You realize that up until recently, it was illegal to sell private health insurance in Canada? (The Canadian high court overturned the law making it illegal just a few months ago.) You realize that the Clinton health-care plan, which thankfully never got past the talking stages, was going to be based on a single-payer plan system modeled after the Canadian system?
You realize you're wrong? A simple Google search would yield you any number of articles that would tell you that the Supreme Court struck down a law in Quebec to that effect. It was a provincial law, not federal, and everyone already knows that Quebec's laws are much different from the rest of the country. This is why, for example, so many contests and lotteries would say you can enter if you live anywhere in Canada except Quebec.
As a resident of Ontario, I've had private health insurance coverage for years! This is because OHIP (Ontario's public health insurance) doesn't cover everything; you really need to supplement it with something else. For example, my dental surgery last year wasn't covered by the government plan. Good thing I had private insurance for that. Saved me a couple grand.
If Apple were to release MacOS for the x86, and (wishful thinking) support Wine to the point where it runs most everything, would they then be able to compete with Microsoft by levelling the playing field as far as software availability goes?
My team got a bunch of the d530s (they are CRAP!) last year.
We have 5 people using these machines. We have had 8 replacements in the 18 months we've been using them (yes, each and every one of us has had at least one machine go on the blink).
I can't believe our company standardized on these machines, but I'll be glad when we get something new. FWIW I have a ThinkPad T42 now that I'm happy with, but I use the HP/Compaq machine for coding.
I second this. Being in Canada, I love to take advantage of this when possible. I do not download music at all (either paid or pirated, unless it's free like the Harvey Danger release recently). Rather, I have ripped all of my own CDs to MP3. Nowadays I still buy the occasional CD (which gets immediately ripped), but I also borrow original CDs from family and friends which also get stored as MP3s, and I can even borrow from the local libraries as well. I can make copies for personal use all I want, but I cannot give the copies away (fair enough). But the original disc can be passed around and each person can make their own personal copy.
We do pay a levy on blank CDs which sucks, but with decent fair-use laws that make everything I mention above perfectly legal it feels to be a reasonably fair arrangement.
I think the biggest problem with this is that they still take up an obscene amount of space. Because most of these consoles are top-loading, this means both that you need to have the unit in an area where you can reach the top easily (and grasp the disc/cartridge), and it also means you need quite a bit of vertical space so that you can lift up that disc/cartridge.
If these consoles were designed like stereo components, say where all the controls and game slots were on the front, you'd use up a lot less space and thus could have more stuff crammed in there, because you wouldn't need to have the extra inches of vertical space clear on top of the unit for these tasks..
All I want is for every database to have the same functions; a standardized way to do the basics.
Every vendor seems to have their own ways to define (or arbitrarily break standard) date functions (add/compare/convert/get current timestamp), string manipulation (like uppercasing, substrings and concatenation), getting the generated id from an inserted row (identity/serial/auto_increment), limiting the number of rows returned (TOP or FIRST?), getting a subset of rows (ie a standard way to get rows 100-150 that works with most DBs) or even getting a list of tables or viewing the schema.
Trying to make an app portable across DBs is next to impossible, and that's not even counting stored procedures or different behaviours for the same syntax (like NULL handling across the various functions). This is very irritating and should have been fixed long ago. Instead, we get this crap which makes the differences we see across different web browsers look like child's play.
How 'bout if they had ballast tanks? If these things are unmanned, would it be possible that if a storm were coming, they could just submerge the sucker and bring it back to the surface (by emptying those tanks) when it's clear?
Sea salt would be a bitch, but I wonder if that could be easier than towing it away. At least that way the anchor can stay put.
Our electricity and natural gas prices are going up quite a bit too. I'm hearing a lot that we can expect to pay up to 50% more on energy costs this winter in Toronto.
My gas bill is on an "equalized" plan, which is that they estimate the costs and try to spread it out so that I pay the amount evenly each month over the course of the year. This gets adjusted once per year (in September). Our bill last month was almost 25% higher than the previous amount (which is now the amount I'm expecting to pay for the next year).
The document (which is very good, by the way) tells you to turn down your hot water heater. This is a bad idea, because the lowered temperature will see your bacteria levels skyrocket in there.
People often suggest turning that down to prevent scalding, but most studies have shown the danger of that is far, far less than the dangers of what could be growing in there.
