First, if you have a little pain or tingling after a long session of work, get some *real* excercise and if the discomfort goes away, keep doing it. Squeeze balls help, as do lifting weights, but be careful. You can actually sprain your wrist or hand if you got a case of tendonitis, so don't give in to the urge to think yourself macho. What you want to do is understand that Repetitive Stress injuries come from doing the same thing constantly: sitting in a rigid position twiddling your fingers is tiring on your body. Notice your hands floating over the keyboard and over to the mouse. Shoulders tight? Notice the mechanics. The weight of your arm is hanging from your shoulder while you twiddle your fingers. Not great for the body.
Second, get over yourself. If you are injured at work, you have a right and the company has a legal responsibility to report it. However, they also have a responsibility to make sure there is not fraud and to keep to chain of command. Translation: all the letter-writing and case-filing is normal for a worker's comp claim. When it happened to me 12 years ago and I realized what it was (wasn't as well known as now), I filled out papers, saw state-referred doctors, and eventually got therapy for it. It was a lot of work for the company, but they were more concerned with my well-being (it was a small company and we all got along). I live with the RSI now, but I can usually keep it under control in even the most stressful conditions. Usually...
I'm not sure if there would be a financial impact on the company, but if there is one, that would explain why they prefer you didn't report it (your loss, their gain, and all they had to do was make a face at you).
But I have to ask: what stigma? Are you in some culture where if you have you're arm cut off, you're considered a sissy if you ask for a band-aid? Pleeease! Take care of yourself, 'cause if you haven't figured it out yet, the company is not your friend. They may have nothing against you, but if you think lying down and waiting for someone else to do what's right is going to get you brownie points: a) it won't, b) you'll still have a medical problem.
So, third, HR is supposed to be there for you; that is, to manage you, one of the company's human resources. HR should be very interested in your case. Go talk to your rep. If there's more than one, and you don't get satisfaction, go to another one. Ask him/her to lunch if you can't go through channels. Get advice. Seek help.
If HR refuses to let you file a worker's comp claim, you can sue them and live off the award. There is no way in hell they could get away with it. Besides which, it sounds like they are already doing it. Sorry if I'm grumpy today, but please get a spine.
If they are so incompetent as to try to convince you that there is some stigma attached to this, can you talk to some other manager? If you're concerned with how it might appear politically, make sure it's understood you are seeking advice, not ratting on someone or complaining. But make sure it's real and not in your head.
Oh, and one more thing on HR: They are not allowed to tell any future company you go to anything more than your employment dates and your salary. This "stigma" nonsense of yours can't possibly affect any future job.
Finally, you have some learning to do. Not all solutions work for all people; but you will have permanent nerve damage if you don't learn to take care of this yourself in the long run. Probably all you need is to soak your hands in cold water at the end of the day, try not sleep on them (consider cheap wrist braces from the drug store if you wake up with achey wrists), get lots of movement like aerobics or weight lifting or juggling (jogging won't help your hands), and take a couple of ibuprofen in the morning. But if you don't know this already, a doctor should be consulted, and ultimately filing the worker's comp claim gets you in the system and a lot of people paying attention to you. Take advantage of it and stop worrying about whether you'll get in trouble or be sent to your room or whatever else you're fretting about.
Because it's a high-level language with lots of sytactic sugar that made a whole new level of flexibility in programming. You can be loose, sloppy, tight, properly formatted, or write one-liners with equal ease.
I agree with the main topic that other languages aspired to its expressiveness. The problem, from the point of view of a Perl hacker like me, is that some of them have actually outdone it, primarily by creating similar power, expressiveness, and simplicity but without being so ugly *and* being OO. Ruby and Python are pretty much the motivators for the upgrade.
That's a really excellent description of ADHD, especially rahyl's description of the brain being wired for high performance. I'm 42 and was diagnosed as hyperactive when I was about 9. Took Ritalin for a while, which my parents said helped, but I also remember huge emotional outbursts before they took me off of it. My experience of me has always been that I want people to talk faster, I lose my mind in lectures unless I very actively take notes, and I sometimes lose the thread of conversations if a person can't get to the point. As annoying for me as for other people.:-(
Anyway, for unrelated reasons, I took up Zen meditation 8 or 10 years ago. After a couple of months, I noticed my mind was calmer and more focused, I could read books for longer without getting distracted, and though my mind was no less quick, I was much more able to deal with the world around me. If Neural Feedback Therapy can fully engage the mind in a similar fashion, the poster can probably get some good results. But if it doesn't work, is too weird or expensive, or his daughter just balks at it, I think meditation and/or martial arts are definitely worth a try.
One more thing, though. Not all martial arts teachers are the same. Talk to people and maybe sit in on different schools during training. The student, as well as the parent, should be comfortable in the surroundings. If nothing else, it's one less distraction.
I agree. In fact, a question has been on my mind for a while which I haven't seen addressed on Slashdot yet.
So, let's say SCO is right and Novell wrote a contract that says (simplified for the sake of argument), "SCO now owns everything having to do with Unix ever." Did Novell ever have the right to grant such to SCO?
Given the amount of code put into the public domain, and given the number of products descended in one way or another from System V, is it even legally feasible for a company to claim it has gained all rights to something one, two, three generations back from my current product, and therefore owns rights to my product?
I'm afraid this hasn't made any sense to me from the beginning.
