Really ? That is how we have decided that the mentioned work places are the worst to work in ? A few random photographs of the workplaces ? This must be one of the worst excuses for a 10 list that I have seen. The workplace/cube is certainly one of the ways to measure the top-ness (sic) of a workplace but just that ? Come on people, we all know that there are a lot of things which into making a great workplace. The dimensions and colour of your cubicle is probably just one of them.
This was inevitable. I remember, about a year back, in India, over a beer, discussing the defense scenario with a colleague who was an engineer/researcher with the Indian Navy for about 20 years. His words -- "What we need is a secure GPS system soon. We all know the American version is civilian and of course they can shut it down whenever they want. It is a major desirable in your defense program." I think the Chinese too think the same way. They just came up with it. I would not be surprised if India announced the same within half a decade. It is what it is. A desirable in the military program. Period.
I am not an american, and hence had a small question. Cases, (however flimsy) do at the end of time, take up some of the state/national judicial bandwidth. Does the person suing pay for that bandwidth or does the taxpayer pay for it ? Just a question, since this case sounds a bit illogical to me and so I was wondering whether the taxpayer would be comfortable paying for it.
I thought that we had hit the pits with Toyota's MAINT REQUIRED flashing LED on the dashboard. It undoubtedly was the dumbest piece of instrumentation I had ever seen. Let me explain -- The flashing of this led has nothing to do with the mechanical state of the car. Nope, no instrumentation connected to that LED except a timer. Reset it buy pressing a few buttons here and there and you dont need MAINT ! Then it got worse. BMW comes up with a even lousier idea -- If your car changes lanes, and you dont have the blinker on, the steering wheel vibrates ! And now this. In all honesty, the mind bleeds. Guys, if you want to _really_ make better cars give us more muscle, smoother gearboxes, better crash safety and mileage. Also, do not cover up lack of innovation with eye-candy. Please leave the driving to the customer.
I wish I had moderation points to mod the parent up. I completely concur. It is amazing that in such a mature democracy such as the UK, people can get away after spouting such nonsense. Comments or plans of this variety deserve a few heads to roll for fucks sake ! At lease _somebody_ should take to the streets man ! Somebody !
1. Yes I have been using P2P, but I have been torrenting legal stuff like unlicensed media and free software. So why the warning ? 2. Could you please give me the reasons as to why you think I am downloading illegal content ? 3. Could you please show me the logs which show I have downloaded illegal content ? 4. What are the methods you have followed to come to the conclusion that the stuff I am downloading is illegal ?
If the ISP has valid answers for my questions, I will have no choice but to comply. It after all, is the law. The answers however, I would need.
Any device one uses to store/transmit any personal information is a security threat. Would be a good idea to install software/hardware which you know are secure. Otherwise everything is pretty much open to exploitation.
Very American viewpoint actually. I have lived in Finland and India and have visited the US a couple of times. The problem with the wireless networks in the US is that they are expensive and the tariff plans are inconvenient. Charging the customer for incoming calls when in the home network only happens in the US as far as I know. I get a feel that the service providers do not intend to the cellphone to be the primary connectivity channel for the consumer -- they want the consumer to have a cellphone as a supplement to the landline. As opposed to that situation, in the third world, a large number of people have actually bypassed the landlines to get themselves a mobile phone, as have I. It also makes a lot of financial sense since GSM/CDMA being a mature technologies, can be deployed with a fraction of the copper which would be required for a PSTN. This dramatically cuts down the network deployment time and cost which suits the third world just fine. In the developed world, as in Finland, all the existing copper is used for DSL. The primary connectivity device is the GSM phone. As regards the significant volume of comments vis-a-vis the voice quality of cellphones, I do admit that the air interface is not physically capable of producing CD quality sound, but sadly, neither is the normal landline. In all honesty, the difference of quality is minimal. Bad quality of sound on wireless phones at most times is not because of the technology, but because of network coverage. If the service providers are good enough, one will not face a problem with voice quality. I have not used a CDMA network in the US but have used the GSM networks, and I have to admit that the quality of GSM coverage in the US is not very impressive. The signal strength in many parts of the suburbs are rather bad. All in all I somehow think that the wireless people in the US are in cahoots with the landline people and actually do not want the cellphone to replace the landline in the US, hence the problems.
