I used to 'work from home, programming all day' too. My intelligent, college degreed girlfriend gave me a little friction about it once and I handed her a check for about four thousand dollars and asked her to go deposit it into our joint checking account. Thus ended the friction.
Next time your wife gives you any flack about 'playing on the computer all day' just hand her the four thousand dollars you made last month and see if that doesn't help her attitude any. Of course if you are not being compensated for your efforts... the friction isn't about computing (it's about money.)
Yea - creating a hero from a software or hardware guy is as easy as unplugging the router before you leave the house to go to work. By 9am you are getting calls from home because the kids can't surf the net and wife can't 'do email'. By the time you get home the natives are restless, or perhaps on the verge of panic.
You get home, put a bath towel on your back like a cape and ~fly~ around the house from computer to computer using your ~x-ray~ vision to ~diagnose the problem~. Then you plug in the router, fix the Internet, and you are a hero.
Price fixing? I didn't know RAM prices were broken. I mean $400 for two gigabytes of memory? Damn!
Once upon a time I remember reading that Netware 4.1 could accomodate two gigs of memory on a single machine and thinking how crazy that sounded - at $50 a meg you were looking at $100,000 dollars just for the memory.
The way I look at it, memory could be a little cheaper when you look at it historically with a little reality sprinkled on top... but the down-side of the price curve is only going to go so low. Historically speaking about the up-side of RAM pricing and quite a few of us remember $80 or more per meg (compared to the.15 to.20 range it is right now) and quite frankly I'm real happy with my $200 per gig. It could go down a little - but it could also go up A LOT.
Yea well... I talk a lot of smack but I'm not in Texas. But if I was I would put a serious dent in the garden gnome stealing business, I assure you of that.
You see, some people twist words to make them seem to be what they are not.
The rest of the sentence, which you casually neglected to include, gives that caveat a completely different meaning:
when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property
So what it says in its entirely (that being the law) is 'when he believes that the deadly force is immediately necessary to make the bad guy not commit the act, or not get away with the stolen goods.'
The 'reasonable' is 'reasonable belief that if you don't kill him he will commit the crime (vandalism) or get away and you will never get your gnome back' - not 'is it reasonable to kill him for spraypainting on my fence or stealing my garden gnome.' Big difference.
This has already been addressed in great detail, with specific references to the Texas Penal Code. Scroll up some
Sorry, but you are incorrect on this aspect. It is perfectly legal to kill someone in order to protect your property in Texas. Not in your home, not on your land, not in your car. Just out and about, minding your own affair - if someone runs off with your cell phone and you personally believe that unless you immediately shoot him in the back and kill him you will never get your cell phone back... you are legally entitled to do so. I'm not saying it is 'worth it' - I'm just saying you are legally allowed.
I appreciate and respect your personal views and the sanctity with which you hold the lives of other people, but please understand that there is a wide gap between your personal convictions and the law. In Massachusetts what you said is in fact the law; in Texas it isn't - and by no means is it illegal in every jusisdiction in the United States to use deadly force to protect property alone.
I am pretty ignorant about a lot of things, but when it comes to killing a man I have all my ducks in a row.
Sorry, I was wrong earlier today, used up my allowance of 'wrong' so I'm just gonna have to be right on this one. I'm sure you understand.
Texas Penal Code Chapter 9 Subchapter D Subsection 9.42 says (and I'm quoting) : Aww hell, read it yourself. Scroll about 3/4 the way down, look for '9.42. Deadly force to protect property.'
Long story short, it's not a myth. Fun fact - it doesn't even have to be your property. Watch a purse snatcher take a random woman's purse, if she screams for your help you are legally authorized to shoot him to death and recover her purse. Check out PC 9.43, sub 2A (also in that link.)
You would be awed by the different circumstances under which you are legally allowed to kill a man in Texas. Your life is going to suck for a while if you do, and you may need to retain a lawyer - but when push comes to shove if you were acting in good faith, have a clean record, and were protecting yourself, your family, or your personal property you will get away with it.
Massachusetts residents are not allowed to use deadly force to protect property.
