I have seen such machines running all kinds of operating systmens including OS/2, Linux and Windows XP and I fail to see at first glance why Windows 3.1 shuld not qualify even if it is only a glorified GUI shell and not a true OS.
OS/2, Linux, and XP are all operating systems that offer necessary features such as pre-emptive multitasking, per-process memory protection, and decent integral network support. DOS6.x/Win3.1 doesn't qualify on that score.
I can tell you from experience that a secret clearance may easily take a year or more to process.
It may, but that doesn't mean it will. I held a Secret for six years when I worked for a Navy contractor in their submarine combat systems group. The closest thing I had to an interim clearance was the Confidential I held for a short while when I started there. From the time that I submitted the paperwork to the time I received the actual clearance was about two months. I was also one of the very few employees there with no previous active duty experience, which I would have expected to lengthen my BI.
TS was a different story, and very few people at the company held those - pretty much everyone and their brother had a plain old Secret clearance, though.
Unless NAVSTAR goes commercial or the DoD stops degrading the signal the high-precision customers like airlines and such will use Galileo and pay for the convenience and predictability.
Selective availability (intentional degradation) was turned off on the Navstar system back in 2000, although there's nothing that says it won't get turned back on again sometime in the futures. In addition, differential GPS transmitters cover a large portion of the U.S., and DGPS is quite a bit more accurate than the data you get directly from the satellites, and works even when selective availability is active.
"The warrant requirement, in particular, is unsuited to the school environment: requiring a teacher to obtain a warrant before searching a child suspected of an infraction of school rules (or of the criminal law) would unduly interfere with the maintenance of the swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools"
Translation: "What the Constitution clearly demands of the government under the Fourth Amendment is just too damn inconvenient to do in the public school environment, so it's okay for the government to ignore it there."
I dunno, you might be right. Just the same, I'd much rather buy something at 0% and pay it off over time even if I could pay it in full right away - I like borrowing the bank's money for free.:-) Hmmm, the wife *is* going to need a new MacBook sometime soon to replace her aging G3 iBook....
I would counter that anyone purchasing *any* computer with the intent of doing music or audio production should have the hardware on the machine to do it properly. For about $80, you can get a FireWire interface that will let you plug a halfway-decent microphone into the machine and record well away from any noise that may be a problem.
If you've got good credit, this pretty much amounts to the same thing you got.
Perhaps, but if you have decent credit (i.e. a FICO of 700 or so), you should already be able to get a Visa/Mastercard with no interest for 12 months, and then the aforementioned 13.5% or so afterwards (provided of course, you continue to pay *all* your bills on time). Apple has never offered what I consider to be good financing when compared to the alternatives.
That's exactly how the situation was related to a friend of mine by a wiser-than-average deputy sheriff some years ago. The crimes that get solved are usually the ones perpetrated by criminals that fail to plan ahead, or whose impulses exceed their capability for rational and careful thought.
I have some monitor code for the Z80 that works in a pinch, but nothing beats a hardware emulator.
Agreed, but software emulators make it *so* easy to bang out & do some rough testing of code quickly without having to go to a lot of effort in setting everything up or downloading code every time you make a change, and modern PCs are fast enough so that you don't have to wait 30 minutes to run 10 milliseconds of machine time anymore.:-) They're not as accurate (especially timing w/interrupts, it often seems), but they're cheap and sure can be convenient in the early stages of getting something built.
People are familiar with their Windows boxes, and most don't like to stray outside their comfort zone.
It's a lot easier to get Windows software you want via casual copying/trading, just because there are more opportunities to do so
Every year for the last three decades apple products have been better at "just working" then MS products. They have always been easier, they have always been more cohesive.
Somewhat. Apple didn't gain a real edge on user-friendliness until the Mac was introduced in 1984 (I'm pointedly excluding the first-gen Lisa because there just weren't that many sold), and prior to that Microsoft (who hadn't gotten into the OS game until 1981) was a big contributor to Apple's success via their Applesoft interpreter that shipped with the Apple II. Ease-of-use wasn't a big thing for the Apple II or III. For instance, if you wanted to use a floppy disk on an Apple II, you had to perform a "PR#6" command after boot to initialize the controller. Need 80-column text? "PR#3" did the trick, but only if you had an 80-column card or an Apple IIe - not exactly intuitive. ProDOS made things easier, but particularly back in the DOS 3.2/3.3 days, you actually had to know something about your machine if you wanted to get anything done.
