Re:The word is treason
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
Examples of people who committed treason: the founding fathers of the United States. They took up arms against the then-legal government, and against law-abiding citizens.
"Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? If it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
it's plausible that the Athlon's performance is going to lag quite a bit more than it already does.
It doesn't. The fastest X86 processor is currently made by AMD. See a non-BAPCo performance comparison.
AMD has always been the value chip company. You can't expect them to keep up with Intel forever
Are you an Intel employee? Intel isn't keeping up with AMD. The P4 is underperforming, as well as overpriced. Take a look at the web page referenced in the lead story.
The interview questions would have to far superecede that question in complexity.
I've interviewed a lot of programmers... lost count of how many over the years, but probably over 100. The one thing you learn from giving technical interviews is, how amazingly bad some "programmers" are at programming. Tell applicants to write a piece of code to solve some simple problem - even something as trivial as this - give them time - it will amaze you how many of them just can't do it. And these are people with reasonable-looking resumes who have held down programming jobs, in some cases for years. Expect to see this even more if "extreme programming" catches on in a big way. One-half the "programmers" will actually be non-programmers, is what I think will happen.
Of course you're right that if you really want top-notch people, you need to use a more substantial test. But most programming jobs do not require top-notch people, and even a very trivial test is better than no test, which is how hiring is usually done.
It seems that if the American people are going to protect their rights, they are going to have to do so actively.
That's always been true, not just in America but in every country. The fact that so few people seem to understand it, is the most serious long-term threat to our freedom. Politicians want power, that's why most of them became politicians. Unless constantly resisted, they will grab more and more power over our lives.
The reason its done in hospitals in North America is to reduce the risk of complications.
Your comment suggests that you might not know that the infant mortality rate is lower in Holland than in the USA, and so is the maternal mortality rate. The most recent figures I have in front of me are from 1990, when the maternal mortality rate was 9 per 100,000 in the US and 5 per 100,000 in Holland; the infant mortality rate was 10 per 1,000 in the US and 8 per 1,000 in Holland. These numbers are from The Economist book of vital world statistics which in turn cites World Health Organization and UN sources. I have seen a very recent comparison which also quoted lower rates for Holland than the US but I don't have the exact numbers. I doubt they have changed significantly.
Unfortunately, there's not an ACLU SIG on Intellectual Property yet, so once you give the nut-jobs your money
My message was about the EFF. Your reply seems to be about the ACLU. They are unrelated. Please check out the EFF web site before dismissing them as a "radical organization" - which IMHO they are not.
Programming is not something that everybody can do. The problem is not: How can I make these people into programmers?, because that might not have a solution.
The right question is: How do I select good programmers to hire?
Hiring the right people may be the most important part of the job, for a manager of software developers. It is also usually neglected. There are people who have received a salary as programmers for years, who just can't program.
By the way, IMHO the "Extreme Programming" fad (people programming in pairs) is just a way to halve the productivity of the capable programmers while hiding the fact that the rest of the team would be better employed in other occupations.
And, by the way, you need to check some numbers [sustance.com] before saying there's less Catalan speakers worldwide than German speakers in Paraguay. That's plain stupid
I'm not so "stupid" as to believe numbers on http://www.sustance.com/catalan/ , a page whose stated purpose is the promotion of Catalan. Only in tiny Andorra (population: about 67,000) is Catalan an official language, and even there, 60% of the population speaks Spanish, according to Ethnologue
A volunteer, to correct you and another responder who claimed I didn't understand the concept, is not simply someone who works for free. That's a hobbyist. "Volunteer" includes the notion of being motivated mainly by the ideal of serving the organisation to which one volunteers. Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.
That's exactly the drawback to entities like the EFF, though; the ways in which one can get involved are usually limited to writing out a check,
The EFF is very effective considering its limited resources. Sending a check to the EFF is probably the most effective way to "get involved". Moreover, their web site alerts you to upcoming legislation, and tells you who to contact to express your opposition.
If half the people who bitch about Hollings, the DMCA, etc had joined EFF, we'd have had a chance to stop the damage before it happened. Talk is cheap. Send them $.
I am told that it is a federal offense to use anything but commercially produced fuel in a vehicle.
Why would any sane person care? Has any law enforcement officer ever inspected the contents of your fuel tank?
Basically there are 3 kinds of laws:
1. Laws against doing bad things (stealing, throwing garbage on the street etc). Reasonable people wouldn't do these things anyway.
2. Crap laws that are enforced to a significant extent (don't carry dope, etc.) Prudent people observe these laws to avoid hassle or worse.
