I would always hire someone who I know is good over someone who I don't know whether he is good or not. And by "good" I mean both a good programmer and a good citizen.
So would you also include someone who appeared to fall into both categories but for other reasons? For example, someone who regularly participates in on-line programming forums might have plenty of sample code available there, and might be a great help to less experienced users of whatever languages or tools are being discussed. More generally, someone might have a strong professional programming background, but choose to do volunteer work for charity in their spare time. Obviously in that case you can't necessarily see a sample of their code on-line, though their work might be of excellent quality and they're certainly helping society in a useful way. Would these people attract your attention?
Are you really saying that you would always hire someone who's contributed to a FOSS project over someone who hasn't, just because they made a public contribution?
But if that were true, then Sun wouldn't have any problem open sourcing Java.
Java is the oddity in Sun's strategy, and something no-one seems to be able to work out. For example, if their strategic objective is to promote their hardware platform, then tactically supporting a fundamentally cross-platform development language is exactly the wrong thing to do.
What Sun probably should do is kill Java as fast as possible on all non-Sun hardware platforms, and attempt to drive all that investment other organisations have now made in Java code onto Sun servers. But they don't seem to have spotted that yet.
I'm sorry, but what you wrote is nonsense, pure and simple. The combination of Windows, Word and Excel was what put Microsoft where they are today. Back then those tools were so far ahead of the DOS-based word processing and spreadsheet market in usability that almost everyone jumped to Windows to use them. The interoperability of Word and Excel, and the standard user interface of all Windows applications, were two of the major selling points in the promotional material. The fact that Windows made it relatively straightforward for new players to offer their products with similar GUI look and feel helped a lot, too.
The web browser is almost irrelevant to Microsoft's current position. They hardly even noticed the web until the 95 generation, by which time the Windows product line had long since estabished itself as the dominant PC platform.
Sadly, I can confirm that several of the problems you mentioned actually are problems in the Windows port as well. The PDF output, for example, has terrible font problems on a bad day, and it seems to have all sorts of problems with mail merge and data sources in Writer. OpenOffice just isn't that polished a product yet, which is presumably why the dev team are more inclined to focus on core functionality than on porting to yet another platform.
This is a serious question: Why is [having all of your programs look and act basically the same] important? I've been using computers from twenty years and have never used an interface which is consistent across all applications. What am I missing?
You're missing the fact that most users aren't as familiar with their computers as you or I might be. To a more casual user, the more consistent the interface, the easier the learning curve and the more productive the tool.
One big reason that Windows took off in mainstream PC use was that it provided standard UI conventions: loading and saving files were done with the same commands on the same menus; clipboard use was consistent across applications (and later even between them); there were common ideas for menus, icons, toolbars, status bars, use of the mouse, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
The Mac is the same, with its own conventions, except that Apple have always had better UI people than Microsoft. Throwing in an OSS app that (like most OSS apps) is rather deficient in the usability stakes just isn't going to win users over when they've got much more polished products available to use instead, no matter how little it costs to buy or how community-centric the attached philosophy may be.
If the mac users are really that picky about the UI why don't they pay for the development of a mac version of OO or lobby apple for a real office suite or just say fuck it and buy msoffice?
Mac users already seem to have a very nice office apps suite available from Apple: iWork. I haven't used it myself, but from the publicity and screenshots, it looks like what Mac users have been crying out for for some time: a polished, powerful, professional office suite that isn't just Office for Windows but a version behind.
That's just a lame excuse for "We are the mighty Sun, but we don't help those Mac faggots, because Apple is now competing with us in servers. [...]
I always look at these threads with amazement. How can anyone really believe that a major corporation supports OSS for philosophical reasons? They do it because of basic economics, which they expect to benefit them in the long run. Typically, they are attempting to commoditize software on a particular hardware or OS platform they control, in order to increase the value of their position in that hardware/OS market, or more likely today in related service sectors. It is not surprising at all that Sun won't divert resources to support OSS on a competing platform!