Texas residents are allowed to use deadly force to protect property. It is perfectly legal to kill someone for spraypainting graffiti on the side of your building, assuming you catch them in the act and use deadly force to make them stop (as opposed to after they stop, which is retribution, which is not legal.) If someone is running away with your garden gnome and all the way down the block, and you have to decide between letting them go or shooting them in the back with a high powered rifle so you can get your garden gnome back - you can legally do either (your choice.)
Not to get horribly off topic but you seem to have a firm grasp of the subject -
Perhaps it wasn't Osama bin Laden's intent to strike at America, but to strike back at the Arab community (Saudi Arabia) for outcasting him in the first place. If somehow he was able to convince the USA that 'those people' were bad and needed to be attacked, he would have his revenge and generally screw the US in the process.
For what it is worth, Fatboy (dropped on Japan in WWII) was only 12.5kt. Based on the historical footage I have seen it was pretty powerful - I'm not going to say it had a blast radius of 2km, but then again that's only 1.2 miles and yes may very well have.
Found in Google : By comparison, the approximately 13-kiloton bomb we dropped on Hiroshima during World War II had a blast radius of about one-and-a-half miles
A 1kilotonner wouldn't be enough, but it wouldn't take a fifth of a meg either... a 10kt would be just about right (but a mighty expensive test, in terms of materials.)
If I had to guess I would say it was an accident. If they were rattling the saber they would have let everybody know well in advance to 'listen up'.
In short, goodwill make for better team building than faux camaraderie. What build a strong team is a shared vision to do the impossible and be willing to die trying to effect...
This belongs in another/. thread : Wow I inherited a team of seasoned professional developers that are working for me because they love technology and magically have no personality conflicts or morale issues.
You seem to be missing the point.
The entire thread from the OP on down is centered around one man's tale of inheriting an existing development group and wanting to create from that group a 'team' capable of ongoing (or new) excellence. He genuinely wants his group to be happy, work together, and deliver results. If you send four co-workers to Vegas with a $800 a day combined bankroll and they don't get in any trouble, together as a team - you might as well fire all four of them because they don't have a drop of team-worthy blood in any of them. They lack Synergy - and Synergy / Teamwork are personality traits. No amount of technical acumen will make up for a lack of personality or cross the chasm of conflicting personalities between members of a group. You are technically 'elite'. Pretending I was only half as good would still make me technically 'elite'. And you have already decided that you and I wouldn't be able to work together. That's not based on technical ability - that's based on synergy, and personality.
Four bad-ass uberDevelopers in the same workgroup are worthless if they can't work together; if they won't play together on a pre-paid trip to an adult playground, it's a pretty safe bet that they won't work together (in a productive manner worthy of the name 'team') in your office. That's just how team synergy works.
As for GOTOs, I believe that Dijstra was building on the works of Nick Wirth in his crusade to remove the more 'evil' aspects of early development by forcing the developer to structure his code logically long before he starts banging on the keyboard. The GOTO was a crutch that allowed a hack in the code, jumping around to different sections of code like the thought patterns of a schizophrenic. Personally I view more than a few GOTO's in someone's code like a flashing neon warning, like the use of the BLINK tag in HTML - it is a pretty strong indication that whoever wrote the code didn't completely think it through before sitting down to code, or hasn't got even a rudimentary grasp of the language fundamentals and although his code will compile and run it probably needs to be gutted and re-coded. The GOTO's aren't the problem, they are simply symptoms of a larger, more ominous problem.
I didn't say the 'team building' exercise was for your enjoyment - I just said it would turn you and your fellow programmers into a tight team. Nothing builds a tight team like almost getting in a lot of trouble and subsequently escaping because you worked together as a team. If I could arrange to have my team randomly walking through a dark alley in Houston one night, get shot at by automatic weapons and nobody get actually hit in the process - I would (in a heartbeat.) If I could arrange to have my entire team kidnapped and left for dead in Mexico - ditto. A difficult deadline, a scrambled database, impossible business requests don't seem so bad when you and your team have that kind of history together.
A group of developers will come back from those kinds of outings a 'team' - sitting random newly hired coders beside one another in cubes isn't a team, it is simply RAID (redundant array of inexpensive developers.)
As for the money - it was in 2000, and I didn't have any say-so in the matter. Also, they didn't 'encourage' anything - they facilitated (we were quite capable of coming up with the rest ourselves.) Anything beyond taking the class - we were on our own. They just put us in fertile grounds; we did the rest.
