I offered to adjust schedules to accomodate them as their customer skills were top-notch.
That's the bit that by his own admission, he didn't do; I wouldn't have had an issue if he had (and good for you for trying). I agree with you that a person does have to recognise their own weaknesses and not take a job which is going to turn those weaknesses into problems, which is why I've never (willingly) worked in a job where my punctuality would be an issue.
Having said which, someone who is consistently less than half an hour late would seem to be reasonably easy to schedule for...
Actually, I confess I'd missed that, so thanks for highlighting it. (Worse, he more or less states that he took the early birds' word for it that they started at 7am!) As far as I'm concerned, what he admits to there is pretty much on the same order of "being shit to colleagues" as what he was complaining about in his original article - if not worse, because it's clear he was abusing his power and discretion to give Susan a particularly harsh time.
We may never know whether it's because she was a night owl, because she was a woman, or simply because she was more competent than her manager. But I'm now persuaded that he has quite forfeit his right to complain about workplace bullying.
My brother-in-law recently had to change jobs as a result of workplace bullying himself, and the common thread is that the bully themselves might be surmountable, but if the employer consistently enables the bully it makes the situation impossible to deal with. For him too, walking was the only feasible option. So from that perspective, I thought the article rang true. And sadly, sometimes it's hard to make the distinction between someone whose social issues are a result of having no interpersonal skills and someone who's simply antisocial.
However, I took a look at one of Mr Spiegel's other articles (this one), which made me wonder whether he might have been reaping what he sowed. That article ends with the line "Now I wonder if Susan will come back to my team? Would you?" - and having read it, my answer would have to be "Not a chance in hell!". Admittedly, I'm biased - a night-owl myself, I'm habitually hours, rather than minutes, late for work - and yes, the expectations of a public-facing role are of necessity a little different. But someone who is unprepared to make small compromises to a rule they believe to be bad anyway in order to keep an exceptional team member is someone whose own priorities could use some work... and the fact that there were other parts of the company in which Susan's timekeeping wasn't an issue suggests that his insistence upon the rules was frankly pointless, soul-sucking pettifoggery.
(If you want to argue about that, go for it. I don't care, and I won't be responding - I simply don't understand people who put arbitrary rules above individual differences, I never will, and I don't even want to.)
How far do you think 4 hours gets you? When I had a 4 hour commute, it was to a job just 25 miles away - and a good hour or two of the commute time was sucked up by transport changes (bus -> train -> bus), because there are developing countries that have better and more integrated public transport systems than Britain.
Driving would have helped quite a lot (though not completely, thanks to some notorious bottlenecks), but not being able to pass a driving test put a block on that. And of course, a drive is 100% dead time - whereas I used to be able to complete a novel in a day's commute. (Sometimes the novel came up short... those journeys were less fun.)
Yes, because loading 1 MB of code as part of one executable is vastly faster than loading it as 1 MB of library. This is especially true when loading 10+ different executables that have the same code statically linked in.
Funnily enough, it might well be. These days, code isn't loaded until it's run, thanks to the wonders of paged VMs - but what does have to be done up front is resolving all the symbols in the calling code to their library locations, and that does have to be done for every different executable. In contrast, statically linked executables can start up instantly, as there's no linking step required; statically linked library code can be inlined, and in any case isn't subject to a minimum granularity of whatever the page size is; in some cases, statically linked code might even end up smaller than its dynamic counterpart...
Can't argue with your other conclusions, but I tripped over this one; sorry to, er, pedate...
[The BPI] also says that if [ISPs] do not help with the fight against music piracy, then the government will bring in legislation to make them cooperate.
Hmm. When SeaMonkey was the Mozilla Foundation's "blessed browser", it was bloaty, buggy and into world domination. As you say, that led directly to the development of Firefox.
Then Firefox became the "blessed browser". And now it's bloaty, buggy and into world domination...
Why can't we do as all the other industrialized countries have done? Why should the employer provide health care?
In Britain, the employer pays a chunk of National Insurance (that portion of taxation which is ringfenced for social provisions), usually a larger one per employee than the employee pays. So in effect, the employer is paying a share of healthcare over here.
That's the last straw, as far as I'm concerned. Any organisation that believes it's OK to murder pets as an intimidation tactic must be destroyed, and every single one of its members tracked down and ritually disembowelled.
There's little difference between illegal immigration and outright invasion... [illegal immigration] is violent
Many people, when it's pointed out that they're falsely equivocating, have the good sense and good grace to back down - they don't commit themselves in turn to an even more ludicrous position than their original one.
Well, if SCO now have everyone thinking that Novell is just another creditor (rather than the legal owner of - well, probably more of SCO's cash than SCO has at this point) they've already achieved precisely what they set out to do.
are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
As I understand it, he's saying that he wants to live in a country where people can do that, not that he wants to do it himself.
