On the contracts I've seen that have these sort of non-compete clauses, it is sometimes mentioned that the CEO has to sign off on any changes to the contract. So, depending on the size of the company, you're often trying to negotiate with someone who has absolutely no authority to negotiate
You don't generally negotiate with the hiring manager, usually you talk to the company lawyer after you've gotten the offer. I've only once signed a contract without any modifications--even huge government contractors have been really reasonable about rational requests in my experience.
Don't think that because it's printed up in legalese that it's immutable; read it and talk about your concerns.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but from what I've read he didn't get lucky. It's possible he could have gotten unlucky, but even then he would have had appeals above him and probably won. Unless the noncompete is as narrow as necessary to protect legitimate company secrets, doesn't significantly infringe on his ability to make a living at his trade, and is sound public policy then almost every court in the US is going to toss it out.
In fact I can't understand how can US workers comply and go away with such a draconian practice like a "non compete" clause....What I find more amazing is the "oh well it's pretty standard" attitude. Do you really think such clauses are fair clauses?
They're almost meaningless in the jurisdictions I've worked in, and courts almost always side with the employee, so it's rarely worth the time to argue against them. I'll usually negotiate them out, but sign and ignore isn't actually as dangerous here as it is with other kinds of clauses.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. To take a couple of examples as I undersand them:
California (by far the biggest tech employer in the US) law states: "Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business is to that extent void."
1. Is the restraint no greater than necessary to protect the employer's legitimate interests? 2. Does the agreement unduly restrict the former employee in his or her ability to earn a livelihood? 3. Is the restraint reasonable from the standpoint of public policy?
I don't know why the Windows equivalent of fork() is slower than the Unix fork(). Perhaps it is a historical thing. Unix programs often use fork() - shell scripts use it all the time (this is one reason why a Python or Perl script is often faster). I'm just guessing now, but perhaps Unix fork() is efficient because it is frequently used and has therefore been optimised in various ways (e.g. memory is only copied if there is a write on Linux).
I already got modded down for mentioning it elsethread (not sure why), but Windows does have ZwCreateProcess and NtCreateProcess. Both of those will do a copy-on-write fork() style process creation if you pass them a NULL SectionHandle--it is much more efficient than the normal CreateProcessEx and is the way to go for doing heavy multiprocess stuff on Win32.
Windows does have a copy-on-write process creation mechanism--use ZwCreateProcess or NtCreateProcess with a NULL SectionHandle. It wasn't in Win98 and earlier, and it's poorly documented, which means a lot of Windows programmers don't use it and threads get massively overused.
But threads are rarely the right choice; OS developers spent years implementing protected memory for good reasons, and throwing it out even within the bounds of one process is rarely beneficial. If you need to share a ton of complex data structures that can't easily be allocated in shared memory, then threads are worthy of consideration; in practically every other case, multiple process solutions will wind up being easier to implement and maintain, and more stable.
Threads look seductively easy at the outset, but you actually have to do a lot of bean counting to get things right; with multiple processes, you have to explicitly set up IPC which makes it _look_ more complex but in reality makes it very clear what the shared resources are. Finding any synchronization problems usually winds up being a lot easier in multiple process systems, and there are the obvious stability and security benefits.
And depending on the task, multiple process solutions may actually be faster since when 2 process are running on seperate CPUs there's no need to worry about cache coherency, etc between them unless they're actually hitting shared resources.
But the performance differences tend to be negligible in practice for many applications; benchmark and see before assuming.
Granted, Gallagher is probably more recognizable than Miss Manners.
I gotta disagree. Judith Martin has her picture in every major newspaper in the country, and has for decades, and she's been introduced to the younger crowd via her appearances on the Colbert Report and other popular shows.
Gallagher had a few years of successful premium cable shows in the 1980s, and pretty much hasn't been heard of since except for whining that Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey aren't nearly as talented as he is a couple years ago.
