I like my job because in a lot of ways my hobbies (computers) are my job. Of course I've been a contractor for the last 13 years and leave when I'm burned out or there is a re-org I don't like.
My vacation is unpaid but I've always been in a position to make it up + working before or after the vacation. Taking a vacation between gigs seemed like a great idea until I realized I spent part of my vacation job hunting. That is one way to really destroy the vacation buzz.
It could be because the political structure of the country's rebels was different, because there was allied support and because Libya is on the edge of a powder-keg while Syria is in the middle of one next to a place that the US had already thrown into turmoil.
MAD was Mutually Assured Destruction between two basically equal parties that almost failed several time. You propose that strategy in an N way relationship between inequal parties many of which have no internal checks and balances. Could we agree that nukes in the hands of those with a martyrdom complex would be a bad idea?
Objective-C, used by Apple, was originally implemented as a preprocessor on C. During the NeXT computer days, we used to sell Objective-Fortran and Objective-Cobol. Both put the Objective-C's object syntax and constructs on top of the base language while being backwards compatible. It was an interesting way to update a language.
Yes the top bracket was very high but the income required was astronomically high by 1939 standards.
1918 77% $1M
1939 80% $5M
The top rate has been higher in the past but the number of people affected by the top rate has grown due to inflation and the lowering of the income required for the top rate. The lowering of the income brackets may increase the impact of the tax across a broader range of society.
In the meantime, freedom isn't free, and if grandma wants an H2 to go grocery shopping, it should cost her proportionally more to do so.
It already does cost more. The car costs more, the parts cost more and the fuel costs more, possibly even double. Grandma appears to be willing to pay it at the current cost levels. It sounds more like you're saying that we should artificially keep increasing the costs until she can't afford it. You've already determined the outcome you want and wish to artificially change the parameters of the decision process until others agree with you.
Banks do renegotiate and rework. The servicers receive a fee every time they try and keep someone in the home. This can sometimes lead to situations where a person has been reworked several times when there was never any hope of them being able to make the payments. One of the problems with the existing loans is that folks signed up for step rates or teaser loans that got them into property they couldn't afford. Foreclosure is an expensive process for the banks that almost always ends up in a net loss. Up till recently, a debtor could either sell the home and get out of the loan because of the rapid appreciation or they could just hand the keys to the lender and walk away because the lender would come out close enough to whole with the paperwork savings that it was in everybody's interest. Now you have a situation where the properties are no longer worth the sizes of the mortgages which make those two processes possible.
Foreclosures aren't the root of the falling home prices. They started falling before the lenders ramped up their processes. They are falling because they rose too quickly, because buyers were speculating and using homes as income generating devices and because people got mortgages they couldn't afford. Who thought I/O loans were a good way to get folks into homes they couldn't afford? Who thought no-paperwork loans weren't going to result in fraud?
Banks and lenders did what they did because the market and congress beat them up if they didn't lend to everyone and if they didn't go after every possible borrower and property. Conservative outfits got hammered in the press and their stock price. Borrowers did what they did because they thought housing was the path to wealth and not just a place to live. Lending guidelines that were in place 20 years ago will come back again because they existed for a reason. All the "new ways of looking at money" crap was greed at all levels.
Web Apps: SImple to rollout. No client sizing
on
The Case Against Web Apps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A very large percentage of enterprise applications are multi-page forms based. The works reasonably well for that with a relatively low training issue. Every new hire knows how to use a web browser. Older very shortcut, abbreviation driven systems let experienced users fly through the system but many jobs have either high turnover or high numbers of irregular users. Web apps are great for that.
Web applications are easy to roll out to the enterprise without any client reboots remote install scripts or any of the other nastiness. All of the client machines in the enterprise are supported. Remote deployment doesn't require remote desktop or other higher complexity solutions. Most enterprises only support one browser internally so there isn't any cross browser issue.
Fat apps have their own issues. Applications that are large enough to be very hard on the web are often complicated and hard to build as a fat application. Data integrity issues across views and panels can be a pain. Two tier client server applications often still need two levels of validation, both on the server and client.
Mail and calendaring are two good examples of applications that work well enough on the web for some very (very) high percentage of users.
Hydraulic hybrids are being designed that are simpler than electric hybrids with higher energy storage density and higher MPG. Electric cars may be the "obvious" solution to higher mileage but they are quite complicated. Most of us techie types thing of electricity as the only way to store power but that isn't true. It may be that 3rd generation hybrids use a completely different energy storage model that that of a battery or capacitor.
I still carry an ancient LG VX6100 for one reason. The clock on the external black and white LCD is visible at all times without pressing any keys because it doesn't require a backlight. The font is large enough that I can read the clock without glasses.
