AmeriQuest had farmed all the work out to an Indian outsourcing firm. You get what you pay for...
I'll admit, that's immediately what I thought when you described the code. It reminded me of what a friend of mine said when he had to interface with some Indian outsourced code. In dealing with them, he said, "They have all the arrogance and skill of a freshman CS student."
That's not to say Indians can't code, anyone that's been in any large western company or university knows they can. The problem is with the outsoursing firms. Many have crappy "engineers" in an effort to lower costs and cash in on a growth industry. It's a standard economic phenomenon.
Validation is overrated. Especially, when it comes to RSS. There's so many competing "compatable" standards, that really aren't. feedparser.org has a great write up about the state of RSS. It's pathetic.
If you're reading a doc, don't bother validating it. You're probably going to have handle "invalid" XML anyway. When you're constructing XML, you should write it according to the DTD, but if you're relying on a remote site, then you're asking for trouble. Just cache the version locally, but seriously, you're tool shouldn't really need it. You're engineers do, but not the tool.
Finally, it's trivial to reconstruct a dtd from sample documents.
Why? Do you find it unlikely that someone would "do their duty" and kill the person who killed the President? When John Wilkes Booth assinated Lincoln, Booth was killed by Boston Corbett against orders. Maybe Boston Corbett was acting under orders, but under orders by Andrew Johnson! See Johnson, wanted Lincoln out of the way so he could become president and roll back all of Lincolns radical civil rights reforms. He was from a slave state afterall.
Then almost exactly 100 years another vice president is Johnson becomes president after an assination? Do I have to spell it out for you?!
See? There's no end to the depth of a conspiracy theory. Once you decide that there's a conspiracy, you'll find "evidence" for it. Just look at the Bible Code, or the 23 Enigma. It's all self-selecting, confusing correlation and coincidence with causation. Eventually you're just putting two and two together and getting 22.
Ahh yes. Someone stokes the consipiracy flames to sell a book, and that makes news. Meanwhile Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutior of Charles Manson, writes a book explaining in excrutiating detail about how the Oswald was the lone gunman and fired the shots from the book depository, and no one says a thing.
All this talk about conspiracy theories is absurd. There's a group of people that that refuse to believe that shit happens. One guy can kill a president. A cult would willingly set themselves on fire rather than be arrested. That 19 guys from the desert can hijack airliners with boxcutters and crash them into buildings. I think it comes from that the need to place some meaning and reason on these acts. They can't fantom the power of a single commited individual, and so they find a vast and all powerful secret conspiracy is behind it all. The Knights Templar. The Illuninati. The Zeta Reticulians. The Water Fluoridation Industrial Complex. The Left Handed People of Borneo. The large underground homosexual population of Des Moines, Iowa. You name it. It's quite absurd.
I think the going theory on this is that the cholesterol (or whatever is causesing the LDL increase) is absorbed by the paper filter used in drip. If so, I figure the simplest thing to do is simply to refilter the french press with a paper prior to drinking.
And they can. That's even protected under the law, under the shared housing exemption. Roomates.com didn't have that form, and apparently didn't good lawyer, because they didn't make that argument.
I'm sorry, but this is just blatent revisionism. The entire media fell in line with the Bush administration during the lead up to war. (The New York Times most notably.) During the invasion of they unquestioningly followed the official line. Anyone that challenged the official line was either thrown off the air (Phil Donahue most notably) or simply ignored. The media was played (The white house spreads the disinformation that Iraq has aluminium tubes to create a centrafuge, and then quotes that same story as support for what they're saying). Everyone got they're war on. The media thouugh, "I've got connections! I can get a Pulitzer! Explosions equal ratings!" The White House said, "My God! Our 9 year wet dream of invading Iraq has finaly come true!"
Of course the invasion worked. No one ever doubted that. The media never questioned the official line right up until Abu Ghraib. Then they said, "What the hell?" just like anyone reasonable person would. Then they decided to report that for all the talk of "supporting the troops," the solidiers didn't have enough armor. It's just that now the official line has diveged so much from reality, you can't ignore it. Do you honestly believe Tony Snow believes himself when he compares Baghdad to when Washington DC was the "murder capital?"