...is to remove it. Everyone knows that. The only reason SCO is acting the way they are is to get money. There's the brain-dead, pathetically desperate attempt to convince people (especially a judge, eventually) that they have been damaged and deserve money; and then there's the attempt to convince people that the infringing code is so extensive that it couldn't possibly be removed -- therefore, they should be able to license Linux/Unix/Irix/etc, with a right to prevent people from using it if they don't pay up.
The correct solution in such cases is a) determine if damages apply, and b) cease and desist infringing (that is, remove or rewrite the code).
But if the code is removed, then SCO can't charge everyone under the sun with licensing fees. And if they showed people what the hell code they're talking about, people would be able to remove the code, thus preventing them garnering licensing fees. Since removal of the code is the last thing they want to happen, they are probably unable to even present a coherent case in court. I mean, besides wanting to keep the purported infringements a secret, wouldn't a judge just order the offending code be removed?
I believe their sole strategy is to whine, posture, lie through their teeth, and desperately hope people will be scared and cave in and purchase licenses, as some have done already.
If they actually had a case, they'd take someone to court and win and be done with it. Resorting to scare tactics and hysterical accusations pretty much proves they have nothing, IMHO.
I worked in tech support at a couple of companies in the late 80's and early
90's and I sort of consulted to tech support in the company I was working for
until I got laid almost two years ago (workin' now, though). Over time, I
developed a theory about at least one of the roots of "computer illiteracy,"
besides the obvious bit about never using one before. I've come across plenty
of seemingly intelligent people who were just out of their element. And they
knew it, too. Some examples, as much for fun as to illustrate my point:
Me: Please put the disk in the drive and close the door.
Him: Okay, wait a minute. (sound of walking and a door closing) Okay, the door
is closed.
I got a letter from a customer which explains that another tech had asked her
to send a copy of her data disk so we could fix it. Enclosed was a photocopy
of said disk.
I got a letter from another customer. Enclosed was a floppy disk with "Bad
Disk" scrawled over the label. The handwritten letter explained that he was
furious because this was the third disk that he had received that had bad
sectors on it. The paper on which the letter was written was a printout of
chkdsk, which had clearly been run on his 20MB hard drive. After
showing everyone, I wrote back and explained that his floppy was fine. Then I
sent him back Bad Disk.
The longest call I ever took was from a guy who could run his programs, could
back them up, could see his data in the list in his backup program, but
couldn't find the data on his disk. I had him cd here and cd there, all to no
avail. I finally caught on to his use of the phrase "I installed the program
to my DOS" and had him look in his C:\DOS directory. Sure enough, he had
installed all his software in the same folder.
So, my theory is that proficient use of a computer requires not only seeing
what's in front of you, but also maintaining a model in your head of what's
going on. In all these cases, the person misunderstood something fundamental
about what they thought they were trying to do and consequently could not work
out a correct sequence of actions.
I'm sure most slashdotters would recognize the experience of "seeing where
you're going" (a folder, a dialog box, a menu in an application) before your
fingers make it happen. If you are generally proficient with your tools, you
probably are really irked by the experience of, for example, navigating up
and down the menus of a new program (or an MS-Office upgrade where the menu
items have been pointlessly shuffled); and you feel like you're getting
somewhere with your new app/tool/whatever when you start memorizing the
keystrokes to get where you're going, and you no longer actually read the
menus most of the time.
This is where I think most "technically illiterate" people differ. They don't have
that model, don't really think that way, and can't understand it if you try to
explain it to them. For instance, my dad used to insist he couldn't use a
computer because he didn't learn the New Math in school. He simply would not
hear differently until his company made him use a browser to access his
reports; he changed his tune pretty quickly, after that.:-) But if he hadn't
been forced, he never would have made what seems a pretty simple leap to most
of us. Whether it's biological or cultural, some people don't "get it" at a
deeper level than I think is generally realized.
I don't know if it's stupid or not, but the majority of French people (well, the one's I've talked to anyway) think it's a little much. When I was working and living in France for a while, it was common to hear "Bon weekend," on Friday afternoon. When I asked about it, they smiled and told me that they didn't really have such a sentiment until recently, when they picked it up from English. Officially, the days Saturday and Sunday should be collectively referred to as the "fin de semaine" (literally "end of week") and the sentiment should be phrased "bon fin de semaine." It is almost universally ignored.
Personally, I think there's an inherent flexibility in the language that comes from the fact that some phrasings can be quite awkward. In practice, they abbreviate everything. For example, comic books are known as B.D.'s, from "band dessin" ("comic strip", or literally "strip art") and in the south, when you go to lunch you'll be wished "bon app" instead of "bon appetit".
I was hired by the build manager of a certain PDA manufacturer (think "* of
your hand") to automate their build processes. He told me they had these
amazing build scripts, but the build engineers required hours to sit and
run the script. (!) Therefore they needed some kind of automation server to
run the scripts... Yeah, right. When I poked holes in his theory, he
claimed that this is what SW Eng wanted, so I should forgive him if he got
it wrong. As stupid as he turned out to be, I was just as stupid for
thinking "I'll meet the engineers, find out what they really want,
and everyone will be happy." I took the job. What a moe!
Long story short: my boss didn't know squat about software (he thought you
could run Mac programs on a Windows box) and he hired friends from previous
jobs to be build engineers (all they could do was memorize steps given them
by the developers). His lauded build scripts simply ran variations of the
builds (different langs, debug/release, etc.). It was a big deal to these
momos because they hadn't even had that level of automation before.
