My screen (160" with an Infocus 7205) is white paint. Sherwin Williams Ultrapaint, to be precise. It looks like a real screen, because I have the projection surface framed off with duvetyne tape and the rest of the wall painted dark blue, and I have had very knowledgeable people comment that it's the best image they have ever seen. And it's just white paint. Similarly, my DVD player cost me $50.
Amen. There are some ridiculously good buys out there (my DVD player was $100 or so in 1999). You can get quality B&W speakers for under $250 that have far better sound than crap like Bose and approaching that of high-end Tannoy, Hales, Martin-Logan, etc. Don't even get me started on Monster cable.
A lot of the home theater industry is more about sales and comparing to crap rather than good values on good performance. Admittedly, it's not really unique to the home theater industry, but it's an area where a lot of consumers who don't do a lot of research are unaware of cheaper, better alternatives than what they will get if they visit 2-3 places and listen to the salespeople's recommendations. And it's reinforced by getting absolute junk or mistuned gear to do comparisons with.
Really what you'd want is a lot of conduit running throughout the house, preferably metallic stuff, and run totally independent of the power lines. End-run it all back to some central place, like a corner of the basement or a big server closet, and you'd be able to run anything you wanted. Analog audio, coax, twisted-pair, fiber... Just remember to leave a bunch of pull lines in the conduit.
Frankly what most geeks want, I think, is a home that's built more like a commercial or industrial structure. Raised-flooring or double-hung cielings, for instance, aren't exactly aesthetically pleasing but make network installation a lot easier than it is in the typical home.
1. Tell the wife you want to install hardwood floor. 2. Pull up the baseboards and lay the hardwood floors. 3. Before installing baseboards and quarter rounds, run network and speaker cables in the gaps between the floors and walls, with nice speaker/rj45 jack wall outlets in convenient locations. 4. Install the baseboards and quarter rounds.
Fishing cables for the runups between 1st/2nd floor is slightly more involved but not a whole lot; going directly up-and-down is easy, then you do similar work on the other floor.
Cost is a factor, of course, but if you lay the hardwood yourself (that's what we did) you can do a whole floor for under $3000 with nice real hardwood; veneers and alternative surfaces can be much cheaper.
If you don't want hardwoods, you can just put in new baseboards and use a router to slot in cable grooves.
And you can always convince yourself that in addition to looking nicer, the hardwood is a capital investment that'll increase the value of the home (aka 5. Profit!!!)
but the poor have gotten relatively poorer by a fair margin.
The gap between them and the rich has risen, but the distribution hasn't and the standard of living for the poor has increased dramatically.
If, say, the median income is $30,000 and the poor have 33% of that, they'll have $10,000. Then if incomes double, the median is $60,000 and the poor have $20,000. The papers print "Income gap increasing! The poor are now twice as far from the median income as they were before! Poverty is out of control".
In fact, the poor today are closer in relative terms to the median than ever before. The US has fewer adults earning less than half the median income than, say, France or Germany. The percentage of the population in that category is declining. The percentage below the poverty line is declining. For those below the poverty line, the lifespan is rising, home ownership and car ownership are rising, infant mortality is declining, violent crime rates are declining, access to health care is increasing, the gap in lifespans between the poor and rich is declining, the racial gap in lifespans is declining, etc.
By any real measure, there are fewer poor per capita in the US now and the poor are much better off than previously.
Those don't make for good headlines, though.
Re:Comment about "web performance" amusing
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Treo 700w Review
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· Score: 1
Has anyone thats got a T650 and complains of crashes ever actually RTFM? Crashing on a Treo is usualy caused by third party apps
That's a major OS flaw. It's not like protected memory hasn't been around for 20 years, and available in mainstream OSes for over a decade, and available in handheld OSes for over 5 years. 3rd-party apps should not be able to crash the system on modern handhelds, cell phones, desktops, etc (very small embedded devices are another issue).
If you don't work to make the company better, you're contributing to when it fails and you _have_ to hunt for another job. You are _not_ doing the right thing to secure job security or a future bonus.
If you can't contribute because management is antagonistic, you're _not_ going to be getting meaningful promotions and it's very likely that your company is not healthy. In that case, sure, suck it up and do whatever they ask for--but have your resumes out there and move on quickly, because if you are interested in getting the "job security or future bonus" that guy mentioned, you're much better off at a place that manages its people well and doesn't make stupid business decisions.
I'm not saying to quibble with everything that's not, in your view, the absolute best way of doing things. But when you see something that is clearly bad, mention it and talk to people about solutions. Don't be antagonistic, and approach it with an open mind (maybe you're missing benefits to other areas of the company or something). But understanding your company's business strategy and plan, and being a contributor to achieving them (or altering them when they are clear losers), is one of the best ways to get real job security and bonuses.
I've been hired by a company (a large vendor who supplies mostly banks, the classic corporate bureaucracy) to go to a training course on a product line and then train their staff in its use and help them roll out a new offering. After the one-week course, I showed up and said "here's the product, here's how it works--but this other company has a competing product that is much cheaper, higher profit margin, lower cost of entry, and fits your customers needs better." They listened. I've worked at companies who had been Microsoft shops for years and shown them some cases where alternative platforms and tools could be major contributors to their productivity and tech management. I don't think I'm unusual or special.
