You know what the REAL problem with telecommuting is? It's kids. There you are, sitting at home, trying to set apart work from nonwork, but the kids know you're in the house. They want to play, and they're just so cute and irrisistible.
CALGARY (ADP) - In a stunning development in the open source movement, the OpenBSD project, led by developer Theo de Raadt, was bombed and strafed by a hitherto-unknown air force belonging to private software corporation Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT).
I mean, seriously... how much does it really cost to "keep a roof over 2 people and keep them fed" in a normal "middle class" neighborhood? One could live quite comfortably for under $2000 a month, which is just over $11 an hour. I wouldn't say someone making over $11/hr is part of the "privileged few".
Horseshit. My son's making about $11.00 an hour. He's about to move into a townhome with two friends, dividing the rent amongst them. He will pay the following:
Rent
Electricity (other utilities included)
Auto Insurance
Renter's Insurance
Food
Fuel
Taxes associated with his car
Other miscellaneous items (clothing, health care costs, vehicle upkeep, etc.)
If he is fortunate, he will have approximately $75.00 a month left over after taxes, the expenses itemized above, and whatnot. In no way will he be living high on the hog, yet he will just barely be able to meet expenses in a modest neighborhood, and then only after most of those expenses are split three ways. Try living on your own in an area of any size before you spout off about how well one can live on such a relativly small sum.
Agreed. I want my cell phone so that I can call someone in an emergency, to let them know I'm running late, etc. I turn it on when I'm driving (I pull over when talking), or if I'm generally out of the house. At home or at the office, it's turned off. Don't want or need text messaging, cameras, browsers, weird ring tones or any of the other crap that the hypesters are peddaling as the must have latest thing. If it works when I need to call (or receive a call from the few people who have my cell number), that's all I care about.
It's not just Delphi... I've worked in the field for over 20 years now. On one of my earliest jobs back in the 80's, I had to help re-write code originally written by a young lady with a BS/CS degree from the University of Maryland. One of the first things I found was a block of code containig 22 nested "If" statements... Myself and a few others significantly re-organized the code so that it ran faster, used less code, and used significantly less memory (this was back in the day of the mighty PLink linker with its static overlays that had to be manually calculated and allocated).
Since then, I've interviewed folks for positions where they would be programming against a database who did not know what keys were, what "normalized" tables meant, etc. I've also taken continuing education courses, and some of the students are completely unskilled in lower-level design. One instructor asked us to create a project using an array to simulate a priority queue. Only about 25% of the class knew what a queue was, much less a priority queue...
Are you out of your mind ? Just how much time do you expect students to spend working on this course?
As much time as they need to in order to understand the fundamentals as well as some of the surrounding tools and concepts. I've always found it useful to put in more time in my classwork than was minimally necessary as I tended to get much more from the experience than others.
Ant is a painful necessity for professional java programmers. Its only useful or necessary with large projects. This an intro course, they'll have quite enough to worry about learning the basics of OO, java syntax and the java language.
Oddly enough, I did not find ANT all that difficult to learn and use, and it's use has simplified my life considerably -- not only at the office where I am a "professional programmer", but also in continuing education courses. It's not just for large projects, IMHO.
When first learning, force them to use a plain text editor and force them to use ANT. In this way, they have to learn the syntax, and they have to learn how to set up the project so that ANT can package it appropriately to run under Tomcat or what have you.
After they have learned the basics and are comfortable with the mechanics of writing/compiling code, introduce them to an IDE (Eclipse and NetBeans are both free, as id Sun's Java Creator Studio) since that's the environment they will likely use in the real world.
It was the theory behind sendng a third as many troops as the generals knew were needed. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al were as entranced by the "Revolution in Military Affairs" as McNamara was by his precious operations research.
Indeed. Historically speaking, an army has required something on the order of one soldier for every 40 or so unarmed civilians in order to successfully occupy a country. See this link for details: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/breaking/story.asp? ID=2149
We have about 150,000 troops in-theatre. According to the CIA factbook (link here: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ iz.html there are 26.7 million Iraqis. According to the math, we have one soldier for every 179 Iraqis, many of whom are still armed. This is a recipe for disaster.
The quote "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." has been variously attributed to Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke, Colin Powell, Murphy Military Laws, and Heinz Guderian (there may be others). D. Rumsfeld and his boys would do well to remember that, since they seem to be incapable of altering either their battle plans or their rhetoric.
every law-abiding Al-Queda agent is going to run right down to the local police station to comply with this edict.
Yet another shining example of a law that will criminalize ordinary citizens who only wish to secure their privacy while doing absolutely nothing to curb the activities of terrorists who would murder those same citizens. Absolutly brilliant!
