old womanizer and his friends risked torture and death all so that they could bequeath a nation to spineless cowards who run around chanting "USA! USA! USA!" and then beg the government to take all their freedom so that the big mean terrorists won't eat them.
Not only has Obama and Dems (don't forget the house was Nancy's) failed to roll back anything of Bush/Cheney, they expanded the powers.
For a Republican congress to pass anything, all they need is a simple majority. Republicans march in lock-step like Red Square on May Day.
For a Democratic congress to pass anything requires a super-majority. Enough votes to override the massed Republicans and the breakaway Democrats. Like Will Rogers said: "I belong to no organized political party, I am a Democrat".
Obama is another story, though. Sure, he's skinnier, darker, more capable of coherent speech. But dangit, sometimes it's hard to tell W's not still in the Oval Office. They even both have the same ears!
Historically, there were 3 reasons for using assembler.
1. You needed access to instructions or hardware that weren't accessible via higher-level mechanisms.
2. You needed performance that compiled code could not provide.
3. You needed access to OS functions (back when the OS functions weren't generally accessible in a format friendly to high-level languages.
I've seen compilers that could kludge their way around item #1, but I never liked the concept myself. If you're going to do assembler, do assembler.
Early compilers were pretty brute-force and the code they generated was only minimally optimized, if at all. That changed with a vengeance circa 1985 when I started encountering compilers that not only took optimization seriously, they re-optimized the entire program at a massive scale each time you re-compiled. It's not that I couldn't do the same - just that I couldn't hold my job and do it, since what a compiler could do in milliseconds would require literally weeks of re-coding in assembler. The situation only got worse when pipelined architectures were introduced and you could no longer accurately determine how long it would take to process an instruction by simple arithmetic applied without knowledge of the current pipleline context.
Item #3 is mostly a non-issue now, since most modern-day OS's come with a decent set of high-level interface libraries.
Assembly language is not totally obsolete, but it's more like Fortran. Virtually essential for certain kinds of work, and (mostly) not that important for most people. It's worth knowing, but you can actually do yourself more harm than good with it now that CPUs and compilers are designed with optimizations based on the way that assembly-ignorant people code.
Nobody is asking you to lie, they're asking you to jump through a hoop.
Actually, I could name some names in a certain Fortune 50 company who in fact, did press me to lie. At the time, I had something like 10 years experience with SQL, including 5 with PostgreSQL, 5 with MySQL, and some Oracle. But I didn't have the mandatory 5 years DB2 and the filter-bots wouldn't pass with out DB2 so they pushed me to alter the résumé.
Often, if you don't lie, you'll never get past the automated sorting mechanisms in HR and your application will never even be seen by a human being. The degree filter is a major one, but there's usually just enough automated buzzword filtering to ensure that the statistical likelihood of an actual honest person matching is vanishingly small.
It's why I've always been hired through direct internal connections instead of via HR.