It's convient to say that no one know what's going on, but that's simply isn't true. There's a civil war on, and the situation in Iraq has steadily gotten worse. Hell, Cheney is over there in May 9th and says, "Violence is down fairly dramatically," And then an explosion rocks the very building. This week the State Department said that everyone going outside the buildings in the green zone needs to wear body armor. This is bad. 30 bodies a day are being found. That's the work of militia death squads. Four years ago, we didn't have those problems. The Iraqi Ministry of Education reports that only 30% of school aged children attend class, because they're parents fear for their safety. That's down from 75% last year. There's been a steady exodus of highly educated professionals from that country. We're talking doctors, teachers, people needed to maintain a cohesive society. McCain visits Baghdad and says, "Look I can walk though a market, and the generals don't need armor." He had 100 guards, armor, and attack helicopters with him, to walk through a market that mostly closed becaused no one wanted their picture taken with the Americans. The Army issued a statment saying that McCain was "mistaken" when he said Prateaus would go about Baghdad without armor. McCain didn't even belive himself.
This situation in Iraq is is bad. It is very very bad.
It's very convienent and comforting to believe that Fox is telling the truth, and everyone else is lying, but that simply isn't true. Even if you ignore the fact that Fox News has gone lockstep with the Republican party since its inception; you have the entire world media on one side, and then you have Fox News. Who you going to believe? Well obviously Fox, since everyone hates America, including a majority of Americans.
Fox News demostably has lousy coverage. Numerious media studies have show that people that primarily get their information from Fox News are grossly misinformed. But I'm sure that's just because reality has a well known liberal bias.
I find myself using asian smilies with my friends from asia and western smilies with my american friends. I will say that the western smilies are quicker to type, but the asian ones are much more expressive. There really aren't any western smilies anyone can recognize beyond::);):(:| and:/ but you can express frustration and resignation much easier with the asian smilies.
^__^ -__- T__T;__; -__-;;
Interestingly, asian smilies always resembled the defunct bixies.
I actually suspect it's some moderator with some sort of vendeta. I have no idea why, but it is pretty childish. I don't care though. I've had excellent karma since the the conversion of raw scores to categories. I've got plenty of karma to burn.
My personal favorite mod for that is "troll," even though I acknoledged the good natured obvious trolling for "playing with my joystick."
Back in the day, my favorite game was Defender for the Atari 2600. I was good. I was really good. I would routinely reach level 100. Good days, I'd hit 200. I played that game constantly. I played it so much, that I got a blister on the webbing between my thumb and index finger from moving the joystick around so much. (HEY! YOU IN THE BACK! Quit snickering!) I remember going to my mom crying because my thumb hurt, but I still wanted to play. (I was like 6 at the time.) She put a band-aid over the blister and gave me a white satin glove of hers to wear to keep the band-aid in place and to protect the rest of my hand. I still remember what she said, "There. Now you look like Michael Jackson." Bandaged up, I rejoined the fight the protect the world's cities from alien invasion.
The only thing that gets more mobhate is DS9. That was good show, especially the multiseason war arc. Sure the ending sucked, but as I understand it, they though they had another season until they had like 3 episodes left to shoot, so I'll let it pass. The whole "yeah, well they only started a war after b5 had a war," is bullshit. I hate to tell you fanboys something, but it doens't work that way. The powers that be, just don't care about the other shows. How is there competition, when they're not even in the same timeslot? No. It's all in your mind.
New BSG is a great show. Old BSG sucked. It sucked like the worst original Star Trek episodes. Apollo has to fight cylon on cowboy world? An evil magician on C-deck? Please! That's just as bad as having Spock and Kirk forced to fight Ghengis Kahn and Abraham Lincoln at the OK Corrale by the Roman god Apollo.[*] The dumbest thing I've heard from the old BSG fanboys has been, "They should have made a sequel to the original BSG." They did. It was called Galactica 1980, AND IT SUCKED. Super Scouts my ass.