Processing a request, checking out the code, verifying the build, copying
built files to the network, and sending emails were all done manually; yet
my boss continued to believe the scripts were wonders of automation and if
I simply built his nonsense server (and other crackpot schemes he came up
with later), SW Eng would finally take him seriously. I wrote memos, made
presentations, drew pretty pictures, and tried to enlist the help of people
I thought he might respect, but ultimately I stayed too long, the economy
changed, I no longer found good job leads, and I got laid off.
I'm working now, but the thing that irks me, and hurt me, is that my boss
bad-mouthed me to my co-workers, apparently over my attempts to pull his
head out of his ass. Despite what I say happened, I got the reputation for
being trouble and refusing to obey orders. When I left, I had few friends,
no references, and little to show for the time I spent there.
My point (and I do have one) is that questioning or pushing won't get you
very far. Sooner or later, they'll remember that they have all the cards
and you're just some guy on a contract. Your question suggests you're not
happy with your company's decisions. If you can get around to being happy,
more power to ya. But if it's going to continue to bother you, get out and
do it sooner rather than later. You
have to remember that 1) not all jobs are good for you, and 2)
sometimes people really are crazy and if you're in the line of fire,
it may hurt you long term.
I think the best way to get anything out of any site that offers up reader reviews is to just read a lot of them. If 9 out of 10 are giving 5-star "It was so great I plotzed!" type reviews, then look for the ones that disagree. Even extreme negative reviews offer some insight (well, frequently enough, anyways) to get a better picture of the whole.
The fact that most people are morons should be irrelevant. The information is out there.
I read this book a few months ago. I actually picked it up at an airport bookstore almost two years ago, attracted to the faux-worn artwork and the faux comic book back cover, but didn't open it until recently. It wasn't what I expected. I thought it started a little slow, but I soon realized it has a very deliberate and well-timed pace. I was quickly drawn into the story and what I want to say here is that Chabon's sheer absolute knowledge of the times, the neighborhoods, the buildings, the people, the clothing, eastern Europe, languages -- and oh yeah, comic books, helps to create an entire world. The story is light, even when it gets a little deep. I felt as if I was entering another world and was repeatedly surprised at how complete it felt.
I can remember to about 16 months, when we lived in CT. We visited my aunt's house. It was raining, and we were in the VW Bus my parents had. I described it to my Mom when I was in my 20's (I'm 41 now) and she was amazed at the details I caught. It wasn't much, but it was enough to convince her.
We lived in Pennsylvania from (my ages) 18 months to 3 3/4 years. I remember quite a bit about the house (two stories, sloping driveway to garage in back, rickety stairs to kitchen, snake under front porch), the street (long, dark houses, big ol' tree at the end of the street, walking with my grandmother to the store), the neighbor kids I played with (two twins and their older brother), and a big storm that hit one day while I was at the store with my father.
FWIW, this is the age when I surprised my mother with being able to read (sorta). She told me this story - I don't actually remember it. We were in the grocery store and I kept pointing and saying "Bread." When she looked, I was pointing at a box of bread crumbs. She thinks I must have recognized the "shape" of the word from the package of Wonder Bread we always had around. Shortly after this, my parents labeled everything in the house, resulting in some funny stories when people came over.
Anyway, my memory seems a bit unusual, but I also think remembering nothing before 8 years old is unusual.
He's just young and inexperienced, is all. When I was young, I was quite *nice*, which is to say I got taken advantage of frequently. I finally wised up. It's just a matter of clarifying the arrangement. "We don't have a business relationship at the moment, though I'd be happy to help you. Shall we say $75/hour? If you want a longer-term arrangement, I'm sure we could negotiate the rate."
The problem with anything sticky is that you only get a single layer of stuck things before things stop sticking.
I'm thinking of a catcher with a simple enough mechanism to be effective, unlikely to break, unlikely to spill its load, and easy to re-use.
Imagine a cone-shaped device. The idea, of course, would be to fly the cone into debris which is, presumably, travelling at a slightly slower velocity than the cone. At the short end of the cone is a set of spring-powered doors, just like in an ashtray. You can push them down and things can enter, then the doors close back up.
I've never seen anything like this, but I'm imagining some kind of arms with "hands" on the end, which move towards and into the "doors", pushing anything that's there along with them. Debris is trapped in a "trash bag", and then you can send it to a fiery doom or pick it up in a shuttle, as you need. Mount this thing on some sort of robot that flies around getting in the way of debris.
I suppose the efficacy of this depends on the ability of a robot to use sensors and machine intelligence to a) differentiate between debris and floating astronauts and ships, and b) the amount of fuel it can carry wrt its cruising speed, range, amount it can push back or down, etc. But it seems like it has the potential for cheapness and reusability.
Re:I went and was minority report a few days ago
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Think of it as a time-travel conundrum. Technically, you can't know the future for the same reasons you can't change the past. Say you want to change, say, the shirt you wore Tuesday from blue to red, and you go back in time and convince yourself to change the shirt.
Now, you've changed your own past, which means you wore the red shirt. But if that's true, you had no motivation to go back in time in the first place. The paradox is that you when you change the past, you either remove the reason for or make impossible (think the "kill your grandfather" riddle) the doing of time-travel.