Its the little things that add up to a usable device. It is always disappointing when some new marketing feature reduces usability:-(
Six years ago a radio station had children stomping on and setting fire to Dixie Chicks albums...
I thought my ability to disagree with someone was part of my free speech rights. Are we limited to disagreement in one direction or to only one level of indirection? It seems like you are saying I am no longer allowed to disagree with someone who disagrees with someone.
Someone asked how you could only do a phone interview. We often did a couple rounds of phone interviews before bringing someone in. In the case of big projects, we would sometimes like a phone candidate so much that we would make them an offer without bringing them in. This usually worked out fine and sometimes worked out very well.
The problems with the interview process are often more fundamental. Managers often wanted to staff a project before the project was well defined so that "they would be ready to go". This caused us to hire at a rate high than we could absorb and sometimes with the wrong skill set.
H1-B is a subtle way for companies to outsource without having to look bad in the local press. It has the side benefit of cutting costs while risking no management jobs. Building overseas offices puts management jobs in the same bucket as line jobs. I'd be interested in knowing the success rate of these remote technical offices.
It is a lot harder to manage remote development than it is to bring cheap labor into local offices near the business users and analysts. Most places would be better off with smaller, better led and trained colocated staff than they are with mounds of cheap labor.
I was at a customer in 2006 where all of our technical job postings were written so that no one would apply. We hired probably 200 people in a year, 90% of them through the H1-B program. They raised the experience level beyond what was required for the job and posted a pay rate on the bottom end of their scale. No one applied so they got to go the H1-B route.
One group posted a list of H1-B only job openings on wall at the entrance of their area. That lasted a week before someone pointed out that was killing morale.
Yes, we saw the same thing happen about 4 years back. We had several phone interview candidates that turned into pumpkins before arriving at our office. We were each doing 5-10 phone interviews a week. It was pretty obvious when someone showed up with radically different language skills and technical knowledge. One only lasted a week.
Re:This is a huge amount of work
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 1
If you suggested that every single change to the codebase be reviewed by multiple developers in a traditional proprietary software development house you would be, rightly, laughed at. There simply isn't the resources.
There is plenty of research that says this isn't true. Steve Mcconnell's "Code Complete" references several studies that show the bug count reduction due to code reviews can save significant time and resources.
I worked at a large financial institution with no software process. We spun up a 20 developer, 1 million lines of Java, 8000 class web project that required tickets (change requests) and code reviews for all checkins. We caught a lot of problems before they went to test. The process was driven by the development team and not by upper management.
I'm now working for an insurance company. We have almost 40 developers, 8000 classes and a mandatory two reviewer policy. Questionable code gets in but we catch a lot of issues and we end up with more folks understanding each module.
Most people learn something as part of the review process, increasing their future value. Please don't join any of my teams if you think your code is too good to need a review!
They used to be known as webmail.us. They provide IMAP, POP and a nice web interface. It comes with 5 mailboxes, calendar, mail aliases. I think I paid $5/year to use their DNS console so I can point at my dynamic IP address for a web server. They don't "do dynamic IP". I check to make sure the entry is correct every couple weeks/months.
Palin may draw female voters from more income and educational levels than you think. We live in liberalville MD and we've been surprised how many folks may vote for Palin. It won't make a difference here because we're a reliably Democratic state that won't be visited by the candidates.
I did like your dig on how only the uneducated would vote for McCain. It's not true but I'm sure it resonates well with your elitist crowd.
I've wasted my vote on 3rd parties for the last 3 elections and will probably do so again this year to help them get public funding. It will probably have more impact on our future than a two main-line part vote would.
You don't have kids (teenagers). Texting is a lot less stressful than talking with them and makes you look hip. Ok, not "hip" because that would make you sound old.
I'll (uh) 4th that suggestion. The Humanscale Freedom is a great chair. We had it at my old employer and I thought they were great. They're pretty pricey. You see used Aerons on Craigslist fairly often but I've only seen the Humanscale chairs there one time. (I bought two)
I'll keep mine around thank you. Re:Good riddance!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My kids have more disposable income than I do to pay for the gas:-(
Dropping 2nd hand value doesn't really bother me because I have no intention of selling it before it dies. I can't afford the $35K to replace my tow vehicle with something acceptable to you and its replacement won't get that much better mileage. We've done the math and it doesn't make any sense to replace it with a smaller more fuel efficient vehicle when you take into account the payments and extra insurance. Add to that the environmental cost of a new vehicle and you have almost no justification to replace. I'll keep my gas sucking pig thank you very much. Yeah, it is the last car to leave the driveway but everyone likes driving it and the thing is pretty handy.