He's asking them to distribute a copy of the GNU General Public License with the software
This is one of three things that they can do to be compliant. There are two others, which given their commercial nature they may decide to undertake:
1 - stop distribution, remove all GPL code from their application immediately and rewrite those parts before distributing again
2 - negotiate an alternative (commercial?) license with the copyright holders of the GPL portions of code. This can be problematic when there's a lot of authors, but it can be done.
Generally if a company effed up in (mis)using GPL code they should be given the opportunity to fix their mistakes. If this is an intentional misuse and they do not intend to correct things they may open themselves up to a lawsuit.
Any way you slice it, of course, the GPL software is still copyrighted. Without the GPL it doesn't become public domain. Eliminating the GPL means that you don't have *any* permission to use the code.
Actually my IBM/Lenovo T42 Notebook can upgrade its BIOS pretty much automatically within Windows. I have this 'Software Installer' tool by Lenovo which downloads all driver, software and BIOS updates, and with one click installs everything in one go (after agreeing to the EULA, of course).
The BIOS update actually gets applied at the next reboot, where it prompts me to make sure the notebook is plugged in with a fully charged battery, but there's no DOS in there as far as I can tell (it's an interface without a GUI, yes, but it doesn't look like it boots into DOS).
There's still time!
on
Zombie Lurch
·
· Score: 4, Informative
...but I wasn't talking about flicker on or the one to two second delays (I bought the *good* bulbs).
I was talking about the fact that it can take up to 5 *minutes* for a bulb to be full brightness. This is across several brands. Fluorescents just never get fully bright (in terms of lumens) right away. If I could have full brightness in 30 seconds or less I'd be happy, but I just haven't seen it across the 4 or 5 brands I've tried (across all price ranges).
Ultimately I settled for the bulbs that were instant-on. So it's great that there's virtually no delay between be flicking the switch and them turning on. But there's still a *huge* time lag between when they turn on and when they are at their brightest. Doesn't seem to matter if it's a 60-watt-equivalent or 100-watt-equivant either (the latter being the ones we use in our laundry room). I have to turn the light on several minutes before we do the laundry so we can see things best.
I've replaced most of the bulbs in our house with CFLs and generally my wife and I love them. There are just two issues which are pretty darn annoying at times (basides their appearance, which isn't a problem given that I've put them in lamps that have shades or other covers).
The first is that the bulbs still have a warm-up time. Sure, they light right away, but it can take several minutes before they're at maximum brightness. This can be annoying, say, in a kitchen or other work area where I need all the light I can get so I can see what I'm doing.
The second annoyance is that I can't use them outdoors. Once the temperature reaches below 5 degrees C or so, they won't light up at all. So I'm still stuck using incandescents for my patio lights. They're iffy in the garage too (not as bright).
But I will agree that they save lots of money, particularly in the summer when you're running the air conditioner. Who needs more heat in the house when you're spending so much energy removing it?
...and that's why most of us use (or have created) a library to simplify it to just that.
On our end, it took only a few hours for one coder to encapsulate all that cruft into a simple library. Sending an email for me (in Java) is now as simple as:
Granted, it might be a tiny bit verbose, but is that really hard? The EmailMessage class does all the messy work, and we only had to write it once. If you're finding that you're doing that hard crap over and over again, you should re-think your coding practices.
I am in a similar role to yours, in a medium-sized company for which software is not part of our core business. In other words, very small team.
I second your comment. The vast majority of the issues we encounter are due to poor requirements gathering. The vast majority of the remainder of the issues are usually due to things getting pushed out before they're ready, because of tight unrealistic deadlines that were set up between sales and the customer before we've even had a look at the requirements (yes, we fight this, but only so much you can do after a contract has been signed).
Overall, the application architecture itself is stable. Very few crashes in the last 5 years. The odd performance issue crops up, again, when a rushed developer writes some boneheaded code when they didn't have a chance to think.
We have very, very few things that our developers get blamed for. Oh, how some have tried, but that's when I pull out the email trail pointing out my objections from the beginning. As the lead, I see it as my role to defend our team when necessary. For things that really are our fault, we accept that and put processes in place to keep it from happening again. For the things that are not, which are most of them, we make sure everyone involved knows what the real problem was.
The lesson here? Document your conversations. Save your emails. Make sure you keep your objections in writing and the stakeholders are aware of the issues before you even start. When the complaints come up, you can then show why things failed and try to offer help in solving the underlying problems in the process.
As far as I know, the friends that I have that work at IBM are generally pretty happy with both their jobs and their pay, where those that work at HP nowadays are treated like dirt and are miserable.