Regardless, you should update your resume; it doesn't look like it has been touched in two years. I normally enjoy tearing online resumes to shreds, but yours is pretty good. Never know - someone may be looking for an old-school coder. I would consider you for my team if we were hiring, but we would have to get you in a lot of trouble first.
That serves a few important tasks: If people know they have a driver they can drink more. They like that. You are participating in the outing, being a team player. Drop the guys and couples off first, then the fat girls. Drop off the hot single girls last. Trust me on this one.
When you are at a bar and officially the designated driver, you are elevated to 'hero' status. Nobody hassles the DD, and everybody defends the honor of the DD.
Hah. That's cause your company's ideas for forced 'morale' events suck ass, I'm guessing. No offense.
The last forced 'morale' event I participated in invovled sending all three developers from a particular project to Miami for a week, putting them up in a 5* hotel known for an amazing nightclub (killer lady's night bash downstairs), giving them an unlimited 'discretionary' fund, and only letting them get one car (so they had to stay together.) Oh yea, and officially we were there taking a class - expanding our skill set for work.
Nothing builds a tight team like a week of everybody getting in trouble, brushes with the law, brushes with strippers or hookers, and maybe getting lost in Miami (and maybe witnessing gang violence because you are on the wrong side of town.) Sure beats singing the company song or playing softball, I can assure you of that.
That's funny - cause it is true. The company I was happiest working for had a 'beer fridge' and they even respected the request list when filling it. I knew I was going to be happy there and I didn't even drink beer (single malt scotch yes, beer no.) God I miss that company.
Honestly, I have read the OP a few times and this really doesn't look like a genuine complaint.
Can't be - a fourth of all computer guys are on the streets out of a job and this guy is publicly bitching about whether or not his employer should pay him a full day's wages if he doesn't come in because of the hurricane... OP - you stupid fuck, get in your car, drive your family to safer grounds for a few days, come back to see if your house is still standing, then drive to see if your company is still intact and if there is a building to host you if you still have a job. If you are so concerned about whether or not you are going to get paid your $200 for the day (assuming $50k a year tech position, which is generous for the area) then fill the day in as a vacation day / paid time off / whatever. You may not get your Labor Day pay either? Good thing you have your vacation / paid time off banked for emergencies - which this was if I ever saw one.
Don't be petty, don't be a little man. If I was a betting man I would bet that there are all kinds of things wrong that you just can't put your finger on, ie. a lot of little things are bad, but not so bad that you can point at any one of them and get sympathy or understanding on the matter - but maybe this one was 'big enough' to go public with so people would understand how bad things really are. It isn't - but it is a pretty good indication of the overall workplace morale there.
OP - If you have lost sight of the bigger picture, I will draw it out for you : you are not happy where you are. The company isn't going to bend to your will, nor are they going to change to make you happy. You need to dust off your resume and from home you need to be surfing Monster.com You need to be networking with your friends and associates to have them help find you a new job. You may need to move to another part of the country to get this new job, so if your house got totalled and you had good insurance - that may be a good thing. The Wendy's up the street is looking to fill a manager's position paying $25,000 to $45,000 a year - and maybe it is time for you to think outside of the box.
If, as a professional, you genuinely have deep emotional issues with the company requiring you to burn a PTO / vacation day for not coming in... and you haven't identified with any of the stuff I wrote above - you need to grow up and see the bigger picture. Particularly if you are otherwise happy with your job.
When there is a positive match between all the keywords you typed and a significant AdWords purchasing advertiser, you will immediately be routed to the highest bidding site.
If your video encoding something that would lend itself well multiple processors, I'm guessing it is something that would lend itself well to being spread across multiple machines. The last couple of nights I have been ripping DVDs (that I bought and 'own') to 700M.avi files to burn to CDs so when I travel I don't need to worry about my originals (I play them on the laptop when waiting for a flight, etc.)
Yes on paper the 4.0GHz P4 w/ HT Alien box is about 40% faster than the 2.8GHz P4 (w/ HT) box I'm using, but for $5k I could buy 6 of my machine (about $800-$850 apiece) and get them all working in parallel - and I could do about 4 times as much (400%) on the array of mid-range machines as I could do on a single AW uberBox.
