:) I think as long as you really try, its OK. IMO anyway. I think what the difference boils down to is that the (1)s want someone to teach them what they need to know in order that they themselves can do the work, while (2)s basically just want someone else to actually do the work for them.
Don't worry too much about it. There are generally two different types of interrupters:
(1) Those people who generally work independently and try their best, but resort to bugging someone when they genuinely need advice or tips or get stuck or simply know their own limitations at that point in time. They want to learn from you, will remember what you've taught them and be able to apply it independently from then on.
(2) Those people who are generally just lazy, and will bug someone because they are too lazy to try to work a problem out for themselves first (rather than working hard at it first, and then only asking when they get stuck). They sometimes forget what you teach them and may bug you again later with the same question.
The more experienced person that you are bugging will generally be able to tell which category you fall into. I generally don't mind type (1) programmers interrupting me, but for type (2) I have much more limited patience.
I have to add another "me too" agreement here. The thing that annoys me most at my current job is that I am being interrupted very often throughout almost any given day. Sometimes, my interruptions are further interrupted by other people, and those interruptions also get interrupted, with sometimes up to four people on this "stack" of interruptions. I have to handle each one, and still try to remember all the things I *was* doing at the bottom of the stack when I first got interrupted, which itself can occupy several "stack" layers when you're programming. It not only breaks my concentration, which can take very long to get back on track (*easily* an hour, as the article mentions), but I find it also very draining: it seriously tires me out, and also drains my motivation, morale, and kills my job enjoyment. And those interruptions can also very directly be the cause of bugs. Often, at time of interruption, I may already have a 'mental stack' of the five or ten things I need to do next. Occasionally, when interrupted, I will forget one or more of them: I have several times now found bugs months later in code that were caused because I left something half-finished after being interrupted.
Person after person seem to come into my office, and they always seem to claim to have "just a quick question". Some days I think, 'if one more person asks me a "quick question" I'm going to quit'. I can really echo your "leave me the hell alone, dammit!":)
My boss is aware of it though and has been trying to help the situation.
I suspect you intended to post to the thread about psychology of programmers. Anyway, one thing struck a chord with me in that: being interrupted. The thing hassling me most at my current job is that people interrupt me very often, and its true, it can easily take an hour to get ones concentration / "train of thought" back on its tracks.
I'm also wondering about this. Visual Studio 6 on Windows XP with VS6 Service Pack 5 has a blatant flaw in which your.cpp source files are sometimes deleted from the hard disk (I kid you not). I've been using VS6 for years, and this bug is a relatively recent development. And SP5, it seems, is going to be the last service pack for VS6. So for customers who want this rather serious problem fixed, their only option is basically to 'upgrade' to.NET. And you can bet that thousands of customers will do precisely that. I have this theory, which I could never prove, that MS deliberately introduced this bug in order to give thousands of their customers an "incentive" to upgrade. Many customers wouldn't need or want to upgrade if they weren't forced to, because the current version is already good enough for them. Its the age old problem of companies like Microsoft ending up competing with older versions of their own products.
They're a damn drain on the economy, if you ask me. They raise the costs of doing business for so many companies who use their products, with little or no real benefits from all the 'upgrades'. Money that could be better spent on something productive (or saved and the product made cheaper) is piling up in MSs bank account instead.
How well have we done writing software to perfection?
Actually, pretty well, if you consider the world outside Microsoft. People generally make software as good as it needs to be. Airbus and Boeing planes with hundreds of critical built-in software systems routinely make flights thousands of times each day around the world - when was the last time one of these had an accident caused by a software failure? Air traffic control at airports all over the world, handling at each airport anything from hundreds to thousands of flights per day, rely on software systems. When last did you hear of an airplane accident caused by software failure on the ATC systems? Thousands of modern cars on our roads make use of embedded software control systems; when last did you hear of any of these failing? Millions of people use cellphones every day, and I have never heard of a case where the software on a cellphone failed. From telephone switching equipment to nuclear power stations to subway train management systems to fighter jet control systems to oil tanker guidance systems to alarm clocks, pocket calculators, washing machines, microwaves, hi-fis, DVD players, video recorders, digital cameras, to the hundreds of satellites orbiting our planet, the other spacecraft we've sent into space (e.g. Mars rover, SOHO etc), to the systems used by banks, I'd say we've done a pretty good job of making software reliable.