Too many people say "well, I'm going to work in government, or for a huge faceless corporation, or at a startup that has a strong personality in charge--no hope of me influencing things".
In reality, that's almost never the case. Everything from business processes to purchasing strategies to technical decisions is malleable.
Hell, when you first show up for the job you can actually read the employment contract and suggest changes--even huge legal departments are open to that as long as you're reasonable about protecting the company's interests as well as your own.
Yes, there are some insane stupid red-tape companies out there. They suck (see my point about sending out resumes once more). But they're not nearly as prevalent as people seem to believe, as long as you have coherent reasons for making suggestions and proposing changes it's simply not that hard to get a lot more done than you would think if you just sit in your cubicle and implement orders without questioning them. And IMO you are far _more_ likely to get promotions, bonuses, and job security if you take initiative like that--companies do notice who is really helping their bottom line and work to reward them and keep them happy.
[quote]Because the "professionals that know better" get fired for disagreeing.[/quote]
That's odd, I've disagreed with everything from minor technical decisions to massive business plan purchasing ideas, and I've never been fired for it. If your management is so closed to ideas that they'd fire you for voicing a reasonable, informed opinion of what's better for the business, you probably ought to start job hunting on the sly.
Once you're saying "Yes, whatever you say" to things that you _know_ are terrible business decisions, it's time to move on.
I _suspect_ that most places will not, in fact, fire you for disagreeing. In my experience, if you can go make a solid business case then it's going to count as a point in your favor--even if they don't agree or act on it, showing some business saavy and taking an active interest in the company is hardly ever a bad thing.
Obviously if you phrase it as "no, that's stupid, you don't understand us techies, I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!" then it's not going to go over well. Make sure you know how you're going to approach the subject before you go to anyone to start talking about it.
Wow, I would've expected C# to be smarter than that. These days even Python will optimize:
a = "" for i in range(1000):
a += "Hello" return a
so that it grows a rationally rather than allocating a new string every time. Indeed, that's faster than doing the obvious do-it-yourself equivalent:
a = [] for i in range(1000):
a.append("Hello") return "".join(a)
(and list.append is optimized for extension so it's not reallocating the list every time through the loop; this form was the preferred form before modern versions of Python added the += optimization to strings)
Java optimizes this kind of string extension too, and has done so far longer. It's just such a common operation that there's no reason for high-level languages not to optimize it, and I would have expected Microsoft to implement it since it can dramatically improve the performance of a lot of naively written web pages.
Your basic point that understanding why doing the "literal" translation of the code in C would be horrendous is valid.
Bzzt. The IUPAC name for H2O is water, regardless of state.
And in Spanish, "arena" means sand.
But I believe the quote "Is water wet?" was speaking English, not IUPAC or any other scientific jargon. In English, water is liquid. See, e.g., Webster "Water[..] 1 a : the liquid that descends from the clouds as rain, forms streams, lakes, and seas, and is a major constituent of all living matter".
IMWO, I would guess he needs a SSH client that will automatically send a list of commands (contents of your suggested script, from some a central location) after the user is authenticated.
No, he just needs to run ssh under one of the standard pty programs like "expect" that can send a few commands for him after he logs in. Then he can do the scripting on his end, setting up aliases and whatever, and not have it affect any other users who log in with that account.
I'd do it by keeping a regular.profile or whatever locally that gets copied over under another (unique) name, sourced, and deleted when I log in. Then I could just edit a normal-looking profile on my machine but have it used at login time on the remote end, and nobody else would be affected.
No need to get a special client when standard Unix tools are designed to work together like this.
They don't even need write access to that script, just IP spoofing or another means of replacing the insecure HTTP call.
At least make it something like `ssh me@someserver cat/path/to/script`, although a minimal shell script that actually bothers to check exit codes and so forth is vastly preferrably. Execute via an expect script and you can get the behaviour you want without installing anything on the remote end.
If people have to be on call 24/7 to perform a job, and they can't go into the cinema or church to do it, you're going to get a lot fewer volunteers for that job. It's hard enough on these doctors as it is when they can't leave town, go skiing, sailing, whatever most weekends of the year, are on call on Christmas, kid's birthdays, etc. And doing that is primarily a volunteer/social responsibility decision; they do get paid for their time when they come in, but there are already a fair number doing only private practice and refusing emergency coverage because they can make more money and work regular hours that way. If you cut them out of major remaining social opportunities, you're going to have even fewer willing to cover.
Ditto for the volunteer firefighters; if you limit their already limited options when on call, it becomes even less attractive. Sure, you could pay full-timers to get 24/7 coverage, but the whole reason many of these towns rely on volunteers is because they can't afford to do that.
And even in big cities, if you make it so that doctors are unreachable when they're out in restaraunts, movie theaters, etc then you're going to cause a lot more people to be seen by unknown faces who are unfamiliar with their specifics during emergencies.
Even leaving that aside, you have normal people who may need to receive a call when their kids gets hurt, their water main bursts, whatever. And none of that is a problem if they leave the ringer off and step out of the area to take the call.
It just seems to me like it's less of a nuisance to everyone to put up with an occasional ringer going off--especially if you limit the frequency of that dramatically, say by having policy of throwing out people who ring or talk on the phone during the show, and banning them in the future--than what widespread deployment of communications-blocking technology would be.