This is the thing about programming in particular or creative engineering design in general. If you enjoy, or are into the work, it is very difficult to become a segmentor. Design and coding are very cerebral processes, and as it happens to me that I design and improve in my head whenever my brain finds a few free cycles. If I hit upon a good idea, I like to implement/try it immediately. Most of the better programmers/designers that I have seen do work in this mode. Hence having perks of this kind does help. Most of the segmentors that I have seen end up in marketing or man-management at the end, even if they might have started in core engineering because of a simple reason they do not enjoy the process. This of course is my opinion and there are exceptions, but exceptions are rare.
Correct spellings are signs of erudition and incorrect ones the opposite. Also, it generally irritates one to see wrong spellings. It ruins the harmony of a sentence. That is all. Spelling comes naturally -- whether one is writing an essay or posting on a forum. I personally find it difficult to comprehend as to how an individual could turn on his or her 'correct spellings' mode at one point of time and turn it off at another.
ESR might have large and extremely pertinent reasons to have made the switch, which behooves a man of his stature, but I switched for much simpler reasons. I have been a redhat user since 5.2 and then switched to fedora when redhat became RHEL and all that. I have made the switch last month. Reason ? Honestly, Ubuntu is a much better distribution. I know that it must have been said a million times but Ubunutu is a complete and a desktop-ready distribution. My reasons for switching --
1. The aptitude thingy rocks. yum/rpm has come to late and with too little. 2. With Ubuntu your laptop/Desktop works, out of the box. My friend has Fedora on his laptop and could not get the wlan working. When I looked into it I realized that the corporate rats at fedora do not bother to package the firmware for iw2200 with the driver. This is symptomatic and representative of the problem with Fedora. When I installed Ubuntu on my laptop ( Toshiba satellite ) iw2200 just worked out of the box. When I say everything, I mean everything. That was a first time for me. Pleasantly surprised. 3. For the average joe user, administration tasks have been very conveniently wrapped over gksudo and the administration tools actually work. Compare network-admin to system-config-network on fedora and you will know what I mean. 4. From the desktop point of view, the only problem that I found was that development tools do not come installed by default. The development tools have to be aptitude-ed. However the great thing is that the installation media is just a single CD as opposed to the 5 or 6 which fedora unleashes unto the poor installation dude. With the bandwidth most people have, installing stuff over the internet using aptitude is a breeze. So once you get a hang of that, things are happy.
I personally would recommend Ubuntu to any first time user or a person slightly miffed by Fedora.
In my personal experience, Simple is probably the worst implementation of an XML parser in perl. For a simple implementation, I have found Twig to be much more useful, sensible and fast.
I personally have been looking forward to using the text based version of gaim. Really helps out since centericq does not allow multiple Jabber accounts. Also gives me the liberty of using the same configuration for a gui based or text based client. Really nice for me because all I run on my X is a xterm (running screen) and firefox. Really do not enjoy to many err... windows. I am still using pine for mail:)
I know I am being a dick, but I really really want to know where the sarcasm tag started. The xml parser in my head is about to burst.... Please help me.
I would like to point out that your ideas about validation are pretty wrong. Hardware verification is not quality assurance. It is a complete and difficult part of hardware development apart from the fact that it also is a rather difficult subject in engineering. Think of traversing all simple paths in of a really really huge graph and making sure all paths work perfectly. That is just a trivial description of the problem. It also requires a deep understanding of the functionality that the RTL is out to deliver. This is not testing/validation as is thought of by us in the software world.
So, this is what it does -- it counts a particular variety of tags on a particular blogging site and charts them. That makes this software so incisive ! Please move along....
If people actually go and buy this in droves, they will do so because of the cheap hardware. The next thing they will say is "Linspire Shinspire !" and proceed to install his or her bootlegged version of windows XP on it.
I work for the Indian wing of a particular American Corporation. We have as a companywide policy, the freedom to choose between Linux or Windows on our laptops. I run RHEL WS 4 on one of my laptops and RHEL WS 3 on another and things work out great for me. I actually use my laptops to do some actual work rather than actually ssh-ing into a remote server. The question however is, How engineers actually excercise that choice ? For all that I know, I am the only person in my whole business unit who actually uses linux on the desktop/laptop although all applications that the company uses run seamlessly on Linux also. My point is that it is not the corporation who is at fault, it is us engineers. I know for sure that there are a large number of my colleagues who would flounder if somebody asked them to run on linux from tomorrow. It is not ineptitude, it is plain FUD. So there are a lot of corporations who I think, would not mind making a switch to linux, but the real problem are the people and not the corporation.