It's also amazing that a few OSS evangelists can still chant the "if you don't like the development direction, you can just fork" mantra and maintain that OSS is future-proof and highly portable on this sort of basis. To an impartial observer, it's obvious that most of the major OSS projects (from Linux on down) are developed principally by a small number of commercial concerns, who have those same reasonable economic drivers for doing it. Unfortunately, it just isn't realistic for a handful of individuals who haven't been involved for a long time to pick up projects on this scale and carry on development. It has never been a good situation in the commercial, closed source world, and just opening the source to everyone (typically laughable documentation and testing included if you're lucky) doesn't make it any more likely that it will happen. Sun apparently understands this, and knows that in reality they still have far more control over StarOffice/OpenOffice development than anyone else, and will therefore use it to their advantage if they're even remotely smart.
Re:Little Known Fact...
on
Google Tidbits
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Now you know why someone's signature used to say "news for herds, stuff that spatters".:-)
I don't really like with the style you use, but I loved this line:
I play a strategic, Internet-based multiplayer team game, Team Fortress (TF)
:-)
I also noticed that despite claiming your education doesn't matter at your stage in your career, you still managed to mention which university you went to in passing...
CV is the abbreviation for the latin phrase curricula vitae
My mother (a professional careers advisor for many years) would despair. Twice in one subthread, people have not just spelt curriculum vitae incorrectly, but actually used the wrong words. Do be sure to get this right if you ever actually write one!
Mine too, but I didn't lend any weight to an article nearly two years old, referring to an anonymous law suit by one anonymous party against another anonymous party, with unspecified claims and unspecified defence, which was ongoing with no indication of likely outcome, just because it happened to mention the RNIB somewhere.:-)
Sorry, tried that. Almost every link there relates to US law, not UK. The only substantial story about the UK on the first couple of pages seems to be the article on A List Apart, which gives some pointers but implies that no significant cases had actually been brought at the time of writing (April 2004).
Background reading some time ago (before starting a major web project) turned up the usual sort of legalese: essentially, making "reasonable" provisions, where reasonable is left to the discretion of a court. The guidelines strongly suggest that what is reasonable for a web site would depend upon the nature of the organisation providing it and the products/services they offer, the resources they have available to make any adjustments, etc.
However, in all of that, I haven't seen anything to indicate that "broken" (meaning IE-only) web pages are discriminatory. That is, while there may well be a correlation between IE-only pages and those with poor accessibility, the former does not imply the latter.
The parent poster's letter is obviously well-intentioned, if somewhat flawed in places, so how about some more constructive feedback and fewer flames?
If I may contribute my own 2 $MINOR_CURRENCY:
The style certainly is rather patronising in places, as others have noted. Telling someone they "don't get it", for example, is unlikely to put them in a frame of mind where they lend any credibility to the remainder of your message (or even read it, I suspect). Perhaps something less hostile would be in order, maybe "I would like to thank you for an informative article, but also to question a couple of your arguments".
The other big problem, as I read it, is that you aren't clear about what is fact and what is your personal philosophy. Based only on the three points you challenge, I would have labelled you as an unrealistic evangelist before reading on, because in all three cases, I don't think you're objectively correct: Gecko is the engine used in Firefox, Microsoft certainly is far more relevant than Linux to most people who'll be reading that article and the Mac probably is too, and ActiveX support is not a bug, as numerous corporate Intranet sites that all use the technology for productive purposes demonstrate.
If you'd stick to the facts and objective benefits, you'd make a far more compelling series of arguments. For example, why not mention that one advantage of Open Source is that the applications are often available on a diverse range of platforms, and not just Windows and Mac? This is an advantage for users of multiple systems, because they can use the same software on each, and support for new systems is usually rapid and complete. Similarly, you could mention that while the lack of built-in support for ActiveX does stop some web pages displaying properly, many fans of Firefox see this as a benefit. You can back this up objectively by observing that few Internet sites use ActiveX constructively, but ActiveX controls are one of the major ways an average user's sytem admits malicious software that then spoils their browsing experience. In each case, these arguments are based on objective benefits for users, rather than any personal pro-OSS philosophy (which, being brutally honest, most people using or potentially using Firefox really don't care about).