It's a drop compared to consumption, but you're asking the wrong question: Is this a worthwhile endeveor? They expect to produce about a million liters a year. Right now, diesel fuel wholesales for, let's say, $.60/liter so the plant should see revenues of $600K/year. Now if they can operate and pay off the construction costs for less than $600K/year, then this is a good idea and should be implemented where possible. (Please note that I just plucked my numbers out of the air. I leave it to a trained professoinal to do an actual feasibility study. I'm also assuming a constant price of oil and we all know that it is anything but.)
You are still missing part of the question. Farms that raise cattle, sheep, pigs, various types of fowl, etc. generate huge amounts of animal waste. Much of this runs off untreated into local streams and tributaries. Around this area, for instance, it flows into the Chesapeake Bay. Not only does this pose a health hazard to humans who use the bay recreationally, it helps cause algae blooms (as does fertilizer runoff) which further endangers human life and kills off fish/shellfish populations leading to persistant economic issues for those who make their living fishing the bay.
The reduction in environmental damage and/or the cost to remediate such damage might tip the scales toward this technology if it's anywhere near a breakeven point in and of itself.
I would agree with your premise about fighting one's own battles if the world were truly a fair place. Unfortunately, it is not. For instance:
The company has far more financial resources than you do, so in any sort of situation where you might feel that you have been the victim of discriminatory action, the company holds the cards, not you. Also, many states are "right to work" states, meaning that you can be fired at will for any reason, or no reason. Who will come to your aid in such a situation?
The company does not stand alone against the world as you do. The company is a member of an industry group, which in turn may be a member of an even larger group. Perhaps you've heard of the Business Roundtable, The Chamber of Commerce, The National Federation of Independent Businesses, The National Small Business Association and the like. Companies band together to promote and ensure their common interests. Why is it considered to be so repulsive when the wage slaves try it?
If you don't like to associate with Union Types, then perhaps you might consider giving up the 5-day week, eight hour days, health insurance, and other benefits that those rascally union workers fought for which, incidentally, trickled down to the rest of the labor force, white collar workers included (and yes, I work lots of unpaid overtime when a critical system goes down for which I am responsible, I know it's not always an 8-hour job, but it is most days).
Many who espouse a tough, individualistic streak will likely change their tune if they get sick for a while, or once they cross a certain age threshold. What you believe about being employable forever at 25 and what you realize at 50 are radically different things.
The world is a hard place. It helps to have friends.
However, I don't think that's the crux of the problem. People with disabilites are more concerned that ODF incorporate handling for text readers and such from the outset and not have to be bludgeoned into doing it later. It does no good exporting Word docs to ODF format later if ODF is still incapable of working with the assistive technology required. And let's face it: if ODF whole-heartedly embraces this, it puts them one up on Microsoft, which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the discussion, then dragged its feet in actually developing the functionality.
I think that this is the wrong qay to frame the debate.
With M$ products, there is no alternative to building a plugin for Word as the.doc formats are closed. While I agree that a plugin for OpenOffice, etc. would be nice so that screen reading/editing can occur simultaneously, I would think that the vast majority of folks only have to read documents, not edit them (I've been wrong before). If that's the case, I would think that it would be simpler to adapt curent text-to-speech products to parse the.ODF files directly than to jigger up something that ties them to OpenOffice, K-Office, StarOffice and the like directly. The document format is open, unencumbered and standardized, yes?
get charged with felonious use of school property for circumventing access codes and the like. Instead of finding a way to encourage them and helping to channel their natural curiosity into a productive learning experience, we threaten to sue their sorry little asses and throw them in jail (former/. article). That'll learn them damn smartass kids to conform!
It all looked good except that line to me. You need a *, I'll add it for you.
Once installed, Oracle can handle 10,000 customers a second on a 40-million row table*
*assuming you have the obligatory DBA who earns 6 figures to optimize your tables twice a week.
unfortunately for me, the company I work for does not. And let me tell you, oracle is a complete dog if you don't have a DBA doing the proper optimizations.
Oh come on! Even MS Access is a dog if you don;t tune it properly! Sheesh!
But seriously, the ability to mold the environment for your individual needs is something I can only do in Linux. The desktop? I don't see that as a big concern. We pay $99 for an OEM copy of XP. It's the SQL Server / Windows Server 2003 / Visual Studio licenses that kick our a$$.