[*] What's going to motivate the flamers more? The fact that I just dissed trek, or that I've conflated three different episodes?
You've been asked to break the law. And if it's ever found out (and keep in mind the VAST majority of BSA audits are on the behest of disgruntled employees) you'll be the one on the hook. You don't want that.
Good leadership is not doing what everybody else wants- it is convincing others that your way is best! You cannot lead by polls- that is called following. That's called being charasmatic. Being a good leader requires that you're actually effective.
You're right that you can't "lead" by following polls, but an elected official is also a representive. He has to represent his consituents. If you're not carrying out the wishes of the your consituents, you aren't representing them. Sure there are times to buck the polls, but winning an election is blank check either.
I guess what I am trying to say is that so much of the public discourse seems to be focused on the past rather than finding solutions for the future. The President's personal convictions about Iraq may be unpopular, but they are based on a reality that many people recognize that an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops will make the situation worse, not better. It's interesting that you used the phrase "a reality." There's only a one. The interesting thing that convictions don't matter. Only the reality of the situation matters. You can be convinced that tomorrow that the sky is going to be striped, but it doesn't matter. It's not.
No one is saying that situation in Iraq is going to improve with the withdrawl of US troops. It's not. Iraq will most likely break out in full fledged civil war from the smaller civil war that's going on now. The question is whether keeping the troops there indefinately will improve the situation. The answer is no. That's not just some idea. It's a conclusion we can draw from experience. We sent the troops. We tried droping the troop levels from the initial invasion levels. We've increased the levels back to invasion levels. We've pulled troops from around Iraq to secure Baghdad. All of these were the administation's ideas. They've all failed. We've done it there way, and the situation has steadily deteriorated. Things have gotten worse. Much worse. It didn't even hold steady. That would have something. Not much, but something. The Iraqi government is as weak as it's ever been. So keeping the troops there is not improving the situation. Increasing the troops didn't improve the situation. At most it's simply retarding the slide in to abject civil war, and even that slide is accelerating.
Is that good enough? Is that why we've spent almost have a trillion dollars and over 3300 lives? No. It absolutely isn't. We can't keep them there forever. How long do we keep throwing good money -- and more importantly, lives -- after bad? If the outcome isn't in doubt, and it's not, then why bother keeping up this failed policy?
I know why Bush and the GOP is doing it. To withdraw the troops would be admitting that they're think tank wet dream failed. So they're not going to do it. The troops aren't going to come home until 2010. Bush won't withdraw the troops because "he's not a failure," and so the next president is going to have to. The situtation will simply demand it. But whoever becomes president isn't going do it in January 2009, because that would look reactionary. So they'll go through the motions for an entire year, and sometime in the middle or end of the second year, the troops will come home.
The only question about Bush and the troops, is whether there's a White House tape like LBJ's 1966 conversation where he admits that Vietnam is unwinable, but he's going to keep sending young boys to die, because he's not going to known as the president who lost a war. Given how spectacularly wrong and mishandled everything in this administration has been, I suspect there is no such a tape. I think they're all true believers. I think they actually believe the situation will get better, if they could just make the American public "understand."
With resepect to Bush and the GOP leadership and "artificial timetables" they were all for them with Kosovo. Now they're suddenly not. Besides the party of the president, what's the difference?
That was a classic article. You're right. Malda, Bates, Miller, et.al did it right that time. Instead of supressing the article, which lets face it, was pretty much as blatent copyright infringement as you can get, the damage was compounded.
And what's up with modern religions trying to copyright they're symbols? The VA can put it on a headstone but you can't see it in the list? You can't put it on a t-shirt? What the hell man? Sounds like someone is more concerned about getting their cut than salvation.
Slashdot Mirror
AmeriQuest had farmed all the work out to an Indian outsourcing firm. You get what you pay for...
I'll admit, that's immediately what I thought when you described the code. It reminded me of what a friend of mine said when he had to interface with some Indian outsourced code. In dealing with them, he said, "They have all the arrogance and skill of a freshman CS student."
