Yeah I know, you have a point. I guess I'm just stubborn and obsessed with semantics. If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like. But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it."PC", on the other hand, is not used exclusively to refer to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows. It can just as easily refer to any personal computer.
It's an interesting comparison, because it underscores the point nicely, though not in your favour. Much like "Americans" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to citizens of the USA, "PCs" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to x86-compatible PCs that aren't Macs. The only people who pretend to be confused about "Macs" not being "PCs" are smug, anal, semantically-obsessive nerds. This has been true for the better part of three decades, pretty much since the first Mac was released.
FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.
This is not true. All but the high-end Macs ship with an integrated GPU just like Intels. Faster, yes, but still not discrete - they're using system RAM.
Any reason you didn't call up former employees A & B after the move and offer them 1.5X once the interview process for replacement employees started in the new location?
Because by then they'd already found new jobs (without having to go through the expense and trauma of relocating across half the country).
I came from that era, and earlier. No programmer in their right mind would ever do something so stupid as to let a book get bought and shipped by one click -- "What if the guy accidentally clicked it? There should be a confirming dialog!"
UNIX programmers certainly would - "if you didn't want to delete it, you shouldn't have typed 'rm file'".
I'd be cautious about showing another job offer. To many employers, that's a sign that you're ready to jump ship (maybe you are), and although they may make a compelling counter offer for the short term, in the long term you may find you're a marked man.
Absolutely. "I've had an offer from somewhere else, can you beat it" is the Joker, and you can only play it once. Depending on your situation, it might be worth it - but you need to be damn sure before you embark on the process and you *have* to be prepared to carry through with it (which is generally in direct conflict with why you might want to stay).
It's much better to show evidence of what the job market supports. IT Salary Surveys are a big way to do so, and so are anecdotes: "My old college buddy who has pretty much identical experience to me just took a job for $X," rather than, "I've been interviewing around, and I can make $X at this other company, they've extended me a job offer." You only do that if you really are ready to jump ship, and the counter offer had better be damn impressive to take the risk that you'll still have a job there 6 months later (when they have had time to find a replacement for you).
I've never worked for anyone who puts any stock in Salary Surveys when determining raises. They will do it for new hires (though not the kind of Salary Surveys you can find online, the ones that HR departments get), but never for raises. This often goes hand-in-hand with a "I'm never giving anyone a raise of more than X%" attitude, even though the salary being offered new hires is significantly more than X% over existing salaries.
Of course, this ends up with a ludicrous situations like the following (happened to me earlier this year trying to keep/hire staff):
Employees A and B are earning X while working in location P. Said employees have a great record and reputation in the company, and have been with it for 3-5 years (thus meaning they also had extensive experience with how the company operates and its environments). Company moves corporate headquarters to location Q. Employees A and B have to move because policy dictates that any employee must have a direct supervisor in the office they work in, and my job was moved to location Q. They are told they have to move as well or new people will be hired to replace them.
The budget for the new hires in location Q is approximately 1.6X - 1.9X (partially because the existing employees were underpaid and partially because location Q has a higher cost of living). However, I am told in no uncertain terms that I cannot offer employees A and B a raise greater than 1.15X (and even that was a struggle), even though I know (and have explained) that both would happily relocate for a new salary of 1.5X, plus relocation assistance totalling about 0.1X.
Thus, I was forced to let two extremely good people go, along with all their acquired knowledge, and spend _months_ short-staffed while trying to hire replacements (couldn't believe how hard it was to find decent people - recession my arse) who ended up being paid ca. 1.8X and with the associated losses in productivity due to a) aforementioned period of being short-staffed and b) the new employees taking the normal couple of months to become really useful.
The root cause of this madness seems to be the unerring and genuine belief that basically all employees are trivial to replace and there is no productivity lost during both a) the short-staffing period after people who couldn't get raises decamp to other employers and b) the 2-3 month training period before new employees become genuinely useful.
In the rare case that your current employer will match or beat a new offering, you're still left the fact that your employer had been knowingly underpaying you for the period you worked there.
There are only two ways an employer can find out what you're "worth":
* You tell them, with evidence (ie: another job offer).
* They hire someone else with your skillset and experience.
In what company does the CEO ever deal with customers?
All of them.