That would be funnier if there weren't several ways to work around the anti-pop-up stuff in Firefox, and these weren't increasingly being used on ad-rich websites.:-(
They're also kicking up quite a storm in England over web access - including lawsuits.
Really? Do you have any citations for that? I know there are some legal changes in the works, but I've yet to see any examples of their practical applications, and certainly nothing where simply writing a page for IE rather than Firefox would get you in trouble in itself.
If I had mod points I'd give you a (+1, Insightful), but as it is I'll have to reply and back you up.
I'm a professional C++ programmer. In the past five years of development, I believe that I have written a grand total of 0 memory leak bugs, just by following basic solid programming techniques such as the "resource allocation is initialisation" idiom described in the parent post. Anyone writing C++ since about 1998BC should be familiar with this technique, and its use should be second nature.
The parent was also spot on about using tools to check for this, just in case you have some circumstance where using RIAA really isn't possible (or perhaps something obscure like a bug in your compiler or a library you're using). How else do you think I'm so confident that I haven't created any memory leaks?:-)
Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.
This is the default behavior in Firefox. If your copy isn't doing this it is because you turned it off. Turn it back on and once more it will ask for conformation.
I don't think it has always been that way, but it certainly has for a while now. It doesn't work if you're browsing full screen, though, which can be a nasty surprise. Perhaps it's meant to be useful for browsing pr0n when your boss is around?;-)
On a related subject, does anyone now how to make Firefox open a new tab/window when a link is followed from, e.g., a message in Thunderbird, please? It's very annoying to have your most recent window taken over, particularly if that contained something like a form that had taken a lot of time to fill in. The back button usually seems to work these days, but it's irritating even so. I've managed to do this several times recently, so if there's not already a way around it, it's probably annoying enough to justify a feature request to the developers.
I do hope not, at least not in its present form. Flash, like frames, has a few legitimate uses but presents a huge opportunity for abuse. In particular, by not respecting the usual web browsing conventions for navigation and bookmarking -- y'know, the basic foundations on which the entire WWW is built -- Flash apps alienate many users. Their increasing use for advertising will harm their usability even further, and probably result in a whole generation of users refusing to install the plug-in. In a sense that would be a shame, because sites certainly can be improved by a well thought out use of Flash. However, until the use of Flash is not 50% advertising trying to get around ad blockers and 49% "Flash sites", it's by far the least of evils.
Seriously, the web needs something new, fresh and well thought out - instead of continually flogging the dead horse !
Yep, but more than that, what the world really needs is another person to tell it how broken everything is without doing anything about it!
Wow! A thread about political backstabbing, and it's taken as many as four posts to invoke Godwin's Law...
Re:So shoot first and don't ask questions later?
on
Smart Guns are Coming
·
· Score: 1
Doesn't law enforcement need a warrant? My guess is that medical personnel likely enter unannounced... and this would be a problem.
If the police are there to, e.g., make an arrest or search the premises, then I believe that's true just about everywhere. However, it's common for police officers to be authorised to gain access immediately where time matters, such as the medical example I gave.
Somewhat less seriously, the police came out to let a plumber into my upstairs neighbour's flat after his water softener broke and he flooded my place. It turned out that he had been in all the time, and somehow slept through two large police officers trying to literally kick his door down for nearly five minutes at 2am, before finally waking up and letting them in!
Forced into theiving? Is this a not uncommon problem?
Sadly, in some places, it's not uncommon at all. Sure, it doesn't happen much in middle-class suburbia, but life for some kids is a series of no-win choices. Ask anyone who's done volunteer work for local childcare or homeless charities and the like, and they'll probably have some pretty shocking stories to tell you.