Funny thing is - in four years you won't be able to give 4GHz computers away for free.
"...to each according to his need, and from each according to his ability."
Isn't that communism? No offense, but I have seen communism with my own eyes and I will take the hellishly evil capitalism you are talking about over communism as implemented in the historical Soviet sense... anyday.
Perhaps the problem isn't that the government isn't taking enough money - it is that the money that the government takes isn't being spent in an economically responsible manner.
See also : The Big Dig, a $17B (that's 17 followed by 9 zeros) civil engineering project to put in a three mile tunnel to route traffic to Logan Airport. Seventeen billion dollars. How much would it cost to have built an entirely new airport out in the 'burbs of Boston, eliminating the traffic problem entirely? For reference Austin's Bergstrom International Airport was built for about $600M. Even if the new Logan was to have been 10x as large as Austin s International Airport, that't stll less than HALF of what Ted Kennedy spent putting in a three mile tunnel so they could keep on using the same old airport.
How about simply force the rich to build the new housing, education facilities, healthcare facilities, airports from their own money, let them run them as for-profit institutions and cap their profits at roughly what the S&P500 return rate is averaging (8% a year sounds very enticing) and let them fund it with all the money they save by not having to pay for government clusterfucks like The Big Dig. People are a LOT more responsible with money when they are spending their own money.
Hey, the cop asked nicely, which just goes to validate Glonoinha's Rule #61:
People are more likely to cooperate with you if you ask nicely and have a gun, than if you ask rudely.
That said, why didn't the guy simply walk into the library, sit down at one of their nice tables and use his laptop on the Internet in the Library using the wifi? The cop may not have been right, but there is nothing more dangerous than a cop who is willing to be wrong.
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I used to 'work from home, programming all day' too. My intelligent, college degreed girlfriend gave me a little friction about it once and I handed her a check for about four thousand dollars and asked her to go deposit it into our joint checking account. Thus ended the friction.
... the friction isn't about computing (it's about money.)
Next time your wife gives you any flack about 'playing on the computer all day' just hand her the four thousand dollars you made last month and see if that doesn't help her attitude any. Of course if you are not being compensated for your efforts
Yea - creating a hero from a software or hardware guy is as easy as unplugging the router before you leave the house to go to work. By 9am you are getting calls from home because the kids can't surf the net and wife can't 'do email'. By the time you get home the natives are restless, or perhaps on the verge of panic.
You get home, put a bath towel on your back like a cape and ~fly~ around the house from computer to computer using your ~x-ray~ vision to ~diagnose the problem~. Then you plug in the router, fix the Internet, and you are a hero.
Works for me about once a month.
Price fixing? I didn't know RAM prices were broken.
... but the down-side of the price curve is only going to go so low. Historically speaking about the up-side of RAM pricing and quite a few of us remember $80 or more per meg (compared to the .15 to .20 range it is right now) and quite frankly I'm real happy with my $200 per gig. It could go down a little - but it could also go up A LOT.
I mean $400 for two gigabytes of memory? Damn!
Once upon a time I remember reading that Netware 4.1 could accomodate two gigs of memory on a single machine and thinking how crazy that sounded - at $50 a meg you were looking at $100,000 dollars just for the memory.
The way I look at it, memory could be a little cheaper when you look at it historically with a little reality sprinkled on top
Hmmm - his UID is 1029 (that's frigging ancient), his name is Wyatt Earp, and his web site is bloodshed.org.
I would take gun advice from him, ayup!
Yea well ... I talk a lot of smack but I'm not in Texas.
But if I was I would put a serious dent in the garden gnome stealing business, I assure you of that.
You see, some people twist words to make them seem to be what they are not.
:
The rest of the sentence, which you casually neglected to include, gives that caveat a completely different meaning
when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property
So what it says in its entirely (that being the law) is 'when he believes that the deadly force is immediately necessary to make the bad guy not commit the act, or not get away with the stolen goods.'
The 'reasonable' is 'reasonable belief that if you don't kill him he will commit the crime (vandalism) or get away and you will never get your gnome back' - not 'is it reasonable to kill him for spraypainting on my fence or stealing my garden gnome.' Big difference.
This has already been addressed in great detail, with specific references to the Texas Penal Code. Scroll up some
... you are legally entitled to do so. I'm not saying it is 'worth it' - I'm just saying you are legally allowed.
