Japan 336 people per square kilometer United Kingdom 266 Netherlands 411 Germany 226 United States 33
Rail works okay when you live and work within 2km of the station. Compared to many countries, the US has 90% less people close to the station. What makes sense in one scenario doesn't make sense with the population density an order of magnitude lower.
> Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
> As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us.
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but that kinda has a certain "I intentionally choose confirmation bias over following the evidence" stink about it. I'm sure that's not what you mean, though.
We don't know about life anywhere else, and we can't even come close to agreeing what the word "God", even *means*, much less understand and prove everything about the concept. So the honest answer to most questions about these subjects is simply "we don't know". That is, once you go beyond certain descriptions of "God" as meaning basically physics and concepts like "truth".
Given that we don't know, we only get hints throughout my our lifetime, we can choose between two ways to think about it, conclusion-based (faith-based?) or evidence-based.
Suppose I'm introduced to a person I don't know, names Rob Smith. I'm asked to guess whether the Rob Smith is a) a career burglar or b) founded and runs a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. I guess, somewhat arbitrarily, that Rob is a career burglar. I then stumble upon the fact that someone named Rob Smith, perhaps the same person, gives 80% of his income to charity.
I can have either of two reactions to the news that Rob Smith is very charitable. I can either adjust my initial guess, saying "perhaps this Rob Smith is a actually a good guy. What little evidence I have is starting to point that direction." Alternatively, I can say "nope, it can't be the same Rob Smith. I already guessed that this guy is a crook, so I won't believe the evidence."
I can either let my foregone conclusion (guess) affect my view of the evidence, or I can let the evidence affect my estimate of the unknown variable. Although most would argue that logically our conclusions should be based on the evidence, for whatever reason we humans have a strong urge do the opposite - letting our previous guess decide how we view the evidence. We're really, really bad about that in politics. I reject all evidence that Person A is doing anything good, because I voted against them. That makes us tend to say things like:
I don't believe any evidence of X, because a long time I guess that Y was false, and if Y actually is true, that would be evidence that Y could be true - that my guess might have been wrong. I reject the evidence because it doesn't support my guess.
There a million different beliefs about God, "anything that anyone calls God therefore does not exist", based on many different sets of reasoning, some evidence-based, some experience-based, and some more extreme conclusion-based, what some would call faith-based (for an extreme definition of "faith"). The extreme faith-based schools of thought, basically cults, say:
I believe X about God, so I reject / ignore all evidence to the contrary.
This cultist way of thinking isn't limited to David Koresh followers. There is a cult sect of atheism that says "all of the million or so descriptions of something someone calls 'God' must be dead wrong, so therefore we reject all evidence and reasoning which suggests anything more powerful than a human has ever existed". That's an act of extreme fact, cultish faith.
There are, of course, other varieties of "atheism". Perhaps the most common is "my mom believed X, Y, Z about God. I think my mom was mistaken about at least one of those. I don't believe in the same idea of God that my mom did. As for the other thousands of ideas about different things people call God, I don't even know what all the different beliefs are, so I certainly can't know which ones are right. I'm just pretty sure that my mom didn't have the God thing all figured out. So if my mom's idea of God wasn't quite right, that leaves me with no understanding of God that I can believe."
W3C didn't really have much choice in the matter. They rejected to the two proposals that were later merged to become HTML5. The browser vendors and others went off and formed WHATWG to develop HTML5, saying the would not implement XHTML 2.0.
The mistake, or lack of foresight, was made much earlier, in the design of XHTML 1.0. That required a rewrite that wasn't backward compatible, XHTML 2.0, which didn't meet the needs of the way the web was evolving.
> But I don't suppose they took 1.2 billion out of ATMs. So most of it just went from bank account to bank account to bank account. How hard can it be to trace?
If the crooks were stupid, they would have transferred it from the victim bank into the crook's personal Wells Fargo account, and left it there. The crooks weren't stupid.
The move it around through several countries right away, then use burner accounts in whichever countries to buy goods, things like laptops, gold, diamonds, etc. Move the diamonds, laptops, gold, whatever to another country where the government officials are part of a fencing operation, etc.