Yes, "Would you hire this person again?" is the right question to ask when checking references. It allows the person on the other end to say "no" without actually saying anything negative about the applicant--they have the cover of "I was just giving my own opinion, I didn't give any reason not to hire him/her".
The problem is that "developer" and "development" are pretty vague and general terms, which programmers have tried to claim as their exclusive terminology. In reality, there are all kinds of developers who have nothing to do with programming.
Indeed, usability and HCI developers tend to have nothing to do with programming.
And why don't programmers simply call themselves programmers - why the obsession with the "developer" title, anyway?
Usually "developer" in the title is a more junior level (senior staff prefer to have "engineer" or "architect", unless of course they can get "director", "officer", etc), so I wouldn't say it's something that programmers are obsessed with so much as sometimes stuck with.
Web developer to me means a programmer/coder kind of position that's usually seperate from page design except at very small sites--the person writing ASP/PHP/ColdFusion/Ruby on Rails/JSP/etc is a web developer, the person deciding that the page should look like this, with nav bars over here, and these fonts and colors is the page designer.
In fact, the following are all different tasks (and I doubt the list is exhaustive by any stretch), though several may be done by one person at a particular site:
Authors (content)
Designers (layout)
Usabilty/HCI developers
Markup (Turning design into HTML code)
Web developer (writing code that dynamically generates HTML)
System developer (writing business logic components/back-end objects)
Database developer/DBA
Systems administrator
There are often ancillary tasks too (tester, publisher, etc) and there are other important tasks that people don't tend to conflate with those so I didn't list them (e.g. project manager, sales, etc).
For a small site there might be just one person doing the whole list, or everything but content and possibly design. In my experience, though, the most common places to seperate tasks if you have just 2 people working on the site are either right above the web designer on the list, or in many cases just the content is one person.
Where I work the line items are mostly seperate except that design, usability, and markup are done by the same people (and they'll often get involved with content), the senior system developers are also the DBAs, and there's a fair amount of overlap between some of the system developers and web developers (some work is strictly segregated between the two, some is more tightly bound).
My brother actually had his (legal) state of Maine ID cut in half and was accused of faking it in the mid-1990s. They were one of the last states to go away from crappy laminate-over-paper licenses, and it looked like a 1980s license from the rest of the country. He was out in LA, where such things aren't really common.
They told him he could leave or they'd call the cops, he waited around, and got a formal apology, they covered his replacement fees, and comped him for a few drinks and a couple meals or something. Certainly not worth the trouble for a working adult, but he was a broke student and also got a good story out of it.
And legally, Virginia, Massachucetts, Pennsylvannia, and whoever else (is it Delaware?) are states by federal law. You can call yourself whatever you want internally, but it doesn't change your status with respect to the federal government and the Constitution.
It may be worth noting that the TSA's mandate is not only to secure the airlines, but also to allow legal travellers to travel freely. That's one of the reasons that you can,in fact, fly without ID (if you submit to additional searches) in general--of course specific airlines may have their own policies.
As far as music goes it hit it's heyday somewhere in the 1980s and this is coming from someone who is 22. There are a few good artists out there and a couple good ones out there but rarely do I find anything interesting on the top 40.
Go back and look at the top 40 charts for the 1980s some time and you'll see that it's mostly absolute crap then as well. It's just that 20 years later a lot of the real drek isn't heard any more, and you only listen to the better stuff. It's the same deal with movies, books, and pretty much any other popular medium, and you have to wait until you have the perspective of time to be confident that, say, the 1950s was really bad for movies or that the 1960s was really groundbreaking for music.