PCs, and in particular those running Microsoft software, stand out BY FAR as being absolutely the most failure-prone software humans have ever created. But Windows represents only a tiny portion of software in general. Software gets a bad rap because most people are exposed mostly to Windows, but software has become such a ubiquitous part of our society that we don't even notice the hundreds of working systems that we rely on every day.
When you look at society as a whole, and how much DOES work every day, and how much we truly have mastered technology, and how much we have built, I'd say we have done an excellent job of predicting and managing all reasonable outcomes of chaos.
Software is made as reliable as it *needs* to be. You might see the software crash on the arrivals/departures TV display in an airport, since that can just be restarted, but you won't see such high levels of failure in the airplanes flight control software, that would be a disaster.
I guess a problem with "genetic design" is that even one mistake could possibly create a VERY serious disaster. But mankind will push forward with these technologies, it is inevitable. Lets hope the genetic designers realise the seriousness of their business, and hold themselves to at least as high standards as the software programmers for Airbus flight control systems.
But why should a worker in India or Pakistan have access to a loaf of bread 100 times less costly than a U.S. worker pays for essentially the same product? Why should non-US workers have some divine right to have access to cheap bread?
Well, why is bread (and other basic cost-of-living items) cheaper in these countries? This is a genuine question, I really want to know why. It seems to me bread should only really be cheaper in India if the Indians can make bread cheaper. In other words, if they are better at making bread, more efficiently, for lower margins. Why should bread in the US cost more? The price of bread is determined by what the producers of the bread want to charge for it. US producers of bread simply charge more for their bread. There are no unfair measures in place forcing American bread producers to have to charge more for their bread. Why not start up a bakery that sells cheaper bread? If your bread is still good, I can guarantee you that people in the US will start buying your bread.
Either you let free trade show its advantages and disadvantages by letting it run free..
Herein lies the problem. The US would not be able to compete in a system of free trade. Other countries can produce goods such as software cheaper than the US can, for a number of reasons (e.g. poorer social services, weaker currencies, lower cost of living, foreign programmers are willing to accept a lower quality of life than a US programmer will, etc). The US is simply not the most (cost) efficient environment for developing software, and as the number of quality programmers in countries like India, Russia, China etc increase over time, the situation will only worsen.
This is just good ol' American capitalism at work: if Joe down the road can make similar quality widgets cheaper than you can, then Joe's widgets should, generally, be allowed to naturally succeed in the marketplace. Foreign countries can produce similar quality software (sometimes better quality) at a lower cost than the US can, and if the "market was allowed to decide on its own", the US would over the long run lose out. Protectionist measures are a possible "solution" to this (from the US's perspective), but they are contrary to the notions of free trade generally advocated within the US.
Uh, yes, of course it could be. So what is insightful about that? It could also be that man's activities are going to have a devastating effect on the climate on Earth. WE DON'T KNOW. Which is exactly why man should do more research on this topic, so that we can get to the truth about this issue. The only sane thing to do in this situation is to focus relentlessly on the truth. Not wishful thinking, not denial, not "blindly carry on and hope for the best".
There is so much wishful thinking on this board, its ridiculous. People here seem to believe that there isn't a problem because they want to believe that there isn't a problem. Forget about what we want to be true, and encourage fully all the scientific efforts underway that are attempting to find out what is true.
If it *is* true that mankind's activities have little or no effect, then research should reflect that. And if it isn't true, and we're headed for problems, then at least we'll be armed with some knowledge of how to tackle the problem.
One almost gets the feeling that some people are trying to discourage any research into the issue of global warming, claiming that man's activities have negligible effect on the climate. If those people are correct, why be afraid of research? Unbiased research would eventually prove them correct if they were. Likewise applies for the global warming pessimists.
Couldn't makes the cliche have meaning. Could makes it meaningless.
Not exactly. As you pointed out, its a syllable reduction of a common expression that people understand when hearing it, either which way it is used. Since it is commonly used in the "incorrect" way, and people still understand it, then it still has meaning. As such, it doesn't make it "incorrect": it makes it idiomatic.
It could well be that in the future "could care less" becomes the only version commonly used, but people will still understand it as meaning "couldn't care less". That makes it an idiomatic expression, because if you try to derive the meaning from the sum of the parts, you'll get nowhere: you just have to "know" the phrase.
So: "couldn't care less" => means just what it says (i.e. subject cares so little about something that he/she is not capable of caring less); "could care less" => idiomatic.
This is how languages evolve and how idiomatic expressions form. Most languages have many, many idioms. Idioms are, however, neither incorrect nor meaningless - you just have to learn them though.