A problem with penalizing companies that fall victim to hackers is that most such incidents are easy to hide, which is precisely what you don't want. You don't want companies covering up a breach to avoid penalties. You want the systems to be safe in the first place, which requires communicating about risks and attacks.
People also have a terrible intuition about judging risks. They probably won't have a major breach this year, so it's not a top priority.
What you want is to have people make their stuff safe. The fire code gives us a pattern for this that has worked. Companies comply with the fire code, and avoid fires, because otherwise their insurance company or the fire marshall will bust them for not following safety code - before they ever have a fire. You don't penalize people for having a fire, the insurance company checks that you're following fire code BEFORE a fire occurs.
For me, when I open a page, in a new tab or the same one, I open it because I intend to look at the page. I *want* my browser to get a page ready to view when I open it.
Where I may not want it loaded right away is when I re-open my browser and have many tabs open from an earlier session. That's a niche where a well thought-out new UI feature would be good, though - pages I intend to use this week, but not right now. Bookmarks feel more permanent than that use case; I use bookmarks for things I plan to return to months later. Tabs aren't really the right choice, either, though - having many pages loaded that I'm not going to miss today is wasteful.
Bookmarks / favorites require a few more clicks than tabs. Tabs are "right click, open in new tab" to start, "close tab" to end, a total of three clicks. Bookmarks add many additional clicks - "open in new table, bookmark this page,select the folder, close the page", then "open bookmarks, find the right bookmark folder", then afterwards, navigating bookmarks again, and removing the bookmark, then closing the tab.
I'd like to "right click - add to read later", two clicks. Then right-click on the close button to "close and remove from read later".
That's funny. They DO need to have some credibility with the companies who hire them. Would you keep using a recruiter who routinely sends you junk candidates that aren't close to be a fit for the job?
The real estate agent tells you the asking price and the current going rates for the neighborhood up front. Like a real estate agent would be wasting their time showing you houses you won't buy, a recruiter would be wasting their time and credibility messing around if they know the job isn't in your range, so they have no reason to mislead you. They'd be better off even referring you to a different recruiter to find you a job you'll want, because yes they get paid when you take the job.
Unlike a real estate agent, the recruiter isn't part of the salary negotiations after the interview. So they have no opportunity for "dragging the process out in the hope of getting you a higher amount" - they are done after the first couple of phone calls.
If you don't communicate about salary and benefit expectations, then sure they'll send you on any interviews they can - they would have no way of knowing that they are wasting their time and credibility.
That's my experience with recruiters. The conversation typically goes about like this:
Me: That sounds interesting. What is the budgeted salary range for this position? Recruiter: $80-$90K Me: That's probably not a good match for what I'm looking for, with 20 years of experience. Them: What range are you looking for? Me: Depending on location and other factors, somewhere above $130K Them: May I call you in the future when I have an opening that's a better match? Me: Sure, please do.
That California law is fine and all, but personally I don't have much need for it.
External recruiters typically get 10% of the employee's first-year salary, so they don't want to low ball candidates. They want to get as many people hired as they can each month, at the highest salaries. They know what the salary range is, because that determines their commission, and have no reason to hide that information. Hiding it would reduce their success rate by spending time on candidates who won't take the position.
The vast majority of recruiters I hear from are external, so when I ask, they tell me the salary range before I ever talk to anyone from the company that is hiring.
PS to my footnote - whenever a third-party recruiter calls me, I always ask about the budget for the position very early in the conversation. The recruiter won't be offended, and it saves them time as well as saving me time and if it's not in the range I'm looking for. If it IS in the right range, I have a good starting point for negotiation.
At this stage of my career, I'm happy to have recruiters have better tools to know when to contact me and when NOT to. I'm pretty happy with my job, I love working from home. I also see the handwriting on the wall as my employer moves jobs overseas. So I'm aware that while I like my job now, I'll probably have to entertain offers before too long. Anything that better matches the offers to my skills and requirements is good, in my opinion.