Sorry, but you are incorrect on this aspect. It is perfectly legal to kill someone in order to protect your property in Texas. Not in your home, not on your land, not in your car. Just out and about, minding your own affair - if someone runs off with your cell phone and you personally believe that unless you immediately shoot him in the back and kill him you will never get your cell phone back
I appreciate and respect your personal views and the sanctity with which you hold the lives of other people, but please understand that there is a wide gap between your personal convictions and the law. In Massachusetts what you said is in fact the law; in Texas it isn't - and by no means is it illegal in every jusisdiction in the United States to use deadly force to protect property alone.
I am pretty ignorant about a lot of things, but when it comes to killing a man I have all my ducks in a row.
Sorry, I was wrong earlier today, used up my allowance of 'wrong' so I'm just gonna have to be right on this one. I'm sure you understand.
Texas Penal Code Chapter 9 Subchapter D Subsection 9.42 says (and I'm quoting) : Aww hell, read it yourself. Scroll about 3/4 the way down, look for '9.42. Deadly force to protect property.'
Long story short, it's not a myth. Fun fact - it doesn't even have to be your property. Watch a purse snatcher take a random woman's purse, if she screams for your help you are legally authorized to shoot him to death and recover her purse. Check out PC 9.43, sub 2A (also in that link.)
You would be awed by the different circumstances under which you are legally allowed to kill a man in Texas. Your life is going to suck for a while if you do, and you may need to retain a lawyer - but when push comes to shove if you were acting in good faith, have a clean record, and were protecting yourself, your family, or your personal property you will get away with it.
Your statement about property is state specific.
Massachusetts residents are not allowed to use deadly force to protect property.
Texas residents are allowed to use deadly force to protect property. It is perfectly legal to kill someone for spraypainting graffiti on the side of your building, assuming you catch them in the act and use deadly force to make them stop (as opposed to after they stop, which is retribution, which is not legal.) If someone is running away with your garden gnome and all the way down the block, and you have to decide between letting them go or shooting them in the back with a high powered rifle so you can get your garden gnome back - you can legally do either (your choice.)
Spring guns (booby traps) are still a no-no.
Well hell - to paraphrase Tom Clancy - that's the difference between fiction and reality : fiction needs to obey the laws of physics.
Actual write-up with a real picture:
No Wing F15
Not to get horribly off topic but you seem to have a firm grasp of the subject -
Perhaps it wasn't Osama bin Laden's intent to strike at America, but to strike back at the Arab community (Saudi Arabia) for outcasting him in the first place. If somehow he was able to convince the USA that 'those people' were bad and needed to be attacked, he would have his revenge and generally screw the US in the process.
With respect to the F15 landing after having a wing sheared :
Supporting picture.
For what it is worth, Fatboy (dropped on Japan in WWII) was only 12.5kt. Based on the historical footage I have seen it was pretty powerful - I'm not going to say it had a blast radius of 2km, but then again that's only 1.2 miles and yes may very well have.
... a 10kt would be just about right (but a mighty expensive test, in terms of materials.)
Found in Google : By comparison, the approximately 13-kiloton bomb we dropped on Hiroshima during World War II had a blast radius of about one-and-a-half miles
A 1kilotonner wouldn't be enough, but it wouldn't take a fifth of a meg either
If I had to guess I would say it was an accident. If they were rattling the saber they would have let everybody know well in advance to 'listen up'.
In short, goodwill make for better team building than faux camaraderie. ...
/. thread : Wow I inherited a team of seasoned professional developers that are working for me because they love technology and magically have no personality conflicts or morale issues.
What build a strong team is a shared vision to do the impossible and be willing to die trying to effect
This belongs in another
You seem to be missing the point.
The entire thread from the OP on down is centered around one man's tale of inheriting an existing development group and wanting to create from that group a 'team' capable of ongoing (or new) excellence. He genuinely wants his group to be happy, work together, and deliver results. If you send four co-workers to Vegas with a $800 a day combined bankroll and they don't get in any trouble, together as a team - you might as well fire all four of them because they don't have a drop of team-worthy blood in any of them. They lack Synergy - and Synergy / Teamwork are personality traits. No amount of technical acumen will make up for a lack of personality or cross the chasm of conflicting personalities between members of a group. You are technically 'elite'. Pretending I was only half as good would still make me technically 'elite'. And you have already decided that you and I wouldn't be able to work together. That's not based on technical ability - that's based on synergy, and personality.