I have also encountered people in my professional life who continually whine not because THEY are miserable but they want to make YOU feel miserable for the present situation that you are in. Slightly sadistic actually. With time you learn to see through their words.
If you notice my comment, you will find that I have mentioned linux user community, and not development tools. The growth of linux largely depends on its popularity/user base, which most of us here would like to see, expand. Linux has not, and will not gain wide acceptance if it is retained as a development/geek computing platform. Acceptance and popularity comes from the ready availability of tools and applications. I would have thought that Google, would be one company which would do that -- It has not. The examples being --
1. Google video. The application supposedly has portions of VLC in it, but does not have a linux port.
2. Google desktop search. They never bothered to bring out a linux port. We of course have stuff like Beagle now, but that is not from Google.
3. Google Earth. I understand that it is acquired software, but there is absolutely no plan to port it to Linux.
4. Google talk. No voice support. In fact, no google talk client on linux, you can go ahead and use a jabber client. If Skype can push out a decent voip phone application on linux, I do not see why the PhDs at google cannot do the same.
5. Picasa. No linux port nor do they have any plans for picasa on linux. In fact I use flickr since that gives me a flash interface that works fine on linux.
So, to review, Google has not (largely) done anything to provides its kick-ass tools on Linux. I guess it is prudent business but I had thought that Google as a company would have the conscience to do something to for the linux user also. I personally do not think it has. Also, as a developer how often do you use the tools pushed out at code.google.com ? This is an unrelated query and not a part of the point that I am making. I am merely curious.
It is indeed heartening to note that there is a plan to push out a Linux version, unlike Google which altogether seems to have forgotten the linux user. What is even sadder about Google is that it being a Linux shop, having derived so much benefit from the existence of Linux, refuses to actually return anything to the user community.
Slashdot Mirror
Really ? That is how we have decided that the mentioned work places are the worst to work in ? A few random photographs of the workplaces ? This must be one of the worst excuses for a 10 list that I have seen.
The workplace/cube is certainly one of the ways to measure the top-ness (sic) of a workplace but just that ? Come on people, we all know that there are a lot of things which into making a great workplace. The dimensions and colour of your cubicle is probably just one of them.
This was inevitable. I remember, about a year back, in India, over a beer, discussing the defense scenario with a colleague who was an engineer/researcher with the Indian Navy for about 20 years. His words -- "What we need is a secure GPS system soon. We all know the American version is civilian and of course they can shut it down whenever they want. It is a major desirable in your defense program." I think the Chinese too think the same way. They just came up with it. I would not be surprised if India announced the same within half a decade.
It is what it is. A desirable in the military program. Period.
I am not an american, and hence had a small question. Cases, (however flimsy) do at the end of time, take up some of the state/national judicial bandwidth.
Does the person suing pay for that bandwidth or does the taxpayer pay for it ? Just a question, since this case sounds a bit illogical to me and so I was wondering whether the taxpayer would be comfortable paying for it.
I thought that we had hit the pits with Toyota's MAINT REQUIRED flashing LED on the dashboard. It undoubtedly was the dumbest piece of instrumentation I had ever seen. Let me explain -- The flashing of this led has nothing to do with the mechanical state of the car. Nope, no instrumentation connected to that LED except a timer. Reset it buy pressing a few buttons here and there and you dont need MAINT ! Then it got worse. BMW comes up with a even lousier idea -- If your car changes lanes, and you dont have the blinker on, the steering wheel vibrates ! And now this. In all honesty, the mind bleeds.
Guys, if you want to _really_ make better cars give us more muscle, smoother gearboxes, better crash safety and mileage. Also, do not cover up lack of innovation with eye-candy. Please leave the driving to the customer.
I wish I had moderation points to mod the parent up. I completely concur. It is amazing that in such a mature democracy such as the UK, people can get away after spouting such nonsense. Comments or plans of this variety deserve a few heads to roll for fucks sake ! At lease _somebody_ should take to the streets man ! Somebody !
And they would be
1. Yes I have been using P2P, but I have been torrenting legal stuff like unlicensed media and free software. So why the warning ?
