Does anyone know of any other countries where such childish, sensless, brutal, inhumane and counterproductive employee termination techniques are used?
My former (U.S. based) company used voice mail on recent firees (They couldn't fire me, I quit way ahead of time!;-). The U.S. division of my current company uses immediate firing within the U.S. but employees outside of the U.S. are generally given time to get things in order, finish what they were working on, use company resources in the job hunt and talk to collegues to help ease the transition. This technique works! I've never heard of a case of an employee going postal or sabatoging the company here.
So is it U.S. employees, U.S. managers or U.S. HR people who are being childish?
It's difficult to compare several thousand task specific GNU/Linux distributions to the 3 or 4 opensolaris distributions. But here is my.02$ oversimplification:
GNU/Linux (e.g. SuSE)
Good: Support for unusual or "cheap" X86 hardware. User-friendly default environment. Excellent package dependency and installation tools. Good support for the casual developer. Enormous number of hobbiest or unique applications packages are available.
Bad: Poor API stability, short shelf life for drivers and commercial applications. Incomplete documentation. Enormous number of potentially unstable/insecure/conflicting applications are part of default installs.
Opensolaris (e.g. Nevada)
Good: Support for clusters, massive scalability in CPUs/disks/memory. Very long term API stability. Good documentation. Excellent system observability tools. Good security features. Good boot and system service architecture.
Bad:Bad/ancient installer and svr4 pkg* package tools have weak dependency support. Weak driver support for unique x86 hardware. Default package cluster choices are skewed towards big iron, conservative organizations. Default environment is familiar and stable to old-timers, but not friendly to new users or developers.
Don't forget Staroffice/openoffice, the GNOME bits (particularly i18n, A11Y and docs). Actually there are many opensource projects with contribution from Sun. Methinks the "propietary" label was assigned to Sun by less open competitors.
I've been looking for something like this also, but I've decided to roll my own using OpenSolaris ZFS as a native software RAID filesystem, accessed via Samba, NFS and Rsync.
Sun's own "Java Desktop" has more C# in it than Java. If one of your prerequisites for choosing a language platform is that the platform has to be Free Software then Mono is the clear winner.
Can you point me to the C# in "Java Desktop?" There may be some in future versions (if GNOME pulls it in), but I haven't seen it in any existing versions. You will find Java, C, C++ and python based code in JDS, but I haven't seen any C#.
Stallman obviously would like GNU to absorb all opensource code ever written so that the GNU license has a monopoly on the concept of opensource.
I never understood why C#, with an API controlled and licensed by Microsoft which appears to plagerize Java... is considered to be appropriate for inclusion in open source projects and yet Java isn't. If you're going to hate Java for not being GPL, just be consistant and exile C# and Mono also.
If Microsoft had purchased stardivision, would they have released StarOffice to the opensource community?, or would it quietly killed the product? How easy would it have been to develop NFS interoperable Linux clients if Microsoft had developed (and released) NFS instead of Sun?
* One of many examples: I think a lot of people might be interested in SunRay if it wasn't that its use is still painfully tied to Solaris, which nobody wants to use so much as within 50 feet of a desktop machine.
Sun Ray isn't tied to Solaris. It has been available for linux since 2004. Customers have been running Windows via RDP client, tarantella or citrix for much longer than that. It just takes a while for new technologies to trickle down to joe user and replace cheap, but inefficient technologies. My only complaint is that there is no Sun Ray server version for OSX yet (AFAIK).
A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as "anecdotal evidence."
Weren't Pons and Fleishman from Utah? Humidity there is typically under 4%. I once watched.5 liter of Kool Aid evaporate off the hood of a car before it had a chance to pour onto the ground. I don't need expensive computer equipment to "prove" anything to me, just a basic calorimiter and the kind of careful measurements a C- high school chemistry student is expected to make.
Here is the problem I see with linux for this application. When your hardware dies, you'll have to replace it. Chances are your 2006 Linux kernel won't support 2008 hardware. That's fine and a common problem with all OSs, the problem with linux is that the APIs the kernel presents to your applications is also likely to change enough to break your applications. Stability of this API is something that Linus has said he isn't interested in.