A soundproof car? No thanks. I'd kinda like to hear the sound of real screeching tires if there is an impending accident, or the horn of a runaway truck coming up behind me, or the sirens of an ambulance etc.
"I talked about salary with a company last week, and they were paying between $30 and $35 an hour," said Donna Bradley, an IT specialist in Mesa, Ariz., who's been out of work since August 2002. "In August I was making $45 an hour."
It didn't matter; Bradley, 49, didn't get the job and is selling her house and moving to Maryland to live with her daughter while she continues to look for work.
Sounds to me like she doesn't want to take the $30/hour job because she'd rather just keep looking for a job that pays her well enough to be able to buy a house. So maybe she is the exception. I assumed hers was an average case since they used it as an example.
Some googling for keywords such as 'average programmer salary' returned very mixed results, ranging from $30,000/year to $80,000/year. However, I did find one article about foreign outsourcing in which they state that Russian programmers are paid about $800 to $900 per month. Which, yes, is very low for someone in the US.
It shows that South Africa is more willing to censor the truth to whore itself out to Microsoft.
I have absolutely no clue what the basis of this statement is. What are you basing this on? I don't see how banning a deceptive MS ad is either "censoring the truth" or "whoring itself out to Microsoft". Try this link: http://www.oss.gov.za/ for a clue, if you think the SA government is whoring itself out to Microsoft.
Are programming jobs going to foreigners for $15/week? If so, well, shite, thats a problem. In an article I was reading last week about this, a programmer was complaining about having to sell her house because she lost her $45/hour job. She was complaining that those jobs are now going to foreigners for $30/hour.
I'd like to see some more actual data though. I'd like to know what foreign programmers are being paid on average by US companies. I would think $15/week is an extreme case.
You are right and wrong. Windows 3.1 supported "386 mode" 32-bit with the "Win32S" layer. Win95 was basically just based on this but with a new look and a different default shell program. Anyway, you are right that it did "support every feature of the 386", but you are wrong in that it didn't bother to do it all the time. Windows95/98 and even WinMe all regularly switched the CPU back to 16-bit "real mode"; a typical Win98 installation is in 16-bit mode probably 10 to 20% of the time. If you want some proof of that, try doing some development/profiling with the Intel profiler, which will tell you exactly how much time Win9X is spending in 16-bit mode.
So Windows9X does NOT "fully" support 386 features. If it "fully" supported them, it would never leave 32-bit mode. Any OS worth anything at all NEVER leaves 32-bit mode. 386 protected mode memory protection is almost completely useless unless you do it ALL THE TIME. If the system leaves 32-bit mode for even a moment, its completely insecure, and even a QBASIC program doing POKEs to segment 0 can cause the system to lock up (try that in Win9X if you're bored). Its pathetic, and I definitely wouldn't call that "32-bit computing".
There are also other nasty POS leftovers from 16-bit "cooperative multitasking" Win3.1 computing in Windows9X, such as the ridiculous Win16Mutex, but thats another rant for another day.
Right now the cost of living in the USA is high, everything here is more expensive.
This is true; the strong dollar vs weaker foreign currencies does encourage hiring foreign skills. But there is also another factor; that many American workers (and I apologize for generalising here) are not willing to significantly lower their quality of life by taking a job that pays worse. They've come to expect a high quality of living, have come to expect that they will live in a nice house, drive a nice car etc, and some would almost sooner sit unemployed or flip burgers than take a lousy paying programming job. Meanwhile, those indian programmers are willing to drive crummy cars and live in crummy apartments for a lower-paying programming job. Of course, for many of them its an improvement over their previous conditions, so they're quite happy about it. The fact is, the IT labour market is quite global, and you are competing with other similarly qualified people from all over the world. This is just plain old supply and demand in action. Nobody inherently has a right to a well-paying job; if there are lots of programmers, and supply outstrips demand, then salaries will fall.
Companies should not be able to scam the system by paying workers in other countries cheaper and keeping the extra cash for themselves.
They do, and no, they shouldn't. But in a market with competition, it won't last, and those companies will sooner or later go under. Why? Because they will not be able to compete with other companies which also pay workers in other countries cheaper, but then go and sell their products cheaper rather than hoarding the extra cash. So they make less money, but undercut the companies doing what you mention. Broadly speaking, software in general becomes cheaper because software development costs generally become cheaper.