Now, he certainly doesn't deal with the kind of customer demographic *you* probably represent, but for those who individually make up whole- or double-digit percentages of revenue, you better believe they're getting a call - and quite possible an in-person visit - from the CEO (or someone similarly high up) every quarter or two.
Not to mention major shareholders if it's a public company, all of whom will get similarly personal contact.
We should feel cheated that portable laptops rarely get past 800 vertical pixels (14 inches and below,) considering that 5 years ago the old Dell D800 could pack 1920x1200 in 15.4" for business sectors. Search dell d800 resolution and read the official Dell PDF.
The Dell D800 was a 15" laptop. It's contemporary equivalent is an E6510, which can be ordered with a 1920x1080 screen.
That annoyed me too, at first, but eventually I realized it was just wasted space. It's far easier to simply trigger Expose to find the window I want, rather than associate which box in the tab bar is associated with which window on my desktop... especially if you have multiple windows from the same program open. On Windows you need the title bar text to distinguish between multiple instances/windows of the same program. On OS X, just select the one with the contents you're looking for.
That works fine for trivial workloads. When you're working with dozens of similar looking windows and 3-4 screens, however, it sucks (not to mention that single Menu bar). A multi-level (I keep three rows in mine) Taskbar with some button grouping tweaks is much better for multitasking.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food,clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.
One big reason is because IT is an extremely immature field with no formal education requirements and basically zero accountability or liability concerns.
The other big reason is because IT folks know that in a few months when the goalposts shift again, all their documentation is going to be out of date anyway, so why bother documenting in the first place.:)
Am not sure why the browser would need 'enterprise tools' for AD (what kind of tools anyway?)...we use AD at work and Firefox is offered pre-packaged for all those, who want it. Tell me what you mean...
The two most obvious things would be SSO authentication and configuration via GPO.
It handles dependencies seamlessly and without the need to seek out dodgey looking websites that would be prone to encourage the average consumer to flee to an iPad.
The only thing you need to stage an invasion across interplanetary distances is a way to get there.
That's like Neanderthals in England with a knowledge of seamanship barely extending to a hollowed-out-log canoe, and whose entire world could be walked across in a few weeks, saying "the only thing we need to stage an invasion of Antarctica is a way to get there".
You can't handwave away a factor of that magnitude.
We have no idea how that could be achieved, so we have no idea what technologies would be necessary to make it work.
That's not true at all. We have several ideas about how it could be achieved, and all require - at a minimum - amounts of energy and manufacturing capacity that are far, far beyond anything humanity is even theoretically capable of today. That, or an improvement in science and technology that is as incomprehensible to us today as a hydrogen bomb would be to a caveman.
You are looking at the task and assuming that we don't know how to do it because it is very difficult.
No, I'm looking at the task and _concluding_ that we couldn't do it because it is impossible with our current capabilities. Or, to flip it around, any society that it capable of it is vastly more advanced than we are.
But the task may be anywhere from completely impossible to very easy. We have no idea how difficult it would be, because we have no theoretical understanding of how it could be possible.
As above. We have several theoretical ideas about how it could be possible, ranging from nearly impossible to utterly fantastical. They all require harnessing amounts of energy ranging from barely believable to practically magical.
When it comes to expansion into space, we've barely discovered how to bang two rocks together to make a campfire. Which means if someone happens to roll up beside our campfire with tanks, attack helicopters and heavy bomber support, we're almost certainly screwed - assuming they don't just drive over us without even noticing.
The soviets were bound by no such constraints [...]
The relative lack of usage of chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons in that region suggests otherwise.
Unless the constraints you refer to is simply being barred from nuking the opposition into oblivion in which case the constraint is perfectly reasonable. It doesn't make sense to destroy the land you are conquering [...]
It certainly makes sense if all you're after is the land or resources, have no moral issues with genocide, and have the technology to construct weapons that can kill your opponents while leaving land and resources intact.
[...] and strong enemies who would destroy you in return is a valid and practical constraint.
We are in no meaningful way "strong" compared to a society capable of even simply manufacturing a space-based invasion fleet, let alone moving it across interplanetary distances. Heck, we can barely lift something the size of a small plane into orbit.