I don't recommend Windows CE for obvious reasons. It is expensive, controlled by a single company and subject to planned obsolecense by this company.
I would investigate embedded kernels for which the source is available and the BSDs, FreeDOS, open source versions of OS2 and (of course) OpenSolaris. All of these have more of a focus on stability than linux currently does. I wish this weren't true but many companies have been burned by linux's lack of attention to API stability.
sayonara kharma!
A friend once told me a technique for minimising leaks in homemade underwater camera housings. Take the valve stem from a bicycle inner tube, attach it to the (PVC/HPVC) camera housing. Just before immersing the camera, pump 15 psi or so into the valve stem. That way if there is a slow leak, air pressure will help keep the water out (up to 30' or so)
Yes with webcams this is what you would do because their small chip size and various other deficiencies means each frame will be extremely noisy. But with multi-megapixel digital SLRs, you'll probably want to take fewer (or just one) longer exposure. I once made the mistake of running the stacker software on a 4.1 Megapixel image, my computer is still cooling off, gathering its wits and freeing swapspace. Most stack aligners are happier with the rough webcam images no bigger than 640X480.
I don't think so, the POV won't have much bearing,nor would the focus of the eye. One weird property of speckle is that because it is a standing wave, you can take off your glasses or focus your eyes on something much nearer or farthert and the speckle will still be sharp.
Most laser diodes have a short coherence length so speckle isn't as bad as it would be with HeNe. Scanning the beam wont help much either but it is possible to reduce/elminate speckle by rotating a diffuser in front of the beam to break up its space/time coherence.
When, after 4000 photos, the front zoom element jammed on my Casio QV-4000, I removed it and found that the remaining elements were still able to form an image if the camera was in macro mode. The camera has a save presets feature so now when I turn it on, it is in macro mode and since the focal length of the remaining elements is much shorter, I now have a very distorted ultra-wide angle non-zoom camera which can take in most of a room, the entire family or weird artsy photos such as
this.
Re:Hacking Webcams For Astrophotography
on
Hacking Digital Cameras
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Astronomers have also been doing this with digital SLRs. Modifying the firmware to allow longer exposures, removing the IR dichroic filter... One camera manufacturer seems to have noticed this and made a specialized version:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0506/05060101canon20d a.asp
No, I don't work for Canon, I just wish Sony (and others) would either open up their firmware or provide more flexible options for semi-pro cameras such as the DSC-V3.
I appreciate that Google isn't completely ignoring those who don't choose Microsoft, but I'm amazed that a modern global internet company would write software that is so tightly coupled to a single proprietery OS. A tightly coupled hack to get it working on a particular Linux dist isn't much better. It will go stale within months. Unsustainable... and evil.
Get the Toshiba fan utility from here:
http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/index.html
You can force the fan on all of the time.
It's the only way I can keep my toshiba (A-something?) laptop from shutting down and melting every time the CPU rises above 800Mhz, God know you could never do anything serious like gaming, spreadsheets or scrolling graphical web pages on one of these.
If Toshiba _EVER_ provides a fix or financial compensation for those of us stuck with one of these unreliable laptops, I might consider buying a toshiba again.
Honestly, there were campaigns to pay legal bills of hackers who use evil encryption and peer to peer. Why be silent and let the MPAA bankrupt these people just because they didn't know what they were doing?
Yeah it's a little off topic, but I wasn't using my kharma anyway.
Your comment boosted my confidence that tax dollars are wisely managed at NIH. How do you weed out the O.S. zealots? BTW, as a former contractor at a medical imaging firm, I found NIH's ImageJ a fantastic program. I've run it on OSX, Red Hat, Java Desktop System (Linux and Solaris 10.) It probably even works on Windows XP. That's the way to write cost effective software, keep your vendor's on their toes and don't ever lock yourself in to a particular hardware or O.S.