The jobs move where labour costs are lower. If you want some of these jobs to move back to the USA, then accept lower pay and live in a smaller place etc.
No, the ad is misleading. It may be technically true, but it is still misleading in that it heavily implies something which is not true. Under ASA standards it only needs to be deliberately misleading to be chucked out, it doesn't have to be an outright lie. This is a good thing.
It is quite obviously possible to mislead people without needing to specifically tell an actual lie, but in the ASA's view, it is not about whether or not a company is technically lying, but about whether or not they are deceiving people. This makes perfect sense to me; deception is wrong regardless of whether or not a lie was required to do it.
Of course.. I was kidding (to a degree) about everyone learning Mandarin. English is politically the most "important"/widespread language at the moment. It might not be that way anymore 50 years from now, but it is that way now.
The three most spoken languages in the world (1st language speakers) are, in order: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish. Can't remember the exact numbers, but its approximately 1 billion, 700 million, 300 million.
More and more kids use expressions like "U" for "you"
I always find this a somewhat weird example/argument for the "degradation" of English, because a number of languages already use "u" to mean "you". In South Africa: "u" means "you" in Afrikaans (pronounced a little like "e" but shorter, isiZulu "u" means "you" (*) (pronounced like "oo" in book), Sesotho uses "o" which is anyway pronounced very much like the isiZulu "u". And none of this has ever been seen as a bad thing. Its perfectly normal. What exactly makes it bad if English people use "u" for "you"? Different, yes. Bad? What is the harm?
There are far more serious threats to "complex English" going on in this world; there seems to be a global trend towards speaking a highly simplified and reduced version of English, like, you know?. It seems to have become culturally frowned upon to try to speak proper English. If you want to talk about English being 'under threat', I'm sure there are many better arguments than a spelling shift for a common word like "you". There is an interesting piece on this here: "Linda Hall - coolspeak"
(*) Its a little more complex than this, but this is still accurate
People aren't eating McDonald's hamburgers because they've been forced to under an imperialistic dictum...they're eating them because they like a cheap, easy meal
Indeed. This for me seems to be the "trap" of "modern" western culture. The technology and conveniences are powerfully alluring, and ultimately any non-isolated culture is going to voluntarily gravitate towards it, seeking its benefits (and perceived status). You can't stop it. Most kids of other cultures will pick Playstations over traditional toys. People like things like cellphones. Not to mention the benefits of western medicine and medical technologies.
Some people of other cultures (e.g. here in South Africa) would like to see their people return to a "traditional" lifestyle, but it can never happen as long as new generations are exposed to "our" (western) culture - its like a Pandora's box, it cannot be closed again. Its unstoppable, because no rational person can argue against the obvious benefits of the technologies our culture has produced. None of this is really a bad thing, as such, because people are ultimately just choosing what they believe is best for them, and surprise surprise, they like cellphones, cars, Playstations etc. So this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it can be. Language and culture form an important part of how people define themselves, of their identity. This shouldn't be underestimated. Many people are attracted by all the "shiny things" our culture has to offer in terms of material wealth and 'fancy gadgets' and nice houses, nice cars etc, and in many cases choose to give up (either partially or entirely) their own language and culture. And once its too late, they may find out just how empty, unfulfilling and alienating our culture can be (not saying it inherently is, but it clearly can be).
But on the whole, people nowadays are making their own choices, and they are voluntarily choosing things like McDonalds.
In a certain sense though, people don't really have a "choice", as such: people have to choose our culture, because it is really the only option available that makes sense in today's society. You need to make money to pay rent and buy food, you need a job to make money, you need an education to get a job, better education = better job, you need a car to get around, etc etc. So in a certain sense people are, very loosely speaking, "forced" to choose this culture.
All the same reasons apply to why its difficult as a "westerner" to choose another cultural lifestyle even if you want to. Sure I would like to go live in the middle of nowhere somewhere or in some central Amazonian rainforest, catching and/or growing my own food etc. But some obvious questions arise, apart from luxuries ("give up Internet?"), but more practically, "where would I get my contact lenses / glasses from?", "what happens if I get sick or break a leg?" etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you mean NEW blood.
Sorry, but sometimes you gotta nitpick the English usage..
No. "cohabit" means "live together".
:) I think as long as you really try, its OK. IMO anyway. I think what the difference boils down to is that the (1)s want someone to teach them what they need to know in order that they themselves can do the work, while (2)s basically just want someone else to actually do the work for them.