Many modern programmers are terrified of having to code to the bare hardware, and many act like it's always a bad thing.
On the other hand, some of us welcome any chance to do so, and have stuff like the Windows DDK, and PIC, 8051, Z-80, and other emulators laying around in our toyboxes. If you don't know what an 8255 is without having to look it up, you probably shouldn't be programming PC hardware directly.:-)
My employment was never in danger, actually. I didn't report it since others in the company had already done so with no apparent effect. Maybe the company had been fined for it - I don't know. If they were, it wasn't enough to stop the practice. The company was just bought out a few months ago, so hopefully the new owners will rectify this situation.
I think my favorite part was the AC's reference to the Bulgarian as being a "darkie", obviously not aware that said Bulgarian was in fact a reasonably hot white woman. Flouting spectacular degrees of ignorance while calling someone else racist is always fun to watch, particularly when the dumbass AC obviously hadn't read the full post before deciding to get all self-righteous on me.
However, we're being taxed for the privilege of connecting to copper telephone wires that have already been largely subsidized by the government, so we actually are getting to pay twice. Oh, and the VoIP providers are *already* paying taxes for access to those POTS lines themselves - now their customers will have to directly pay taxes on them too?
Independent VoIP providers represent one of the very few communications mediums in the US that hasn't received generous government subsidies in one form or another, yet they're supposed to pay a larger percentage of the USF?
Uhm, because they are often specifically forbidden to.
There are plenty of other things that companies do that are forbidden by law, and often the fine they'll receive for it is factored into the mix and simply considered a cost of doing business. Going public with this information could easily enough be done without incriminating any particular individual employee, and all the company would get would be a fine. Heaven forbid a big corporation will do something like that when it's something critically important like this, though. "Maximizing shareholder value" doesn't apply to anything except money, even though the loss of freedom will cost the non-institutional shareholders quite a bit more.
What I love have been the companies that have interviewed me and have either been jerking me around (many of them) or, in one case, quite literally downright verbally abusive.
I refuse to put up with it, and if someone is verbally abusive to me I will not hesitate to quickly and loudly put them in their place before leaving immediately afterwards.
I had one company that I had *really* wanted to work at, and after a combination of five phone and in-person interviews, they said they wanted me to come in and interview yet again. I got fed up with it and told them, "thanks, but no - you have my resume and you've already talked to me enough to be able to determine whether you want me or not. I'm not spending my own money just to come down and talk to every manager that says he wants to speak to me." Two weeks later they offered me a job, but I'd already taken something with another company and I told them I wouldn't have accepted even if I hadn't. If they were going to screw with candidates like that, I figured nothing would be keeping them from doing the same once I was an employee.
I've been reading a lot of your comments, and you often have stuff of value to say. However, I think pulling Warren Buffett into the mix is really stretching things. Buffett is first and foremost an investor, and unlike a lot of the folks that are playing with stocks today, he's generally a long term investor who is *extremely* careful about where he puts his money and isn't interested in flipping stocks for the quick buck. He's earned the fortune he has by sound investing, and by making sure competent people are running his companies. He makes $100K per year as the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, lives in a very unpretentious home, and generally is the antithesis of the over-the-top CEOs we've seen in recent years.
The ridiculously large CEO pay that you quoted is also fairly uncommon. The only two really big paydays that immediately come to mind are the $400 million package that Lee Raymond received when he left Exxon, and Michael Eisner's $576 million that he made largely through exercised stock options in 1998. Both were very unusual, and aren't really representative of average CEO pay at large companies. Even Carly Fiorina's $42 million severance package she got after she was done screwing HP raised a lot of eyebrows. She's still pretty hot, though.:-) I don't count the $366 million that Bernie Ebbers got in improper loans from MCI, because Ebbers is a worthless criminal who will hopefully be spending a lot of time in jail for his efforts.
Like I said, I often think you have stuff to say that's worth reading, but it hurts your arguments when you start slinging stuff like that around.
I guess I've been really fortunate - since I started coding professionally in 1989, I've not really had any time that I was unemployed where I didn't choose to take some time off. The vast majority of job changes for me have been "last day at old place on Friday, first day at new place on Monday". The last time that it wasn't was more than eight years ago. My last job change was this past April, and it was a total of about three weeks from the time I sent the resume to the time I was turning in notice at my then-current employer. The new place also offered me $10K/year more than what I was asking for [shrug]. Of course I didn't want to be rude and argue with them.:-)
I'm not disputing that some folks have problems, though. I've not personally experienced any real difficulty, but I also know a lot of comparably qualified people that seem to have a hard time finding work. I don't get it.