So, turn it around. If you can know the future and can change it, then pre-cog is invalid under many circumstances. If you can know the future and not change it, then trying to act on it will inevitably create self-fulfilling prophecies, predicated on knowing the outcome!
My wife hates time travel and refuses to talk with me about it.
I had to do some development in Lotus Notes 3.3, years ago. One of the most annoying features (which I considered a huge design bug) was the separation of @Commands and @Macros. @Macros were functions like @truncate, @date, etc., while @Commands corresponded directly to menu commands.
I created a help desk application and included a feature to check all the fields in a form before sending. The feature/bug was that @Commands ALWAYS executed before @Macros (as per the documentation, as I found out), no matter what order you wrote them in. The script would be written something like this:
Check fields.
If an error, AlertBox and Exit.
Else, send form.
but it would always execute like this:
Send form.
Check fields.
If an error, AlertBox and Exit (a little late).
Until they created LotusScript, it was almost impossible to do anything useful with it. And it was still an awfully strange system.
...'cause they never get anything right unless they wait until someone else does it and then buys the whole company.
When I was working at Intuit in the mid-90's, MS tried to buy us. Intuit's stock price went so high after it was announced that the price was going to be pretty steep. Between that and the Justice Dept investigating the deal, Bill backed out.
The story of how it came to be is interesting, though. MS did the usual "Hey, someone, somewhere is successful at something. We should own that market!" and created MS-Money to compete with us. Money 1 and 2 were pretty pathetic, but competition really began when Money 3 started to gain market share. That is to say, people who found it bundled on their new Gateway didn't go buy Quicken after trying Money.
"Online transactions" was the big buzzword in those days and Intuit had just purchased a transaction clearing house (I forget the name). The thing is, though, Intuit and MS had both been negotiating with the company in secret. Intuit knew about MS, but MS didn't know about Intuit. When Bill found out that a) we bought the company and b) they let themselves be bought for less just so they wouldn't be bought by MS, Bill decided the only thing to do was disband the MS-Money group and buy Intuit.
I've been a member of NetFlix twice. Both times I quit for a variety of
reasons. Here's my summary of the system.
The good:
Good selection: They really do have a good selection, and it
seems to keep up with new DVD's that are released.
Usually prompt delivery: The West Coast distribution center is
near where I live, so standard mail usually gets me items in 1 to
2 days.
Good customer service: When I've had problems, the responses
have been fast, courteous, and appropriate. When some customer
service droid didn't get it right the first time, the follow-up
was right-on.
The bad:
Most disks are scratched from repeated use. I had a problem
once when the disk crapped out in the last 10 minutes of the
film.
Delivered out of order, based on availability. I had 4
Musketeers (1974 version) would have been delivered before
3 Musketeers. I had to remove 4 Musketeers from the queue to get 3M
delivered first.
No "Save for Later" feature. I often put books in my shopping cart
on Amazon to ponder whether I really want to buy the book. I have
like 15 items there now, most in the "Save for Later" section. With
NetFlix, anything you put in your queue will be sent to you, and
you have no real control over when it will be sent.
I go through up and down periods, sometimes watching 2 or 3 movies
a weekend, sometimes 2 or 3 a month. It's not always worth it, and I
find that I still go to Blockbuster sometimes for an impulse buy.
Delivery times vary. Typically, if I send a disk (or 2 or 3)
back on Monday, it arrives at NetFlix on Tuesday and new disks are
sent out that day; I receive them Wednesday. My wife was travelling
for 10 days and I planned to maximize my viewing pleasure, ordering
some DVD's ahead of time. Though I sent the movies back after viewing
them, on successive days, I didn't receive new movies for a week. In
10 days, I only managed to watch 4 films, which may only have been
a coincidence, but it soured me on the service.
Here here! I would love to be able to read books on my Palm, or on-screen, but it always tires out my eyes. Maybe when we have 300dpi screens at 300Hz...
I find myself feeling pity towards Weinberger. He must not have had a life
before sitting down in front of a computer and...uh...not having a life. It
seems to me that what the web has done is enable, or make easier, things we
already did, much the way the telephone did. Before the phone, you needed to
know people or ask around to find someone, and the world was smaller
(telegraph not withstanding). The phone allowed us to spread out, use a phone
book to find a person you needed to talk to and call them directly.
The web has had that effect, I think. We can find information very quickly
now, but is that a function of the web itself? Or of Google? I don't mean to
play down the web (I still think it's pretty cool, but you could always go to
the library to look up information or find a non-local phone book. With the
web you can search the globe in your pajamas. The sheer scale changes things,
but I'm not sure anything fundamental has changed.
- Space. eBay is a Web space...whose links are based not on contiguity but
on human interest. eBay demonstrates that the geography of the Web is as
ephemeral as human interest iself...
Kind of like a conversation. People talk about whatever, and the conversation
ebbs and flows with coming and going of the participants. For a while, phone
chat rooms were a big hit. People like to gather and talk. With the web,
conversations leave echoes, allowing others to continue the thread.
- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks... Checking
back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I
were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I
wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came
home, and go back whenever I wanted."
I worked myself through school at The Good Earth restaurant, a very busy place
during breakfast and lunch, especially on weekends. Not too long after I
started, I noticed that I was carrying on conversations with several of the
other waitrons (as we called ourselves in the 80's) which were spread out over
time. Mention something to one while filling the ice bin, get a reaction 10
minutes later at the coffee station. Tell a joke badly at the reception stand,
hear "Oh I get it" while picking up your order. It was eye-opening at the
time, and I was strongly reminded of it while reading the review.