Four bad-ass uberDevelopers in the same workgroup are worthless if they can't work together; if they won't play together on a pre-paid trip to an adult playground, it's a pretty safe bet that they won't work together (in a productive manner worthy of the name 'team') in your office. That's just how team synergy works.
As for GOTOs, I believe that Dijstra was building on the works of Nick Wirth in his crusade to remove the more 'evil' aspects of early development by forcing the developer to structure his code logically long before he starts banging on the keyboard. The GOTO was a crutch that allowed a hack in the code, jumping around to different sections of code like the thought patterns of a schizophrenic. Personally I view more than a few GOTO's in someone's code like a flashing neon warning, like the use of the BLINK tag in HTML - it is a pretty strong indication that whoever wrote the code didn't completely think it through before sitting down to code, or hasn't got even a rudimentary grasp of the language fundamentals and although his code will compile and run it probably needs to be gutted and re-coded. The GOTO's aren't the problem, they are simply symptoms of a larger, more ominous problem.
I didn't say the 'team building' exercise was for your enjoyment - I just said it would turn you and your fellow programmers into a tight team. Nothing builds a tight team like almost getting in a lot of trouble and subsequently escaping because you worked together as a team. If I could arrange to have my team randomly walking through a dark alley in Houston one night, get shot at by automatic weapons and nobody get actually hit in the process - I would (in a heartbeat.) If I could arrange to have my entire team kidnapped and left for dead in Mexico - ditto. A difficult deadline, a scrambled database, impossible business requests don't seem so bad when you and your team have that kind of history together.
A group of developers will come back from those kinds of outings a 'team' - sitting random newly hired coders beside one another in cubes isn't a team, it is simply RAID (redundant array of inexpensive developers.)
As for the money - it was in 2000, and I didn't have any say-so in the matter. Also, they didn't 'encourage' anything - they facilitated (we were quite capable of coming up with the rest ourselves.) Anything beyond taking the class - we were on our own. They just put us in fertile grounds; we did the rest.
Regardless, you should update your resume; it doesn't look like it has been touched in two years. I normally enjoy tearing online resumes to shreds, but yours is pretty good. Never know - someone may be looking for an old-school coder. I would consider you for my team if we were hiring, but we would have to get you in a lot of trouble first.
If you don't drink, be the designated driver.
:
That serves a few important tasks
If people know they have a driver they can drink more. They like that.
You are participating in the outing, being a team player.
Drop the guys and couples off first, then the fat girls. Drop off the hot single girls last. Trust me on this one.
When you are at a bar and officially the designated driver, you are elevated to 'hero' status. Nobody hassles the DD, and everybody defends the honor of the DD.
Hah. That's cause your company's ideas for forced 'morale' events suck ass, I'm guessing. No offense.
The last forced 'morale' event I participated in invovled sending all three developers from a particular project to Miami for a week, putting them up in a 5* hotel known for an amazing nightclub (killer lady's night bash downstairs), giving them an unlimited 'discretionary' fund, and only letting them get one car (so they had to stay together.) Oh yea, and officially we were there taking a class - expanding our skill set for work.
Nothing builds a tight team like a week of everybody getting in trouble, brushes with the law, brushes with strippers or hookers, and maybe getting lost in Miami (and maybe witnessing gang violence because you are on the wrong side of town.) Sure beats singing the company song or playing softball, I can assure you of that.
That's funny - cause it is true. The company I was happiest working for had a 'beer fridge' and they even respected the request list when filling it. I knew I was going to be happy there and I didn't even drink beer (single malt scotch yes, beer no.)
God I miss that company.
Honestly, I have read the OP a few times and this really doesn't look like a genuine complaint.
... OP - you stupid fuck, get in your car, drive your family to safer grounds for a few days, come back to see if your house is still standing, then drive to see if your company is still intact and if there is a building to host you if you still have a job. If you are so concerned about whether or not you are going to get paid your $200 for the day (assuming $50k a year tech position, which is generous for the area) then fill the day in as a vacation day / paid time off / whatever. You may not get your Labor Day pay either? Good thing you have your vacation / paid time off banked for emergencies - which this was if I ever saw one.