An invasion from a spacefaring society isn't going to be a fight like, say, the war in Afghanistan. It'd be more akin to a modern carrier battle group sailing up to Hawaii in about 1500 AD (and even that's probably being generous). Heck, you'd probably only need to knock out a few hundred - maybe a few thousand - strategic targets across the entire planet and humanity would likely _never_ recover, and be well on the path to complete destruction, even if no actual "invasion" was forthcoming afterwards.
There were no major scientific developments that lead to the industrial revolution, the tehoritical basis for the steam engine (and some working models) had existed for thousands of years. The enlightenment and all the associated scientific advancements happened hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. The only major scientific breakthroughs since then have been in theoretical physics (QM and relativity). All other advancements have been incremental (gaining new information, not dramatically changing the way we look at the world).
I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not relevant to the statement: "but fundamentally, we do not know a lot more today than we knew then". We know a lot more today than we did in the 18th century, nuclear power being one of the more obvious examples
Just look into this some more. There are plenty of examples of warfare between industrialized and non industrialized nations where the non-industrialized nation was victorious. Most of them were not lost over rules of engagement.
For example ?
You think based on what you know. A person from a non-industrialized society may look at many modern civil engineering achievements and reach the conclusion that we are a race powerful giants. But they would be wrong.
No they wouldn't. Well, they would be about the giants part, but there's no real reason to conclude that from "modern civil engineering achivements", practically all of which - where relevant - are sized for standard humans.
I am curious as to how you think a society could stage an invasion across interplanetary distances *without* being dramatically more technologically advanced and capable than we are toady ? (We'll ignore the bigger question of "why would they bother" for the moment.)
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Yeah I know, you have a point. I guess I'm just stubborn and obsessed with semantics. If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like. But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it."PC", on the other hand, is not used exclusively to refer to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows. It can just as easily refer to any personal computer.
It's an interesting comparison, because it underscores the point nicely, though not in your favour. Much like "Americans" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to citizens of the USA, "PCs" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to x86-compatible PCs that aren't Macs. The only people who pretend to be confused about "Macs" not being "PCs" are smug, anal, semantically-obsessive nerds. This has been true for the better part of three decades, pretty much since the first Mac was released.
FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.
This is not true. All but the high-end Macs ship with an integrated GPU just like Intels. Faster, yes, but still not discrete - they're using system RAM.
OS X is genuinely superior technically to the alternatives.
No, it's not. At best it's on par, and even that's only been true since Snow Leopard.
Any reason you didn't call up former employees A & B after the move and offer them 1.5X once the interview process for replacement employees started in the new location?
Because by then they'd already found new jobs (without having to go through the expense and trauma of relocating across half the country).
The click is when you hit enter at the end of the line.
By default rm asks for confirmation before deleting a file. You have to override this behavior with the -f flag.
Only if you have an alias setup for 'rm' to 'rm -i'.
This is certainly something most _distros_ do, but it's not the default behaviour of 'rm' itself.
I came from that era, and earlier. No programmer in their right mind would ever do something so stupid as to let a book get bought and shipped by one click -- "What if the guy accidentally clicked it? There should be a confirming dialog!"
UNIX programmers certainly would - "if you didn't want to delete it, you shouldn't have typed 'rm file'".
I'd be cautious about showing another job offer. To many employers, that's a sign that you're ready to jump ship (maybe you are), and although they may make a compelling counter offer for the short term, in the long term you may find you're a marked man.
Absolutely. "I've had an offer from somewhere else, can you beat it" is the Joker, and you can only play it once. Depending on your situation, it might be worth it - but you need to be damn sure before you embark on the process and you *have* to be prepared to carry through with it (which is generally in direct conflict with why you might want to stay).
It's much better to show evidence of what the job market supports. IT Salary Surveys are a big way to do so, and so are anecdotes: "My old college buddy who has pretty much identical experience to me just took a job for $X," rather than, "I've been interviewing around, and I can make $X at this other company, they've extended me a job offer." You only do that if you really are ready to jump ship, and the counter offer had better be damn impressive to take the risk that you'll still have a job there 6 months later (when they have had time to find a replacement for you).
I've never worked for anyone who puts any stock in Salary Surveys when determining raises. They will do it for new hires (though not the kind of Salary Surveys you can find online, the ones that HR departments get), but never for raises. This often goes hand-in-hand with a "I'm never giving anyone a raise of more than X%" attitude, even though the salary being offered new hires is significantly more than X% over existing salaries.