It might be legally prudent to put a sign up outside your house; I don't know. As I said, personally I have no objection to your having a weapon in your home, and using it in any reasonable way if your home is entered without your permission. My concern was only that your previous post seemed to be advocating attacking before identifying your target, which I'd consider to be a (the?) big no-no in weapon use in just about any situation. Perhaps I simply misunderstood your intent, in which case, my apologies.
I've posted some fairly lengthy comments on this subject on Slashdot before; go ahead and search my old posts if you want.
Here are a few quick tips for now:
A CV/resume is a taster to get you past the machines/HR drones and into the interview stage with people who matter. It should give a summary of your skills and abilities, and provide plenty of food for thought so they want to discuss the details with you later.
Make it easily scannable. It may go into a database, so make sure you use the standard buzzwords if only in a list. You get 20 seconds, max, to make an initial impression on the first human to see it. If you haven't got the reader by then, you're going to File 32, so make sure the biggies are obvious: how many years of experience you have, degree(s)/awarding institution(s), major areas you've worked in and tools/technologies you've used. This first phase is more about not ruling yourself out of the shortlist by being stupid rather than getting yourself hired immediately.
Personally, I like to put a short "skills" section for the buzzword lists at the top, followed by the slightly more detailed comments on my academic and professional background in a classic chronological order format. As another poster commented, these comments should be focussed on the results you achieved and just mention the buzzwords used, rather than the other way around. These are what get read after that 20 second mark, and will probably form the basis for any background questions at interview. Obviously, try to highlight your strengths and draw attention to areas you'd like to discuss further. Look for key skills in the job spec that you can demonstrate, and particularly for related areas you've worked in before.
Local customs vary, but it can be a good idea to include a little personal information: what do you like to do out of work? Some of this could be as relevant as past work experience -- perhaps you've worked on some OSS projects? Other things might demonstrate less tangible values like having people skills, planning ability, dedication and commitment, being trustworthy with money, etc. Finally, it just gives an insight into your personality and proves you're not Just Another Clone Developer, which will make you a far more interesting person to work with (and provide more starting points for your interviewer).
Hopefully that's some useful food for thought, but there are plenty of advice pages out there -- some much better than others, so go for the advice that's popular on most or all sites, and don't lend so much weight to one site's pet idea.
Absolutely: it sounds pretty clear that you would shoot first and (maybe) ask questions later, which should automatically remove whatever otherwise reasonable legal rights you might have had to bear arms.
If you'd been a paramedic, you'd know that you might actually be required to enter someone's home (normally with a police escort to gain access) in response to a report that the owner was incapacitated, for example. Please consider how you'd feel if you shot the paramedic/police officer who'd come to your home in response to such a call after you passed out and a worried friend/relative/neighbour called in that you hadn't been seen. And before you claim that you'd have answered the door when they knocked and called in, consider that if they're there in the first place, maybe you actually did pass out, have a fit, or otherwise miss their call without knowing it.
How about a case that's closer to the gray area: if an unfortunate young child, forced into working as a thief for someone else, breaks into someone's home to steal something, do they deserve to be shot dead? Is that proportionate? Were they any threat to you, and did you have no more moderate means of defending yourself?
I don't mind you having a weapon to defend your home, or for that matter as a last resort to defend your civil liberties. I do mind you having an attitude where you'd open fire without knowing what you were shooting at, ever, even in your own home.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd add "if and" before "how", but sure.
Wow. Is this one of those posts with a "..." step in the middle you have to fill in yourself? :-)
So would you also include someone who appeared to fall into both categories but for other reasons? For example, someone who regularly participates in on-line programming forums might have plenty of sample code available there, and might be a great help to less experienced users of whatever languages or tools are being discussed. More generally, someone might have a strong professional programming background, but choose to do volunteer work for charity in their spare time. Obviously in that case you can't necessarily see a sample of their code on-line, though their work might be of excellent quality and they're certainly helping society in a useful way. Would these people attract your attention?