As far as those who listen to hip-hop and embrace it as a culture, they are just as misguided and ignorant as those who make this noise and call it art. Anyone who can glorify a "culture" that embraces avarice, debasement of human life, and the overall lowering of the expectations of morale need to get there head checked
Hip-hop culture is no more about that than rock and roll culture is. From the Beatles coopting "The best things in life are free, but you can leave them to the birds and bees-I want money.", to Mungo Jerry singing "If her daddy's rich take her out for a meal, if her daddy's poor just do what you feel--have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find". rock has always dealt with sex, greed, drinking, and drugs. Heck, you can go back to pre-rock "popular music" and hear Ella excusing cheating and borderline prostitution ("There's an oil man known as tex/Who is keen to give me checks/And his checks, I fear, means that tex is here to stay/But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion/Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.") or Sinatra and the gang advocating pedophilia ("nothing could be finer than to shack up with a minor").
But, of course, they also dealt with a lot of other topics too--just as hip-hop does. Of course if you only listen to the press railing against gangsta rap you'll never pick up on that. It's not a minor subculture, though--from Run DMC and Public Enemy through Lauryn Hill and Jay-Z, there's always been plenty that's socially conscious and positive alongside both mean-spirited stuff and fluffy party tunes. Popular bands like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and Arrested Development were pretty much founded entirely to be socially conscious, and while they may sometimes be too "angry black man" for you, it's hard to argue that songs like "911 is a Joke" weren't addressing real problems.
Just a few examples off of #1 selling hip-hop albums:
"Now I see the importance of history, why people be in the mess that they be Many journeys to freedom made in vain by brothers on the corner playin ghetto games I ask you lord why you enlightened me without the enlightment of all my folks He said cuz I set myself on a quest for truth and he was there to quench my thirst"--Arrested Development, Tennessee, 1992
"I wanna know why Christians pray for a new day but its still the same way I wanna know why ghetto people pray for a new day hey, hey, heeey and its still the same way The preacher man told me good things come to those who wait--do good things come to those who wait? people don't you know that we can't stop the violence, no because the war is not over until you can feel love, peace, and hear the silence"--Wyclef Jean, Gunpowder, 1997
"We are not thugs (we don't use drugs) but you assume (on your own) They offer coke (and lots of dope) but we just leave it alone" -- Run DMC, It's Tricky, 1986
Some Presidents who never vetoed a bill (in months):... George W. Bush: 62
No longer true as of July 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5193998. stm "US President George W Bush has vetoed a controversial bill which would have lifted a ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research."
Add Taylor, Harrison, and Garfield to the "no vetoes" list.
Valid point, but that still breaks on files with newlines in the filename. Use a combination of find's -print0 and xargs' -0 option to deal with all filenames safely (and no, null isn't a valid filename character so there's no problem there).
readlines isn't needed(and even in old versions, xreadlines is probably better); also his version quoted the url so you can use urls with shell-unfriendly characters:
import os
for url in open("file"):
os.system("wget '%s'"%url.rstrip('\r\n'))
If you don't have wget or don't want to fork a bunch of processes:
It makes sense if cat is doing something more than just reading the file (e.g. "cat -n" to add line numbers, "cat -s" to eliminate multiple blank lines in a row, etc).
But other than that, there's practically never a reason to cat a single file. Even if you want the filename before the command, a simple redirect like:
you can just use a redirect at the beginning of the line:
file grep regex
There's not a really good reason to use cat unless you're concatenating multiple files or using one of cat's filtering flags. OTOH it's fairly harmless and not really worth being on the list, either.
In the US, pennies are pretty useless too. The sooner they're officially eliminated the better. There are a couple of ways that the market's phasing them out already:
Many stores have a little dish next to the register--if you get pennies in your change, you drop them in the dish; if you need pennies to pay you take them from the dish. So if, say, something costs $1.02 you pay a dollar and grab 2 pennies from the dish. If it costs $.97 you pay a dollar and drop your 3 pennies change into the dish.
Even better, a lot of places I shop now just ignore the pennies. If they ring something up and it's $1.76 they'll say "a buck seventy-five please". If I know a place is like that I'll do the same if it's $1.74.
Found it. 1982 they switched from 95% copper, 5% zinc to 97.6% zinc with 2.4% copper plating.