- Self....adopt a name by which they will be known. Unlike non-virtual
selves, these eBay selves are intermittent and, most important, they are
in writing.
What a load! Aliases are nothing new, and the "selves" are certainly not that
at all. People have used false names on BBS's, newsgroups, IRC, etc. for
years before the web was born. I agree that the layer of anonymity granted by
an online, connected system has an effect on how people interact, but it
didn't start with the web, and I don't think the contemplation on self it
might germinate is as deep as Weinberger would like to think.
- Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts.
But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing
quite a bit.
If he was that interested, he could always have joined a quilting club...
For my money, what has changed things is the ease with which you can do things. But fundamentally, not much has changed.
I agree. It looks like they're trying to get the jump on Palm, IMHO. Palm got nailed for pre-announcing their m50x series last spring, which caused people to stop buying their current product in anticipation of the new ones, which complicated their inventory overstock... Many problems there.
So maybe Handspring figured, since they're sales are down like everyone else, it couldn't hurt to try to get their stock up and get back in the news by pre-announcing this.
Dunno about a Blackberry/Palm/phone combo, though. The VisorPhone was a resounding dud (they've practically been giving them away). And while they've imitated the little tiny Blackberry keyboard, as well as the email functionality, I can't help but think that if it was that important (read compelling) to a user, wouldn't they have gone and bought either a Blackberry or Palm VII by now?
I continue to find Handspring much less imaginitive than I expected.
That's what I actually remember. I worked at Intuit at the time, and some of our engineers were looking at it to determine if we wanted to port Quicken to it. What I remember is that a) there was no development kit, and b) when it was released, they'd be required to write in assembly. They dropped all interest in it quickly, even though it was very Windows-like but could run in 512K.
Slashdot Mirror
First, if you have a little pain or tingling after a long session of work, get some *real* excercise and if the discomfort goes away, keep doing it. Squeeze balls help, as do lifting weights, but be careful. You can actually sprain your wrist or hand if you got a case of tendonitis, so don't give in to the urge to think yourself macho. What you want to do is understand that Repetitive Stress injuries come from doing the same thing constantly: sitting in a rigid position twiddling your fingers is tiring on your body. Notice your hands floating over the keyboard and over to the mouse. Shoulders tight? Notice the mechanics. The weight of your arm is hanging from your shoulder while you twiddle your fingers. Not great for the body.
Second, get over yourself. If you are injured at work, you have a right and the company has a legal responsibility to report it. However, they also have a responsibility to make sure there is not fraud and to keep to chain of command. Translation: all the letter-writing and case-filing is normal for a worker's comp claim. When it happened to me 12 years ago and I realized what it was (wasn't as well known as now), I filled out papers, saw state-referred doctors, and eventually got therapy for it. It was a lot of work for the company, but they were more concerned with my well-being (it was a small company and we all got along). I live with the RSI now, but I can usually keep it under control in even the most stressful conditions. Usually...
I'm not sure if there would be a financial impact on the company, but if there is one, that would explain why they prefer you didn't report it (your loss, their gain, and all they had to do was make a face at you).
But I have to ask: what stigma? Are you in some culture where if you have you're arm cut off, you're considered a sissy if you ask for a band-aid? Pleeease! Take care of yourself, 'cause if you haven't figured it out yet, the company is not your friend. They may have nothing against you, but if you think lying down and waiting for someone else to do what's right is going to get you brownie points: a) it won't, b) you'll still have a medical problem.
So, third, HR is supposed to be there for you; that is, to manage you, one of the company's human resources. HR should be very interested in your case. Go talk to your rep. If there's more than one, and you don't get satisfaction, go to another one. Ask him/her to lunch if you can't go through channels. Get advice. Seek help.
If HR refuses to let you file a worker's comp claim, you can sue them and live off the award. There is no way in hell they could get away with it. Besides which, it sounds like they are already doing it. Sorry if I'm grumpy today, but please get a spine.
If they are so incompetent as to try to convince you that there is some stigma attached to this, can you talk to some other manager? If you're concerned with how it might appear politically, make sure it's understood you are seeking advice, not ratting on someone or complaining. But make sure it's real and not in your head.
Oh, and one more thing on HR: They are not allowed to tell any future company you go to anything more than your employment dates and your salary. This "stigma" nonsense of yours can't possibly affect any future job.
Finally, you have some learning to do. Not all solutions work for all people; but you will have permanent nerve damage if you don't learn to take care of this yourself in the long run. Probably all you need is to soak your hands in cold water at the end of the day, try not sleep on them (consider cheap wrist braces from the drug store if you wake up with achey wrists), get lots of movement like aerobics or weight lifting or juggling (jogging won't help your hands), and take a couple of ibuprofen in the morning. But if you don't know this already, a doctor should be consulted, and ultimately filing the worker's comp claim gets you in the system and a lot of people paying attention to you. Take advantage of it and stop worrying about whether you'll get in trouble or be sent to your room or whatever else you're fretting about.
</rant_of_a_corporate_burnout_with_rsi>
Yes, yes, yes...and I use those features frequently, but...well, you know.
Because it's a high-level language with lots of sytactic sugar that made a whole new level of flexibility in programming. You can be loose, sloppy, tight, properly formatted, or write one-liners with equal ease.