3. Crap laws that are not enforced. Sensible people ignore these laws. Let's be sensible, OK?
And oh, btw, $565 per day isn't cheap, it's like $135,000 a year in raw salary
"Cost to the employer of $565/day" corresponds to a salary of $45k to $60k/year, depending on a lot of factors. Any manager who has costed a project will tell you this. To calculate the true cost of employing an engineer (say), you have to figure in the cost of providing office space/heating/air-con, desk space, infrastructure like HR department, line management, employer's social security tax and employment tax, and some of the benefits. All this usually adds up to a bit more than the actual salary. Then you have to figure that the average employee works about 1760 hours/year, allowing for vacation and sick leave. So if the actual salary is $60k/year, that's 60000/1760 = $34/hour or $272/day, the cost to the employer will be at least double that, usually significantly more.
Release of Debian 3.0 is great news.
But those of us who have been regularly checking their web site in anticipation will be surprised, because the number of release-critical bugs has increased lately, and stands at 186 as I type. Check for yourself - up from a low point of under 100 a month ago.
Back to the release notes: we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan? The total number of speakers of Catalan, worldwide, is far less than the number of native Chinese speakers in New York (or even in Queens). And less than the number of native German speakers in Paraguay. The release notes are not provided in either Chinese or German.
Right. Debian "stable" (Potato) is still based on the 2.2 kernel. That's so old that it doesn't have USB support. You have to question whether it's still a viable distro.
However, I think you are unfair in blaming the package maintainers - the key packages are not what held up Debian. IMHO the real problem is that TPTB within Debian decided to support 11 different hardware architectures. I think there is real value in targeting more than just Intel/AMD; like PowerPC, ARM, the emerging 64-bit cpus, maybe 1 or 2 others. But when you start supporting dying or marginal hardware, it's not just a big waste of scarce people time, it also gets harder to find machines to do full testing on, and that seems to have contributed to the long delay. I guess we just have to be grateful that there are other distros out there that can build on Debian's work and avoid their mistakes.
That's funny, because he was a socialist.
Thinking about his experiences caused him to change his mind, as intelligent people do. Animal Farm appeared in 1946, and 1984 appeared in 1949. In 1984, which you obviously haven't read, the totalitarian society has evolved from English Socialism.
I doubt that the code for the fragment shading and the vertex programming is precisely the same as whatever MS has. If they are claiming just the idea,
You're confusing patents with copyrights. They're completely different. The writer of the code (not Microsoft) is the initial owner of the copyright on the code. But a patent covers the idea behind the code. A patent is a little more than "just the idea", to get a patent you have to show that the idea is practical, but it's legally separate from the copyright in a specific piece of code. It's also much more difficult to deal with - if someone holds copyright on code, you can circumvent it by the well-known clean-room techniques developed in the early 1980s by the writers of BIOSes for clone PCs. But if the code uses ideas which are part of the patent, it still can be blocked by the patent.
you are either giving in, or going without most music.
Correction: you may be going without most new commercial music.
All the music I listen to was written at least a couple of hundred years ago, and while there are occasionally new performances that are possibly a little bit better than CDs already in the catalog, I wouldn't really miss them if they stopped coming.
You need to write different stylesheets for Netscape 4 and IE/Mozilla, minimum.
No, you don't.
The whole features race between browsers is completely pointless. Most of the features added to HTML since about version 3.2 have been completely pointless, aimed at immature users who are impressed by talk of "features" and by time-wasting rubbish like Shockwave. People who actually want to USE the web, to get real information, place secure orders with merchants, etc don't need eye-candy, don't want it and don't have time for it. The only really useful feature added to any browser in the last 3 years that I can think of offhand, is the capability to permanently disable animation. How much simpler it would have been if that nonsense had never been implemented in the first place!
It seems not to be widely known that Mr Cage went on to publish a piece entitled "0 minutes 0 seconds", described by the composer as being playable "by anyone, at any time, on any instrument, anywhere". Provided one has the permission of the copyright owner, of course...
If your old company were worth working for, they'd be paying you what you're worth. Do you plan to threaten to quit every time you're due a raise?
Anyone who thinks he/she is underpaid, should try presenting the case for a raise to their manager. If the employer doesn't want to give a raise, go looking. (You might find your current pay is OK, after all.) Then if you get a good offer, take it and go. It's not just about money; it's about being appreciated at your true worth, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Examples of people who committed treason: the founding fathers of the United States. They took up arms against the then-legal government, and against law-abiding citizens.
"Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason?
If it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
it's plausible that the Athlon's performance is going to lag quite a bit more than it already does.
It doesn't. The fastest X86 processor is currently made by AMD. See a non-BAPCo performance comparison.