Yes, but that difference is the relevant one for this discussion--it is the one that makes cell phones/beepers a must-have. In a large city where there are FDs staffed 24 hours, you'd still get a response if cell phones were completely banned in movies, etc because the guys on shift at the department would get the call. In small towns, the 911 dispatchers page or call the volunteers. You'd either have to find volunteers willing to forgo certain public spaces entirely, or you'd have coverage gaps. I don't know about your area, but many small towns in Maine have enough trouble getting well-qualified volunteers without additional barriers to entry.
Also, in a lot of small towns, there's maybe 1 truck that volunteers man. For any real house fire, they call in support from a larger neighboring town (or in more distant areas, all the neighboring volunteer departments). It's not a case of the volunteers being any less good at their jobs, it's simply an issue of resources--a town of 500 can't afford to keep staff and equipment on hand that can deal with a large fire on their own.
Even the town I grew up in--Brunswick, a reasonable size college town, with a navy base and population around 20,000 at the time--often relied on mutual assistance agreements with neighboring jurisdictions. And for the surrounding towns, they were the support structure. Several surrounding towns share the same primary hospital, smaller towns have only volunteer firefighters with no trucks who show up to deal with garbage can fires and so forth and lock down the area and try to evacuate people in larger situations until the cavalry arrives, the Brunswick high school takes in students from other towns that don't run their own, etc.
And that's in a reasonably urbanized part of the state. If you go up north there are kids who have a 3 hour ride to high school, and there are several islands where the ferries run 2-3 times a day on weekdays and if you're on the island Friday evening you stay until Monday morning. But I'm not talking about niche cases like that, I'm talking about the huge areas of our country that aren't in major cities. And even in the cities there are the other issues I raised.
The solution is to deal with the offenders harshly, not to cut off valuable communications tools from everyone.
Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind
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Zack Brown Taking a Break
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· Score: 2, Informative
OK, for those who didn't get it: Windows admins and developers don't get to participate in a daily Windows "Kernel" thread. So...they avoid having to read 13 megs of stuff each week
Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives. Neither do most Linux developers in the sense that is analagous to Windows developers. The list is for people actually contributing to kernel development; people just developing software that runs on Linux don't normally read it.
There are some edge-cases of software applications that depend on kernel internals (libc is a good example), but those are analagous to interal Windows DLLs distributed with Windows.
Essentially, the people on linux-kernel are analagous to internal Microsoft developers and those few users who sign up for Microsoft beta testing/debugging. Presumably those people have mailing lists or other discussion areas to follow in the MS world.
Just don't go in the theatre/church/classroom. You don't have a right to cell phone reception on private property.
No, but doctors have relied on communications devices for years. My dad carried a beeper in the 1970s and 80s, then got a cell phone (the big car-only kind) in the mid-80s along with the beeper, and switched to a cell only in the 90s. In many small towns like the one we grew up in, there are only 1-2 specialists of some types, so he was basically always on call.
Even in larger cities, if one of your patients has an emergency related to a condition you've been treating, you are generally the preferred contact since you are familiar with prior treatment, medications, etc. The advent of the beeper, and later the cell phone, has made it much more likely that people get care from their physician in emergencies.
Volunteer firefighters (often the primary responders until trucks from the nearest real FD can reach the area) also relied on beepers, and probably use cell phones these days.
It's nice to say that people don't have a right to cell reception on private property, but then you're probably going to things like: * Cause more people to be treated by unknown physicians in emergency situations, since their doctor may be unreachable * Decrease the number of doctors willing to work in small towns; at least in cities they can platoon their on-call status, if they're always on call and can never go to church, movies, etc that's a pretty heavy burden. * Decrease dramatically the people willing to be volunteer firefighters * Smaller issues, too; my dad was a eucharistic minister at his church. Blocking cell phones probably would have prevented that and put a minor strain on church resources.
Now, of course, there's absolutely no reason not to prohibit having ringers on, and people whose ringers go off or who answer the phone and start talking in the middle of the theater should be thrown out and possibly barred in the future.
Command line works fine for me, but I want it to be simple and fast to code. No, I don't want to fuss with declarations most of the time, and no, I dont' have time to learn a whole new langauge and mess with a compiler. I just want to write (essentially) a script and have it run. Why does everything have to be so @$%%ing complicated.
Sounds like you want Python. Very simple language for beginners to use, interpreted so no compilation step, and yet very powerful so you can grow into full-blown software engineering in it if you want. But if not, it gets out of your way and lets you easily express what's in your mind. e.g. a minimal full program showing how to read a file, loop, do conditionals, and print:
for line in file("myfile.txt"):
if line.startswith("Mr."):
line = line + " male"
else:
line = line + " female"
print line
Or code to run through a list:
mylist = [ "apples", "oranges", "bananas" ] for line in mylist:
print line + " is a fruit starting with the letter " + line[0]
Really it's an ideal language for simple scripting because it is so easy to get right--and I don't consider anything a good language for simple scripting unless it also scales gracefully to large projects, which Python does.
(Program requirements weren't exactly high back then, so finishing a program in a day or two was quite common.)
I'd phrase that as "programming tools were miserable back then, so taking as long as a day or two for simple processing programs was common".
A day is a ton of programming time with (vaguely) modern languages and libraries. Really a lot of the "advanced document processing" that people need is one-liners in awk, and much of the more sophisticated stuff (that might need to operate on CSV and do DB-style joins, etc) is 5 minutes of Python code.