Don't worry too much about it. There are generally two different types of interrupters:
(1) Those people who generally work independently and try their best, but resort to bugging someone when they genuinely need advice or tips or get stuck or simply know their own limitations at that point in time. They want to learn from you, will remember what you've taught them and be able to apply it independently from then on.
(2) Those people who are generally just lazy, and will bug someone because they are too lazy to try to work a problem out for themselves first (rather than working hard at it first, and then only asking when they get stuck). They sometimes forget what you teach them and may bug you again later with the same question.
The more experienced person that you are bugging will generally be able to tell which category you fall into. I generally don't mind type (1) programmers interrupting me, but for type (2) I have much more limited patience.
I have to add another "me too" agreement here. The thing that annoys me most at my current job is that I am being interrupted very often throughout almost any given day. Sometimes, my interruptions are further interrupted by other people, and those interruptions also get interrupted, with sometimes up to four people on this "stack" of interruptions. I have to handle each one, and still try to remember all the things I *was* doing at the bottom of the stack when I first got interrupted, which itself can occupy several "stack" layers when you're programming. It not only breaks my concentration, which can take very long to get back on track (*easily* an hour, as the article mentions), but I find it also very draining: it seriously tires me out, and also drains my motivation, morale, and kills my job enjoyment. And those interruptions can also very directly be the cause of bugs. Often, at time of interruption, I may already have a 'mental stack' of the five or ten things I need to do next. Occasionally, when interrupted, I will forget one or more of them: I have several times now found bugs months later in code that were caused because I left something half-finished after being interrupted.
Person after person seem to come into my office, and they always seem to claim to have "just a quick question". Some days I think, 'if one more person asks me a "quick question" I'm going to quit'. I can really echo your "leave me the hell alone, dammit!" :)
My boss is aware of it though and has been trying to help the situation.
I suspect you intended to post to the thread about psychology of programmers. Anyway, one thing struck a chord with me in that: being interrupted. The thing hassling me most at my current job is that people interrupt me very often, and its true, it can easily take an hour to get ones concentration / "train of thought" back on its tracks.
I'm also wondering about this. Visual Studio 6 on Windows XP with VS6 Service Pack 5 has a blatant flaw in which your .cpp source files are sometimes deleted from the hard disk (I kid you not). I've been using VS6 for years, and this bug is a relatively recent development. And SP5, it seems, is going to be the last service pack for VS6. So for customers who want this rather serious problem fixed, their only option is basically to 'upgrade' to .NET. And you can bet that thousands of customers will do precisely that. I have this theory, which I could never prove, that MS deliberately introduced this bug in order to give thousands of their customers an "incentive" to upgrade. Many customers wouldn't need or want to upgrade if they weren't forced to, because the current version is already good enough for them. Its the age old problem of companies like Microsoft ending up competing with older versions of their own products.
They're a damn drain on the economy, if you ask me. They raise the costs of doing business for so many companies who use their products, with little or no real benefits from all the 'upgrades'. Money that could be better spent on something productive (or saved and the product made cheaper) is piling up in MSs bank account instead.
How well have we done writing software to perfection?
Actually, pretty well, if you consider the world outside Microsoft. People generally make software as good as it needs to be. Airbus and Boeing planes with hundreds of critical built-in software systems routinely make flights thousands of times each day around the world - when was the last time one of these had an accident caused by a software failure? Air traffic control at airports all over the world, handling at each airport anything from hundreds to thousands of flights per day, rely on software systems. When last did you hear of an airplane accident caused by software failure on the ATC systems? Thousands of modern cars on our roads make use of embedded software control systems; when last did you hear of any of these failing? Millions of people use cellphones every day, and I have never heard of a case where the software on a cellphone failed. From telephone switching equipment to nuclear power stations to subway train management systems to fighter jet control systems to oil tanker guidance systems to alarm clocks, pocket calculators, washing machines, microwaves, hi-fis, DVD players, video recorders, digital cameras, to the hundreds of satellites orbiting our planet, the other spacecraft we've sent into space (e.g. Mars rover, SOHO etc), to the systems used by banks, I'd say we've done a pretty good job of making software reliable.
PCs, and in particular those running Microsoft software, stand out BY FAR as being absolutely the most failure-prone software humans have ever created. But Windows represents only a tiny portion of software in general. Software gets a bad rap because most people are exposed mostly to Windows, but software has become such a ubiquitous part of our society that we don't even notice the hundreds of working systems that we rely on every day.