AMD has always been the value chip company. You can't expect them to keep up with Intel forever
Are you an Intel employee? Intel isn't keeping up with AMD. The P4 is underperforming, as well as overpriced. Take a look at the web page referenced in the lead story.
Are they going to sue the b*st*rds?
(If they need a donation to help them do that - they have only to ask, as far as I'm concerned.)
The interview questions would have to far superecede that question in complexity.
... lost count of how many over the years, but probably over 100. The one thing you learn from giving technical interviews is, how amazingly bad some "programmers" are at programming. Tell applicants to write a piece of code to solve some simple problem - even something as trivial as this - give them time - it will amaze you how many of them just can't do it. And these are people with reasonable-looking resumes who have held down programming jobs, in some cases for years. Expect to see this even more if "extreme programming" catches on in a big way. One-half the "programmers" will actually be non-programmers, is what I think will happen.
I've interviewed a lot of programmers
Of course you're right that if you really want top-notch people, you need to use a more substantial test. But most programming jobs do not require top-notch people, and even a very trivial test is better than no test, which is how hiring is usually done.
It's hardly "news" 4 days later.
It seems that if the American people are going to protect their rights, they are going to have to do so actively.
That's always been true, not just in America but in every country. The fact that so few people seem to understand it, is the most serious long-term threat to our freedom. Politicians want power, that's why most of them became politicians. Unless constantly resisted, they will grab more and more power over our lives.
The reason its done in hospitals in North America is to reduce the risk of complications.
Your comment suggests that you might not know that the infant mortality rate is lower in Holland than in the USA, and so is the maternal mortality rate. The most recent figures I have in front of me are from 1990, when the maternal mortality rate was 9 per 100,000 in the US and 5 per 100,000 in Holland; the infant mortality rate was 10 per 1,000 in the US and 8 per 1,000 in Holland. These numbers are from The Economist book of vital world statistics which in turn cites World Health Organization and UN sources. I have seen a very recent comparison which also quoted lower rates for Holland than the US but I don't have the exact numbers. I doubt they have changed significantly.
Unfortunately, there's not an ACLU SIG on Intellectual Property yet, so once you give the nut-jobs your money
My message was about the EFF. Your reply seems to be about the ACLU. They are unrelated. Please check out the EFF web site before dismissing them as a "radical organization" - which IMHO they are not.
Of course, you've already joined the EFF and sent them at least $100
Have you ?
Programming is not something that everybody can do. The problem is not: How can I make these people into programmers?, because that might not have a solution.
The right question is: How do I select good programmers to hire?
Hiring the right people may be the most important part of the job, for a manager of software developers. It is also usually neglected. There are people who have received a salary as programmers for years, who just can't program.
By the way, IMHO the "Extreme Programming" fad (people programming in pairs) is just a way to halve the productivity of the capable programmers while hiding the fact that the rest of the team would be better employed in other occupations.
And, by the way, you need to check some numbers [sustance.com] before saying there's less Catalan speakers worldwide than German speakers in Paraguay. That's plain stupid
I'm not so "stupid" as to believe numbers on
http://www.sustance.com/catalan/ , a page whose stated purpose is the promotion of Catalan. Only in tiny Andorra (population: about 67,000) is Catalan an official language, and even there, 60% of the population speaks Spanish, according to Ethnologue
A volunteer, to correct you and another responder who claimed I didn't understand the concept, is not simply someone who works for free. That's a hobbyist. "Volunteer" includes the notion of being motivated mainly by the ideal of serving the organisation to which one volunteers. Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.
That's exactly the drawback to entities like the EFF, though; the ways in which one can get involved are usually limited to writing out a check,
The EFF is very effective considering its limited resources.
Sending a check to the EFF is probably the most effective way to "get involved". Moreover, their web site alerts you to upcoming legislation, and tells you who to contact to express your opposition.
If half the people who bitch about Hollings, the DMCA, etc had joined EFF, we'd have had a chance to stop the damage before it happened. Talk is cheap. Send them $.
I am told that it is a federal offense to use anything but commercially produced fuel in a vehicle.
Why would any sane person care? Has any law enforcement officer ever inspected the contents of your fuel tank?
Basically there are 3 kinds of laws:
1. Laws against doing bad things (stealing, throwing garbage on the street etc). Reasonable people wouldn't do these things anyway.
2. Crap laws that are enforced to a significant extent (don't carry dope, etc.) Prudent people observe these laws to avoid hassle or worse.