A couple days is forever for the simple data in, data out processing programs you're talking about. It's long enough to build some semi-sophisticated GUI projects with today's dev environments. Heck, it took me about 14 hours to write my window manager (mostly in Python, though much of the time was embedded C dealing with stupid low-level ICCCM details and integrating the raw X Event queue with the gtk event loop). And it's not like I'm the world's fastest programmer or anything, a lot of smart people have made it far easier to write code these days.
Relating back to the initial subject, Python is sort of the hallmark for this, one of the main initial python thrusts was the "Computer programming for everyone" project. The idea is that with very high-level easy-to-use languages, you can dramatically increase the useful developer base (and enable people to write some of their own code without having to come running to the learned wizards for help).
Seriously, letting someone choose "null" is like letting them pick "Administrator" or "HelpDesk"
No it isn't. There's no reason for anyone to send email to null@domain unless they're trying to reach a user named "null". The latter two will get people guessing at administrative addresses.
The blame is on broken Java apps that are sending things out with uninitialized strings as the email address. You could see similar broken emails to other addresses from broken apps written in other languages.
Where would the Fantasy genre be if Tolkien had copyrighted most of his "ideas" instead of only his books?
Several of his books weren't copyrighted in the US, the first edition of the LOTR series was ruled public domain and he wound up heavily editing the second edition to make it copyrightable. Ace Books published an unauthorized (by him) version of the first edition at one point, though they discontinued it when several of their prominent authors threatened to leave the publishing house for good if they kept it up. I believe they also wound up paying an honorarium to Tolkien (not legally required).
Interestingly, Tolkien had been strongly opposed to ever printing a paperback version of LOTR; it wasn't until after Ace did so that authorized paperback editions became available.
Jury nullification was explicitly killed in California in 2001. I can't find a relevant news article, only "slanted" articles decrying the decision (with which I happen to agree). Judges are free to remove any juror who may be considering nullification, and they can instruct the jury not to nullify
Neither of those is new, what the 2001 law requires is that other jurors inform the judge if they believe another juror is going to make a finding against his instructions. However, jury nullification is itself still legal in California (and it would take a US Constitutional amendment to make it otherwise), although as in all other states the judge won't say that but will instead instruct the jury to make their decisions solely on matters of fact.
There's always been a weird tension about it; juries have the right to decide how they want, but they are instructed to decide based on narrow criteria. That comes in part from the judges wanting to maintain more power over trials, in part from complex cases really requiring an expert understanding of the law, and in part from juries historically making egregiously bad nullification decisions (e.g. in the American south where it was for a time almost impossible to convict whites accused of victimizing blacks, leading in part to the federal Civil Rights Act being passed to get those cases out of local courts).
I am unaware of your country, but in common law countries, the job of the jury is to make a decision of fact. The judge makes the decision of law.
That's not true, that's what judges and lawyers want you to believe. In pretty much any common-law country (including the US), the bench in a regular trial will tell the jury to limit their findings to findings of fact, and will instruct them as to how the matters of law should be determined--but the supreme court of the land will hold in favor of jury nullification when it happens.
It's an odd tension, because on the one hand the jury is the ultimate arbiter of guilty/not-guilty and can use the power to throw out cases that lawmakers had not foreseen, and where enforcing the letter of the law would be unjust. On the other hand, juries don't always decide based on morality; for a long time in the American south, some juries would use the power of nullification to throw out cases against whites accused of victimizing blacks (indeed the Civil Rights Act was largely driven by the inability to get southern juries to convict).
Jury nullification has a long history in common law (see, for instance, the trial of William Penn in 1670, and the subsequent commentary from Chief Justice Vaughn upholding the verdict and calling any ability to restrict the jury's verdict or punish them for it absurd; I think there was another famous case involving the Archbishop of Canterbury shortly thereafter).
In the US, judges are not required to instruct juries of their right to nullify, and the American Bar Association is strongly against jury nullification and try to dance around by saying there's no statute authorizing it.
This, of course, ignores the fact that the law does grant the right of the final verdict to the juries, and numerous Supreme Court cases have upheld jury nullification.
Ultimately, I don't believe it's a case of a loophole in the law; John Adams once said of jurors It is not only his right but his duty...to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court
You must have 1 individual with that duty otherwise it may not get done or worse get redone.
You should never have any duty that only 1 individual can accomplish. Even barring "hit by a bus" scenarios, there are "on vacation", "out to lunch", etc.
What you want is good logging of who made what changes, and well-defined processes for dealing with common situations (new employee, employee leaving, name changes, replacing a desktop, etc).
If every nerd in the department has full read/write access to the Email server who do you fire (or shoot) when the mail you need for evidence disappears?
The one who deleted it, and possibly the ones who don't have it backed up presuming it was available for more than a few hours. You don't need to give out the same anonymous root access to everyone, and you should be auditing access to any important documents.
How many billions of DVD players are there in the world?
There are not 1 billion DVD players in the world.
They're in everything from your car to your PC to portable hand-held DVD players.
Actually, they're not in my car or my PC. They aren't in most cars or PCs. They aren't in most new cars or PCs sold, although they are in a slight majority of new PCs sold in the US (note that the entry-level systems from Dell, Gateway, etc do not contain them).
