I'm also in favor of a $100K/year USD salary floor for H-1B visas. If there's really a need, then the salary should be that hi... we're talking trained, technical employees.. if you're offering that much, and can't find local workers, so be it... hire foreign.
As a british software developer with 3 years experience as a technical lead doing MVC (in Zend Framework) PHP Web Development and 5 or 6 years similar full time experience before that exactly how much is $100/year? To get some perspective can someone tell me what an equivalent role in the US to mine would pay?
Please don't just posta link to one of these salary calculator sites as I think they always come out slightly high as they generally produced by recruitment companies who want you to switch jobs.
"I can write a game of my own design for an audience of me" isn't terribly impressive experience. You'll have to show you've worked with and for other people, and that what you've created is useful for someone other than yourself.
This is the most important task for any junior developer (they guy is not a team lead as he clearly has no experience leading a development team): Doing what other people tell them to do.
It is all very useful to have someone on the team who makes suggestions as to whether a project can be improved, but is far more important that if the suggestion is rejected that they do not argue and just get on with the task as it was given as sometimes the the person telling you not to do something a particular way really does know better and doesn't have time, or can't for other commercial reasons to explain exactly why they need it done that way.
i first read about global warming sometime around 1990. have any of the original predictions come true?
so far i have noticed that the water at the beach in NYC is colder compared to the 80's
Yes, sea levels have risen due to there being less ice covering the poles of the planet.
Also, a local temperature of water in one place going down does not actually preclude the planets average temperature having gone up as it is quite big.
The real thing to remember about climate change though is that there is only really one certainty and that is that the already extreme weather events you experience will become far more extreme due to there being more energy in the atmosphere (even cold weather events as increased wind chill causes temperatures to feel colder even if the are actually slightly warmer)
But It's appropriate for it to be in CSS, It's a style of display that has to syntax. I wish they'd remove bold and italic too.
They already have. They have replaced the bold with strong and italic with em as the replacements are also relevant to if the text is being read allowed by a screen reader too by changing the tone or inflection.
On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL
If you have a 15 year old machine it belongs in the bin anyway.
You can go out and buy a Raspberry Pi for £30 and replace that old machine with something far better. There is simply no reason for wasting any time on crap that old anymore. Ok, this does mean you will have to use a different distribution without support but this is only for hobbyist stuff your doing at home anyway as nobody sane would use a 15 year old PC in any kind of production or professional scenario.
Old machines are great for routers or VPN servers, and they can't be used for much else. If the machine is installed at a remote office, the long-term CentOS support is really useful, since I don't have to upgrade the machine (requiring on-site service) every 18 months, or so, if I want to keep getting kernel updates.
So you are actually suggesting using a machine from 1998 in office where it is actually required to work reliably? Oh dear.
Seriously, there are tons of better solutions for what you want which do not cost the earth and are less than the cost of a redhat licence. Try looking at a little atom based nettop pc to do the same thing. It will have the added benefit of using far less power and not making any noise, even if you don't ever need the extra oomph. The best thing though is that it will be reliable, unlike relying on something thats warranty probably ended a decade ago.
The problem is the site was already very bitrotten and was running into regular issues with security. It's probably better to build something new using the data in the database than to use the old code.
Also, he may not actually own the copyright on the old code. He may have got someone else to write it for him and they did not release him the copyright. Since the guy who wrote the code did it in 1999 chances are he is no longer in touch to get confirmation regarding copyright even if he wanted to.
To be honest though, the fact that it was written in 1999 should mean any sensible person would not use it anyway. Throw that crap away and start again like he suggests. The only thing I would do is ask him for an extension on the current site for a month or so while someone figured out how to get the old data into a new site.
To be honest though it seems like the community should have seen this coming as he mentions things like the forums becoming clogged with spam and such. So he probably is utterly burnt out by this site and is sceptical about anyone actually taking this on. I am sure many people say they might but when it comes to actually putting in a month or so of full time work to make it happen that is very different.
The moment your computer becomes public (however limited that "public" is), it is a goner. It is like asking how to secure your computer after it was compromised.
Exactly.
When I was a more sociable chap a few years ago I had an easy solution to this. I put an old PC in my living room that anyone could use. It ran windows so anybody could use it, and I never used it for anything important. I only used it for playing movies as it was connected to my TV and they were all streamed of a web site on my main Linux PC in my bedroom.
If it got infected with malware (which it did, many times) I never really cared since most of the people who used it were too cheap to buy their own PC. I would try and keep it clear of malware and would remove anything when I noticed it was infected but I generally took the opinion that the people using the PC knew it was public so should be very careful about it anyway (this was in the day when people used internet cafes so were used to this).
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
I have just been digging around and think I can answer this question. It seems that the reason for this is to do with the upcoming webkit2 Apple project taking a very different approach to how multiprocess stuff should work. They have some pretty diagrams here showing the differences: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
Google have long taken the approach it seems to just have entirely separate processes for each page talk to a webkit subprocess via api calls.The webkit2 project are taking a different approach by trying to put multiprocess stuff actually into the webkit2 api itself.