I agree with the main topic that other languages aspired to its expressiveness. The problem, from the point of view of a Perl hacker like me, is that some of them have actually outdone it, primarily by creating similar power, expressiveness, and simplicity but without being so ugly *and* being OO. Ruby and Python are pretty much the motivators for the upgrade.
That's a really excellent description of ADHD, especially rahyl's description of the brain being wired for high performance. I'm 42 and was diagnosed as hyperactive when I was about 9. Took Ritalin for a while, which my parents said helped, but I also remember huge emotional outbursts before they took me off of it. My experience of me has always been that I want people to talk faster, I lose my mind in lectures unless I very actively take notes, and I sometimes lose the thread of conversations if a person can't get to the point. As annoying for me as for other people. :-(
Anyway, for unrelated reasons, I took up Zen meditation 8 or 10 years ago. After a couple of months, I noticed my mind was calmer and more focused, I could read books for longer without getting distracted, and though my mind was no less quick, I was much more able to deal with the world around me. If Neural Feedback Therapy can fully engage the mind in a similar fashion, the poster can probably get some good results. But if it doesn't work, is too weird or expensive, or his daughter just balks at it, I think meditation and/or martial arts are definitely worth a try.
One more thing, though. Not all martial arts teachers are the same. Talk to people and maybe sit in on different schools during training. The student, as well as the parent, should be comfortable in the surroundings. If nothing else, it's one less distraction.
I agree. In fact, a question has been on my mind for a while which I haven't seen addressed on Slashdot yet.
So, let's say SCO is right and Novell wrote a contract that says (simplified for the sake of argument), "SCO now owns everything having to do with Unix ever." Did Novell ever have the right to grant such to SCO?
Given the amount of code put into the public domain, and given the number of products descended in one way or another from System V, is it even legally feasible for a company to claim it has gained all rights to something one, two, three generations back from my current product, and therefore owns rights to my product?
I'm afraid this hasn't made any sense to me from the beginning.
Maybe originally (I don't actually know), but they sold it as "New Technology."
The correct solution in such cases is a) determine if damages apply, and b) cease and desist infringing (that is, remove or rewrite the code).
But if the code is removed, then SCO can't charge everyone under the sun with licensing fees. And if they showed people what the hell code they're talking about, people would be able to remove the code, thus preventing them garnering licensing fees. Since removal of the code is the last thing they want to happen, they are probably unable to even present a coherent case in court. I mean, besides wanting to keep the purported infringements a secret, wouldn't a judge just order the offending code be removed?
I believe their sole strategy is to whine, posture, lie through their teeth, and desperately hope people will be scared and cave in and purchase licenses, as some have done already.
If they actually had a case, they'd take someone to court and win and be done with it. Resorting to scare tactics and hysterical accusations pretty much proves they have nothing, IMHO.
--marmot
Yeah, I noticed that after it was posted....AFTER proofreading it. So much for my proofreading abilities...
Me: Please put the disk in the drive and close the door.
Him: Okay, wait a minute. (sound of walking and a door closing) Okay, the door is closed.
I got a letter from a customer which explains that another tech had asked her to send a copy of her data disk so we could fix it. Enclosed was a photocopy of said disk.
I got a letter from another customer. Enclosed was a floppy disk with "Bad Disk" scrawled over the label. The handwritten letter explained that he was furious because this was the third disk that he had received that had bad sectors on it. The paper on which the letter was written was a printout of chkdsk, which had clearly been run on his 20MB hard drive. After showing everyone, I wrote back and explained that his floppy was fine. Then I sent him back Bad Disk.
The longest call I ever took was from a guy who could run his programs, could back them up, could see his data in the list in his backup program, but couldn't find the data on his disk. I had him cd here and cd there, all to no avail. I finally caught on to his use of the phrase "I installed the program to my DOS" and had him look in his C:\DOS directory. Sure enough, he had installed all his software in the same folder.
So, my theory is that proficient use of a computer requires not only seeing what's in front of you, but also maintaining a model in your head of what's going on. In all these cases, the person misunderstood something fundamental about what they thought they were trying to do and consequently could not work out a correct sequence of actions.
I'm sure most slashdotters would recognize the experience of "seeing where you're going" (a folder, a dialog box, a menu in an application) before your fingers make it happen. If you are generally proficient with your tools, you probably are really irked by the experience of, for example, navigating up and down the menus of a new program (or an MS-Office upgrade where the menu items have been pointlessly shuffled); and you feel like you're getting somewhere with your new app/tool/whatever when you start memorizing the keystrokes to get where you're going, and you no longer actually read the menus most of the time.
This is where I think most "technically illiterate" people differ. They don't have that model, don't really think that way, and can't understand it if you try to explain it to them. For instance, my dad used to insist he couldn't use a computer because he didn't learn the New Math in school. He simply would not hear differently until his company made him use a browser to access his reports; he changed his tune pretty quickly, after that. :-) But if he hadn't
been forced, he never would have made what seems a pretty simple leap to most
of us. Whether it's biological or cultural, some people don't "get it" at a
deeper level than I think is generally realized.
Personally, I think there's an inherent flexibility in the language that comes from the fact that some phrasings can be quite awkward. In practice, they abbreviate everything. For example, comic books are known as B.D.'s, from "band dessin" ("comic strip", or literally "strip art") and in the south, when you go to lunch you'll be wished "bon app" instead of "bon appetit".