Current estimates are at around 800 million DVD players (including DVD-ROM drives and other non-video DVD readers) worldwide at the end of 2005. There were 210 million PCs sold worldwide in 2005, compared to less than 100 million DVD-ROM drives.
I maintain that it's not an efficient use of the Trading Standards people's time to be reading licence agreements, and contacting the copyright holders is a better idea.
This makes no sense. By the time you can get the contact info, sit through corporate hold, talk to someone, and explain the situation you could've read the license several times over. It makes far more sense to read it, and then call if it's ambiguous.
Slashdot Mirror
My screen (160" with an Infocus 7205) is white paint. Sherwin Williams Ultrapaint, to be precise. It looks like a real screen, because I have the projection surface framed off with duvetyne tape and the rest of the wall painted dark blue, and I have had very knowledgeable people comment that it's the best image they have ever seen. And it's just white paint. Similarly, my DVD player cost me $50.
Amen. There are some ridiculously good buys out there (my DVD player was $100 or so in 1999). You can get quality B&W speakers for under $250 that have far better sound than crap like Bose and approaching that of high-end Tannoy, Hales, Martin-Logan, etc. Don't even get me started on Monster cable.
A lot of the home theater industry is more about sales and comparing to crap rather than good values on good performance. Admittedly, it's not really unique to the home theater industry, but it's an area where a lot of consumers who don't do a lot of research are unaware of cheaper, better alternatives than what they will get if they visit 2-3 places and listen to the salespeople's recommendations. And it's reinforced by getting absolute junk or mistuned gear to do comparisons with.
Really what you'd want is a lot of conduit running throughout the house, preferably metallic stuff, and run totally independent of the power lines. End-run it all back to some central place, like a corner of the basement or a big server closet, and you'd be able to run anything you wanted. Analog audio, coax, twisted-pair, fiber ... Just remember to leave a bunch of pull lines in the conduit.
Frankly what most geeks want, I think, is a home that's built more like a commercial or industrial structure. Raised-flooring or double-hung cielings, for instance, aren't exactly aesthetically pleasing but make network installation a lot easier than it is in the typical home.
1. Tell the wife you want to install hardwood floor.
2. Pull up the baseboards and lay the hardwood floors.
3. Before installing baseboards and quarter rounds, run network and speaker cables in the gaps between the floors and walls, with nice speaker/rj45 jack wall outlets in convenient locations.
4. Install the baseboards and quarter rounds.
Fishing cables for the runups between 1st/2nd floor is slightly more involved but not a whole lot; going directly up-and-down is easy, then you do similar work on the other floor.
Cost is a factor, of course, but if you lay the hardwood yourself (that's what we did) you can do a whole floor for under $3000 with nice real hardwood; veneers and alternative surfaces can be much cheaper.
If you don't want hardwoods, you can just put in new baseboards and use a router to slot in cable grooves.
And you can always convince yourself that in addition to looking nicer, the hardwood is a capital investment that'll increase the value of the home (aka 5. Profit!!!)
but the poor have gotten relatively poorer by a fair margin.
The gap between them and the rich has risen, but the distribution hasn't and the standard of living for the poor has increased dramatically.
If, say, the median income is $30,000 and the poor have 33% of that, they'll have $10,000. Then if incomes double, the median is $60,000 and the poor have $20,000. The papers print "Income gap increasing! The poor are now twice as far from the median income as they were before! Poverty is out of control".
In fact, the poor today are closer in relative terms to the median than ever before. The US has fewer adults earning less than half the median income than, say, France or Germany. The percentage of the population in that category is declining. The percentage below the poverty line is declining. For those below the poverty line, the lifespan is rising, home ownership and car ownership are rising, infant mortality is declining, violent crime rates are declining, access to health care is increasing, the gap in lifespans between the poor and rich is declining, the racial gap in lifespans is declining, etc.
By any real measure, there are fewer poor per capita in the US now and the poor are much better off than previously.
Those don't make for good headlines, though.
Has anyone thats got a T650 and complains of crashes ever actually RTFM? Crashing on a Treo is usualy caused by third party apps
That's a major OS flaw. It's not like protected memory hasn't been around for 20 years, and available in mainstream OSes for over a decade, and available in handheld OSes for over 5 years. 3rd-party apps should not be able to crash the system on modern handhelds, cell phones, desktops, etc (very small embedded devices are another issue).
If you don't work to make the company better, you're contributing to when it fails and you _have_ to hunt for another job. You are _not_ doing the right thing to secure job security or a future bonus.
If you can't contribute because management is antagonistic, you're _not_ going to be getting meaningful promotions and it's very likely that your company is not healthy. In that case, sure, suck it up and do whatever they ask for--but have your resumes out there and move on quickly, because if you are interested in getting the "job security or future bonus" that guy mentioned, you're much better off at a place that manages its people well and doesn't make stupid business decisions.
I'm not saying to quibble with everything that's not, in your view, the absolute best way of doing things. But when you see something that is clearly bad, mention it and talk to people about solutions. Don't be antagonistic, and approach it with an open mind (maybe you're missing benefits to other areas of the company or something). But understanding your company's business strategy and plan, and being a contributor to achieving them (or altering them when they are clear losers), is one of the best ways to get real job security and bonuses.