Of course, this ends up with a ludicrous situations like the following (happened to me earlier this year trying to keep/hire staff):
Employees A and B are earning X while working in location P. Said employees have a great record and reputation in the company, and have been with it for 3-5 years (thus meaning they also had extensive experience with how the company operates and its environments). Company moves corporate headquarters to location Q. Employees A and B have to move because policy dictates that any employee must have a direct supervisor in the office they work in, and my job was moved to location Q. They are told they have to move as well or new people will be hired to replace them.
The budget for the new hires in location Q is approximately 1.6X - 1.9X (partially because the existing employees were underpaid and partially because location Q has a higher cost of living). However, I am told in no uncertain terms that I cannot offer employees A and B a raise greater than 1.15X (and even that was a struggle), even though I know (and have explained) that both would happily relocate for a new salary of 1.5X, plus relocation assistance totalling about 0.1X.
Thus, I was forced to let two extremely good people go, along with all their acquired knowledge, and spend _months_ short-staffed while trying to hire replacements (couldn't believe how hard it was to find decent people - recession my arse) who ended up being paid ca. 1.8X and with the associated losses in productivity due to a) aforementioned period of being short-staffed and b) the new employees taking the normal couple of months to become really useful.
The root cause of this madness seems to be the unerring and genuine belief that basically all employees are trivial to replace and there is no productivity lost during both a) the short-staffing period after people who couldn't get raises decamp to other employers and b) the 2-3 month training period before new employees become genuinely useful.
In the rare case that your current employer will match or beat a new offering, you're still left the fact that your employer had been knowingly underpaying you for the period you worked there.
There are only two ways an employer can find out what you're "worth":
* You tell them, with evidence (ie: another job offer).
* They hire someone else with your skillset and experience.
In what company does the CEO ever deal with customers?
All of them.
Now, he certainly doesn't deal with the kind of customer demographic *you* probably represent, but for those who individually make up whole- or double-digit percentages of revenue, you better believe they're getting a call - and quite possible an in-person visit - from the CEO (or someone similarly high up) every quarter or two.
Not to mention major shareholders if it's a public company, all of whom will get similarly personal contact.
The whole "rich people shouldn't be taxed as much because otherwise they won't create jobs" is pure, unmitigated bullshit.
Especially once you understand that nearly all costs involved in "creating jobs" are tax deductible.
We should feel cheated that portable laptops rarely get past 800 vertical pixels (14 inches and below,) considering that 5 years ago the old Dell D800 could pack 1920x1200 in 15.4" for business sectors. Search dell d800 resolution and read the official Dell PDF.
The Dell D800 was a 15" laptop. It's contemporary equivalent is an E6510, which can be ordered with a 1920x1080 screen.
That annoyed me too, at first, but eventually I realized it was just wasted space. It's far easier to simply trigger Expose to find the window I want, rather than associate which box in the tab bar is associated with which window on my desktop... especially if you have multiple windows from the same program open. On Windows you need the title bar text to distinguish between multiple instances/windows of the same program. On OS X, just select the one with the contents you're looking for.
That works fine for trivial workloads. When you're working with dozens of similar looking windows and 3-4 screens, however, it sucks (not to mention that single Menu bar). A multi-level (I keep three rows in mine) Taskbar with some button grouping tweaks is much better for multitasking.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food,clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.
Which "socialist countries" is he referring to ?
One big reason is because IT is an extremely immature field with no formal education requirements and basically zero accountability or liability concerns.
The other big reason is because IT folks know that in a few months when the goalposts shift again, all their documentation is going to be out of date anyway, so why bother documenting in the first place. :)
Am not sure why the browser would need 'enterprise tools' for AD (what kind of tools anyway?)...we use AD at work and Firefox is offered pre-packaged for all those, who want it. Tell me what you mean...
The two most obvious things would be SSO authentication and configuration via GPO.
It's stupid that modern 64 bit browsers don't have the same "continue" function my old 8 bit software had.
They do. Of course, that's of no use when the other end doesn't support it.
It handles dependencies seamlessly and without the need to seek out dodgey looking websites that would be prone to encourage the average consumer to flee to an iPad.
What dependencies ?
They're simply purveyors of Free Speech.