The previous composition (95% copper/5% zinc) went back to 1962. 1864-1962 it was 95% copper/5% zinc/tin alloy, except in 1943 they were zinc-plated steel.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contracts I've seen that have these sort of non-compete clauses, it is sometimes mentioned that the CEO has to sign off on any changes to the contract. So, depending on the size of the company, you're often trying to negotiate with someone who has absolutely no authority to negotiate
You don't generally negotiate with the hiring manager, usually you talk to the company lawyer after you've gotten the offer. I've only once signed a contract without any modifications--even huge government contractors have been really reasonable about rational requests in my experience.
Don't think that because it's printed up in legalese that it's immutable; read it and talk about your concerns.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but from what I've read he didn't get lucky. It's possible he could have gotten unlucky, but even then he would have had appeals above him and probably won. Unless the noncompete is as narrow as necessary to protect legitimate company secrets, doesn't significantly infringe on his ability to make a living at his trade, and is sound public policy then almost every court in the US is going to toss it out.
They're almost meaningless in the jurisdictions I've worked in, and courts almost always side with the employee, so it's rarely worth the time to argue against them. I'll usually negotiate them out, but sign and ignore isn't actually as dangerous here as it is with other kinds of clauses.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. To take a couple of examples as I undersand them:
California (by far the biggest tech employer in the US) law states: "Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business is to that extent void."
Virginia (where I live) courts weigh such clauses on three keys:
http://www.williamsmullen.com/news/articles_detai
I already got modded down for mentioning it elsethread (not sure why), but Windows does have ZwCreateProcess and NtCreateProcess. Both of those will do a copy-on-write fork() style process creation if you pass them a NULL SectionHandle--it is much more efficient than the normal CreateProcessEx and is the way to go for doing heavy multiprocess stuff on Win32.
see, e.g., http://www.osronline.com/showThread.cfm?link=3591
Windows does have a copy-on-write process creation mechanism--use ZwCreateProcess or NtCreateProcess with a NULL SectionHandle. It wasn't in Win98 and earlier, and it's poorly documented, which means a lot of Windows programmers don't use it and threads get massively overused.
But threads are rarely the right choice; OS developers spent years implementing protected memory for good reasons, and throwing it out even within the bounds of one process is rarely beneficial. If you need to share a ton of complex data structures that can't easily be allocated in shared memory, then threads are worthy of consideration; in practically every other case, multiple process solutions will wind up being easier to implement and maintain, and more stable.
Threads look seductively easy at the outset, but you actually have to do a lot of bean counting to get things right; with multiple processes, you have to explicitly set up IPC which makes it _look_ more complex but in reality makes it very clear what the shared resources are. Finding any synchronization problems usually winds up being a lot easier in multiple process systems, and there are the obvious stability and security benefits.
And depending on the task, multiple process solutions may actually be faster since when 2 process are running on seperate CPUs there's no need to worry about cache coherency, etc between them unless they're actually hitting shared resources.
But the performance differences tend to be negligible in practice for many applications; benchmark and see before assuming.
I gotta disagree. Judith Martin has her picture in every major newspaper in the country, and has for decades, and she's been introduced to the younger crowd via her appearances on the Colbert Report and other popular shows.
Gallagher had a few years of successful premium cable shows in the 1980s, and pretty much hasn't been heard of since except for whining that Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey aren't nearly as talented as he is a couple years ago.
Do you have a cite? Not doubting, just curious.
Yes, "Would you hire this person again?" is the right question to ask when checking references. It allows the person on the other end to say "no" without actually saying anything negative about the applicant--they have the cover of "I was just giving my own opinion, I didn't give any reason not to hire him/her".
The problem is that "developer" and "development" are pretty vague and general terms, which programmers have tried to claim as their exclusive terminology. In reality, there are all kinds of developers who have nothing to do with programming.
Indeed, usability and HCI developers tend to have nothing to do with programming.