Since Apple will probably throw webkit out the window anyway when webkit2 is ready it seems that everyone moaning about Google here may be a bit backward. It seems that when Webkit2 is ready then everyone except Chromium will use it. Chromium won't need to use webkit2 because it is already designed to do what webkit2 does anyway.
I have to admit, I have a gut feeling here that wrapping the multiprocess stuff around webkit ala chromium is actually a better idea than trying to do what WebKit2 is trying so I think the chromium devs might be making a better choice from a technical perspective even though it probably is a bit more resource hungry.
Of course much of this about Apple adopting webkit2 for Safari all pure speculation, but then it has to be when you are talking about a closed source product like Safari and don't work for Apple.
My grandfather has spent years in prison during Stalin times without any reason, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, tortured, repressed...
Shame he didn't imprison him sooner, like maybe before he had a chance to reproduce.
Slashdot mods this up? Very representative.
Nope, wasn't modded up at all. It might just be that it starts at 2 in your view of things because I am a logged in user with high Karma and all my posts start like that (Slashdot also notifies me if any of my posts are modded up or down).
Ironically, the fact that PostgreSQL is a better DB makes it easier to convert from PostgreSQL to MySQL than the reverse. MySQL attempts to error correct your SQL queries while PostgreSQL is much more strict. The upshot of this is that queries that works and are tested in MySQL have a good chance of not working and need to be checked (doubly so if the original programmer tried to be clever).
This doesn't really fit in with the concept of being perfect with what you supply but flexible with what you accept though does it?
I can understand that Postgres is probably more standards compliant and it is very admirable that it helps you write better SQL by refusing to run badly optimised drivel. The problem with this approach though it is assumes that all developers want to write better SQL.
Many developers in the world of work don't give too hoots about the quality of the work they produce, they just want go work 9-5 then go home and do other stuff. We might not like it, but there are tons of them, I bet all the people who are working know at least 1 or 2 in their office (If your still at university then they are the guys study CS that hate you for being a geek, unfortunately they don't fail and crawl under a rock). These developers will complain loudly about things "not working" under Postgres and just blame the DB.
You can argue that Postgres is more standards compliant to management until you are blue in the face, but unless you can demonstrate real world benefits your manager is going to go with MySQL. Sometimes the efficiency of the better queries is a real world benefit, but often that is outweighed by the increased costs of training developers to use postgres (there are fewer postgres devs out there than mysql) since in many situations it is cheap to just throw hardware at a problem. Also the majority of the time efficiency is not really needed since very few people will use the system anyway.
Technical decision makers will often prefer the tool that is easier to use as the complicated one is probably beyond them. That is why the became managers.
(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)
After having watched the full video of its capabilities I am pretty amazed and certainly some of it will be useful.
I particularly liked things like the ability to use ls to a get a list of files but with small thumbnails next each. You were then able to select the thumbail and see a bigger preview for images and movies. I also like the ability to do things like hover over a file in a "ls" output then just click and drag it but getting a full path to the file.
Let me get this straight.... If this patent is upheld, it will become illegal to pass along BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes to offspring.
We've found it - the cure to cancer!
Actually no. It just means that when you get cancer you are double screwed. You are probably going to die, and all your estate will go to whoever owns these patents in damages. If you are lucky enough to get a survivable form of cancer, then you are just made destitute by the medical bills and the patent damages.
I don't see how. I remember when I was younger there was a local bar that you could pick up a loaded stolen gun for $20. I think you could pay a little more for one with the serial numbers already filed off too. I'm sure places like that are still around, but the prices may have gone up since then. Still, how much does a 3D printer cost? It's going to be a long time before it's cheaper to print a gun than to steal or buy a stolen one.
Yup. It's only countries like where I live in the UK (with strict gun laws) where a 3D printer would be useful to make a gun. Even after I had printed my own firearm though I would still have to get hold of some ammo (which is also restricted) or make my own out of black powder (hey guess what, also restricted).
Printing you own firearm is always going to be easier than printing your own ammo:)
I suppose I could mix up my own gunpowder but that is a bit too much like hard work. It's probably still easier here to go hang around the odd dodgy bar or ask some inner city kids to get me a loaded gun instead.
Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.
For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed.
Exactly.
I used to work from 2002 to 2005 as a web developer for a company who mostly contracted to graphic designers. At the time they expected to things to work on IE5 (the Mac version of course). They did not really care about Firefox (although it did exist then, but with zero non-techy users).
I threw together god knows how many sites in the 2-3 years I worked at that company. All we did was offer the client a choice: If they wanted firefox support, they paid extra. Almost nobody bothered. We were a budget development house so our margins would not support the extra work of supporting all the IE hacks needed and the more W3C firefox unless the client paid extra. They all required the sites to work perfectly in IE though obviously.
I tried to make sites work in Firefox just out of a sense of professionalism on a few occasions but the problem is that then you appeared to have a far slower work rate than the rest of the team who took the IE only short cut they were told to by the technical manager. He was also a developer, director of the company and joint owner so he made an informed decision not to support anything other than IE from technical perspective and was able to see if you were ignoring it. If you ignored it that was fine, but you still had to keep up with the other devs simply by putting in overtime.