Granted, this is in the Toronto area, so things may be different where you are. I'm sorry to hear that you don't like your job. Why haven't you bailed if it's that bad?
This is why I don't download music. It might be a convenient way to get it, and even though it's currently legal in Canada (uploading is not), it just doesn't seem worth the hassle or worry.
I can get any music I want through our fair-use laws. Borrow the original CD from someone (friend, relative, library) and rip it for personal use. Nobody can touch me then.
I might not be able to share the copies, but I do share my originals.
Well, let's see. My *bank* (TD Canada Trust) uses it for their online banking. It's never been anything but fast for me.
I also work on my company's team developing our online applications, all in Java on the server side. Whenever we'd had a performance issue, it'd been traced to bad code, not the JVM. But our modest hardware is supporting users from all over the country, and our customers are the medium-large (+ gov't) businesses, and we have no trouble supporting them with this setup. Now we don't use JSP (I vetoed that approach because it doesn't enforce MVC well enough for my liking), but rather a Servlets+Velocity templates approach works well for us.
To be completely honest, I don't know and I haven't checked.
What my wife and I do in our house (and sort of what made me think of the joke) is that if we want to play our MP3s, I have a small RatShack FM transmitter plugged into the back of her computer. Radios throughout the house are tuned to the frequency we set it at, and now we can hear the music wherever we happen to be. Useful if we're doing chores or whatnot and moving around. It works well enough - not quite clear enough for an audiophile but we're not picky.
For surround, though, I admit that I put the wires in the wall while our house was being constructed. Just like the cat5e/cat6 drops (2 wires in each location) I put on two walls in each room. I was glad that the builder let me do that.
Slashdot Mirror
The evil bit?
You realize that up until recently, it was illegal to sell private health insurance in Canada? (The Canadian high court overturned the law making it illegal just a few months ago.) You realize that the Clinton health-care plan, which thankfully never got past the talking stages, was going to be based on a single-payer plan system modeled after the Canadian system?
You realize you're wrong? A simple Google search would yield you any number of articles that would tell you that the Supreme Court struck down a law in Quebec to that effect. It was a provincial law, not federal, and everyone already knows that Quebec's laws are much different from the rest of the country. This is why, for example, so many contests and lotteries would say you can enter if you live anywhere in Canada except Quebec.
As a resident of Ontario, I've had private health insurance coverage for years! This is because OHIP (Ontario's public health insurance) doesn't cover everything; you really need to supplement it with something else. For example, my dental surgery last year wasn't covered by the government plan. Good thing I had private insurance for that. Saved me a couple grand.
If Apple were to release MacOS for the x86, and (wishful thinking) support Wine to the point where it runs most everything, would they then be able to compete with Microsoft by levelling the playing field as far as software availability goes?
Such a move would benefit both Apple and Linux.
My team got a bunch of the d530s (they are CRAP!) last year.
We have 5 people using these machines. We have had 8 replacements in the 18 months we've been using them (yes, each and every one of us has had at least one machine go on the blink).
I can't believe our company standardized on these machines, but I'll be glad when we get something new. FWIW I have a ThinkPad T42 now that I'm happy with, but I use the HP/Compaq machine for coding.
Will any software be able to see that file after it disappears so you can delete it or will it be stuck there, forever hidden?
How about Knoppix?
I second this. Being in Canada, I love to take advantage of this when possible. I do not download music at all (either paid or pirated, unless it's free like the Harvey Danger release recently). Rather, I have ripped all of my own CDs to MP3. Nowadays I still buy the occasional CD (which gets immediately ripped), but I also borrow original CDs from family and friends which also get stored as MP3s, and I can even borrow from the local libraries as well. I can make copies for personal use all I want, but I cannot give the copies away (fair enough). But the original disc can be passed around and each person can make their own personal copy.
We do pay a levy on blank CDs which sucks, but with decent fair-use laws that make everything I mention above perfectly legal it feels to be a reasonably fair arrangement.
...why not buy some shelves for your rack?
I think the biggest problem with this is that they still take up an obscene amount of space. Because most of these consoles are top-loading, this means both that you need to have the unit in an area where you can reach the top easily (and grasp the disc/cartridge), and it also means you need quite a bit of vertical space so that you can lift up that disc/cartridge.
If these consoles were designed like stereo components, say where all the controls and game slots were on the front, you'd use up a lot less space and thus could have more stuff crammed in there, because you wouldn't need to have the extra inches of vertical space clear on top of the unit for these tasks..