A few years ago, I was significantly underpaid. It was advantageous for me to have potential employers offer what I'm worth, rather than making an offer based on my current salary at the time. Had they known my salary, my take-home probably wouldn't have doubled the last two times I switched jobs.
* Yes they always *ask* what your current salary is. You can answer "I'm looking for...", because that's what they really.want to know - "how much will we have to pay you?"
> Small problems can be quietly negotiated. T lacks a sense of proportion
I've kept an eye on Trump for 20 years, and I'd say that's a fundamental part of his personality, his psyche. Parodies of him always have him talking about "yuge" because that's Trump, he always wants to go big, the biggest.
There is good and bad about "go big or go home" in a president.
The other day you had a submission about a RAID enclosure. You didn't say how many drives, or talk about budget. I used some large ones, 12-16 bay.
Enclosures are very simple devices. It's a metal case, a power supply, connectors, and optionally a SAS expander card. So there's not a WHOLE lot of room for one to be that much better than another.
If you don't want to buy pre-owned stuff off eBay, check out the Rackable Systems web site, or for a more prestigious brand, Supermicro. Supermicro makes some really nice storage.
If you use RAID 5, make sure it's set to check / re-sync the RAID weekly and your email address is set correctly to be notified of RAID and SMART errors. You want to be notified when one drive starts having errors.
Now on to my question for you, since you seem to have some experience with PICs, and specifically their DS line. I want to build a pretty simple circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802. I wonder where I might be able to get a little help. Maybe you have an idea of who I could talk to.
That part is designed for motor control applications. It has two Quadrature Encoding Interfaces (QEI) which are used to read the position of a rotary encoder. It has several pwm outputs to control brushed DC motors, through a transistor or H bridge. So I want a pretty simple circuit - read my two encoders to find the position of my motors, then send pwm signals through the h-bridge to move them. Hook the encoders to the QEI inputs, the PWM output to the h-bridge, power and ground, and we're good to go, right?
My experience tells me that a naÃve implementation like that works for several milliseconds, until the magic smoke comes out. Some pins need to be connected to ground via a diode to protect against whatever, some others need to be connected to vcc via a resistor because gobblygook, and these other two pins need to be connected to each via a diode and a capacitor to protect it from whatever. That's the stuff I don't know or understand.
If that didn't make sense, let me try an analogy. A transistor allows a larger current to flow based on a much smaller current, so it works as an amplifier. Naively, we could think if you connect headphones across a transistor and a low-power input to the gate, you've just made an audio amplifier. Actual audio amplifiers, the very simple ones, have about 20 parts. The transistor does the amplifying, and 19 other parts make sure the transistor doesn't melt, or otherwise behave very badly. I'm at the stage where when I want to amplify a signal I can select an appropriately rated transistor, but other than controlling gain with a pot I don't know what those other 19 components are for.
Any ideas where I could get some help designing / building a basic circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802? I know I want to connect the rotary encoders to inputs, the h-bridge to pwm out, and a serial or CAN bus interface. All the auxiliary components to make it start up and run without catching fire or cancelling my car insurance is what I need help with.
I started to mention that program. The official partners are listed on the Moodle page, can use Moodle trademarks, and send a portion (10%?) of sales back to Moodle HQ. That's a good program.
Because they had (needed) a Moodle developer in-house, third-party support wasn't what they needed. They explicitly did not want to slowly become dependent on a vendor. Buying support through an authorized vendor would have cost them more than paying $500/year, and Moodle HQ would only get 10% of it or so.
That said, my employer DID make contributions to Moodle which were useful for other users, by paying me to do so. I championed making sure we could publicly distribute our module and contributions, arguing that by doing so the community would help maintain OUR code, rather than us having to update our patches and modules for new versions of Moodle. My employer agreed to allow me to post code as long as it wasn't specific to our organization or contain any trade secrets, "general use" code I could distribute. I made sure that all of my code was general enough for other people to use, and for us to use in a new way next year.