And why don't programmers simply call themselves programmers - why the obsession with the "developer" title, anyway?
Usually "developer" in the title is a more junior level (senior staff prefer to have "engineer" or "architect", unless of course they can get "director", "officer", etc), so I wouldn't say it's something that programmers are obsessed with so much as sometimes stuck with.
Web developer to me means a programmer/coder kind of position that's usually seperate from page design except at very small sites--the person writing ASP/PHP/ColdFusion/Ruby on Rails/JSP/etc is a web developer, the person deciding that the page should look like this, with nav bars over here, and these fonts and colors is the page designer.
In fact, the following are all different tasks (and I doubt the list is exhaustive by any stretch), though several may be done by one person at a particular site:
Authors (content)
Designers (layout)
Usabilty/HCI developers
Markup (Turning design into HTML code)
Web developer (writing code that dynamically generates HTML)
System developer (writing business logic components/back-end objects)
Database developer/DBA
Systems administrator
There are often ancillary tasks too (tester, publisher, etc) and there are other important tasks that people don't tend to conflate with those so I didn't list them (e.g. project manager, sales, etc).
For a small site there might be just one person doing the whole list, or everything but content and possibly design. In my experience, though, the most common places to seperate tasks if you have just 2 people working on the site are either right above the web designer on the list, or in many cases just the content is one person.
Where I work the line items are mostly seperate except that design, usability, and markup are done by the same people (and they'll often get involved with content), the senior system developers are also the DBAs, and there's a fair amount of overlap between some of the system developers and web developers (some work is strictly segregated between the two, some is more tightly bound).
Of course, lines often get blurred.
My brother actually had his (legal) state of Maine ID cut in half and was accused of faking it in the mid-1990s. They were one of the last states to go away from crappy laminate-over-paper licenses, and it looked like a 1980s license from the rest of the country. He was out in LA, where such things aren't really common.
They told him he could leave or they'd call the cops, he waited around, and got a formal apology, they covered his replacement fees, and comped him for a few drinks and a couple meals or something. Certainly not worth the trouble for a working adult, but he was a broke student and also got a good story out of it.
And legally, Virginia, Massachucetts, Pennsylvannia, and whoever else (is it Delaware?) are states by federal law. You can call yourself whatever you want internally, but it doesn't change your status with respect to the federal government and the Constitution.
It may be worth noting that the TSA's mandate is not only to secure the airlines, but also to allow legal travellers to travel freely. That's one of the reasons that you can,in fact, fly without ID (if you submit to additional searches) in general--of course specific airlines may have their own policies.
As far as music goes it hit it's heyday somewhere in the 1980s and this is coming from someone who is 22. There are a few good artists out there and a couple good ones out there but rarely do I find anything interesting on the top 40.
Go back and look at the top 40 charts for the 1980s some time and you'll see that it's mostly absolute crap then as well. It's just that 20 years later a lot of the real drek isn't heard any more, and you only listen to the better stuff. It's the same deal with movies, books, and pretty much any other popular medium, and you have to wait until you have the perspective of time to be confident that, say, the 1950s was really bad for movies or that the 1960s was really groundbreaking for music.
As far as those who listen to hip-hop and embrace it as a culture, they are just as misguided and ignorant as those who make this noise and call it art. Anyone who can glorify a "culture" that embraces avarice, debasement of human life, and the overall lowering of the expectations of morale need to get there head checked
Hip-hop culture is no more about that than rock and roll culture is. From the Beatles coopting "The best things in life are free, but you can leave them to the birds and bees-I want money.", to Mungo Jerry singing "If her daddy's rich take her out for a meal, if her daddy's poor just do what you feel--have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find". rock has always dealt with sex, greed, drinking, and drugs. Heck, you can go back to pre-rock "popular music" and hear Ella excusing cheating and borderline prostitution ("There's an oil man known as tex/Who is keen to give me checks/And his checks, I fear, means that tex is here to stay/But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion/Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.") or Sinatra and the gang advocating pedophilia ("nothing could be finer than to shack up with a minor").