... and you haven't identified with any of the stuff I wrote above - you need to grow up and see the bigger picture. Particularly if you are otherwise happy with your job.
Can't be - a fourth of all computer guys are on the streets out of a job and this guy is publicly bitching about whether or not his employer should pay him a full day's wages if he doesn't come in because of the hurricane
Don't be petty, don't be a little man. If I was a betting man I would bet that there are all kinds of things wrong that you just can't put your finger on, ie. a lot of little things are bad, but not so bad that you can point at any one of them and get sympathy or understanding on the matter - but maybe this one was 'big enough' to go public with so people would understand how bad things really are. It isn't - but it is a pretty good indication of the overall workplace morale there.
OP - If you have lost sight of the bigger picture, I will draw it out for you : you are not happy where you are. The company isn't going to bend to your will, nor are they going to change to make you happy. You need to dust off your resume and from home you need to be surfing Monster.com You need to be networking with your friends and associates to have them help find you a new job. You may need to move to another part of the country to get this new job, so if your house got totalled and you had good insurance - that may be a good thing. The Wendy's up the street is looking to fill a manager's position paying $25,000 to $45,000 a year - and maybe it is time for you to think outside of the box.
If, as a professional, you genuinely have deep emotional issues with the company requiring you to burn a PTO / vacation day for not coming in
I meant translation of the original post, in a larger global scale, not translation of the first post, which as we can all agree was teh funny.
When there is a positive match between all the keywords you typed and a significant AdWords purchasing advertiser, you will immediately be routed to the highest bidding site.
If your video encoding something that would lend itself well multiple processors, I'm guessing it is something that would lend itself well to being spread across multiple machines. The last couple of nights I have been ripping DVDs (that I bought and 'own') to 700M .avi files to burn to CDs so when I travel I don't need to worry about my originals (I play them on the laptop when waiting for a flight, etc.)
Yes on paper the 4.0GHz P4 w/ HT Alien box is about 40% faster than the 2.8GHz P4 (w/ HT) box I'm using, but for $5k I could buy 6 of my machine (about $800-$850 apiece) and get them all working in parallel - and I could do about 4 times as much (400%) on the array of mid-range machines as I could do on a single AW uberBox.
Funny thing is - in four years you won't be able to give 4GHz computers away for free.
"...to each according to his need, and from each according to his ability."
... anyday.
Isn't that communism? No offense, but I have seen communism with my own eyes and I will take the hellishly evil capitalism you are talking about over communism as implemented in the historical Soviet sense
Perhaps the problem isn't that the government isn't taking enough money - it is that the money that the government takes isn't being spent in an economically responsible manner.
See also : The Big Dig, a $17B (that's 17 followed by 9 zeros) civil engineering project to put in a three mile tunnel to route traffic to Logan Airport. Seventeen billion dollars. How much would it cost to have built an entirely new airport out in the 'burbs of Boston, eliminating the traffic problem entirely? For reference Austin's Bergstrom International Airport was built for about $600M. Even if the new Logan was to have been 10x as large as Austin
s International Airport, that't stll less than HALF of what Ted Kennedy spent putting in a three mile tunnel so they could keep on using the same old airport.
How about simply force the rich to build the new housing, education facilities, healthcare facilities, airports from their own money, let them run them as for-profit institutions and cap their profits at roughly what the S&P500 return rate is averaging (8% a year sounds very enticing) and let them fund it with all the money they save by not having to pay for government clusterfucks like The Big Dig. People are a LOT more responsible with money when they are spending their own money.
It's a pretty terrible example to set when the commander gets off
Damn, you are pretty funny for someone writing at 06:47am EST. That's a mental image I didn't need, but laughed at anyways.
Hey, the cop asked nicely, which just goes to validate Glonoinha's Rule #61 :
People are more likely to cooperate with you if you ask nicely and have a gun, than if you ask rudely.
That said, why didn't the guy simply walk into the library, sit down at one of their nice tables and use his laptop on the Internet in the Library using the wifi? The cop may not have been right, but there is nothing more dangerous than a cop who is willing to be wrong.