The article seems to omit the fact that this is possible and effective against the pirates, because they play COUNTRY 'MUSIC' through this thing.
That was the first model. The new enhanced (super-secret) model plays WESTERN too!
All I want is for every database to have the same functions; a standardized way to do the basics.
Every vendor seems to have their own ways to define (or arbitrarily break standard) date functions (add/compare/convert/get current timestamp), string manipulation (like uppercasing, substrings and concatenation), getting the generated id from an inserted row (identity/serial/auto_increment), limiting the number of rows returned (TOP or FIRST?), getting a subset of rows (ie a standard way to get rows 100-150 that works with most DBs) or even getting a list of tables or viewing the schema.
Trying to make an app portable across DBs is next to impossible, and that's not even counting stored procedures or different behaviours for the same syntax (like NULL handling across the various functions). This is very irritating and should have been fixed long ago. Instead, we get this crap which makes the differences we see across different web browsers look like child's play.
How 'bout if they had ballast tanks? If these things are unmanned, would it be possible that if a storm were coming, they could just submerge the sucker and bring it back to the surface (by emptying those tanks) when it's clear?
Sea salt would be a bitch, but I wonder if that could be easier than towing it away. At least that way the anchor can stay put.
Our electricity and natural gas prices are going up quite a bit too. I'm hearing a lot that we can expect to pay up to 50% more on energy costs this winter in Toronto.
My gas bill is on an "equalized" plan, which is that they estimate the costs and try to spread it out so that I pay the amount evenly each month over the course of the year. This gets adjusted once per year (in September). Our bill last month was almost 25% higher than the previous amount (which is now the amount I'm expecting to pay for the next year).
The document (which is very good, by the way) tells you to turn down your hot water heater. This is a bad idea, because the lowered temperature will see your bacteria levels skyrocket in there.
People often suggest turning that down to prevent scalding, but most studies have shown the danger of that is far, far less than the dangers of what could be growing in there.
He's asking them to distribute a copy of the GNU General Public License with the software
This is one of three things that they can do to be compliant. There are two others, which given their commercial nature they may decide to undertake:
1 - stop distribution, remove all GPL code from their application immediately and rewrite those parts before distributing again
2 - negotiate an alternative (commercial?) license with the copyright holders of the GPL portions of code. This can be problematic when there's a lot of authors, but it can be done.
Generally if a company effed up in (mis)using GPL code they should be given the opportunity to fix their mistakes. If this is an intentional misuse and they do not intend to correct things they may open themselves up to a lawsuit.
Any way you slice it, of course, the GPL software is still copyrighted. Without the GPL it doesn't become public domain. Eliminating the GPL means that you don't have *any* permission to use the code.
Actually my IBM/Lenovo T42 Notebook can upgrade its BIOS pretty much automatically within Windows. I have this 'Software Installer' tool by Lenovo which downloads all driver, software and BIOS updates, and with one click installs everything in one go (after agreeing to the EULA, of course).
The BIOS update actually gets applied at the next reboot, where it prompts me to make sure the notebook is plugged in with a fully charged battery, but there's no DOS in there as far as I can tell (it's an interface without a GUI, yes, but it doesn't look like it boots into DOS).
Toronto has one going on at 2pm *today*!
I think I'll be staying inside this afternoon...
...but I wasn't talking about flicker on or the one to two second delays (I bought the *good* bulbs).
I was talking about the fact that it can take up to 5 *minutes* for a bulb to be full brightness. This is across several brands. Fluorescents just never get fully bright (in terms of lumens) right away. If I could have full brightness in 30 seconds or less I'd be happy, but I just haven't seen it across the 4 or 5 brands I've tried (across all price ranges).
Ultimately I settled for the bulbs that were instant-on. So it's great that there's virtually no delay between be flicking the switch and them turning on. But there's still a *huge* time lag between when they turn on and when they are at their brightest. Doesn't seem to matter if it's a 60-watt-equivalent or 100-watt-equivant either (the latter being the ones we use in our laundry room). I have to turn the light on several minutes before we do the laundry so we can see things best.
I've replaced most of the bulbs in our house with CFLs and generally my wife and I love them. There are just two issues which are pretty darn annoying at times (basides their appearance, which isn't a problem given that I've put them in lamps that have shades or other covers).