I was hired by the build manager of a certain PDA manufacturer (think "* of your hand") to automate their build processes. He told me they had these amazing build scripts, but the build engineers required hours to sit and run the script. (!) Therefore they needed some kind of automation server to run the scripts... Yeah, right. When I poked holes in his theory, he claimed that this is what SW Eng wanted, so I should forgive him if he got it wrong. As stupid as he turned out to be, I was just as stupid for thinking "I'll meet the engineers, find out what they really want, and everyone will be happy." I took the job. What a moe!
Long story short: my boss didn't know squat about software (he thought you could run Mac programs on a Windows box) and he hired friends from previous jobs to be build engineers (all they could do was memorize steps given them by the developers). His lauded build scripts simply ran variations of the builds (different langs, debug/release, etc.). It was a big deal to these momos because they hadn't even had that level of automation before. Processing a request, checking out the code, verifying the build, copying built files to the network, and sending emails were all done manually; yet my boss continued to believe the scripts were wonders of automation and if I simply built his nonsense server (and other crackpot schemes he came up with later), SW Eng would finally take him seriously. I wrote memos, made presentations, drew pretty pictures, and tried to enlist the help of people I thought he might respect, but ultimately I stayed too long, the economy changed, I no longer found good job leads, and I got laid off.
I'm working now, but the thing that irks me, and hurt me, is that my boss bad-mouthed me to my co-workers, apparently over my attempts to pull his head out of his ass. Despite what I say happened, I got the reputation for being trouble and refusing to obey orders. When I left, I had few friends, no references, and little to show for the time I spent there.
My point (and I do have one) is that questioning or pushing won't get you very far. Sooner or later, they'll remember that they have all the cards and you're just some guy on a contract. Your question suggests you're not happy with your company's decisions. If you can get around to being happy, more power to ya. But if it's going to continue to bother you, get out and do it sooner rather than later. You have to remember that 1) not all jobs are good for you, and 2) sometimes people really are crazy and if you're in the line of fire, it may hurt you long term.
I think the best way to get anything out of any site that offers up reader reviews is to just read a lot of them. If 9 out of 10 are giving 5-star "It was so great I plotzed!" type reviews, then look for the ones that disagree. Even extreme negative reviews offer some insight (well, frequently enough, anyways) to get a better picture of the whole.
The fact that most people are morons should be irrelevant. The information is out there.
I read this book a few months ago. I actually picked it up at an airport bookstore almost two years ago, attracted to the faux-worn artwork and the faux comic book back cover, but didn't open it until recently. It wasn't what I expected. I thought it started a little slow, but I soon realized it has a very deliberate and well-timed pace. I was quickly drawn into the story and what I want to say here is that Chabon's sheer absolute knowledge of the times, the neighborhoods, the buildings, the people, the clothing, eastern Europe, languages -- and oh yeah, comic books, helps to create an entire world. The story is light, even when it gets a little deep. I felt as if I was entering another world and was repeatedly surprised at how complete it felt.
Check it out!
I can remember to about 16 months, when we lived in CT. We visited my aunt's house. It was raining, and we were in the VW Bus my parents had. I described it to my Mom when I was in my 20's (I'm 41 now) and she was amazed at the details I caught. It wasn't much, but it was enough to convince her.
We lived in Pennsylvania from (my ages) 18 months to 3 3/4 years. I remember quite a bit about the house (two stories, sloping driveway to garage in back, rickety stairs to kitchen, snake under front porch), the street (long, dark houses, big ol' tree at the end of the street, walking with my grandmother to the store), the neighbor kids I played with (two twins and their older brother), and a big storm that hit one day while I was at the store with my father.
FWIW, this is the age when I surprised my mother with being able to read (sorta). She told me this story - I don't actually remember it. We were in the grocery store and I kept pointing and saying "Bread." When she looked, I was pointing at a box of bread crumbs. She thinks I must have recognized the "shape" of the word from the package of Wonder Bread we always had around. Shortly after this, my parents labeled everything in the house, resulting in some funny stories when people came over.
Anyway, my memory seems a bit unusual, but I also think remembering nothing before 8 years old is unusual.
My 2 cents.
He's just young and inexperienced, is all. When I was young, I was quite *nice*, which is to say I got taken advantage of frequently. I finally wised up. It's just a matter of clarifying the arrangement. "We don't have a business relationship at the moment, though I'd be happy to help you. Shall we say $75/hour? If you want a longer-term arrangement, I'm sure we could negotiate the rate."
The problem with anything sticky is that you only get a single layer of stuck things before things stop sticking.
I'm thinking of a catcher with a simple enough mechanism to be effective, unlikely to break, unlikely to spill its load, and easy to re-use.
Imagine a cone-shaped device. The idea, of course, would be to fly the cone into debris which is, presumably, travelling at a slightly slower velocity than the cone. At the short end of the cone is a set of spring-powered doors, just like in an ashtray. You can push them down and things can enter, then the doors close back up.
I've never seen anything like this, but I'm imagining some kind of arms with "hands" on the end, which move towards and into the "doors", pushing anything that's there along with them. Debris is trapped in a "trash bag", and then you can send it to a fiery doom or pick it up in a shuttle, as you need. Mount this thing on some sort of robot that flies around getting in the way of debris.