Are you really saying that you would always hire someone who's contributed to a FOSS project over someone who hasn't, just because they made a public contribution?
Java is the oddity in Sun's strategy, and something no-one seems to be able to work out. For example, if their strategic objective is to promote their hardware platform, then tactically supporting a fundamentally cross-platform development language is exactly the wrong thing to do.
What Sun probably should do is kill Java as fast as possible on all non-Sun hardware platforms, and attempt to drive all that investment other organisations have now made in Java code onto Sun servers. But they don't seem to have spotted that yet.
I'm sorry, but what you wrote is nonsense, pure and simple. The combination of Windows, Word and Excel was what put Microsoft where they are today. Back then those tools were so far ahead of the DOS-based word processing and spreadsheet market in usability that almost everyone jumped to Windows to use them. The interoperability of Word and Excel, and the standard user interface of all Windows applications, were two of the major selling points in the promotional material. The fact that Windows made it relatively straightforward for new players to offer their products with similar GUI look and feel helped a lot, too.
The web browser is almost irrelevant to Microsoft's current position. They hardly even noticed the web until the 95 generation, by which time the Windows product line had long since estabished itself as the dominant PC platform.
Sadly, I can confirm that several of the problems you mentioned actually are problems in the Windows port as well. The PDF output, for example, has terrible font problems on a bad day, and it seems to have all sorts of problems with mail merge and data sources in Writer. OpenOffice just isn't that polished a product yet, which is presumably why the dev team are more inclined to focus on core functionality than on porting to yet another platform.
You're missing the fact that most users aren't as familiar with their computers as you or I might be. To a more casual user, the more consistent the interface, the easier the learning curve and the more productive the tool.
One big reason that Windows took off in mainstream PC use was that it provided standard UI conventions: loading and saving files were done with the same commands on the same menus; clipboard use was consistent across applications (and later even between them); there were common ideas for menus, icons, toolbars, status bars, use of the mouse, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
The Mac is the same, with its own conventions, except that Apple have always had better UI people than Microsoft. Throwing in an OSS app that (like most OSS apps) is rather deficient in the usability stakes just isn't going to win users over when they've got much more polished products available to use instead, no matter how little it costs to buy or how community-centric the attached philosophy may be.
Mac users already seem to have a very nice office apps suite available from Apple: iWork. I haven't used it myself, but from the publicity and screenshots, it looks like what Mac users have been crying out for for some time: a polished, powerful, professional office suite that isn't just Office for Windows but a version behind.
I always look at these threads with amazement. How can anyone really believe that a major corporation supports OSS for philosophical reasons? They do it because of basic economics, which they expect to benefit them in the long run. Typically, they are attempting to commoditize software on a particular hardware or OS platform they control, in order to increase the value of their position in that hardware/OS market, or more likely today in related service sectors. It is not surprising at all that Sun won't divert resources to support OSS on a competing platform!
It's also amazing that a few OSS evangelists can still chant the "if you don't like the development direction, you can just fork" mantra and maintain that OSS is future-proof and highly portable on this sort of basis. To an impartial observer, it's obvious that most of the major OSS projects (from Linux on down) are developed principally by a small number of commercial concerns, who have those same reasonable economic drivers for doing it. Unfortunately, it just isn't realistic for a handful of individuals who haven't been involved for a long time to pick up projects on this scale and carry on development. It has never been a good situation in the commercial, closed source world, and just opening the source to everyone (typically laughable documentation and testing included if you're lucky) doesn't make it any more likely that it will happen. Sun apparently understands this, and knows that in reality they still have far more control over StarOffice/OpenOffice development than anyone else, and will therefore use it to their advantage if they're even remotely smart.
Now you know why someone's signature used to say "news for herds, stuff that spatters". :-)
I don't really like with the style you use, but I loved this line:
:-)
I also noticed that despite claiming your education doesn't matter at your stage in your career, you still managed to mention which university you went to in passing...