That's not to say Indians can't code, anyone that's been in any large western company or university knows they can. The problem is with the outsoursing firms. Many have crappy "engineers" in an effort to lower costs and cash in on a growth industry. It's a standard economic phenomenon.
But it doesn't matter. It's the one that's actually used. Real world data always trumps ideal data.
Validation is overrated. Especially, when it comes to RSS. There's so many competing "compatable" standards, that really aren't. feedparser.org has a great write up about the state of RSS. It's pathetic.
If you're reading a doc, don't bother validating it. You're probably going to have handle "invalid" XML anyway. When you're constructing XML, you should write it according to the DTD, but if you're relying on a remote site, then you're asking for trouble. Just cache the version locally, but seriously, you're tool shouldn't really need it. You're engineers do, but not the tool.
Finally, it's trivial to reconstruct a dtd from sample documents.
Why? Do you find it unlikely that someone would "do their duty" and kill the person who killed the President? When John Wilkes Booth assinated Lincoln, Booth was killed by Boston Corbett against orders. Maybe Boston Corbett was acting under orders, but under orders by Andrew Johnson! See Johnson, wanted Lincoln out of the way so he could become president and roll back all of Lincolns radical civil rights reforms. He was from a slave state afterall.
Then almost exactly 100 years another vice president is Johnson becomes president after an assination? Do I have to spell it out for you?!
See? There's no end to the depth of a conspiracy theory. Once you decide that there's a conspiracy, you'll find "evidence" for it. Just look at the Bible Code, or the 23 Enigma. It's all self-selecting, confusing correlation and coincidence with causation. Eventually you're just putting two and two together and getting 22.
And most damning of all
Ahh yes. Someone stokes the consipiracy flames to sell a book, and that makes news. Meanwhile Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutior of Charles Manson, writes a book explaining in excrutiating detail about how the Oswald was the lone gunman and fired the shots from the book depository, and no one says a thing.
All this talk about conspiracy theories is absurd. There's a group of people that that refuse to believe that shit happens. One guy can kill a president. A cult would willingly set themselves on fire rather than be arrested. That 19 guys from the desert can hijack airliners with boxcutters and crash them into buildings. I think it comes from that the need to place some meaning and reason on these acts. They can't fantom the power of a single commited individual, and so they find a vast and all powerful secret conspiracy is behind it all. The Knights Templar. The Illuninati. The Zeta Reticulians. The Water Fluoridation Industrial Complex. The Left Handed People of Borneo. The large underground homosexual population of Des Moines, Iowa. You name it. It's quite absurd.
I think the going theory on this is that the cholesterol (or whatever is causesing the LDL increase) is absorbed by the paper filter used in drip. If so, I figure the simplest thing to do is simply to refilter the french press with a paper prior to drinking.
And they can. That's even protected under the law, under the shared housing exemption. Roomates.com didn't have that form, and apparently didn't good lawyer, because they didn't make that argument.
I'm sorry, but this is just blatent revisionism. The entire media fell in line with the Bush administration during the lead up to war. (The New York Times most notably.) During the invasion of they unquestioningly followed the official line. Anyone that challenged the official line was either thrown off the air (Phil Donahue most notably) or simply ignored. The media was played (The white house spreads the disinformation that Iraq has aluminium tubes to create a centrafuge, and then quotes that same story as support for what they're saying). Everyone got they're war on. The media thouugh, "I've got connections! I can get a Pulitzer! Explosions equal ratings!" The White House said, "My God! Our 9 year wet dream of invading Iraq has finaly come true!"
Of course the invasion worked. No one ever doubted that. The media never questioned the official line right up until Abu Ghraib. Then they said, "What the hell?" just like anyone reasonable person would. Then they decided to report that for all the talk of "supporting the troops," the solidiers didn't have enough armor. It's just that now the official line has diveged so much from reality, you can't ignore it. Do you honestly believe Tony Snow believes himself when he compares Baghdad to when Washington DC was the "murder capital?"