But, of course, they also dealt with a lot of other topics too--just as hip-hop does. Of course if you only listen to the press railing against gangsta rap you'll never pick up on that. It's not a minor subculture, though--from Run DMC and Public Enemy through Lauryn Hill and Jay-Z, there's always been plenty that's socially conscious and positive alongside both mean-spirited stuff and fluffy party tunes. Popular bands like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and Arrested Development were pretty much founded entirely to be socially conscious, and while they may sometimes be too "angry black man" for you, it's hard to argue that songs like "911 is a Joke" weren't addressing real problems.
Just a few examples off of #1 selling hip-hop albums:
"Now I see the importance of history, why people be in the mess that they be
Many journeys to freedom made in vain by brothers on the corner playin ghetto games
I ask you lord why you enlightened me without the enlightment of all my folks
He said cuz I set myself on a quest for truth and he was there to quench my thirst"--Arrested Development, Tennessee, 1992
"I wanna know why Christians pray for a new day but its still the same way
I wanna know why ghetto people pray for a new day hey, hey, heeey and its still the same way
The preacher man told me good things come to those who wait--do good things come to those who wait?
people don't you know that we can't stop the violence, no
because the war is not over until you can feel love, peace, and hear the silence"--Wyclef Jean, Gunpowder, 1997
"We are not thugs (we don't use drugs) but you assume (on your own)
They offer coke (and lots of dope) but we just leave it alone" -- Run DMC, It's Tricky, 1986
Some Presidents who never vetoed a bill (in months): ...
. stm
George W. Bush: 62
No longer true as of July 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5193998
"US President George W Bush has vetoed a controversial bill which would have lifted a ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research."
Add Taylor, Harrison, and Garfield to the "no vetoes" list.
Valid point, but that still breaks on files with newlines in the filename. Use a combination of find's -print0 and xargs' -0 option to deal with all filenames safely (and no, null isn't a valid filename character so there's no problem there).
For something this simple I'd use shell, though.
It makes sense if cat is doing something more than just reading the file (e.g. "cat -n" to add line numbers, "cat -s" to eliminate multiple blank lines in a row, etc).
But other than that, there's practically never a reason to cat a single file. Even if you want the filename before the command, a simple redirect like:
< file grep foo
works fine.
You can still build pipelines without cat.
For instance, instead of:
cat file |grep regex
you can just use a redirect at the beginning of the line:
file grep regex
There's not a really good reason to use cat unless you're concatenating multiple files or using one of cat's filtering flags. OTOH it's fairly harmless and not really worth being on the list, either.
Yeah. Washington, DC area. It's mostly smaller places, but even some chains are doing it now.
1968-1982 they used the 95% copper/5% zinc formulation which I think is the same as "shell casing bronze" (the earlier bronze had tin as well).
In the US, pennies are pretty useless too. The sooner they're officially eliminated the better. There are a couple of ways that the market's phasing them out already:
Many stores have a little dish next to the register--if you get pennies in your change, you drop them in the dish; if you need pennies to pay you take them from the dish. So if, say, something costs $1.02 you pay a dollar and grab 2 pennies from the dish. If it costs $.97 you pay a dollar and drop your 3 pennies change into the dish.
Even better, a lot of places I shop now just ignore the pennies. If they ring something up and it's $1.76 they'll say "a buck seventy-five please". If I know a place is like that I'll do the same if it's $1.74.
Found it. 1982 they switched from 95% copper, 5% zinc to 97.6% zinc with 2.4% copper plating.
The previous composition (95% copper/5% zinc) went back to 1962. 1864-1962 it was 95% copper/5% zinc/tin alloy, except in 1943 they were zinc-plated steel.
I thought it was 1980 when they switched from copper to copper-clad zinc.