I've been hired by a company (a large vendor who supplies mostly banks, the classic corporate bureaucracy) to go to a training course on a product line and then train their staff in its use and help them roll out a new offering. After the one-week course, I showed up and said "here's the product, here's how it works--but this other company has a competing product that is much cheaper, higher profit margin, lower cost of entry, and fits your customers needs better." They listened. I've worked at companies who had been Microsoft shops for years and shown them some cases where alternative platforms and tools could be major contributors to their productivity and tech management. I don't think I'm unusual or special.
Too many people say "well, I'm going to work in government, or for a huge faceless corporation, or at a startup that has a strong personality in charge--no hope of me influencing things".
In reality, that's almost never the case. Everything from business processes to purchasing strategies to technical decisions is malleable.
Hell, when you first show up for the job you can actually read the employment contract and suggest changes--even huge legal departments are open to that as long as you're reasonable about protecting the company's interests as well as your own.
Yes, there are some insane stupid red-tape companies out there. They suck (see my point about sending out resumes once more). But they're not nearly as prevalent as people seem to believe, as long as you have coherent reasons for making suggestions and proposing changes it's simply not that hard to get a lot more done than you would think if you just sit in your cubicle and implement orders without questioning them. And IMO you are far _more_ likely to get promotions, bonuses, and job security if you take initiative like that--companies do notice who is really helping their bottom line and work to reward them and keep them happy.
[quote]Because the "professionals that know better" get fired for disagreeing.[/quote]
That's odd, I've disagreed with everything from minor technical decisions to massive business plan purchasing ideas, and I've never been fired for it. If your management is so closed to ideas that they'd fire you for voicing a reasonable, informed opinion of what's better for the business, you probably ought to start job hunting on the sly.
Once you're saying "Yes, whatever you say" to things that you _know_ are terrible business decisions, it's time to move on.
I _suspect_ that most places will not, in fact, fire you for disagreeing. In my experience, if you can go make a solid business case then it's going to count as a point in your favor--even if they don't agree or act on it, showing some business saavy and taking an active interest in the company is hardly ever a bad thing.
Obviously if you phrase it as "no, that's stupid, you don't understand us techies, I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!" then it's not going to go over well. Make sure you know how you're going to approach the subject before you go to anyone to start talking about it.
Java optimizes this kind of string extension too, and has done so far longer. It's just such a common operation that there's no reason for high-level languages not to optimize it, and I would have expected Microsoft to implement it since it can dramatically improve the performance of a lot of naively written web pages.
Your basic point that understanding why doing the "literal" translation of the code in C would be horrendous is valid.
Bzzt. The IUPAC name for H2O is water, regardless of state.
And in Spanish, "arena" means sand.
But I believe the quote "Is water wet?" was speaking English, not IUPAC or any other scientific jargon. In English, water is liquid. See, e.g., Webster "Water[..] 1 a : the liquid that descends from the clouds as rain, forms streams, lakes, and seas, and is a major constituent of all living matter".
"expect" will do this on Unix, and is very robust against races (it'll wait for proper prompts/whatever to appear before sending keystrokes, etc).
IMWO, I would guess he needs a SSH client that will automatically send a list of commands (contents of your suggested script, from some a central location) after the user is authenticated.
.profile or whatever locally that gets copied over under another (unique) name, sourced, and deleted when I log in. Then I could just edit a normal-looking profile on my machine but have it used at login time on the remote end, and nobody else would be affected.
No, he just needs to run ssh under one of the standard pty programs like "expect" that can send a few commands for him after he logs in. Then he can do the scripting on his end, setting up aliases and whatever, and not have it affect any other users who log in with that account.
I'd do it by keeping a regular
No need to get a special client when standard Unix tools are designed to work together like this.
They don't even need write access to that script, just IP spoofing or another means of replacing the insecure HTTP call.
/path/to/script`, although a minimal shell script that actually bothers to check exit codes and so forth is vastly preferrably. Execute via an expect script and you can get the behaviour you want without installing anything on the remote end.
At least make it something like `ssh me@someserver cat
You persist in missing the point.
If people have to be on call 24/7 to perform a job, and they can't go into the cinema or church to do it, you're going to get a lot fewer volunteers for that job. It's hard enough on these doctors as it is when they can't leave town, go skiing, sailing, whatever most weekends of the year, are on call on Christmas, kid's birthdays, etc. And doing that is primarily a volunteer/social responsibility decision; they do get paid for their time when they come in, but there are already a fair number doing only private practice and refusing emergency coverage because they can make more money and work regular hours that way. If you cut them out of major remaining social opportunities, you're going to have even fewer willing to cover.
Ditto for the volunteer firefighters; if you limit their already limited options when on call, it becomes even less attractive. Sure, you could pay full-timers to get 24/7 coverage, but the whole reason many of these towns rely on volunteers is because they can't afford to do that.
And even in big cities, if you make it so that doctors are unreachable when they're out in restaraunts, movie theaters, etc then you're going to cause a lot more people to be seen by unknown faces who are unfamiliar with their specifics during emergencies.
Even leaving that aside, you have normal people who may need to receive a call when their kids gets hurt, their water main bursts, whatever. And none of that is a problem if they leave the ringer off and step out of the area to take the call.
It just seems to me like it's less of a nuisance to everyone to put up with an occasional ringer going off--especially if you limit the frequency of that dramatically, say by having policy of throwing out people who ring or talk on the phone during the show, and banning them in the future--than what widespread deployment of communications-blocking technology would be.