My mother (a professional careers advisor for many years) would despair. Twice in one subthread, people have not just spelt curriculum vitae incorrectly, but actually used the wrong words. Do be sure to get this right if you ever actually write one!
Fantastic, that (Tools->Options->Advanced->Tabbed Browsing) was exactly what I was looking for. Many thanks.
Mine too, but I didn't lend any weight to an article nearly two years old, referring to an anonymous law suit by one anonymous party against another anonymous party, with unspecified claims and unspecified defence, which was ongoing with no indication of likely outcome, just because it happened to mention the RNIB somewhere. :-)
Sorry, tried that. Almost every link there relates to US law, not UK. The only substantial story about the UK on the first couple of pages seems to be the article on A List Apart, which gives some pointers but implies that no significant cases had actually been brought at the time of writing (April 2004).
Background reading some time ago (before starting a major web project) turned up the usual sort of legalese: essentially, making "reasonable" provisions, where reasonable is left to the discretion of a court. The guidelines strongly suggest that what is reasonable for a web site would depend upon the nature of the organisation providing it and the products/services they offer, the resources they have available to make any adjustments, etc.
However, in all of that, I haven't seen anything to indicate that "broken" (meaning IE-only) web pages are discriminatory. That is, while there may well be a correlation between IE-only pages and those with poor accessibility, the former does not imply the latter.
The parent poster's letter is obviously well-intentioned, if somewhat flawed in places, so how about some more constructive feedback and fewer flames?
If I may contribute my own 2 $MINOR_CURRENCY:
The style certainly is rather patronising in places, as others have noted. Telling someone they "don't get it", for example, is unlikely to put them in a frame of mind where they lend any credibility to the remainder of your message (or even read it, I suspect). Perhaps something less hostile would be in order, maybe "I would like to thank you for an informative article, but also to question a couple of your arguments".
The other big problem, as I read it, is that you aren't clear about what is fact and what is your personal philosophy. Based only on the three points you challenge, I would have labelled you as an unrealistic evangelist before reading on, because in all three cases, I don't think you're objectively correct: Gecko is the engine used in Firefox, Microsoft certainly is far more relevant than Linux to most people who'll be reading that article and the Mac probably is too, and ActiveX support is not a bug, as numerous corporate Intranet sites that all use the technology for productive purposes demonstrate.
If you'd stick to the facts and objective benefits, you'd make a far more compelling series of arguments. For example, why not mention that one advantage of Open Source is that the applications are often available on a diverse range of platforms, and not just Windows and Mac? This is an advantage for users of multiple systems, because they can use the same software on each, and support for new systems is usually rapid and complete. Similarly, you could mention that while the lack of built-in support for ActiveX does stop some web pages displaying properly, many fans of Firefox see this as a benefit. You can back this up objectively by observing that few Internet sites use ActiveX constructively, but ActiveX controls are one of the major ways an average user's sytem admits malicious software that then spoils their browsing experience. In each case, these arguments are based on objective benefits for users, rather than any personal pro-OSS philosophy (which, being brutally honest, most people using or potentially using Firefox really don't care about).
That would be funnier if there weren't several ways to work around the anti-pop-up stuff in Firefox, and these weren't increasingly being used on ad-rich websites. :-(
Really? Do you have any citations for that? I know there are some legal changes in the works, but I've yet to see any examples of their practical applications, and certainly nothing where simply writing a page for IE rather than Firefox would get you in trouble in itself.
If I had mod points I'd give you a (+1, Insightful), but as it is I'll have to reply and back you up.
I'm a professional C++ programmer. In the past five years of development, I believe that I have written a grand total of 0 memory leak bugs, just by following basic solid programming techniques such as the "resource allocation is initialisation" idiom described in the parent post. Anyone writing C++ since about 1998BC should be familiar with this technique, and its use should be second nature.