The problem i have with your agrument is that you're assuming we know everything about interstellar travel, while admitting we know nothing about it.
No, I'm not.
The only thing you need to stage an invasion across interplanetary distances is a way to get there.
That's like Neanderthals in England with a knowledge of seamanship barely extending to a hollowed-out-log canoe, and whose entire world could be walked across in a few weeks, saying "the only thing we need to stage an invasion of Antarctica is a way to get there".
You can't handwave away a factor of that magnitude.
We have no idea how that could be achieved, so we have no idea what technologies would be necessary to make it work.
That's not true at all. We have several ideas about how it could be achieved, and all require - at a minimum - amounts of energy and manufacturing capacity that are far, far beyond anything humanity is even theoretically capable of today. That, or an improvement in science and technology that is as incomprehensible to us today as a hydrogen bomb would be to a caveman.
You are looking at the task and assuming that we don't know how to do it because it is very difficult.
No, I'm looking at the task and _concluding_ that we couldn't do it because it is impossible with our current capabilities. Or, to flip it around, any society that it capable of it is vastly more advanced than we are.
But the task may be anywhere from completely impossible to very easy. We have no idea how difficult it would be, because we have no theoretical understanding of how it could be possible.
As above. We have several theoretical ideas about how it could be possible, ranging from nearly impossible to utterly fantastical. They all require harnessing amounts of energy ranging from barely believable to practically magical.
When it comes to expansion into space, we've barely discovered how to bang two rocks together to make a campfire. Which means if someone happens to roll up beside our campfire with tanks, attack helicopters and heavy bomber support, we're almost certainly screwed - assuming they don't just drive over us without even noticing.
The soviets were bound by no such constraints [...]
The relative lack of usage of chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons in that region suggests otherwise.
Unless the constraints you refer to is simply being barred from nuking the opposition into oblivion in which case the constraint is perfectly reasonable. It doesn't make sense to destroy the land you are conquering [...]
It certainly makes sense if all you're after is the land or resources, have no moral issues with genocide, and have the technology to construct weapons that can kill your opponents while leaving land and resources intact.
[...] and strong enemies who would destroy you in return is a valid and practical constraint.
We are in no meaningful way "strong" compared to a society capable of even simply manufacturing a space-based invasion fleet, let alone moving it across interplanetary distances. Heck, we can barely lift something the size of a small plane into orbit.
An invasion from a spacefaring society isn't going to be a fight like, say, the war in Afghanistan. It'd be more akin to a modern carrier battle group sailing up to Hawaii in about 1500 AD (and even that's probably being generous). Heck, you'd probably only need to knock out a few hundred - maybe a few thousand - strategic targets across the entire planet and humanity would likely _never_ recover, and be well on the path to complete destruction, even if no actual "invasion" was forthcoming afterwards.
There were no major scientific developments that lead to the industrial revolution, the tehoritical basis for the steam engine (and some working models) had existed for thousands of years. The enlightenment and all the associated scientific advancements happened hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. The only major scientific breakthroughs since then have been in theoretical physics (QM and relativity). All other advancements have been incremental (gaining new information, not dramatically changing the way we look at the world).
I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not relevant to the statement: "but fundamentally, we do not know a lot more today than we knew then". We know a lot more today than we did in the 18th century, nuclear power being one of the more obvious examples
Just look into this some more. There are plenty of examples of warfare between industrialized and non industrialized nations where the non-industrialized nation was victorious. Most of them were not lost over rules of engagement.
For example ?
You think based on what you know. A person from a non-industrialized society may look at many modern civil engineering achievements and reach the conclusion that we are a race powerful giants. But they would be wrong.
No they wouldn't. Well, they would be about the giants part, but there's no real reason to conclude that from "modern civil engineering achivements", practically all of which - where relevant - are sized for standard humans.
I am curious as to how you think a society could stage an invasion across interplanetary distances *without* being dramatically more technologically advanced and capable than we are toady ? (We'll ignore the bigger question of "why would they bother" for the moment.)
This country has been torn between turning fascist by the far righties, and socialist by the far lefties for the last 100 years or so.
There are "far lefties" in the US ? Where do they hide ?
Compiling, deploying, starting complex server software. Several minutes, twenty or thirty times a day. Almost purely disk bound.
Almost certainly by IOPS, though, not bandwidth.