When you look at society as a whole, and how much DOES work every day, and how much we truly have mastered technology, and how much we have built, I'd say we have done an excellent job of predicting and managing all reasonable outcomes of chaos.
Software is made as reliable as it *needs* to be. You might see the software crash on the arrivals/departures TV display in an airport, since that can just be restarted, but you won't see such high levels of failure in the airplanes flight control software, that would be a disaster.
I guess a problem with "genetic design" is that even one mistake could possibly create a VERY serious disaster. But mankind will push forward with these technologies, it is inevitable. Lets hope the genetic designers realise the seriousness of their business, and hold themselves to at least as high standards as the software programmers for Airbus flight control systems.
But why should a worker in India or Pakistan have access to a loaf of bread 100 times less costly than a U.S. worker pays for essentially the same product? Why should non-US workers have some divine right to have access to cheap bread?
Well, why is bread (and other basic cost-of-living items) cheaper in these countries? This is a genuine question, I really want to know why. It seems to me bread should only really be cheaper in India if the Indians can make bread cheaper. In other words, if they are better at making bread, more efficiently, for lower margins. Why should bread in the US cost more? The price of bread is determined by what the producers of the bread want to charge for it. US producers of bread simply charge more for their bread. There are no unfair measures in place forcing American bread producers to have to charge more for their bread. Why not start up a bakery that sells cheaper bread? If your bread is still good, I can guarantee you that people in the US will start buying your bread.
Either you let free trade show its advantages and disadvantages by letting it run free ..
Herein lies the problem. The US would not be able to compete in a system of free trade. Other countries can produce goods such as software cheaper than the US can, for a number of reasons (e.g. poorer social services, weaker currencies, lower cost of living, foreign programmers are willing to accept a lower quality of life than a US programmer will, etc). The US is simply not the most (cost) efficient environment for developing software, and as the number of quality programmers in countries like India, Russia, China etc increase over time, the situation will only worsen.
This is just good ol' American capitalism at work: if Joe down the road can make similar quality widgets cheaper than you can, then Joe's widgets should, generally, be allowed to naturally succeed in the marketplace. Foreign countries can produce similar quality software (sometimes better quality) at a lower cost than the US can, and if the "market was allowed to decide on its own", the US would over the long run lose out. Protectionist measures are a possible "solution" to this (from the US's perspective), but they are contrary to the notions of free trade generally advocated within the US.
Uh, yes, of course it could be. So what is insightful about that? It could also be that man's activities are going to have a devastating effect on the climate on Earth. WE DON'T KNOW. Which is exactly why man should do more research on this topic, so that we can get to the truth about this issue. The only sane thing to do in this situation is to focus relentlessly on the truth. Not wishful thinking, not denial, not "blindly carry on and hope for the best".
There is so much wishful thinking on this board, its ridiculous. People here seem to believe that there isn't a problem because they want to believe that there isn't a problem. Forget about what we want to be true, and encourage fully all the scientific efforts underway that are attempting to find out what is true.
If it *is* true that mankind's activities have little or no effect, then research should reflect that. And if it isn't true, and we're headed for problems, then at least we'll be armed with some knowledge of how to tackle the problem.
One almost gets the feeling that some people are trying to discourage any research into the issue of global warming, claiming that man's activities have negligible effect on the climate. If those people are correct, why be afraid of research? Unbiased research would eventually prove them correct if they were. Likewise applies for the global warming pessimists.
Couldn't makes the cliche have meaning. Could makes it meaningless.
Not exactly. As you pointed out, its a syllable reduction of a common expression that people understand when hearing it, either which way it is used. Since it is commonly used in the "incorrect" way, and people still understand it, then it still has meaning. As such, it doesn't make it "incorrect": it makes it idiomatic.
It could well be that in the future "could care less" becomes the only version commonly used, but people will still understand it as meaning "couldn't care less". That makes it an idiomatic expression, because if you try to derive the meaning from the sum of the parts, you'll get nowhere: you just have to "know" the phrase.
So: "couldn't care less" => means just what it says (i.e. subject cares so little about something that he/she is not capable of caring less); "could care less" => idiomatic.
This is how languages evolve and how idiomatic expressions form. Most languages have many, many idioms. Idioms are, however, neither incorrect nor meaningless - you just have to learn them though.
Sure, but how do you suppose this is going to be achieved for dozens of motorists and pedestrians simultaneously, in rush hour, by an ambulance siren?