That's not supposed to happen if the company is following the rules, however. The H1 workers are supposed to be paid comparably to what domestic labor would, but I've personally seen that requirement ignored entirely.
And then there's the method preferred by a previous employer of mine - have a Sri Lankan CEO that has good buddies in the Sri Lankan IT services industry, and mysteriously have people shipped in without even having posted the openings. When I started there, our department had four Americans, one Pakistani, and one Bulgarian. The Pakistani and Bulgarian both were U.S. citizens. Five years later when I left, we had four Americans (3 good people, 1 basket case), two Pakistanis (one H1-B) who were a little above average, one Indian who was largely useless (H1-B), and IIRC, 7 Sri Lankans (all H1-B, all pretty decent). I personally handed in no less than five resumes of qualified locals that I knew for two of positions that *were* advertised, and not a single one was contacted. "Qualified" meaning they had the required skills (and I could personally vouch for their competence), most of the "good to have" skills, were available, and were willing to work for industry standard wages. The "industry standard wages" part was the kicker - I found out later at least two of the Sri Lankans were working for a little more than half of what I was, when their experience and abilities warranted pay on par with mine. They had also told me that they were bound to the company by restrictive contracts that would end up costing them thousands of dollars if they left, but felt that they had to do it if they wanted to eventually get a green card.
The H1-B program is a joke. It's often not fair to the Americans that get displaced, and it's often not fair to the visa holders, who in my experience can end up in situations resembling indentured servitude. The only parties that consistently benefit from it are those unscrupulous companies who aren't willing to follow the law, since the government does next to nothing to enforce the requirements placed on employers.
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I have seen such machines running all kinds of operating systmens including OS/2, Linux and Windows XP and I fail to see at first glance why Windows 3.1 shuld not qualify even if it is only a glorified GUI shell and not a true OS.
OS/2, Linux, and XP are all operating systems that offer necessary features such as pre-emptive multitasking, per-process memory protection, and decent integral network support. DOS6.x/Win3.1 doesn't qualify on that score.
Xen is a nice hypervisor, but nothing else. They have nothing like VMotion, or even snapshots.
Are you sure about that?
I can tell you from experience that a secret clearance may easily take a year or more to process.
It may, but that doesn't mean it will. I held a Secret for six years when I worked for a Navy contractor in their submarine combat systems group. The closest thing I had to an interim clearance was the Confidential I held for a short while when I started there. From the time that I submitted the paperwork to the time I received the actual clearance was about two months. I was also one of the very few employees there with no previous active duty experience, which I would have expected to lengthen my BI.
TS was a different story, and very few people at the company held those - pretty much everyone and their brother had a plain old Secret clearance, though.
Unless NAVSTAR goes commercial or the DoD stops degrading the signal the high-precision customers like airlines and such will use Galileo and pay for the convenience and predictability.
Selective availability (intentional degradation) was turned off on the Navstar system back in 2000, although there's nothing that says it won't get turned back on again sometime in the futures. In addition, differential GPS transmitters cover a large portion of the U.S., and DGPS is quite a bit more accurate than the data you get directly from the satellites, and works even when selective availability is active.
"The warrant requirement, in particular, is unsuited to the school environment: requiring a teacher to obtain a warrant before searching a child suspected of an infraction of school rules (or of the criminal law) would unduly interfere with the maintenance of the swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools"
Translation: "What the Constitution clearly demands of the government under the Fourth Amendment is just too damn inconvenient to do in the public school environment, so it's okay for the government to ignore it there."
I dunno, you might be right. Just the same, I'd much rather buy something at 0% and pay it off over time even if I could pay it in full right away - I like borrowing the bank's money for free. :-) Hmmm, the wife *is* going to need a new MacBook sometime soon to replace her aging G3 iBook....
I would counter that anyone purchasing *any* computer with the intent of doing music or audio production should have the hardware on the machine to do it properly. For about $80, you can get a FireWire interface that will let you plug a halfway-decent microphone into the machine and record well away from any noise that may be a problem.
If you've got good credit, this pretty much amounts to the same thing you got.