Mod parent down to troll unless RayDude can come up with specifics. Are you comparing memory and cache handicapped Ultras from the late 1990s to brand new Dell boxes with gobs of memory? Are you comparing Solaris 8 Sparc to linux's 2.6 kernel? Have you even looked at the capabilitys and independent benchmarks of Solaris 10 or are you going to wing it on urban folklore? Which dell boxes and how do they compare to Sun's AMD 64 bit offerings for low end servers? I use both linux and Solaris on a daily basis and all I can say is good luck Duke and RayDude, sometimes you get what you pay for.
Point them to this article in the venerable, conservative, even stodgy British magazine "The Economist" which indicates that kneejerk opposition to peer to peer may be stifling innovation. Point them to corporate products such as Sun's JXTA, research project such as seti@home and folding@home.
Wait, this is Wisconsin? Nevermind, I think progressivness went out of style there in the 1920s.
Which O.S. would you prefer in the following situations and why:
1) A CT scanner must enable and disable a powerful X-Ray tube reliably and precisely while simultaneously capturing all of the the data.
2) Your credit card number and social security number stored as a text file in the home directory of a computer connected to the internet.
Having configured Windows computers for various companies I've always been underwhelmed by its technical merits. Is it possible that by its agressive business practices and monopoly status, Microsoft has managed to retard technological advancement? What (if any) is the impetus for excelling (if any) when your competition makes up less than 5% of the desktop market?
Re:How did they decide?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
And yet, they overlook fairly significant obstacles to free reporting. The fact that Ireland was near the top of the list was my first clue that this report is meaningless. Irish Radio and Television is overwhelmingly dominated by a single state monopoly, RTE which is funded primarily through a mandatory television tax. Might that not give RTE a disincentive to criticize Irish government and an incentive to throw it's most critical news reporting outside of Ireland?
The survey also overlooks the fact that Ireland has one of the most archaic libel laws in the world. I can't tell you how many times I've heard threats of libel mentioned in on air debates. In Ireland if someone sues for libel, the burden of proof is on the defendant that what he said was true. In the U.S. (ranked 22nd) if someone sues for libel, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff and a successful libel case against even a minor political figure is almost unheard of. Thus in the Ireland you really do have to be careful you don't print something like "government official X appears to be accepting bribes." Unless you are willing and able to fight a lawsuit.
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Does anyone know of any other countries where such childish, sensless, brutal, inhumane and counterproductive employee termination techniques are used? My former (U.S. based) company used voice mail on recent firees (They couldn't fire me, I quit way ahead of time! ;-). The U.S. division of my current company uses immediate firing within the U.S. but employees outside of the U.S. are generally given time to get things in order, finish what they were working on, use company resources in the job hunt and talk to collegues to help ease the transition. This technique works! I've never heard of a case of an employee going postal or sabatoging the company here.
So is it U.S. employees, U.S. managers or U.S. HR people who are being childish?
Recent versions of Sun Microsystem's developer suite have interval math libraries: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806-7998 And since Sun execs are beginning to pull their heads out of their ... and finally making their development suite available for developers (free as in beer), you can play with it:
http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/cc/index.jsp
- GNU/Linux (e.g. SuSE)
Good: Support for unusual or "cheap" X86 hardware. User-friendly default environment. Excellent package dependency and installation tools. Good support for the casual developer. Enormous number of hobbiest or unique applications packages are available.Bad: Poor API stability, short shelf life for drivers and commercial applications. Incomplete documentation. Enormous number of potentially unstable/insecure/conflicting applications are part of default installs.
- Opensolaris (e.g. Nevada)
Good: Support for clusters, massive scalability in CPUs/disks/memory. Very long term API stability. Good documentation. Excellent system observability tools. Good security features. Good boot and system service architecture.Bad:Bad/ancient installer and svr4 pkg* package tools have weak dependency support. Weak driver support for unique x86 hardware. Default package cluster choices are skewed towards big iron, conservative organizations. Default environment is familiar and stable to old-timers, but not friendly to new users or developers.
Don't forget Staroffice/openoffice, the GNOME bits (particularly i18n, A11Y and docs). Actually there are many opensource projects with contribution from Sun. Methinks the "propietary" label was assigned to Sun by less open competitors.