I suppose the efficacy of this depends on the ability of a robot to use sensors and machine intelligence to a) differentiate between debris and floating astronauts and ships, and b) the amount of fuel it can carry wrt its cruising speed, range, amount it can push back or down, etc. But it seems like it has the potential for cheapness and reusability.
Think of it as a time-travel conundrum. Technically, you can't know the future for the same reasons you can't change the past. Say you want to change, say, the shirt you wore Tuesday from blue to red, and you go back in time and convince yourself to change the shirt.
Now, you've changed your own past, which means you wore the red shirt. But if that's true, you had no motivation to go back in time in the first place. The paradox is that you when you change the past, you either remove the reason for or make impossible (think the "kill your grandfather" riddle) the doing of time-travel.
So, turn it around. If you can know the future and can change it, then pre-cog is invalid under many circumstances. If you can know the future and not change it, then trying to act on it will inevitably create self-fulfilling prophecies, predicated on knowing the outcome!
My wife hates time travel and refuses to talk with me about it.
- Check fields.
- If an error, AlertBox and Exit.
- Else, send form.
but it would always execute like this:- Send form.
- Check fields.
- If an error, AlertBox and Exit (a little late).
Until they created LotusScript, it was almost impossible to do anything useful with it. And it was still an awfully strange system....'cause they never get anything right unless they wait until someone else does it and then buys the whole company.
When I was working at Intuit in the mid-90's, MS tried to buy us. Intuit's stock price went so high after it was announced that the price was going to be pretty steep. Between that and the Justice Dept investigating the deal, Bill backed out.
The story of how it came to be is interesting, though. MS did the usual "Hey, someone, somewhere is successful at something. We should own that market!" and created MS-Money to compete with us. Money 1 and 2 were pretty pathetic, but competition really began when Money 3 started to gain market share. That is to say, people who found it bundled on their new Gateway didn't go buy Quicken after trying Money.
"Online transactions" was the big buzzword in those days and Intuit had just purchased a transaction clearing house (I forget the name). The thing is, though, Intuit and MS had both been negotiating with the company in secret. Intuit knew about MS, but MS didn't know about Intuit. When Bill found out that a) we bought the company and b) they let themselves be bought for less just so they wouldn't be bought by MS, Bill decided the only thing to do was disband the MS-Money group and buy Intuit.
Quitters never prosp...uh...well I guess they do!
- Good selection: They really do have a good selection, and it
seems to keep up with new DVD's that are released.
- Usually prompt delivery: The West Coast distribution center is
near where I live, so standard mail usually gets me items in 1 to
2 days.
- Good customer service: When I've had problems, the responses
have been fast, courteous, and appropriate. When some customer
service droid didn't get it right the first time, the follow-up
was right-on.
The bad:- Most disks are scratched from repeated use. I had a problem
once when the disk crapped out in the last 10 minutes of the
film.
- Delivered out of order, based on availability. I had 4
Musketeers (1974 version) would have been delivered before
3 Musketeers. I had to remove 4 Musketeers from the queue to get 3M
delivered first.
- No "Save for Later" feature. I often put books in my shopping cart
on Amazon to ponder whether I really want to buy the book. I have
like 15 items there now, most in the "Save for Later" section. With
NetFlix, anything you put in your queue will be sent to you, and
you have no real control over when it will be sent.
- I go through up and down periods, sometimes watching 2 or 3 movies
a weekend, sometimes 2 or 3 a month. It's not always worth it, and I
find that I still go to Blockbuster sometimes for an impulse buy.
- Delivery times vary. Typically, if I send a disk (or 2 or 3)
back on Monday, it arrives at NetFlix on Tuesday and new disks are
sent out that day; I receive them Wednesday. My wife was travelling
for 10 days and I planned to maximize my viewing pleasure, ordering
some DVD's ahead of time. Though I sent the movies back after viewing
them, on successive days, I didn't receive new movies for a week. In
10 days, I only managed to watch 4 films, which may only have been
a coincidence, but it soured me on the service.
There's room for improvement, buy YMMV.Here here! I would love to be able to read books on my Palm, or on-screen, but it always tires out my eyes. Maybe when we have 300dpi screens at 300Hz...
Fool
Excerpt: "... OF REASONING Fool. fool, idiot, tomfool, wiseacre, simpleton..."
Unmeaningness
Excerpt: "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,..."
Madman
Excerpt: "...; knight errant, Don Quixote. idiot. "
I agree. It looks like they're trying to get the jump on Palm, IMHO. Palm got nailed for pre-announcing their m50x series last spring, which caused people to stop buying their current product in anticipation of the new ones, which complicated their inventory overstock... Many problems there.
So maybe Handspring figured, since they're sales are down like everyone else, it couldn't hurt to try to get their stock up and get back in the news by pre-announcing this.
Dunno about a Blackberry/Palm/phone combo, though. The VisorPhone was a resounding dud (they've practically been giving them away). And while they've imitated the little tiny Blackberry keyboard, as well as the email functionality, I can't help but think that if it was that important (read compelling) to a user, wouldn't they have gone and bought either a Blackberry or Palm VII by now?
I continue to find Handspring much less imaginitive than I expected.
That's what I actually remember. I worked at Intuit at the time, and some of our engineers were looking at it to determine if we wanted to port Quicken to it. What I remember is that a) there was no development kit, and b) when it was released, they'd be required to write in assembly. They dropped all interest in it quickly, even though it was very Windows-like but could run in 512K.