It's convient to say that no one know what's going on, but that's simply isn't true. There's a civil war on, and the situation in Iraq has steadily gotten worse. Hell, Cheney is over there in May 9th and says, "Violence is down fairly dramatically," And then an explosion rocks the very building. This week the State Department said that everyone going outside the buildings in the green zone needs to wear body armor. This is bad. 30 bodies a day are being found. That's the work of militia death squads. Four years ago, we didn't have those problems. The Iraqi Ministry of Education reports that only 30% of school aged children attend class, because they're parents fear for their safety. That's down from 75% last year. There's been a steady exodus of highly educated professionals from that country. We're talking doctors, teachers, people needed to maintain a cohesive society. McCain visits Baghdad and says, "Look I can walk though a market, and the generals don't need armor." He had 100 guards, armor, and attack helicopters with him, to walk through a market that mostly closed becaused no one wanted their picture taken with the Americans. The Army issued a statment saying that McCain was "mistaken" when he said Prateaus would go about Baghdad without armor. McCain didn't even belive himself.
This situation in Iraq is is bad. It is very very bad.
It's very convienent and comforting to believe that Fox is telling the truth, and everyone else is lying, but that simply isn't true. Even if you ignore the fact that Fox News has gone lockstep with the Republican party since its inception; you have the entire world media on one side, and then you have Fox News. Who you going to believe? Well obviously Fox, since everyone hates America, including a majority of Americans.
Fox News demostably has lousy coverage. Numerious media studies have show that people that primarily get their information from Fox News are grossly misinformed. But I'm sure that's just because reality has a well known liberal bias.
Yeah. Everything is going swimmingly.
I find myself using asian smilies with my friends from asia and western smilies with my american friends. I will say that the western smilies are quicker to type, but the asian ones are much more expressive. There really aren't any western smilies anyone can recognize beyond: :) ;) :( :| and :/
;__;
but you can express frustration and resignation much easier with the asian smilies.
^__^
-__-
T__T
-__-;;
Interestingly, asian smilies always resembled the defunct bixies.
No one cares about your plants! ;)
I actually suspect it's some moderator with some sort of vendeta. I have no idea why, but it is pretty childish. I don't care though. I've had excellent karma since the the conversion of raw scores to categories. I've got plenty of karma to burn.
My personal favorite mod for that is "troll," even though I acknoledged the good natured obvious trolling for "playing with my joystick."
C'est le vie.
Back in the day, my favorite game was Defender for the Atari 2600. I was good. I was really good. I would routinely reach level 100. Good days, I'd hit 200. I played that game constantly. I played it so much, that I got a blister on the webbing between my thumb and index finger from moving the joystick around so much. (HEY! YOU IN THE BACK! Quit snickering!) I remember going to my mom crying because my thumb hurt, but I still wanted to play. (I was like 6 at the time.) She put a band-aid over the blister and gave me a white satin glove of hers to wear to keep the band-aid in place and to protect the rest of my hand. I still remember what she said, "There. Now you look like Michael Jackson." Bandaged up, I rejoined the fight the protect the world's cities from alien invasion.
You son, and greatful planet, thank you.
The only thing that gets more mobhate is DS9. That was good show, especially the multiseason war arc. Sure the ending sucked, but as I understand it, they though they had another season until they had like 3 episodes left to shoot, so I'll let it pass. The whole "yeah, well they only started a war after b5 had a war," is bullshit. I hate to tell you fanboys something, but it doens't work that way. The powers that be, just don't care about the other shows. How is there competition, when they're not even in the same timeslot? No. It's all in your mind.
New BSG is a great show. Old BSG sucked. It sucked like the worst original Star Trek episodes. Apollo has to fight cylon on cowboy world? An evil magician on C-deck? Please! That's just as bad as having Spock and Kirk forced to fight Ghengis Kahn and Abraham Lincoln at the OK Corrale by the Roman god Apollo.[*] The dumbest thing I've heard from the old BSG fanboys has been, "They should have made a sequel to the original BSG." They did. It was called Galactica 1980, AND IT SUCKED. Super Scouts my ass.
[*] What's going to motivate the flamers more? The fact that I just dissed trek, or that I've conflated three different episodes?
And season 5 of B5 was so great.