It's amazing to me how often Windows is 10-20 years behind Linux in such basic features. Here's a screenshot from Gnome 1.0 in 1999. The 2x2 panel at the bottom left is for switching between virtual desktops (workspaces). It was included in 1.0 because it was considered a basic feature in Linux by 1999.
Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.
I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.
Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.
I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.
Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.
For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).
I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.
First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.
There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.
There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.
Unit tests are included and easy to run.
Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.
All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.
All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.
What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.
Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.
Here's a little additional information on how Stillman intends the "or any later version" mechanism to be used. It provides a method to slowly obsolete an old version of the license in case a major problem comes up.
Suppose version 1.0 of some software was distributed under "version 1 or later" of the GPL. Many people contribute. Some people leave the project and new people join. The new people can keep distributing the old contributions, if they follow GPLv1 OR any later version. Suppose there is a court case that potentially affects GPLv1 and a new GPLv2 license is needed, with section 7 added (the liberty or death clause).
The current members of the project can choose the "or any later version" option for new versions of the software. "Any version later than v1" of course means the same thing as "version 2 or later". The project has successfully upgraded from "version 1 or later" to "version 2 or later", simply by choosing the "or later" part of the "or".
Of course, the lawsuit isn't hypothetical, GPLv2 isn't hypothetical, and we really did add section 7. Projects did in fact switch to "v2 or later" using exactly this mechanism.
This would not have been possible if the language was "v1and every later version". It's the option of selecting either or that made the migration to v2 possible.
> You're of course welcome to remove any clause from the GPL you wish. Linus Torvalds did just that when he licensed the kernel; the "or any later version" clause is removed.
You may NOT modify the license and still call it GPL, nor use the GPL preamble.
If you grep the license, the GPL.org copy, ( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... ) you'll see there IS no "or any later version" grant in the license. Nothing was removed. Rather, you'll find that suggestion as an option after "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS", under "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". It's a suggestion on how one can use the license, and is not part of the license itself.
What does appear in the license (10) is an explanation of what if means IF a program specifies "or any later version": -- If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. --
Note first the first word "if". If the author choose to grant "or any later", the license says that means "either that version, or any later". Either, or. As in programming, in law "or" means something very different from "and". It does not mean "comply with this version AND every later version".
You can choose to follow v2 OR v3, you aren't required to comply with the combined conditions of every later version ever produced.
So if you re-distribute some of our code that's "GPLv2 or any later version", you may follow v2, or you may follow v3, at your option. You can choose to follow both. The GPL FAQ explains this as well:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... --
When a program says âoeVersion 2 of the GPL or any later versionâ, users will always be permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2â"even after later versions of the GPL are available --
When it says "v2 or later... permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2", that means they have to follow all of the conditions of GPLv2, and there are no other conditions. They may elect v2 and ignore any other versions. One of the conditions of GPLv2 is that if you distribute a modified copy, you must distribute it under GPLv2.
So for any software under "GPLv2 or later", you can choose to accept the v2 license, and distribute your modified version under the v2 license. You need not follow a version you don't even know exists, and need not distribute your changes under later versions. You must put your modifications under the same license you're using to allow you to distribute it - which can be v2 OR something else.
> We've been doing it successfully (and legally) for years, and we're a tiny company.
If you've been collecting and remitting sales tax for all 50 states, without a nexus and sales tax license in each state, you've been doing it wrong, and illegally. In Texas, for example, collecting sales tax without a license is illegal, and you need a nexus in Texas to get a sales tax license in Texas.
Until this decision it was ILLEGAL for states to collect sales tax from out-out-state sellers. So you've either been doing that while it was illegal, or you've been legally not doing it. You can't have been doing it and doing it legally, while it was illegal to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan 336 people per square kilometer
United Kingdom 266
Netherlands 411
Germany 226
United States 33
Rail works okay when you live and work within 2km of the station. Compared to many countries, the US has 90% less people close to the station. What makes sense in one scenario doesn't make sense with the population density an order of magnitude lower.
I suspect GP was thinking of 0 Kelvin, absolute zero. Saying Celsius may have been a mistake.
> Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
> As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us.
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but that kinda has a certain "I intentionally choose confirmation bias over following the evidence" stink about it. I'm sure that's not what you mean, though.
We don't know about life anywhere else, and we can't even come close to agreeing what the word "God", even *means*, much less understand and prove everything about the concept. So the honest answer to most questions about these subjects is simply "we don't know". That is, once you go beyond certain descriptions of "God" as meaning basically physics and concepts like "truth".
Given that we don't know, we only get hints throughout my our lifetime, we can choose between two ways to think about it, conclusion-based (faith-based?) or evidence-based.
Suppose I'm introduced to a person I don't know, names Rob Smith. I'm asked to guess whether the Rob Smith is a) a career burglar or b) founded and runs a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. I guess, somewhat arbitrarily, that Rob is a career burglar. I then stumble upon the fact that someone named Rob Smith, perhaps the same person, gives 80% of his income to charity.
I can have either of two reactions to the news that Rob Smith is very charitable. I can either adjust my initial guess, saying "perhaps this Rob Smith is a actually a good guy. What little evidence I have is starting to point that direction." Alternatively, I can say "nope, it can't be the same Rob Smith. I already guessed that this guy is a crook, so I won't believe the evidence."
I can either let my foregone conclusion (guess) affect my view of the evidence, or I can let the evidence affect my estimate of the unknown variable. Although most would argue that logically our conclusions should be based on the evidence, for whatever reason we humans have a strong urge do the opposite - letting our previous guess decide how we view the evidence. We're really, really bad about that in politics. I reject all evidence that Person A is doing anything good, because I voted against them. That makes us tend to say things like:
I don't believe any evidence of X, because a long time I guess that Y was false, and if Y actually is true, that would be evidence that Y could be true - that my guess might have been wrong. I reject the evidence because it doesn't support my guess.
There a million different beliefs about God, "anything that anyone calls God therefore does not exist", based on many different sets of reasoning, some evidence-based, some experience-based, and some more extreme conclusion-based, what some would call faith-based (for an extreme definition of "faith"). The extreme faith-based schools of thought, basically cults, say:
I believe X about God, so I reject / ignore all evidence to the contrary.
This cultist way of thinking isn't limited to David Koresh followers. There is a cult sect of atheism that says "all of the million or so descriptions of something someone calls 'God' must be dead wrong, so therefore we reject all evidence and reasoning which suggests anything more powerful than a human has ever existed". That's an act of extreme fact, cultish faith.
There are, of course, other varieties of "atheism". Perhaps the most common is "my mom believed X, Y, Z about God. I think my mom was mistaken about at least one of those. I don't believe in the same idea of God that my mom did. As for the other thousands of ideas about different things people call God, I don't even know what all the different beliefs are, so I certainly can't know which ones are right. I'm just pretty sure that my mom didn't have the God thing all figured out. So if my mom's idea of God wasn't quite right, that leaves me with no understanding of God that I can believe."
W3C didn't really have much choice in the matter. They rejected to the two proposals that were later merged to become HTML5. The browser vendors and others went off and formed WHATWG to develop HTML5, saying the would not implement XHTML 2.0.
The mistake, or lack of foresight, was made much earlier, in the design of XHTML 1.0. That required a rewrite that wasn't backward compatible, XHTML 2.0, which didn't meet the needs of the way the web was evolving.
Compared to planes and helicopters, at least balloons stay aloft without burning fuel constantly, running out pretty quickly.
> But I don't suppose they took 1.2 billion out of ATMs. So most of it just went from bank account to bank account to bank account. How hard can it be to trace?
If the crooks were stupid, they would have transferred it from the victim bank into the crook's personal Wells Fargo account, and left it there. The crooks weren't stupid.
The move it around through several countries right away, then use burner accounts in whichever countries to buy goods, things like laptops, gold, diamonds, etc. Move the diamonds, laptops, gold, whatever to another country where the government officials are part of a fencing operation, etc.