I've been looking for something like this also, but I've decided to roll my own using OpenSolaris ZFS as a native software RAID filesystem, accessed via Samba, NFS and Rsync.
Stallman obviously would like GNU to absorb all opensource code ever written so that the GNU license has a monopoly on the concept of opensource.
I never understood why C#, with an API controlled and licensed by Microsoft which appears to plagerize Java... is considered to be appropriate for inclusion in open source projects and yet Java isn't. If you're going to hate Java for not being GPL, just be consistant and exile C# and Mono also.
If Microsoft had purchased stardivision, would they have released StarOffice to the opensource community?, or would it quietly killed the product? How easy would it have been to develop NFS interoperable Linux clients if Microsoft had developed (and released) NFS instead of Sun?
* One of many examples: I think a lot of people might be interested in SunRay if it wasn't that its use is still painfully tied to Solaris, which nobody wants to use so much as within 50 feet of a desktop machine.
Sun Ray isn't tied to Solaris. It has been available for linux since 2004. Customers have been running Windows via RDP client, tarantella or citrix for much longer than that. It just takes a while for new technologies to trickle down to joe user and replace cheap, but inefficient technologies. My only complaint is that there is no Sun Ray server version for OSX yet (AFAIK).A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as "anecdotal evidence."
.5 liter of Kool Aid evaporate off the hood of a car before it had a chance to pour onto the ground. I don't need expensive computer equipment to "prove" anything to me, just a basic calorimiter and the kind of careful measurements a C- high school chemistry student is expected to make.
Weren't Pons and Fleishman from Utah? Humidity there is typically under 4%. I once watched
Here is the problem I see with linux for this application. When your hardware dies, you'll have to replace it. Chances are your 2006 Linux kernel won't support 2008 hardware. That's fine and a common problem with all OSs, the problem with linux is that the APIs the kernel presents to your applications is also likely to change enough to break your applications. Stability of this API is something that Linus has said he isn't interested in.
I don't recommend Windows CE for obvious reasons. It is expensive, controlled by a single company and subject to planned obsolecense by this company.
I would investigate embedded kernels for which the source is available and the BSDs, FreeDOS, open source versions of OS2 and (of course) OpenSolaris. All of these have more of a focus on stability than linux currently does. I wish this weren't true but many companies have been burned by linux's lack of attention to API stability. sayonara kharma!
A friend once told me a technique for minimising leaks in homemade underwater camera housings. Take the valve stem from a bicycle inner tube, attach it to the (PVC/HPVC) camera housing. Just before immersing the camera, pump 15 psi or so into the valve stem. That way if there is a slow leak, air pressure will help keep the water out (up to 30' or so)
Yes with webcams this is what you would do because their small chip size and various other deficiencies means each frame will be extremely noisy. But with multi-megapixel digital SLRs, you'll probably want to take fewer (or just one) longer exposure. I once made the mistake of running the stacker software on a 4.1 Megapixel image, my computer is still cooling off, gathering its wits and freeing swapspace. Most stack aligners are happier with the rough webcam images no bigger than 640X480.
I don't think so, the POV won't have much bearing,nor would the focus of the eye. One weird property of speckle is that because it is a standing wave, you can take off your glasses or focus your eyes on something much nearer or farthert and the speckle will still be sharp. Most laser diodes have a short coherence length so speckle isn't as bad as it would be with HeNe. Scanning the beam wont help much either but it is possible to reduce/elminate speckle by rotating a diffuser in front of the beam to break up its space/time coherence.
When, after 4000 photos, the front zoom element jammed on my Casio QV-4000, I removed it and found that the remaining elements were still able to form an image if the camera was in macro mode. The camera has a save presets feature so now when I turn it on, it is in macro mode and since the focal length of the remaining elements is much shorter, I now have a very distorted ultra-wide angle non-zoom camera which can take in most of a room, the entire family or weird artsy photos such as this.
Astronomers have also been doing this with digital SLRs. Modifying the firmware to allow longer exposures, removing the IR dichroic filter... One camera manufacturer seems to have noticed this and made a specialized version: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0506/05060101canon20d a.asp
No, I don't work for Canon, I just wish Sony (and others) would either open up their firmware or provide more flexible options for semi-pro cameras such as the DSC-V3.