Perhaps, but if you have decent credit (i.e. a FICO of 700 or so), you should already be able to get a Visa/Mastercard with no interest for 12 months, and then the aforementioned 13.5% or so afterwards (provided of course, you continue to pay *all* your bills on time). Apple has never offered what I consider to be good financing when compared to the alternatives.
That's exactly how the situation was related to a friend of mine by a wiser-than-average deputy sheriff some years ago. The crimes that get solved are usually the ones perpetrated by criminals that fail to plan ahead, or whose impulses exceed their capability for rational and careful thought.
I have some monitor code for the Z80 that works in a pinch, but nothing beats a hardware emulator.
:-) They're not as accurate (especially timing w/interrupts, it often seems), but they're cheap and sure can be convenient in the early stages of getting something built.
Agreed, but software emulators make it *so* easy to bang out & do some rough testing of code quickly without having to go to a lot of effort in setting everything up or downloading code every time you make a change, and modern PCs are fast enough so that you don't have to wait 30 minutes to run 10 milliseconds of machine time anymore.
- People are familiar with their Windows boxes, and most don't like to stray outside their comfort zone.
- It's a lot easier to get Windows software you want via casual copying/trading, just because there are more opportunities to do so
Every year for the last three decades apple products have been better at "just working" then MS products. They have always been easier, they have always been more cohesive.Somewhat. Apple didn't gain a real edge on user-friendliness until the Mac was introduced in 1984 (I'm pointedly excluding the first-gen Lisa because there just weren't that many sold), and prior to that Microsoft (who hadn't gotten into the OS game until 1981) was a big contributor to Apple's success via their Applesoft interpreter that shipped with the Apple II. Ease-of-use wasn't a big thing for the Apple II or III. For instance, if you wanted to use a floppy disk on an Apple II, you had to perform a "PR#6" command after boot to initialize the controller. Need 80-column text? "PR#3" did the trick, but only if you had an 80-column card or an Apple IIe - not exactly intuitive. ProDOS made things easier, but particularly back in the DOS 3.2/3.3 days, you actually had to know something about your machine if you wanted to get anything done.
Many modern programmers are terrified of having to code to the bare hardware, and many act like it's always a bad thing.
:-)
On the other hand, some of us welcome any chance to do so, and have stuff like the Windows DDK, and PIC, 8051, Z-80, and other emulators laying around in our toyboxes. If you don't know what an 8255 is without having to look it up, you probably shouldn't be programming PC hardware directly.
My employment was never in danger, actually. I didn't report it since others in the company had already done so with no apparent effect. Maybe the company had been fined for it - I don't know. If they were, it wasn't enough to stop the practice. The company was just bought out a few months ago, so hopefully the new owners will rectify this situation.
I think my favorite part was the AC's reference to the Bulgarian as being a "darkie", obviously not aware that said Bulgarian was in fact a reasonably hot white woman. Flouting spectacular degrees of ignorance while calling someone else racist is always fun to watch, particularly when the dumbass AC obviously hadn't read the full post before deciding to get all self-righteous on me.
However, we're being taxed for the privilege of connecting to copper telephone wires that have already been largely subsidized by the government, so we actually are getting to pay twice. Oh, and the VoIP providers are *already* paying taxes for access to those POTS lines themselves - now their customers will have to directly pay taxes on them too?
Independent VoIP providers represent one of the very few communications mediums in the US that hasn't received generous government subsidies in one form or another, yet they're supposed to pay a larger percentage of the USF?
Uhm, because they are often specifically forbidden to.
There are plenty of other things that companies do that are forbidden by law, and often the fine they'll receive for it is factored into the mix and simply considered a cost of doing business. Going public with this information could easily enough be done without incriminating any particular individual employee, and all the company would get would be a fine. Heaven forbid a big corporation will do something like that when it's something critically important like this, though. "Maximizing shareholder value" doesn't apply to anything except money, even though the loss of freedom will cost the non-institutional shareholders quite a bit more.
The active political party identified as the Libertarian party is full of crazies, or at least, really extreme viewpoints.
I think I'd still prefer "crazy" to "calculating evil".
What I love have been the companies that have interviewed me and have either been jerking me around (many of them) or, in one case, quite literally downright verbally abusive.
I refuse to put up with it, and if someone is verbally abusive to me I will not hesitate to quickly and loudly put them in their place before leaving immediately afterwards.