2. Could you please give me the reasons as to why you think I am downloading illegal content ?
3. Could you please show me the logs which show I have downloaded illegal content ?
4. What are the methods you have followed to come to the conclusion that the stuff I am downloading is illegal ?
If the ISP has valid answers for my questions, I will have no choice but to comply. It after all, is the law. The answers however, I would need.
Hmmm.. Do I see a self-styled geek because he has 3 different machines at home ?
Any device one uses to store/transmit any personal information is a security threat. Would be a good idea to install software/hardware which you know are secure. Otherwise everything is pretty much open to exploitation.
Very American viewpoint actually. I have lived in Finland and India and have visited the US a couple of times. The problem with the wireless networks in the US is that they are expensive and the tariff plans are inconvenient. Charging the customer for incoming calls when in the home network only happens in the US as far as I know. I get a feel that the service providers do not intend to the cellphone to be the primary connectivity channel for the consumer -- they want the consumer to have a cellphone as a supplement to the landline.
As opposed to that situation, in the third world, a large number of people have actually bypassed the landlines to get themselves a mobile phone, as have I. It also makes a lot of financial sense since GSM/CDMA being a mature technologies, can be deployed with a fraction of the copper which would be required for a PSTN. This dramatically cuts down the network deployment time and cost which suits the third world just fine.
In the developed world, as in Finland, all the existing copper is used for DSL. The primary connectivity device is the GSM phone.
As regards the significant volume of comments vis-a-vis the voice quality of cellphones, I do admit that the air interface is not physically capable of producing CD quality sound, but sadly, neither is the normal landline. In all honesty, the difference of quality is minimal. Bad quality of sound on wireless phones at most times is not because of the technology, but because of network coverage. If the service providers are good enough, one will not face a problem with voice quality. I have not used a CDMA network in the US but have used the GSM networks, and I have to admit that the quality of GSM coverage in the US is not very impressive. The signal strength in many parts of the suburbs are rather bad.
All in all I somehow think that the wireless people in the US are in cahoots with the landline people and actually do not want the cellphone to replace the landline in the US, hence the problems.
news for nerds -- stuff that matters ?
This is the thing about programming in particular or creative engineering design in general. If you enjoy, or are into the work, it is very difficult to become a segmentor. Design and coding are very cerebral processes, and as it happens to me that I design and improve in my head whenever my brain finds a few free cycles. If I hit upon a good idea, I like to implement/try it immediately. Most of the better programmers/designers that I have seen do work in this mode. Hence having perks of this kind does help.
Most of the segmentors that I have seen end up in marketing or man-management at the end, even if they might have started in core engineering because of a simple reason they do not enjoy the process.
This of course is my opinion and there are exceptions, but exceptions are rare.
Correct spellings are signs of erudition and incorrect ones the opposite. Also, it generally irritates one to see wrong spellings. It ruins the harmony of a sentence. That is all. Spelling comes naturally -- whether one is writing an essay or posting on a forum. I personally find it difficult to comprehend as to how an individual could turn on his or her 'correct spellings' mode at one point of time and turn it off at another.
ESR might have large and extremely pertinent reasons to have made the switch, which behooves a man of his stature, but I switched for much simpler reasons. I have been a redhat user since 5.2 and then switched to fedora when redhat became RHEL and all that. I have made the switch last month. Reason ? Honestly, Ubuntu is a much better distribution. I know that it must have been said a million times but Ubunutu is a complete and a desktop-ready distribution. My reasons for switching --
1. The aptitude thingy rocks. yum/rpm has come to late and with too little.
2. With Ubuntu your laptop/Desktop works, out of the box. My friend has Fedora on his laptop and could not get the wlan working. When I looked into it I realized that the corporate rats at fedora do not bother to package the firmware for iw2200 with the driver. This is symptomatic and representative of the problem with Fedora. When I installed Ubuntu on my laptop ( Toshiba satellite ) iw2200 just worked out of the box. When I say everything, I mean everything. That was a first time for me. Pleasantly surprised.
3. For the average joe user, administration tasks have been very conveniently wrapped over gksudo and the administration tools actually work. Compare network-admin to system-config-network on fedora and you will know what I mean.
4. From the desktop point of view, the only problem that I found was that development tools do not come installed by default. The development tools have to be aptitude-ed. However the great thing is that the installation media is just a single CD as opposed to the 5 or 6 which fedora unleashes unto the poor installation dude. With the bandwidth most people have, installing stuff over the internet using aptitude is a breeze. So once you get a hang of that, things are happy.