A soundproof car? No thanks. I'd kinda like to hear the sound of real screeching tires if there is an impending accident, or the horn of a runaway truck coming up behind me, or the sirens of an ambulance etc.
Well, I found the article, it was on CNNMoney:
"I talked about salary with a company last week, and they were paying between $30 and $35 an hour," said Donna Bradley, an IT specialist in Mesa, Ariz., who's been out of work since August 2002. "In August I was making $45 an hour."
It didn't matter; Bradley, 49, didn't get the job and is selling her house and moving to Maryland to live with her daughter while she continues to look for work.
Sounds to me like she doesn't want to take the $30/hour job because she'd rather just keep looking for a job that pays her well enough to be able to buy a house. So maybe she is the exception. I assumed hers was an average case since they used it as an example.
The article was published on March 13 and titled "US jobs jumping ship"; its here: http://money.cnn.com/2003/03/13/news/economy/jobs_ offshore/. A couple of interesting graphs with the article.
Some googling for keywords such as 'average programmer salary' returned very mixed results, ranging from $30,000/year to $80,000/year. However, I did find one article about foreign outsourcing in which they state that Russian programmers are paid about $800 to $900 per month. Which, yes, is very low for someone in the US.
It shows that South Africa is more willing to censor the truth to whore itself out to Microsoft.
I have absolutely no clue what the basis of this statement is. What are you basing this on? I don't see how banning a deceptive MS ad is either "censoring the truth" or "whoring itself out to Microsoft". Try this link: http://www.oss.gov.za/ for a clue, if you think the SA government is whoring itself out to Microsoft.
Are programming jobs going to foreigners for $15/week? If so, well, shite, thats a problem. In an article I was reading last week about this, a programmer was complaining about having to sell her house because she lost her $45/hour job. She was complaining that those jobs are now going to foreigners for $30/hour.
I'd like to see some more actual data though. I'd like to know what foreign programmers are being paid on average by US companies. I would think $15/week is an extreme case.
You are right and wrong. Windows 3.1 supported "386 mode" 32-bit with the "Win32S" layer. Win95 was basically just based on this but with a new look and a different default shell program. Anyway, you are right that it did "support every feature of the 386", but you are wrong in that it didn't bother to do it all the time. Windows95/98 and even WinMe all regularly switched the CPU back to 16-bit "real mode"; a typical Win98 installation is in 16-bit mode probably 10 to 20% of the time. If you want some proof of that, try doing some development/profiling with the Intel profiler, which will tell you exactly how much time Win9X is spending in 16-bit mode.
So Windows9X does NOT "fully" support 386 features. If it "fully" supported them, it would never leave 32-bit mode. Any OS worth anything at all NEVER leaves 32-bit mode. 386 protected mode memory protection is almost completely useless unless you do it ALL THE TIME. If the system leaves 32-bit mode for even a moment, its completely insecure, and even a QBASIC program doing POKEs to segment 0 can cause the system to lock up (try that in Win9X if you're bored). Its pathetic, and I definitely wouldn't call that "32-bit computing".
There are also other nasty POS leftovers from 16-bit "cooperative multitasking" Win3.1 computing in Windows9X, such as the ridiculous Win16Mutex, but thats another rant for another day.
Right now the cost of living in the USA is high, everything here is more expensive.
This is true; the strong dollar vs weaker foreign currencies does encourage hiring foreign skills. But there is also another factor; that many American workers (and I apologize for generalising here) are not willing to significantly lower their quality of life by taking a job that pays worse. They've come to expect a high quality of living, have come to expect that they will live in a nice house, drive a nice car etc, and some would almost sooner sit unemployed or flip burgers than take a lousy paying programming job. Meanwhile, those indian programmers are willing to drive crummy cars and live in crummy apartments for a lower-paying programming job. Of course, for many of them its an improvement over their previous conditions, so they're quite happy about it. The fact is, the IT labour market is quite global, and you are competing with other similarly qualified people from all over the world. This is just plain old supply and demand in action. Nobody inherently has a right to a well-paying job; if there are lots of programmers, and supply outstrips demand, then salaries will fall.
Companies should not be able to scam the system by paying workers in other countries cheaper and keeping the extra cash for themselves.
They do, and no, they shouldn't. But in a market with competition, it won't last, and those companies will sooner or later go under. Why? Because they will not be able to compete with other companies which also pay workers in other countries cheaper, but then go and sell their products cheaper rather than hoarding the extra cash. So they make less money, but undercut the companies doing what you mention. Broadly speaking, software in general becomes cheaper because software development costs generally become cheaper.