A problem with penalizing companies that fall victim to hackers is that most such incidents are easy to hide, which is precisely what you don't want. You don't want companies covering up a breach to avoid penalties. You want the systems to be safe in the first place, which requires communicating about risks and attacks.
People also have a terrible intuition about judging risks. They probably won't have a major breach this year, so it's not a top priority.
What you want is to have people make their stuff safe. The fire code gives us a pattern for this that has worked. Companies comply with the fire code, and avoid fires, because otherwise their insurance company or the fire marshall will bust them for not following safety code - before they ever have a fire. You don't penalize people for having a fire, the insurance company checks that you're following fire code BEFORE a fire occurs.
For me, when I open a page, in a new tab or the same one, I open it because I intend to look at the page. I *want* my browser to get a page ready to view when I open it.
Where I may not want it loaded right away is when I re-open my browser and have many tabs open from an earlier session. That's a niche where a well thought-out new UI feature would be good, though - pages I intend to use this week, but not right now. Bookmarks feel more permanent than that use case; I use bookmarks for things I plan to return to months later. Tabs aren't really the right choice, either, though - having many pages loaded that I'm not going to miss today is wasteful.
Bookmarks / favorites require a few more clicks than tabs. Tabs are "right click, open in new tab" to start, "close tab" to end, a total of three clicks. Bookmarks add many additional clicks - "open in new table, bookmark this page,select the folder, close the page", then "open bookmarks, find the right bookmark folder", then afterwards, navigating bookmarks again, and removing the bookmark, then closing the tab.
I'd like to "right click - add to read later", two clicks. Then right-click on the close button to "close and remove from read later".
That's funny. They DO need to have some credibility with the companies who hire them. Would you keep using a recruiter who routinely sends you junk candidates that aren't close to be a fit for the job?
Let me see if I understand you correctly.
A. You think this judge is a jackass.
B. He's a jackass because he declined to unilaterally decide energy policy, instead leaving policy to policy-makers.
C. You would have preferred for the jackass judge to decide national energy policy himself.
Is that about right?
The real estate agent tells you the asking price and the current going rates for the neighborhood up front.
Like a real estate agent would be wasting their time showing you houses you won't buy, a recruiter would be wasting their time and credibility messing around if they know the job isn't in your range, so they have no reason to mislead you. They'd be better off even referring you to a different recruiter to find you a job you'll want, because yes they get paid when you take the job.
Unlike a real estate agent, the recruiter isn't part of the salary negotiations after the interview. So they have no opportunity for "dragging the process out in the hope of getting you a higher amount" - they are done after the first couple of phone calls.
If you don't communicate about salary and benefit expectations, then sure they'll send you on any interviews they can - they would have no way of knowing that they are wasting their time and credibility.
That's my experience with recruiters. The conversation typically goes about like this:
Me: That sounds interesting. What is the budgeted salary range for this position?
Recruiter: $80-$90K
Me: That's probably not a good match for what I'm looking for, with 20 years of experience.
Them: What range are you looking for?
Me: Depending on location and other factors, somewhere above $130K
Them: May I call you in the future when I have an opening that's a better match?
Me: Sure, please do.
That California law is fine and all, but personally I don't have much need for it.
External recruiters typically get 10% of the employee's first-year salary, so they don't want to low ball candidates. They want to get as many people hired as they can each month, at the highest salaries. They know what the salary range is, because that determines their commission, and have no reason to hide that information. Hiding it would reduce their success rate by spending time on candidates who won't take the position.
The vast majority of recruiters I hear from are external, so when I ask, they tell me the salary range before I ever talk to anyone from the company that is hiring.
PS to my footnote - whenever a third-party recruiter calls me, I always ask about the budget for the position very early in the conversation. The recruiter won't be offended, and it saves them time as well as saving me time and if it's not in the range I'm looking for. If it IS in the right range, I have a good starting point for negotiation.
At this stage of my career, I'm happy to have recruiters have better tools to know when to contact me and when NOT to. I'm pretty happy with my job, I love working from home. I also see the handwriting on the wall as my employer moves jobs overseas. So I'm aware that while I like my job now, I'll probably have to entertain offers before too long. Anything that better matches the offers to my skills and requirements is good, in my opinion.