The first is that the bulbs still have a warm-up time. Sure, they light right away, but it can take several minutes before they're at maximum brightness. This can be annoying, say, in a kitchen or other work area where I need all the light I can get so I can see what I'm doing.
The second annoyance is that I can't use them outdoors. Once the temperature reaches below 5 degrees C or so, they won't light up at all. So I'm still stuck using incandescents for my patio lights. They're iffy in the garage too (not as bright).
But I will agree that they save lots of money, particularly in the summer when you're running the air conditioner. Who needs more heat in the house when you're spending so much energy removing it?
...and that's why most of us use (or have created) a library to simplify it to just that.
//also optionally email.addAttachment( inputStream, filename );
On our end, it took only a few hours for one coder to encapsulate all that cruft into a simple library. Sending an email for me (in Java) is now as simple as:
EmailMessage email = new EmailMessage();
email.setFrom( "from@wherever.com" );
email.addRecipient( "to@wherever.com" );
email.setSubject( "Example" );
email.setBody( "Whatever" );
email.send();
Granted, it might be a tiny bit verbose, but is that really hard? The EmailMessage class does all the messy work, and we only had to write it once. If you're finding that you're doing that hard crap over and over again, you should re-think your coding practices.
That reminds me of the old Abbott & Costello routine, where Costello "proves" to Abbott on a blackboard that
7 x 13 = 28
28 / 7 = 13
and 13+13+13+13+13+13+13=28
It was quite enlightening.
I am in a similar role to yours, in a medium-sized company for which software is not part of our core business. In other words, very small team.
I second your comment. The vast majority of the issues we encounter are due to poor requirements gathering. The vast majority of the remainder of the issues are usually due to things getting pushed out before they're ready, because of tight unrealistic deadlines that were set up between sales and the customer before we've even had a look at the requirements (yes, we fight this, but only so much you can do after a contract has been signed).
Overall, the application architecture itself is stable. Very few crashes in the last 5 years. The odd performance issue crops up, again, when a rushed developer writes some boneheaded code when they didn't have a chance to think.
We have very, very few things that our developers get blamed for. Oh, how some have tried, but that's when I pull out the email trail pointing out my objections from the beginning. As the lead, I see it as my role to defend our team when necessary. For things that really are our fault, we accept that and put processes in place to keep it from happening again. For the things that are not, which are most of them, we make sure everyone involved knows what the real problem was.
The lesson here? Document your conversations. Save your emails. Make sure you keep your objections in writing and the stakeholders are aware of the issues before you even start. When the complaints come up, you can then show why things failed and try to offer help in solving the underlying problems in the process.
Sure you're not working for HP?
As far as I know, the friends that I have that work at IBM are generally pretty happy with both their jobs and their pay, where those that work at HP nowadays are treated like dirt and are miserable.
Granted, this is in the Toronto area, so things may be different where you are. I'm sorry to hear that you don't like your job. Why haven't you bailed if it's that bad?
This is why I don't download music. It might be a convenient way to get it, and even though it's currently legal in Canada (uploading is not), it just doesn't seem worth the hassle or worry.
I can get any music I want through our fair-use laws. Borrow the original CD from someone (friend, relative, library) and rip it for personal use. Nobody can touch me then.
I might not be able to share the copies, but I do share my originals.
Sure. All you have to do is stay still while the planet revolves under you.
Well, let's see. My *bank* (TD Canada Trust) uses it for their online banking. It's never been anything but fast for me.
I also work on my company's team developing our online applications, all in Java on the server side. Whenever we'd had a performance issue, it'd been traced to bad code, not the JVM. But our modest hardware is supporting users from all over the country, and our customers are the medium-large (+ gov't) businesses, and we have no trouble supporting them with this setup. Now we don't use JSP (I vetoed that approach because it doesn't enforce MVC well enough for my liking), but rather a Servlets+Velocity templates approach works well for us.
To be completely honest, I don't know and I haven't checked.
What my wife and I do in our house (and sort of what made me think of the joke) is that if we want to play our MP3s, I have a small RatShack FM transmitter plugged into the back of her computer. Radios throughout the house are tuned to the frequency we set it at, and now we can hear the music wherever we happen to be. Useful if we're doing chores or whatnot and moving around. It works well enough - not quite clear enough for an audiophile but we're not picky.
For surround, though, I admit that I put the wires in the wall while our house was being constructed. Just like the cat5e/cat6 drops (2 wires in each location) I put on two walls in each room. I was glad that the builder let me do that.