I appreciate that Google isn't completely ignoring those who don't choose Microsoft, but I'm amazed that a modern global internet company would write software that is so tightly coupled to a single proprietery OS. A tightly coupled hack to get it working on a particular Linux dist isn't much better. It will go stale within months. Unsustainable... and evil.
Get the Toshiba fan utility from here: http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/index.html You can force the fan on all of the time. It's the only way I can keep my toshiba (A-something?) laptop from shutting down and melting every time the CPU rises above 800Mhz, God know you could never do anything serious like gaming, spreadsheets or scrolling graphical web pages on one of these. If Toshiba _EVER_ provides a fix or financial compensation for those of us stuck with one of these unreliable laptops, I might consider buying a toshiba again.
Ah, thanks now I feel a bit better that at least it was published. I sure hope the kid and grandpa come out alright.
Honestly, there were campaigns to pay legal bills of hackers who use evil encryption and peer to peer. Why be silent and let the MPAA bankrupt these people just because they didn't know what they were doing?
Yeah it's a little off topic, but I wasn't using my kharma anyway.
"Plus it's really easy to be fooled when charging batteries--..."
;-)
And if the electrolyte contains too much heavy water, cold fusion can play havoc with those wattage calcs. Kids, let's be careful out there hey?
Your comment boosted my confidence that tax dollars are wisely managed at NIH. How do you weed out the O.S. zealots? BTW, as a former contractor at a medical imaging firm, I found NIH's ImageJ a fantastic program. I've run it on OSX, Red Hat, Java Desktop System (Linux and Solaris 10.) It probably even works on Windows XP. That's the way to write cost effective software, keep your vendor's on their toes and don't ever lock yourself in to a particular hardware or O.S.
Mod parent down to troll unless RayDude can come up with specifics. Are you comparing memory and cache handicapped Ultras from the late 1990s to brand new Dell boxes with gobs of memory? Are you comparing Solaris 8 Sparc to linux's 2.6 kernel? Have you even looked at the capabilitys and independent benchmarks of Solaris 10 or are you going to wing it on urban folklore? Which dell boxes and how do they compare to Sun's AMD 64 bit offerings for low end servers? I use both linux and Solaris on a daily basis and all I can say is good luck Duke and RayDude, sometimes you get what you pay for.
Point them to this article in the venerable, conservative, even stodgy British magazine "The Economist" which indicates that kneejerk opposition to peer to peer may be stifling innovation. Point them to corporate products such as Sun's JXTA, research project such as seti@home and folding@home.
Wait, this is Wisconsin? Nevermind, I think progressivness went out of style there in the 1920s.
Which O.S. would you prefer in the following situations and why: 1) A CT scanner must enable and disable a powerful X-Ray tube reliably and precisely while simultaneously capturing all of the the data. 2) Your credit card number and social security number stored as a text file in the home directory of a computer connected to the internet.
Having configured Windows computers for various companies I've always been underwhelmed by its technical merits. Is it possible that by its agressive business practices and monopoly status, Microsoft has managed to retard technological advancement? What (if any) is the impetus for excelling (if any) when your competition makes up less than 5% of the desktop market?
And yet, they overlook fairly significant obstacles to free reporting. The fact that Ireland was near the top of the list was my first clue that this report is meaningless. Irish Radio and Television is overwhelmingly dominated by a single state monopoly, RTE which is funded primarily through a mandatory television tax. Might that not give RTE a disincentive to criticize Irish government and an incentive to throw it's most critical news reporting outside of Ireland?
The survey also overlooks the fact that Ireland has one of the most archaic libel laws in the world. I can't tell you how many times I've heard threats of libel mentioned in on air debates. In Ireland if someone sues for libel, the burden of proof is on the defendant that what he said was true. In the U.S. (ranked 22nd) if someone sues for libel, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff and a successful libel case against even a minor political figure is almost unheard of. Thus in the Ireland you really do have to be careful you don't print something like "government official X appears to be accepting bribes." Unless you are willing and able to fight a lawsuit.