3. Crap laws that are not enforced. Sensible people ignore these laws. Let's be sensible, OK?
And oh, btw, $565 per day isn't cheap, it's like $135,000 a year in raw salary
"Cost to the employer of $565/day" corresponds to a salary of $45k to $60k/year, depending on a lot of factors. Any manager who has costed a project will tell you this. To calculate the true cost of employing an engineer (say), you have to figure in the cost of providing office space/heating/air-con, desk space, infrastructure like HR department, line management, employer's social security tax and employment tax, and some of the benefits. All this usually adds up to a bit more than the actual salary. Then you have to figure that the average employee works about 1760 hours/year, allowing for vacation and sick leave. So if the actual salary is $60k/year, that's 60000/1760 = $34/hour or $272/day, the cost to the employer will be at least double that, usually significantly more.
Release of Debian 3.0 is great news.
But those of us who have been regularly checking their web site in anticipation will be surprised, because the number of release-critical bugs has increased lately, and stands at 186 as I type.
Check for yourself - up from a low point of under 100 a month ago.
Back to the release notes: we understand Debian likes to be eccentric, but isn't it silly to provide the release notes in Catalan? The total number of speakers of Catalan, worldwide, is far less than the number of native Chinese speakers in New York (or even in Queens). And less than the number of native German speakers in Paraguay. The release notes are not provided in either Chinese or German.
Right. Debian "stable" (Potato) is still based on the 2.2 kernel. That's so old that it doesn't have USB support. You have to question whether it's still a viable distro.
However, I think you are unfair in blaming the package maintainers - the key packages are not what held up Debian. IMHO the real problem is that TPTB within Debian decided to support 11 different hardware architectures. I think there is real value in targeting more than just Intel/AMD; like PowerPC, ARM, the emerging 64-bit cpus, maybe 1 or 2 others. But when you start supporting dying or marginal hardware, it's not just a big waste of scarce people time, it also gets harder to find machines to do full testing on, and that seems to have contributed to the long delay. I guess we just have to be grateful that there are other distros out there that can build on Debian's work and avoid their mistakes.
That's funny, because he was a socialist.
Thinking about his experiences caused him to change his mind, as intelligent people do. Animal Farm appeared in 1946, and 1984 appeared in 1949. In 1984, which you obviously haven't read, the totalitarian society has evolved from English Socialism.
I doubt that the code for the fragment shading and the vertex programming is precisely the same as whatever MS has. If they are claiming just the idea,
You're confusing patents with copyrights. They're completely different. The writer of the code (not Microsoft) is the initial owner of the copyright on the code. But a patent covers the idea behind the code. A patent is a little more than "just the idea", to get a patent you have to show that the idea is practical, but it's legally separate from the copyright in a specific piece of code. It's also much more difficult to deal with - if someone holds copyright on code, you can circumvent it by the well-known clean-room techniques developed in the early 1980s by the writers of BIOSes for clone PCs. But if the code uses ideas which are part of the patent, it still can be blocked by the patent.
From the article:
I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date
But it lets you be out-of-date on 11 different architectures!
you are either giving in, or going without most music.
Correction: you may be going without most new commercial music.
All the music I listen to was written at least a couple of hundred years ago, and while there are occasionally new performances that are possibly a little bit better than CDs already in the catalog, I wouldn't really miss them if they stopped coming.
Lucas (...) I mean, it's not like he could do any worse, right?
Wrong, unfortunately...!
You need to write different stylesheets for Netscape 4 and IE/Mozilla, minimum.
No, you don't.
The whole features race between browsers is completely pointless. Most of the features added to HTML since about version 3.2 have been completely pointless, aimed at immature users who are impressed by talk of "features" and by time-wasting rubbish like Shockwave. People who actually want to USE the web, to get real information, place secure orders with merchants, etc don't need eye-candy, don't want it and don't have time for it. The only really useful feature added to any browser in the last 3 years that I can think of offhand, is the capability to permanently disable animation. How much simpler it would have been if that nonsense had never been implemented in the first place!
It seems not to be widely known that Mr Cage went on to publish a piece entitled "0 minutes 0 seconds", described by the composer as being playable "by anyone, at any time, on any instrument, anywhere". Provided one has the permission of the copyright owner, of course ...
You missed the page footer, the last line of which says "Please use IE4.0 ..."
If your old company were worth working for, they'd be paying you what you're worth. Do you plan to threaten to quit every time you're due a raise?
Anyone who thinks he/she is underpaid, should try presenting the case for a raise to their manager. If the employer doesn't want to give a raise, go looking. (You might find your current pay is OK, after all.) Then if you get a good offer, take it and go. It's not just about money; it's about being appreciated at your true worth, as well.