I personally would recommend Ubuntu to any first time user or a person slightly miffed by Fedora.
In my personal experience, Simple is probably the worst implementation of an XML parser in perl. For a simple implementation, I have found Twig to be much more useful, sensible and fast.
Soon, we can rename The O'Reilly factor as Tomb Raider and replace that bald CGI character with Lara Croft !
I personally have been looking forward to using the text based version of gaim. Really helps out since centericq does not allow multiple Jabber accounts. Also gives me the liberty of using the same configuration for a gui based or text based client. :)
Really nice for me because all I run on my X is a xterm (running screen) and firefox. Really do not enjoy to many err... windows. I am still using pine for mail
I know I am being a dick, but I really really want to know where the sarcasm tag started. The xml parser in my head is about to burst.... Please help me.
I would like to point out that your ideas about validation are pretty wrong. Hardware verification is not quality assurance. It is a complete and difficult part of hardware development apart from the fact that it also is a rather difficult subject in engineering. Think of traversing all simple paths in of a really really huge graph and making sure all paths work perfectly. That is just a trivial description of the problem. It also requires a deep understanding of the functionality that the RTL is out to deliver. This is not testing/validation as is thought of by us in the software world.
So, this is what it does -- it counts a particular variety of tags on a particular blogging site and charts them. That makes this software so incisive ! Please move along....
If people actually go and buy this in droves, they will do so because of the cheap hardware. The next thing they will say is "Linspire Shinspire !" and proceed to install his or her bootlegged version of windows XP on it.
I work for the Indian wing of a particular American Corporation. We have as a companywide policy, the freedom to choose between Linux or Windows on our laptops. I run RHEL WS 4 on one of my laptops and RHEL WS 3 on another and things work out great for me. I actually use my laptops to do some actual work rather than actually ssh-ing into a remote server.
The question however is, How engineers actually excercise that choice ? For all that I know, I am the only person in my whole business unit who actually uses linux on the desktop/laptop although all applications that the company uses run seamlessly on Linux also.
My point is that it is not the corporation who is at fault, it is us engineers. I know for sure that there are a large number of my colleagues who would flounder if somebody asked them to run on linux from tomorrow. It is not ineptitude, it is plain FUD.
So there are a lot of corporations who I think, would not mind making a switch to linux, but the real problem are the people and not the corporation.
Remember the Adobe + Killustrator thing ? Pretty much the same.. if not better. Big deal. As the parent says.. cruel, but business.
I have also encountered people in my professional life who continually whine not because THEY are miserable but they want to make YOU feel miserable for the present situation that you are in. Slightly sadistic actually. With time you learn to see through their words.
If you notice my comment, you will find that I have mentioned linux user community, and not development tools. The growth of linux largely depends on its popularity/user base, which most of us here would like to see, expand. Linux has not, and will not gain wide acceptance if it is retained as a development/geek computing platform. Acceptance and popularity comes from the ready availability of tools and applications. I would have thought that Google, would be one company which would do that -- It has not. The examples being --
1. Google video. The application supposedly has portions of VLC in it, but does not have a linux port.
2. Google desktop search. They never bothered to bring out a linux port. We of course have stuff like Beagle now, but that is not from Google.
3. Google Earth. I understand that it is acquired software, but there is absolutely no plan to port it to Linux.
4. Google talk. No voice support. In fact, no google talk client on linux, you can go ahead and use a jabber client. If Skype can push out a decent voip phone application on linux, I do not see why the PhDs at google cannot do the same.
5. Picasa. No linux port nor do they have any plans for picasa on linux. In fact I use flickr since that gives me a flash interface that works fine on linux.
So, to review, Google has not (largely) done anything to provides its kick-ass tools on Linux. I guess it is prudent business but I had thought that Google as a company would have the conscience to do something to for the linux user also. I personally do not think it has.
Also, as a developer how often do you use the tools pushed out at code.google.com ? This is an unrelated query and not a part of the point that I am making. I am merely curious.
It is indeed heartening to note that there is a plan to push out a Linux version, unlike Google which altogether seems to have forgotten the linux user.
What is even sadder about Google is that it being a Linux shop, having derived so much benefit from the existence of Linux, refuses to actually return anything to the user community.