And really, if I'm supporting myself, if I'm not asking your country for anything, if I'm not only not consuming your precious tax dollars but adding my own - why the hell shouldn't I go and live in whichever country I please? (No, overcrowding isn't a legitimate excuse, nor is unemployment. If there's a job for me to do, it's because there's a job that would otherwise go undone; if I'm willing to work for less than the resident population, then perhaps the resident population needs to check its attitude in at the unemployment office; if I can earn and make a living, then there's obviously "space" for me to do so.) As I recall the very reason you can pontificate about upstanding guests today is that a bunch of people did precisely that a few hundred years ago - and they were a lot less careful of the sensibilities of those who were already there than you seem to expect newcomers to be.
Well, for a start, not buying your entertainment on physical media makes that job a hell of a lot easier for them. The first sale doctrine only exists because you can't divide the content of a book (or a CD, or a DVD) from its physical manifestation, and the physical manifestation is no different from any other form of property. Dispose of that physical manifestation, and what remains to support first sale..?
If you want to stop that trend, insist on physical media. Not just on the right to back up to physical media, because you can't sell your backup; insist on getting a physical manifestation, something for which title can be transferred - something on which to hang first sale. The alternative is to wait for the law to recognise that a licence to hold an MP3 is of the same nature as the leasehold to an apartment, including transferability... and there are powerful forces opposed to that.
Well, if it does, at least you'll still be able to find a copy of OO.o 2 in a decade - which makes upgrading somewhat less pressing than with certain other office suites that might make wholesale changes to their UI.
I was treated like crap and told to suck it up and that I was spoilt by a generation that had it a fuck load easier than I did.
Yes, you were. The baby boomers. Us gen-X-ers watched them take over everything on the grounds that youth and social position should not be discriminated against, cement themselves so firmly into positions of power that nothing can dislodge them, and then kick away the ladders they found so useful on the grounds that age and achievement should not be discriminated against. You lot are the second generation they've shat on - they practised on us, and we were so stunned by the sight of our future being flushed down the toilet that we let them get really good at it. Sorry about that... on the other hand, you guys have at least grown up without the memory of hope.
Why don't cops spend time tracking ACTUAL CRIMINALS and solving ACTUAL CRIMES, instead of grouping everyone together and tracking them as "potential criminals" and waiting for potential crimes?
Because the police are, when all's said and done, civil servants - they're employed by the government, which seems to have a propensity to pass inane, insane, intrusive, reactionary laws in response to transient events and torchlit mobs. And guess which laws go straight to the top of the enforcement priority queue...?
Ah, if only there were some kind of cap on the power of government to pass laws which aren't well thought out, or intrude too far on the liberty of citizens. It could even have a catchy name, like "bill of rights" or "written constitution". I'm sure it would solve all of these problems.;-)
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That's the bit that by his own admission, he didn't do; I wouldn't have had an issue if he had (and good for you for trying). I agree with you that a person does have to recognise their own weaknesses and not take a job which is going to turn those weaknesses into problems, which is why I've never (willingly) worked in a job where my punctuality would be an issue.
Having said which, someone who is consistently less than half an hour late would seem to be reasonably easy to schedule for...
Actually, I confess I'd missed that, so thanks for highlighting it. (Worse, he more or less states that he took the early birds' word for it that they started at 7am!) As far as I'm concerned, what he admits to there is pretty much on the same order of "being shit to colleagues" as what he was complaining about in his original article - if not worse, because it's clear he was abusing his power and discretion to give Susan a particularly harsh time.
We may never know whether it's because she was a night owl, because she was a woman, or simply because she was more competent than her manager. But I'm now persuaded that he has quite forfeit his right to complain about workplace bullying.
Your dentist might argue otherwise.
My brother-in-law recently had to change jobs as a result of workplace bullying himself, and the common thread is that the bully themselves might be surmountable, but if the employer consistently enables the bully it makes the situation impossible to deal with. For him too, walking was the only feasible option. So from that perspective, I thought the article rang true. And sadly, sometimes it's hard to make the distinction between someone whose social issues are a result of having no interpersonal skills and someone who's simply antisocial.
However, I took a look at one of Mr Spiegel's other articles (this one), which made me wonder whether he might have been reaping what he sowed. That article ends with the line "Now I wonder if Susan will come back to my team? Would you?" - and having read it, my answer would have to be "Not a chance in hell!". Admittedly, I'm biased - a night-owl myself, I'm habitually hours, rather than minutes, late for work - and yes, the expectations of a public-facing role are of necessity a little different. But someone who is unprepared to make small compromises to a rule they believe to be bad anyway in order to keep an exceptional team member is someone whose own priorities could use some work... and the fact that there were other parts of the company in which Susan's timekeeping wasn't an issue suggests that his insistence upon the rules was frankly pointless, soul-sucking pettifoggery.
(If you want to argue about that, go for it. I don't care, and I won't be responding - I simply don't understand people who put arbitrary rules above individual differences, I never will, and I don't even want to.)
How far do you think 4 hours gets you? When I had a 4 hour commute, it was to a job just 25 miles away - and a good hour or two of the commute time was sucked up by transport changes (bus -> train -> bus), because there are developing countries that have better and more integrated public transport systems than Britain.