I had one company that I had *really* wanted to work at, and after a combination of five phone and in-person interviews, they said they wanted me to come in and interview yet again. I got fed up with it and told them, "thanks, but no - you have my resume and you've already talked to me enough to be able to determine whether you want me or not. I'm not spending my own money just to come down and talk to every manager that says he wants to speak to me." Two weeks later they offered me a job, but I'd already taken something with another company and I told them I wouldn't have accepted even if I hadn't. If they were going to screw with candidates like that, I figured nothing would be keeping them from doing the same once I was an employee.
I've been reading a lot of your comments, and you often have stuff of value to say. However, I think pulling Warren Buffett into the mix is really stretching things. Buffett is first and foremost an investor, and unlike a lot of the folks that are playing with stocks today, he's generally a long term investor who is *extremely* careful about where he puts his money and isn't interested in flipping stocks for the quick buck. He's earned the fortune he has by sound investing, and by making sure competent people are running his companies. He makes $100K per year as the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, lives in a very unpretentious home, and generally is the antithesis of the over-the-top CEOs we've seen in recent years.
:-) I don't count the $366 million that Bernie Ebbers got in improper loans from MCI, because Ebbers is a worthless criminal who will hopefully be spending a lot of time in jail for his efforts.
The ridiculously large CEO pay that you quoted is also fairly uncommon. The only two really big paydays that immediately come to mind are the $400 million package that Lee Raymond received when he left Exxon, and Michael Eisner's $576 million that he made largely through exercised stock options in 1998. Both were very unusual, and aren't really representative of average CEO pay at large companies. Even Carly Fiorina's $42 million severance package she got after she was done screwing HP raised a lot of eyebrows. She's still pretty hot, though.
Like I said, I often think you have stuff to say that's worth reading, but it hurts your arguments when you start slinging stuff like that around.
On the other hand, electricians are one group of people that are pretty damned hard to outsource. :-)
I guess I've been really fortunate - since I started coding professionally in 1989, I've not really had any time that I was unemployed where I didn't choose to take some time off. The vast majority of job changes for me have been "last day at old place on Friday, first day at new place on Monday". The last time that it wasn't was more than eight years ago. My last job change was this past April, and it was a total of about three weeks from the time I sent the resume to the time I was turning in notice at my then-current employer. The new place also offered me $10K/year more than what I was asking for [shrug]. Of course I didn't want to be rude and argue with them. :-)
I'm not disputing that some folks have problems, though. I've not personally experienced any real difficulty, but I also know a lot of comparably qualified people that seem to have a hard time finding work. I don't get it.
That's not supposed to happen if the company is following the rules, however. The H1 workers are supposed to be paid comparably to what domestic labor would, but I've personally seen that requirement ignored entirely.
And then there's the method preferred by a previous employer of mine - have a Sri Lankan CEO that has good buddies in the Sri Lankan IT services industry, and mysteriously have people shipped in without even having posted the openings. When I started there, our department had four Americans, one Pakistani, and one Bulgarian. The Pakistani and Bulgarian both were U.S. citizens. Five years later when I left, we had four Americans (3 good people, 1 basket case), two Pakistanis (one H1-B) who were a little above average, one Indian who was largely useless (H1-B), and IIRC, 7 Sri Lankans (all H1-B, all pretty decent). I personally handed in no less than five resumes of qualified locals that I knew for two of positions that *were* advertised, and not a single one was contacted. "Qualified" meaning they had the required skills (and I could personally vouch for their competence), most of the "good to have" skills, were available, and were willing to work for industry standard wages. The "industry standard wages" part was the kicker - I found out later at least two of the Sri Lankans were working for a little more than half of what I was, when their experience and abilities warranted pay on par with mine. They had also told me that they were bound to the company by restrictive contracts that would end up costing them thousands of dollars if they left, but felt that they had to do it if they wanted to eventually get a green card.
The H1-B program is a joke. It's often not fair to the Americans that get displaced, and it's often not fair to the visa holders, who in my experience can end up in situations resembling indentured servitude. The only parties that consistently benefit from it are those unscrupulous companies who aren't willing to follow the law, since the government does next to nothing to enforce the requirements placed on employers.
Yeah, that occurred to me a little bit later. Duh.
How many times do we have to tell you? Don't buy first-gen Apple hardware!
My first-gen 5GB iPod (bought two weeks after they were introduced) is still humming along quite well, thanks.