The Democratic Party delegate system contains two components that diverge from the "one person one vote" concept. The first is the insider payoff system called the "SuperDelegate". The second is the much discussed proportional allocation scheme.
The proportional allocation system was skewed towards reliably Democratic district. 1000 votes in a typically Republican district were worth X delegates. The same 1000 votes in a historically Democratic district were worth more than X delegates.
Docks are a big win in the corporate environment. I worked at a large lending institution where we had a couple thousand Dell Latitude machines with docks and external monitors. They all had VPN installed so that the company controlled the machines that connected to the network even when folks worked from home. I liked the setup so much that I bought a dock for home and plugged in my two external monitors. It's pretty nice.
I don't think the folks at apple realize how useful docking stations are because they don't have experience with them. They eat their own dog food and they don't make dockable laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only true if the 100% of vaccinations lead to immunity. They don't. Your impact is greater than you stated.
Those would be great pictures to get scanned and posted somewhere!
I like my job because in a lot of ways my hobbies (computers) are my job. Of course I've been a contractor for the last 13 years and leave when I'm burned out or there is a re-org I don't like. My vacation is unpaid but I've always been in a position to make it up + working before or after the vacation. Taking a vacation between gigs seemed like a great idea until I realized I spent part of my vacation job hunting. That is one way to really destroy the vacation buzz.
It could be because the political structure of the country's rebels was different, because there was allied support and because Libya is on the edge of a powder-keg while Syria is in the middle of one next to a place that the US had already thrown into turmoil.
MAD was Mutually Assured Destruction between two basically equal parties that almost failed several time. You propose that strategy in an N way relationship between inequal parties many of which have no internal checks and balances. Could we agree that nukes in the hands of those with a martyrdom complex would be a bad idea?
Objective-C, used by Apple, was originally implemented as a preprocessor on C. During the NeXT computer days, we used to sell Objective-Fortran and Objective-Cobol. Both put the Objective-C's object syntax and constructs on top of the base language while being backwards compatible. It was an interesting way to update a language.
Yes the top bracket was very high but the income required was astronomically high by 1939 standards. 1918 77% $1M 1939 80% $5M The top rate has been higher in the past but the number of people affected by the top rate has grown due to inflation and the lowering of the income required for the top rate. The lowering of the income brackets may increase the impact of the tax across a broader range of society.
It already does cost more. The car costs more, the parts cost more and the fuel costs more, possibly even double. Grandma appears to be willing to pay it at the current cost levels. It sounds more like you're saying that we should artificially keep increasing the costs until she can't afford it. You've already determined the outcome you want and wish to artificially change the parameters of the decision process until others agree with you.
Foreclosures aren't the root of the falling home prices. They started falling before the lenders ramped up their processes. They are falling because they rose too quickly, because buyers were speculating and using homes as income generating devices and because people got mortgages they couldn't afford. Who thought I/O loans were a good way to get folks into homes they couldn't afford? Who thought no-paperwork loans weren't going to result in fraud?
Banks and lenders did what they did because the market and congress beat them up if they didn't lend to everyone and if they didn't go after every possible borrower and property. Conservative outfits got hammered in the press and their stock price. Borrowers did what they did because they thought housing was the path to wealth and not just a place to live. Lending guidelines that were in place 20 years ago will come back again because they existed for a reason. All the "new ways of looking at money" crap was greed at all levels.
A very large percentage of enterprise applications are multi-page forms based. The works reasonably well for that with a relatively low training issue. Every new hire knows how to use a web browser. Older very shortcut, abbreviation driven systems let experienced users fly through the system but many jobs have either high turnover or high numbers of irregular users. Web apps are great for that.
Web applications are easy to roll out to the enterprise without any client reboots remote install scripts or any of the other nastiness. All of the client machines in the enterprise are supported. Remote deployment doesn't require remote desktop or other higher complexity solutions. Most enterprises only support one browser internally so there isn't any cross browser issue.
Fat apps have their own issues. Applications that are large enough to be very hard on the web are often complicated and hard to build as a fat application. Data integrity issues across views and panels can be a pain. Two tier client server applications often still need two levels of validation, both on the server and client.
Mail and calendaring are two good examples of applications that work well enough on the web for some very (very) high percentage of users.
Hydraulic hybrids are being designed that are simpler than electric hybrids with higher energy storage density and higher MPG. Electric cars may be the "obvious" solution to higher mileage but they are quite complicated. Most of us techie types thing of electricity as the only way to store power but that isn't true. It may be that 3rd generation hybrids use a completely different energy storage model that that of a battery or capacitor.