Driving would have helped quite a lot (though not completely, thanks to some notorious bottlenecks), but not being able to pass a driving test put a block on that. And of course, a drive is 100% dead time - whereas I used to be able to complete a novel in a day's commute. (Sometimes the novel came up short... those journeys were less fun.)
Surely it'd make more sense to sue the designers of the guns, for making them completely unable to shoot in a straight line?
You can pry my 8088-based PC from my cold dead hands...
"500,000s of people"...?
Funnily enough, it might well be. These days, code isn't loaded until it's run, thanks to the wonders of paged VMs - but what does have to be done up front is resolving all the symbols in the calling code to their library locations, and that does have to be done for every different executable. In contrast, statically linked executables can start up instantly, as there's no linking step required; statically linked library code can be inlined, and in any case isn't subject to a minimum granularity of whatever the page size is; in some cases, statically linked code might even end up smaller than its dynamic counterpart...
Can't argue with your other conclusions, but I tripped over this one; sorry to, er, pedate...
(Sadly, they're probably on safe ground.)
Hmm. When SeaMonkey was the Mozilla Foundation's "blessed browser", it was bloaty, buggy and into world domination. As you say, that led directly to the development of Firefox.
Then Firefox became the "blessed browser". And now it's bloaty, buggy and into world domination...
Could there be a leadership issue here, perhaps?
In Britain, the employer pays a chunk of National Insurance (that portion of taxation which is ringfenced for social provisions), usually a larger one per employee than the employee pays. So in effect, the employer is paying a share of healthcare over here.
That's the last straw, as far as I'm concerned. Any organisation that believes it's OK to murder pets as an intimidation tactic must be destroyed, and every single one of its members tracked down and ritually disembowelled.
Likewise, we should all run to the nearest cliff and satisfy our curiosity as to the exhilaration of free fall too...
Many people, when it's pointed out that they're falsely equivocating, have the good sense and good grace to back down - they don't commit themselves in turn to an even more ludicrous position than their original one.
Well, if SCO now have everyone thinking that Novell is just another creditor (rather than the legal owner of - well, probably more of SCO's cash than SCO has at this point) they've already achieved precisely what they set out to do.
Riiight, because illegal immigration is exactly on a par with territory theft and genocide.
As I understand it, he's saying that he wants to live in a country where people can do that, not that he wants to do it himself.
And really, if I'm supporting myself, if I'm not asking your country for anything, if I'm not only not consuming your precious tax dollars but adding my own - why the hell shouldn't I go and live in whichever country I please? (No, overcrowding isn't a legitimate excuse, nor is unemployment. If there's a job for me to do, it's because there's a job that would otherwise go undone; if I'm willing to work for less than the resident population, then perhaps the resident population needs to check its attitude in at the unemployment office; if I can earn and make a living, then there's obviously "space" for me to do so.) As I recall the very reason you can pontificate about upstanding guests today is that a bunch of people did precisely that a few hundred years ago - and they were a lot less careful of the sensibilities of those who were already there than you seem to expect newcomers to be.
Well, for a start, not buying your entertainment on physical media makes that job a hell of a lot easier for them. The first sale doctrine only exists because you can't divide the content of a book (or a CD, or a DVD) from its physical manifestation, and the physical manifestation is no different from any other form of property. Dispose of that physical manifestation, and what remains to support first sale..?
If you want to stop that trend, insist on physical media. Not just on the right to back up to physical media, because you can't sell your backup; insist on getting a physical manifestation, something for which title can be transferred - something on which to hang first sale. The alternative is to wait for the law to recognise that a licence to hold an MP3 is of the same nature as the leasehold to an apartment, including transferability... and there are powerful forces opposed to that.
Well, if it does, at least you'll still be able to find a copy of OO.o 2 in a decade - which makes upgrading somewhat less pressing than with certain other office suites that might make wholesale changes to their UI.
Yes, you were. The baby boomers. Us gen-X-ers watched them take over everything on the grounds that youth and social position should not be discriminated against, cement themselves so firmly into positions of power that nothing can dislodge them, and then kick away the ladders they found so useful on the grounds that age and achievement should not be discriminated against. You lot are the second generation they've shat on - they practised on us, and we were so stunned by the sight of our future being flushed down the toilet that we let them get really good at it. Sorry about that... on the other hand, you guys have at least grown up without the memory of hope.
Which must have made stopping, er, interesting.
Because the police are, when all's said and done, civil servants - they're employed by the government, which seems to have a propensity to pass inane, insane, intrusive, reactionary laws in response to transient events and torchlit mobs. And guess which laws go straight to the top of the enforcement priority queue...?
Ah, if only there were some kind of cap on the power of government to pass laws which aren't well thought out, or intrude too far on the liberty of citizens. It could even have a catchy name, like "bill of rights" or "written constitution". I'm sure it would solve all of these problems.
In fact, as I understand it it's not so much "SCO owes Novell $37m", more "SCO is holding Novell's $37m hostage".
Can that point be appealed, either in theory or in practice?