GOTHS....IN....SPAAAAAAAAAACE!
*yawn*
And yet, that's exactly what the NASA press release did.
Slashdot submitters frequently just copy and paste rather than write their own teasers.
Married with Children ran for 10 years.
Killed before its time.
It is for Fela Kuti.
You've been asked to break the law. And if it's ever found out (and keep in mind the VAST majority of BSA audits are on the behest of disgruntled employees) you'll be the one on the hook. You don't want that.
Resign, and make no bones about why.
You're right that you can't "lead" by following polls, but an elected official is also a representive. He has to represent his consituents. If you're not carrying out the wishes of the your consituents, you aren't representing them. Sure there are times to buck the polls, but winning an election is blank check either. I guess what I am trying to say is that so much of the public discourse seems to be focused on the past rather than finding solutions for the future. The President's personal convictions about Iraq may be unpopular, but they are based on a reality that many people recognize that an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops will make the situation worse, not better. It's interesting that you used the phrase "a reality." There's only a one. The interesting thing that convictions don't matter. Only the reality of the situation matters. You can be convinced that tomorrow that the sky is going to be striped, but it doesn't matter. It's not.
No one is saying that situation in Iraq is going to improve with the withdrawl of US troops. It's not. Iraq will most likely break out in full fledged civil war from the smaller civil war that's going on now. The question is whether keeping the troops there indefinately will improve the situation. The answer is no. That's not just some idea. It's a conclusion we can draw from experience. We sent the troops. We tried droping the troop levels from the initial invasion levels. We've increased the levels back to invasion levels. We've pulled troops from around Iraq to secure Baghdad. All of these were the administation's ideas. They've all failed. We've done it there way, and the situation has steadily deteriorated. Things have gotten worse. Much worse. It didn't even hold steady. That would have something. Not much, but something. The Iraqi government is as weak as it's ever been. So keeping the troops there is not improving the situation. Increasing the troops didn't improve the situation. At most it's simply retarding the slide in to abject civil war, and even that slide is accelerating.
Is that good enough? Is that why we've spent almost have a trillion dollars and over 3300 lives? No. It absolutely isn't. We can't keep them there forever. How long do we keep throwing good money -- and more importantly, lives -- after bad? If the outcome isn't in doubt, and it's not, then why bother keeping up this failed policy?
I know why Bush and the GOP is doing it. To withdraw the troops would be admitting that they're think tank wet dream failed. So they're not going to do it. The troops aren't going to come home until 2010. Bush won't withdraw the troops because "he's not a failure," and so the next president is going to have to. The situtation will simply demand it. But whoever becomes president isn't going do it in January 2009, because that would look reactionary. So they'll go through the motions for an entire year, and sometime in the middle or end of the second year, the troops will come home.
The only question about Bush and the troops, is whether there's a White House tape like LBJ's 1966 conversation where he admits that Vietnam is unwinable, but he's going to keep sending young boys to die, because he's not going to known as the president who lost a war. Given how spectacularly wrong and mishandled everything in this administration has been, I suspect there is no such a tape. I think they're all true believers. I think they actually believe the situation will get better, if they could just make the American public "understand."
With resepect to Bush and the GOP leadership and "artificial timetables" they were all for them with Kosovo. Now they're suddenly not. Besides the party of the president, what's the difference?
That was a classic article. You're right. Malda, Bates, Miller, et.al did it right that time. Instead of supressing the article, which lets face it, was pretty much as blatent copyright infringement as you can get, the damage was compounded.
And what's up with modern religions trying to copyright they're symbols? The VA can put it on a headstone but you can't see it in the list? You can't put it on a t-shirt? What the hell man? Sounds like someone is more concerned about getting their cut than salvation.
After tons of bad press, they've reversed position..
Gee. Took them a while.
Whoa! Deja vu!
As the saying goes, "If you can put it on a t-shirt, it's speech."
I'm certainly glad the RIAA's efforts worked last time! I mean, what would the world be like if we didn't have DVDs?
it's 10
:)
You screwed up your own joke. Dumbass.