A few years ago, I was significantly underpaid. It was advantageous for me to have potential employers offer what I'm worth, rather than making an offer based on my current salary at the time. Had they known my salary, my take-home probably wouldn't have doubled the last two times I switched jobs.
* Yes they always *ask* what your current salary is. You can answer "I'm looking for ...", because that's what they really.want to know - "how much will we have to pay you?"
> Small problems can be quietly negotiated. T lacks a sense of proportion
I've kept an eye on Trump for 20 years, and I'd say that's a fundamental part of his personality, his psyche. Parodies of him always have him talking about "yuge" because that's Trump, he always wants to go big, the biggest.
There is good and bad about "go big or go home" in a president.
The other day you had a submission about a RAID enclosure. You didn't say how many drives, or talk about budget. I used some large ones, 12-16 bay.
Enclosures are very simple devices. It's a metal case, a power supply, connectors, and optionally a SAS expander card. So there's not a WHOLE lot of room for one to be that much better than another.
These are a great value. With the right card and firmware, they handle large drives.
https://www.servethehome.com/s...
If you don't want to buy pre-owned stuff off eBay, check out the Rackable Systems web site, or for a more prestigious brand, Supermicro. Supermicro makes some really nice storage.
If you use RAID 5, make sure it's set to check / re-sync the RAID weekly and your email address is set correctly to be notified of RAID and SMART errors. You want to be notified when one drive starts having errors.
Now on to my question for you, since you seem to have some experience with PICs, and specifically their DS line. I want to build a pretty simple circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802. I wonder where I might be able to get a little help. Maybe you have an idea of who I could talk to.
That part is designed for motor control applications. It has two Quadrature Encoding Interfaces (QEI) which are used to read the position of a rotary encoder. It has several pwm outputs to control brushed DC motors, through a transistor or H bridge. So I want a pretty simple circuit - read my two encoders to find the position of my motors, then send pwm signals through the h-bridge to move them. Hook the encoders to the QEI inputs, the PWM output to the h-bridge, power and ground, and we're good to go, right?
My experience tells me that a naÃve implementation like that works for several milliseconds, until the magic smoke comes out. Some pins need to be connected to ground via a diode to protect against whatever, some others need to be connected to vcc via a resistor because gobblygook, and these other two pins need to be connected to each via a diode and a capacitor to protect it from whatever. That's the stuff I don't know or understand.
If that didn't make sense, let me try an analogy. A transistor allows a larger current to flow based on a much smaller current, so it works as an amplifier. Naively, we could think if you connect headphones across a transistor and a low-power input to the gate, you've just made an audio amplifier. Actual audio amplifiers, the very simple ones, have about 20 parts. The transistor does the amplifying, and 19 other parts make sure the transistor doesn't melt, or otherwise behave very badly. I'm at the stage where when I want to amplify a signal I can select an appropriately rated transistor, but other than controlling gain with a pot I don't know what those other 19 components are for.
Any ideas where I could get some help designing / building a basic circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802? I know I want to connect the rotary encoders to inputs, the h-bridge to pwm out, and a serial or CAN bus interface. All the auxiliary components to make it start up and run without catching fire or cancelling my car insurance is what I need help with.
I started to mention that program. The official partners are listed on the Moodle page, can use Moodle trademarks, and send a portion (10%?) of sales back to Moodle HQ. That's a good program.
Because they had (needed) a Moodle developer in-house, third-party support wasn't what they needed. They explicitly did not want to slowly become dependent on a vendor. Buying support through an authorized vendor would have cost them more than paying $500/year, and Moodle HQ would only get 10% of it or so.
That said, my employer DID make contributions to Moodle which were useful for other users, by paying me to do so. I championed making sure we could publicly distribute our module and contributions, arguing that by doing so the community would help maintain OUR code, rather than us having to update our patches and modules for new versions of Moodle. My employer agreed to allow me to post code as long as it wasn't specific to our organization or contain any trade secrets, "general use" code I could distribute. I made sure that all of my code was general enough for other people to use, and for us to use in a new way next year.