The parent was also spot on about using tools to check for this, just in case you have some circumstance where using RIAA really isn't possible (or perhaps something obscure like a bug in your compiler or a library you're using). How else do you think I'm so confident that I haven't created any memory leaks? :-)
I don't think it has always been that way, but it certainly has for a while now. It doesn't work if you're browsing full screen, though, which can be a nasty surprise. Perhaps it's meant to be useful for browsing pr0n when your boss is around? ;-)
On a related subject, does anyone now how to make Firefox open a new tab/window when a link is followed from, e.g., a message in Thunderbird, please? It's very annoying to have your most recent window taken over, particularly if that contained something like a form that had taken a lot of time to fill in. The back button usually seems to work these days, but it's irritating even so. I've managed to do this several times recently, so if there's not already a way around it, it's probably annoying enough to justify a feature request to the developers.
I do hope not, at least not in its present form. Flash, like frames, has a few legitimate uses but presents a huge opportunity for abuse. In particular, by not respecting the usual web browsing conventions for navigation and bookmarking -- y'know, the basic foundations on which the entire WWW is built -- Flash apps alienate many users. Their increasing use for advertising will harm their usability even further, and probably result in a whole generation of users refusing to install the plug-in. In a sense that would be a shame, because sites certainly can be improved by a well thought out use of Flash. However, until the use of Flash is not 50% advertising trying to get around ad blockers and 49% "Flash sites", it's by far the least of evils.
Yep, but more than that, what the world really needs is another person to tell it how broken everything is without doing anything about it!
Wow! A thread about political backstabbing, and it's taken as many as four posts to invoke Godwin's Law...
If the police are there to, e.g., make an arrest or search the premises, then I believe that's true just about everywhere. However, it's common for police officers to be authorised to gain access immediately where time matters, such as the medical example I gave.
Somewhat less seriously, the police came out to let a plumber into my upstairs neighbour's flat after his water softener broke and he flooded my place. It turned out that he had been in all the time, and somehow slept through two large police officers trying to literally kick his door down for nearly five minutes at 2am, before finally waking up and letting them in!
Sadly, in some places, it's not uncommon at all. Sure, it doesn't happen much in middle-class suburbia, but life for some kids is a series of no-win choices. Ask anyone who's done volunteer work for local childcare or homeless charities and the like, and they'll probably have some pretty shocking stories to tell you.
It might be legally prudent to put a sign up outside your house; I don't know. As I said, personally I have no objection to your having a weapon in your home, and using it in any reasonable way if your home is entered without your permission. My concern was only that your previous post seemed to be advocating attacking before identifying your target, which I'd consider to be a (the?) big no-no in weapon use in just about any situation. Perhaps I simply misunderstood your intent, in which case, my apologies.
I've posted some fairly lengthy comments on this subject on Slashdot before; go ahead and search my old posts if you want.
Here are a few quick tips for now:
Hopefully that's some useful food for thought, but there are plenty of advice pages out there -- some much better than others, so go for the advice that's popular on most or all sites, and don't lend so much weight to one site's pet idea.
Absolutely: it sounds pretty clear that you would shoot first and (maybe) ask questions later, which should automatically remove whatever otherwise reasonable legal rights you might have had to bear arms.
If you'd been a paramedic, you'd know that you might actually be required to enter someone's home (normally with a police escort to gain access) in response to a report that the owner was incapacitated, for example. Please consider how you'd feel if you shot the paramedic/police officer who'd come to your home in response to such a call after you passed out and a worried friend/relative/neighbour called in that you hadn't been seen. And before you claim that you'd have answered the door when they knocked and called in, consider that if they're there in the first place, maybe you actually did pass out, have a fit, or otherwise miss their call without knowing it.
How about a case that's closer to the gray area: if an unfortunate young child, forced into working as a thief for someone else, breaks into someone's home to steal something, do they deserve to be shot dead? Is that proportionate? Were they any threat to you, and did you have no more moderate means of defending yourself?
I don't mind you having a weapon to defend your home, or for that matter as a last resort to defend your civil liberties. I do mind you having an attitude where you'd open fire without knowing what you were shooting at, ever, even in your own home.