Yes, but that difference is the relevant one for this discussion--it is the one that makes cell phones/beepers a must-have. In a large city where there are FDs staffed 24 hours, you'd still get a response if cell phones were completely banned in movies, etc because the guys on shift at the department would get the call. In small towns, the 911 dispatchers page or call the volunteers. You'd either have to find volunteers willing to forgo certain public spaces entirely, or you'd have coverage gaps. I don't know about your area, but many small towns in Maine have enough trouble getting well-qualified volunteers without additional barriers to entry.
Also, in a lot of small towns, there's maybe 1 truck that volunteers man. For any real house fire, they call in support from a larger neighboring town (or in more distant areas, all the neighboring volunteer departments). It's not a case of the volunteers being any less good at their jobs, it's simply an issue of resources--a town of 500 can't afford to keep staff and equipment on hand that can deal with a large fire on their own.
Even the town I grew up in--Brunswick, a reasonable size college town, with a navy base and population around 20,000 at the time--often relied on mutual assistance agreements with neighboring jurisdictions. And for the surrounding towns, they were the support structure. Several surrounding towns share the same primary hospital, smaller towns have only volunteer firefighters with no trucks who show up to deal with garbage can fires and so forth and lock down the area and try to evacuate people in larger situations until the cavalry arrives, the Brunswick high school takes in students from other towns that don't run their own, etc.
And that's in a reasonably urbanized part of the state. If you go up north there are kids who have a 3 hour ride to high school, and there are several islands where the ferries run 2-3 times a day on weekdays and if you're on the island Friday evening you stay until Monday morning. But I'm not talking about niche cases like that, I'm talking about the huge areas of our country that aren't in major cities. And even in the cities there are the other issues I raised.
The solution is to deal with the offenders harshly, not to cut off valuable communications tools from everyone.
OK, for those who didn't get it: Windows admins and developers don't get to participate in a daily Windows "Kernel" thread. So...they avoid having to read 13 megs of stuff each week
Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives. Neither do most Linux developers in the sense that is analagous to Windows developers. The list is for people actually contributing to kernel development; people just developing software that runs on Linux don't normally read it.
There are some edge-cases of software applications that depend on kernel internals (libc is a good example), but those are analagous to interal Windows DLLs distributed with Windows.
Essentially, the people on linux-kernel are analagous to internal Microsoft developers and those few users who sign up for Microsoft beta testing/debugging. Presumably those people have mailing lists or other discussion areas to follow in the MS world.
Just don't go in the theatre/church/classroom. You don't have a right to cell phone reception on private property.
No, but doctors have relied on communications devices for years. My dad carried a beeper in the 1970s and 80s, then got a cell phone (the big car-only kind) in the mid-80s along with the beeper, and switched to a cell only in the 90s. In many small towns like the one we grew up in, there are only 1-2 specialists of some types, so he was basically always on call.
Even in larger cities, if one of your patients has an emergency related to a condition you've been treating, you are generally the preferred contact since you are familiar with prior treatment, medications, etc. The advent of the beeper, and later the cell phone, has made it much more likely that people get care from their physician in emergencies.
Volunteer firefighters (often the primary responders until trucks from the nearest real FD can reach the area) also relied on beepers, and probably use cell phones these days.
It's nice to say that people don't have a right to cell reception on private property, but then you're probably going to things like:
* Cause more people to be treated by unknown physicians in emergency situations, since their doctor may be unreachable
* Decrease the number of doctors willing to work in small towns; at least in cities they can platoon their on-call status, if they're always on call and can never go to church, movies, etc that's a pretty heavy burden.
* Decrease dramatically the people willing to be volunteer firefighters
* Smaller issues, too; my dad was a eucharistic minister at his church. Blocking cell phones probably would have prevented that and put a minor strain on church resources.
Now, of course, there's absolutely no reason not to prohibit having ringers on, and people whose ringers go off or who answer the phone and start talking in the middle of the theater should be thrown out and possibly barred in the future.
Sounds like you want Python. Very simple language for beginners to use, interpreted so no compilation step, and yet very powerful so you can grow into full-blown software engineering in it if you want. But if not, it gets out of your way and lets you easily express what's in your mind. e.g. a minimal full program showing how to read a file, loop, do conditionals, and print:Or code to run through a list:Really it's an ideal language for simple scripting because it is so easy to get right--and I don't consider anything a good language for simple scripting unless it also scales gracefully to large projects, which Python does.
(Program requirements weren't exactly high back then, so finishing a program in a day or two was quite common.)
I'd phrase that as "programming tools were miserable back then, so taking as long as a day or two for simple processing programs was common".
A day is a ton of programming time with (vaguely) modern languages and libraries. Really a lot of the "advanced document processing" that people need is one-liners in awk, and much of the more sophisticated stuff (that might need to operate on CSV and do DB-style joins, etc) is 5 minutes of Python code.
A couple days is forever for the simple data in, data out processing programs you're talking about. It's long enough to build some semi-sophisticated GUI projects with today's dev environments. Heck, it took me about 14 hours to write my window manager (mostly in Python, though much of the time was embedded C dealing with stupid low-level ICCCM details and integrating the raw X Event queue with the gtk event loop). And it's not like I'm the world's fastest programmer or anything, a lot of smart people have made it far easier to write code these days.