I always tell them to try some hemp underwear. So much better than cotton. If you're a masochist.
It's amazing to me how often Windows is 10-20 years behind Linux in such basic features. Here's a screenshot from Gnome 1.0 in 1999. The 2x2 panel at the bottom left is for switching between virtual desktops (workspaces). It was included in 1.0 because it was considered a basic feature in Linux by 1999.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
You're sure Poettering was *thinking* when he made systemd? Would you like to take this opportunity to revise that comment?
Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.
I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.
Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.
I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.
Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.
For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).
I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.
First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.
There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.
There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.
Unit tests are included and easy to run.
Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.
All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.
All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.
What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.
Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.
Here's a little additional information on how Stillman intends the "or any later version" mechanism to be used. It provides a method to slowly obsolete an old version of the license in case a major problem comes up.
Suppose version 1.0 of some software was distributed under "version 1 or later" of the GPL. Many people contribute. Some people leave the project and new people join. The new people can keep distributing the old contributions, if they follow GPLv1 OR any later version. Suppose there is a court case that potentially affects GPLv1 and a new GPLv2 license is needed, with section 7 added (the liberty or death clause).
The current members of the project can choose the "or any later version" option for new versions of the software. "Any version later than v1" of course means the same thing as "version 2 or later". The project has successfully upgraded from "version 1 or later" to "version 2 or later", simply by choosing the "or later" part of the "or".
Of course, the lawsuit isn't hypothetical, GPLv2 isn't hypothetical, and we really did add section 7. Projects did in fact switch to "v2 or later" using exactly this mechanism.
This would not have been possible if the language was "v1and every later version". It's the option of selecting either or that made the migration to v2 possible.
> You're of course welcome to remove any clause from the GPL you wish. Linus Torvalds did just that when he licensed the kernel; the "or any later version" clause is removed.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o...
You may NOT modify the license and still call it GPL, nor use the GPL preamble.
If you grep the license, the GPL.org copy,
( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... )
you'll see there IS no "or any later version" grant in the license. Nothing was removed. Rather, you'll find that suggestion as an option after "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS", under "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". It's a suggestion on how one can use the license, and is not part of the license itself.
What does appear in the license (10) is an explanation of what if means IF a program specifies "or any later version":
--
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
--
Note first the first word "if". If the author choose to grant "or any later", the license says that means "either that version, or any later". Either, or. As in programming, in law "or" means something very different from "and". It does not mean "comply with this version AND every later version".
You can choose to follow v2 OR v3, you aren't required to comply with the combined conditions of every later version ever produced.
So if you re-distribute some of our code that's "GPLv2 or any later version", you may follow v2, or you may follow v3, at your option. You can choose to follow both. The GPL FAQ explains this as well:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o...
--
When a program says âoeVersion 2 of the GPL or any later versionâ, users will always be permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2â"even after later versions of the GPL are available
--
When it says "v2 or later ... permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2", that means they have to follow all of the conditions of GPLv2, and there are no other conditions. They may elect v2 and ignore any other versions. One of the conditions of GPLv2 is that if you distribute a modified copy, you must distribute it under GPLv2.
So for any software under "GPLv2 or later", you can choose to accept the v2 license, and distribute your modified version under the v2 license. You need not follow a version you don't even know exists, and need not distribute your changes under later versions. You must put your modifications under the same license you're using to allow you to distribute it - which can be v2 OR something else.
> We've been doing it successfully (and legally) for years, and we're a tiny company.
If you've been collecting and remitting sales tax for all 50 states, without a nexus and sales tax license in each state, you've been doing it wrong, and illegally. In Texas, for example, collecting sales tax without a license is illegal, and you need a nexus in Texas to get a sales tax license in Texas.
Until this decision it was ILLEGAL for states to collect sales tax from out-out-state sellers. So you've either been doing that while it was illegal, or you've been legally not doing it. You can't have been doing it and doing it legally, while it was illegal to do.