The jobs move where labour costs are lower. If you want some of these jobs to move back to the USA, then accept lower pay and live in a smaller place etc.
No, the ad is misleading. It may be technically true, but it is still misleading in that it heavily implies something which is not true. Under ASA standards it only needs to be deliberately misleading to be chucked out, it doesn't have to be an outright lie. This is a good thing.
It is quite obviously possible to mislead people without needing to specifically tell an actual lie, but in the ASA's view, it is not about whether or not a company is technically lying, but about whether or not they are deceiving people. This makes perfect sense to me; deception is wrong regardless of whether or not a lie was required to do it.
Of course .. I was kidding (to a degree) about everyone learning Mandarin. English is politically the most "important"/widespread language at the moment. It might not be that way anymore 50 years from now, but it is that way now.
The three most spoken languages in the world (1st language speakers) are, in order: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish. Can't remember the exact numbers, but its approximately 1 billion, 700 million, 300 million.
So I guess we should all learn Mandarin then.
More and more kids use expressions like "U" for "you"
I always find this a somewhat weird example/argument for the "degradation" of English, because a number of languages already use "u" to mean "you". In South Africa: "u" means "you" in Afrikaans (pronounced a little like "e" but shorter, isiZulu "u" means "you" (*) (pronounced like "oo" in book), Sesotho uses "o" which is anyway pronounced very much like the isiZulu "u". And none of this has ever been seen as a bad thing. Its perfectly normal. What exactly makes it bad if English people use "u" for "you"? Different, yes. Bad? What is the harm?
There are far more serious threats to "complex English" going on in this world; there seems to be a global trend towards speaking a highly simplified and reduced version of English, like, you know?. It seems to have become culturally frowned upon to try to speak proper English. If you want to talk about English being 'under threat', I'm sure there are many better arguments than a spelling shift for a common word like "you". There is an interesting piece on this here: "Linda Hall - coolspeak"
(*) Its a little more complex than this, but this is still accurate
People aren't eating McDonald's hamburgers because they've been forced to under an imperialistic dictum...they're eating them because they like a cheap, easy meal
Indeed. This for me seems to be the "trap" of "modern" western culture. The technology and conveniences are powerfully alluring, and ultimately any non-isolated culture is going to voluntarily gravitate towards it, seeking its benefits (and perceived status). You can't stop it. Most kids of other cultures will pick Playstations over traditional toys. People like things like cellphones. Not to mention the benefits of western medicine and medical technologies.
Some people of other cultures (e.g. here in South Africa) would like to see their people return to a "traditional" lifestyle, but it can never happen as long as new generations are exposed to "our" (western) culture - its like a Pandora's box, it cannot be closed again. Its unstoppable, because no rational person can argue against the obvious benefits of the technologies our culture has produced. None of this is really a bad thing, as such, because people are ultimately just choosing what they believe is best for them, and surprise surprise, they like cellphones, cars, Playstations etc. So this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it can be. Language and culture form an important part of how people define themselves, of their identity. This shouldn't be underestimated. Many people are attracted by all the "shiny things" our culture has to offer in terms of material wealth and 'fancy gadgets' and nice houses, nice cars etc, and in many cases choose to give up (either partially or entirely) their own language and culture. And once its too late, they may find out just how empty, unfulfilling and alienating our culture can be (not saying it inherently is, but it clearly can be).
But on the whole, people nowadays are making their own choices, and they are voluntarily choosing things like McDonalds.
In a certain sense though, people don't really have a "choice", as such: people have to choose our culture, because it is really the only option available that makes sense in today's society. You need to make money to pay rent and buy food, you need a job to make money, you need an education to get a job, better education = better job, you need a car to get around, etc etc. So in a certain sense people are, very loosely speaking, "forced" to choose this culture.
All the same reasons apply to why its difficult as a "westerner" to choose another cultural lifestyle even if you want to. Sure I would like to go live in the middle of nowhere somewhere or in some central Amazonian rainforest, catching and/or growing my own food etc. But some obvious questions arise, apart from luxuries ("give up Internet?"), but more practically, "where would I get my contact lenses / glasses from?", "what happens if I get sick or break a leg?" etc.
These hot spots produce a steady beam of light, which we see as 33 pulses per second.
Since there are two, wouldn't that imply we see 66 pulses per second?