Relating back to the initial subject, Python is sort of the hallmark for this, one of the main initial python thrusts was the "Computer programming for everyone" project. The idea is that with very high-level easy-to-use languages, you can dramatically increase the useful developer base (and enable people to write some of their own code without having to come running to the learned wizards for help).
Seriously, letting someone choose "null" is like letting them pick "Administrator" or "HelpDesk"
No it isn't. There's no reason for anyone to send email to null@domain unless they're trying to reach a user named "null". The latter two will get people guessing at administrative addresses.
The blame is on broken Java apps that are sending things out with uninitialized strings as the email address. You could see similar broken emails to other addresses from broken apps written in other languages.
No, he just never heard that China's planned shift to Esperanto as the official language after the 1911 revolution didn't wind up happening.
Where would the Fantasy genre be if Tolkien had copyrighted most of his "ideas" instead of only his books?
Several of his books weren't copyrighted in the US, the first edition of the LOTR series was ruled public domain and he wound up heavily editing the second edition to make it copyrightable. Ace Books published an unauthorized (by him) version of the first edition at one point, though they discontinued it when several of their prominent authors threatened to leave the publishing house for good if they kept it up. I believe they also wound up paying an honorarium to Tolkien (not legally required).
Interestingly, Tolkien had been strongly opposed to ever printing a paperback version of LOTR; it wasn't until after Ace did so that authorized paperback editions became available.
Jury nullification was explicitly killed in California in 2001. I can't find a relevant news article, only "slanted" articles decrying the decision (with which I happen to agree). Judges are free to remove any juror who may be considering nullification, and they can instruct the jury not to nullify
Neither of those is new, what the 2001 law requires is that other jurors inform the judge if they believe another juror is going to make a finding against his instructions. However, jury nullification is itself still legal in California (and it would take a US Constitutional amendment to make it otherwise), although as in all other states the judge won't say that but will instead instruct the jury to make their decisions solely on matters of fact.
There's always been a weird tension about it; juries have the right to decide how they want, but they are instructed to decide based on narrow criteria. That comes in part from the judges wanting to maintain more power over trials, in part from complex cases really requiring an expert understanding of the law, and in part from juries historically making egregiously bad nullification decisions (e.g. in the American south where it was for a time almost impossible to convict whites accused of victimizing blacks, leading in part to the federal Civil Rights Act being passed to get those cases out of local courts).
I am unaware of your country, but in common law countries, the job of the jury is to make a decision of fact. The judge makes the decision of law.
That's not true, that's what judges and lawyers want you to believe. In pretty much any common-law country (including the US), the bench in a regular trial will tell the jury to limit their findings to findings of fact, and will instruct them as to how the matters of law should be determined--but the supreme court of the land will hold in favor of jury nullification when it happens.
It's an odd tension, because on the one hand the jury is the ultimate arbiter of guilty/not-guilty and can use the power to throw out cases that lawmakers had not foreseen, and where enforcing the letter of the law would be unjust. On the other hand, juries don't always decide based on morality; for a long time in the American south, some juries would use the power of nullification to throw out cases against whites accused of victimizing blacks (indeed the Civil Rights Act was largely driven by the inability to get southern juries to convict).
Jury nullification has a long history in common law (see, for instance, the trial of William Penn in 1670, and the subsequent commentary from Chief Justice Vaughn upholding the verdict and calling any ability to restrict the jury's verdict or punish them for it absurd; I think there was another famous case involving the Archbishop of Canterbury shortly thereafter).
In the US, judges are not required to instruct juries of their right to nullify, and the American Bar Association is strongly against jury nullification and try to dance around by saying there's no statute authorizing it.
This, of course, ignores the fact that the law does grant the right of the final verdict to the juries, and numerous Supreme Court cases have upheld jury nullification.
Ultimately, I don't believe it's a case of a loophole in the law; John Adams once said of jurors It is not only his right but his duty...to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court
You must have 1 individual with that duty otherwise it may not get done or worse get redone.
You should never have any duty that only 1 individual can accomplish. Even barring "hit by a bus" scenarios, there are "on vacation", "out to lunch", etc.
What you want is good logging of who made what changes, and well-defined processes for dealing with common situations (new employee, employee leaving, name changes, replacing a desktop, etc).
If every nerd in the department has full read/write access to the Email server who do you fire (or shoot) when the mail you need for evidence disappears?
The one who deleted it, and possibly the ones who don't have it backed up presuming it was available for more than a few hours. You don't need to give out the same anonymous root access to everyone, and you should be auditing access to any important documents.
How many billions of DVD players are there in the world?
There are not 1 billion DVD players in the world.
They're in everything from your car to your PC to portable hand-held DVD players.
Actually, they're not in my car or my PC. They aren't in most cars or PCs. They aren't in most new cars or PCs sold, although they are in a slight majority of new PCs sold in the US (note that the entry-level systems from Dell, Gateway, etc do not contain them).
Current estimates are at around 800 million DVD players (including DVD-ROM drives and other non-video DVD readers) worldwide at the end of 2005. There were 210 million PCs sold worldwide in 2005, compared to less than 100 million DVD-ROM drives.
I maintain that it's not an efficient use of the Trading Standards people's time to be reading licence agreements, and contacting the copyright holders is a better idea.
This makes no sense. By the time you can get the contact info, sit through corporate hold, talk to someone, and explain the situation you could've read the license several times over. It makes far more sense to read it, and then call if it's ambiguous.