Yeah, but then there's the Office Licenses too. And Photoshop. And AutoCad, and other apps that you can only seriously run on Windoze. Those all cost big $$$ as well (and IIRC, the next Office version will virutally require an Exchange back end, even if you don't use Outlook for mail/calendering. If you had a viable, stable Linix desktop, more vendors migh be inclined to create and support linux versions of Office productivity suites (yes, I know about and use OpenOffice at home, as well as Thunderbird, but AFAIK, there is no equivalent calendering solution). Then again, I'm not a Linux weenie, so I could very well be quite wrong.
I don't think their goal is to get rid of Microsoft, per say. When you buy an automobile, you have the choices ranging from sedans to minivans to heavy duty trucks. Does the Ford F350 really "compete" with a Honda Civic?
I think you miss the point. The reason that M$ has been wildly successful ("success" being defined by the fact that they own > 90% of the desktop space) is that they came out with a standard way to interface with the underlying system (yeah, I know -- 16/32 bit API's. Still...). To my knowledge, Linux hasn't achieved that. Part of that is by design -- the folks who do Suse have a different vison than the folks who do say, Mandrake. Still, if you want to dislodge M$ and have far greater desktop penetration, you need to have a standard to which various vendors can write.
If I'm missing something, please feel free to enlighten me.
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said the spider to the fly...
- Rent
- Electricity (other utilities included)
- Auto Insurance
- Renter's Insurance
- Food
- Fuel
- Taxes associated with his car
- Other miscellaneous items (clothing, health care costs, vehicle upkeep, etc.)
If he is fortunate, he will have approximately $75.00 a month left over after taxes, the expenses itemized above, and whatnot. In no way will he be living high on the hog, yet he will just barely be able to meet expenses in a modest neighborhood, and then only after most of those expenses are split three ways. Try living on your own in an area of any size before you spout off about how well one can live on such a relativly small sum.is what FEMA intends to do about this?
of a most excellent book written by Tom DeMarco; ISBN: 0-932633-61-7. I highly recommend it.
Agreed. I want my cell phone so that I can call someone in an emergency, to let them know I'm running late, etc. I turn it on when I'm driving (I pull over when talking), or if I'm generally out of the house. At home or at the office, it's turned off. Don't want or need text messaging, cameras, browsers, weird ring tones or any of the other crap that the hypesters are peddaling as the must have latest thing. If it works when I need to call (or receive a call from the few people who have my cell number), that's all I care about.
'Nuff said...
Since then, I've interviewed folks for positions where they would be programming against a database who did not know what keys were, what "normalized" tables meant, etc. I've also taken continuing education courses, and some of the students are completely unskilled in lower-level design. One instructor asked us to create a project using an array to simulate a priority queue. Only about 25% of the class knew what a queue was, much less a priority queue...
After they have learned the basics and are comfortable with the mechanics of writing/compiling code, introduce them to an IDE (Eclipse and NetBeans are both free, as id Sun's Java Creator Studio) since that's the environment they will likely use in the real world.
We have about 150,000 troops in-theatre. According to the CIA factbook (link here: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ iz.html there are 26.7 million Iraqis. According to the math, we have one soldier for every 179 Iraqis, many of whom are still armed. This is a recipe for disaster.
The quote "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." has been variously attributed to Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke, Colin Powell, Murphy Military Laws, and Heinz Guderian (there may be others). D. Rumsfeld and his boys would do well to remember that, since they seem to be incapable of altering either their battle plans or their rhetoric.
Yet another shining example of a law that will criminalize ordinary citizens who only wish to secure their privacy while doing absolutely nothing to curb the activities of terrorists who would murder those same citizens. Absolutly brilliant!
The reduction in environmental damage and/or the cost to remediate such damage might tip the scales toward this technology if it's anywhere near a breakeven point in and of itself.
'nuff said...
The world is a hard place. It helps to have friends.
With M$ products, there is no alternative to building a plugin for Word as the .doc formats are closed. While I agree that a plugin for OpenOffice, etc. would be nice so that screen reading/editing can occur simultaneously, I would think that the vast majority of folks only have to read documents, not edit them (I've been wrong before). If that's the case, I would think that it would be simpler to adapt curent text-to-speech products to parse the .ODF files directly than to jigger up something that ties them to OpenOffice, K-Office, StarOffice and the like directly. The document format is open, unencumbered and standardized, yes?
get charged with felonious use of school property for circumventing access codes and the like. Instead of finding a way to encourage them and helping to channel their natural curiosity into a productive learning experience, we threaten to sue their sorry little asses and throw them in jail (former /. article). That'll learn them damn smartass kids to conform!
If I'm missing something, please feel free to enlighten me.
Let's concentrate on making synthetic babes! Oh, wait...
*Some restrictions apply...