I still carry an ancient LG VX6100 for one reason. The clock on the external black and white LCD is visible at all times without pressing any keys because it doesn't require a backlight. The font is large enough that I can read the clock without glasses. Its the little things that add up to a usable device. It is always disappointing when some new marketing feature reduces usability :-(
I thought my ability to disagree with someone was part of my free speech rights. Are we limited to disagreement in one direction or to only one level of indirection? It seems like you are saying I am no longer allowed to disagree with someone who disagrees with someone.
The problems with the interview process are often more fundamental. Managers often wanted to staff a project before the project was well defined so that "they would be ready to go". This caused us to hire at a rate high than we could absorb and sometimes with the wrong skill set.
It is a lot harder to manage remote development than it is to bring cheap labor into local offices near the business users and analysts. Most places would be better off with smaller, better led and trained colocated staff than they are with mounds of cheap labor.
One group posted a list of H1-B only job openings on wall at the entrance of their area. That lasted a week before someone pointed out that was killing morale.
Yes, we saw the same thing happen about 4 years back. We had several phone interview candidates that turned into pumpkins before arriving at our office. We were each doing 5-10 phone interviews a week. It was pretty obvious when someone showed up with radically different language skills and technical knowledge. One only lasted a week.
There is plenty of research that says this isn't true. Steve Mcconnell's "Code Complete" references several studies that show the bug count reduction due to code reviews can save significant time and resources.
I worked at a large financial institution with no software process. We spun up a 20 developer, 1 million lines of Java, 8000 class web project that required tickets (change requests) and code reviews for all checkins. We caught a lot of problems before they went to test. The process was driven by the development team and not by upper management.
I'm now working for an insurance company. We have almost 40 developers, 8000 classes and a mandatory two reviewer policy. Questionable code gets in but we catch a lot of issues and we end up with more folks understanding each module.
Most people learn something as part of the review process, increasing their future value. Please don't join any of my teams if you think your code is too good to need a review!
They used to be known as webmail.us. They provide IMAP, POP and a nice web interface. It comes with 5 mailboxes, calendar, mail aliases. I think I paid $5/year to use their DNS console so I can point at my dynamic IP address for a web server. They don't "do dynamic IP". I check to make sure the entry is correct every couple weeks/months.
Palin may draw female voters from more income and educational levels than you think. We live in liberalville MD and we've been surprised how many folks may vote for Palin. It won't make a difference here because we're a reliably Democratic state that won't be visited by the candidates. I did like your dig on how only the uneducated would vote for McCain. It's not true but I'm sure it resonates well with your elitist crowd. I've wasted my vote on 3rd parties for the last 3 elections and will probably do so again this year to help them get public funding. It will probably have more impact on our future than a two main-line part vote would.
You don't have kids (teenagers). Texting is a lot less stressful than talking with them and makes you look hip. Ok, not "hip" because that would make you sound old.
I'll (uh) 4th that suggestion. The Humanscale Freedom is a great chair. We had it at my old employer and I thought they were great. They're pretty pricey. You see used Aerons on Craigslist fairly often but I've only seen the Humanscale chairs there one time. (I bought two)
My kids have more disposable income than I do to pay for the gas :-(
Dropping 2nd hand value doesn't really bother me because I have no intention of selling it before it dies. I can't afford the $35K to replace my tow vehicle with something acceptable to you and its replacement won't get that much better mileage. We've done the math and it doesn't make any sense to replace it with a smaller more fuel efficient vehicle when you take into account the payments and extra insurance. Add to that the environmental cost of a new vehicle and you have almost no justification to replace. I'll keep my gas sucking pig thank you very much. Yeah, it is the last car to leave the driveway but everyone likes driving it and the thing is pretty handy.
The Democratic Party delegate system contains two components that diverge from the "one person one vote" concept. The first is the insider payoff system called the "SuperDelegate". The second is the much discussed proportional allocation scheme. The proportional allocation system was skewed towards reliably Democratic district. 1000 votes in a typically Republican district were worth X delegates. The same 1000 votes in a historically Democratic district were worth more than X delegates.
Docks are a big win in the corporate environment. I worked at a large lending institution where we had a couple thousand Dell Latitude machines with docks and external monitors. They all had VPN installed so that the company controlled the machines that connected to the network even when folks worked from home. I liked the setup so much that I bought a dock for home and plugged in my two external monitors. It's pretty nice. I don't think the folks at apple realize how useful docking stations are because they don't have experience with them. They eat their own dog food and they don't make dockable laptops.