It only took other browser to get a market share above 5% - 10% for things other than IE5 / IE6 under Windows and suddenly clients were interested in supporting other browsers. In 2002 - 2004 though IE was so dominant that nobody cared about anything else in the real world as only geeks bothered to change their browser. Making things IE only remained common place in commercial web development right up to 2005 - 2006.
I remember having to spoof using IE under Linux in order to access my online banking (from HSBC) as they considered all other browser to be too insecure:)
I can see my GP almost as much as I want when I have an appointment, certainly more than eight minutes and I know they are not tied to any ridiculous arbritrary timetable.
We can do that too if we want to pay for medical care like you have to. He was talking about seeing a GP on the NHS, if you go private you can spend as much time your GP as you can afford.
When you guys in the US talk about our health service you always miss the point about us being able to get treatment in the same way as you when ever we like just by paying in the same way you do. It is a fall back system, you can't opt out of it but you can choose to use something else instead.
When it comes to chests, take the antibiotics. You really, really, really, do not want a series bacterial chest infection to develop. That's the sort of thing that lead to stuff like sepsis or having bits of your lung surgically removed.
You should only look for things like antibiotics if you have pneumonia (ie: a real bacterial chest infection), most chest infections though are only viral and your body will deal with this on its own in a few days if you give it the chance.
No qualified doctor should be prescribing medication just because a patient "demands" it.
Well in this case their not, their shutting them up and getting them out of their surgery by prescribing them something which is not actually medication.
antibiotic treatments used as placebos for vial infections
I'm sorry but a medical professional should flat out know better.
Why?
Much of the time people are prescribed antibiotics they do not really need them anyway as their own immune system will do the job in the end anyway.
Plenty of people go to the doctor demanding antibiotics just because they have a cold and thinking they will help. If the doctor gave all of these retards antibiotics the few effective ones we have remaining would be depleted in no time, especially as the patient would stop taking them as soon as they felt better instead of finishing the course they were prescribed (which is absolutely essential when prescribed antibiotics).
These people then keep moaning at the GP and refusing to accept the truth: cold and flu very rarely kill you so you should just stay in bed until you feel better. Let your immune system do some work, dose yourself up with vitamin C and stay in bed. Instead they demand an instant remedy that lets them go straight back to work or whatever and keep shouting more and more loudly, going back to see the doctor every other day, and blaming it on the skinflint NHS trying to save money.
If a cold / flu is likely to kill you because you are in a high risk group then chances are you have already been given a flu jab anyway for free, thanks to the NHS. Obviously people in these groups should not be given placebos just to shut them up.
If you have a short term, temporary condition then the best approach is almost always just to let your body deal with it. The problem is that we are put under considerable pressure by our employers to try and go in even when were are sick. In my case I just flat out refuse, but since I probably only average 3 or 4 sick days per year I never get complaints in this regard.
Well, the VGA cable or the audio output is always there to capture. This is a battle against windmills.
No, its not.
Modern computers do not necessarily have a VGA output, they have a HDMI or DVI output. These both implement HDCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection). This basically means that the computer knows if it is connected to a device that supports capture or an output only device like a monitor or TV.
I know you often use a converter to convert DVI to a VGA connector, but the computer knows when you do this (via the closed source part of the display driver or closed source OS) and can report that to software like Windows Media Player so it refuses to play protected content. I am not sure if anything does this but it has been this way for years. In a few years the VGA Connector will cease to exist.
No-one really wants DRM except for some of the bigger and nastier corporations. And as TFS mentioned, it does nothing to make sure the artists get paid for their work.
The best way to ensure that is for them to either distribute it themselves or to sell it through one of the less-evil marketplaces (for instance Magnatune comes to mind). I personally prefer the former, since I like the warm fuzzy I get from the feeling that I am paying the artist directly, but I completely understand if they can't be bothered with the learning curve involved.
I know that is the overwelming perspective you see on slashdot, but believe me there are plenty of people who want DRM who are not just big nasty corporations. Some people (myself included) see no problem with a technology that prevents unauthorised viewing, use or copying of something provided it does not interfere with legitimate users in any way.
If the DRM on DVD's let me watch a movie I had purchased in any country but simply stopped me creating copies for other people I would have no issues with it. Unfortunately they try and use DRM to restrict legitimate uses like playback in another country.
I actually resent when other people get something for free illegally when I had to pay for it to obtain it legally, if someone invented a perfect method of DRM that only stopped freeloading little jerks watching movies without paying for them but did not effect me (as a paying customer) at all I would be all for it.
During the transition period, the Pentagon will murder whoever the CIA asks them to, and vice versa, and it will be impossible to pin blame on either of them.
After the transition, the CIA will probably keep using drones the same way as before, just keeping it slightly more secret, and pulling out different legal nonsense when they get caught.
Exactly.
Go and look up how they organised the Osama Bin Laden kill / capture mission for an excellent example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden) They had to assign the troops going in to be under the control of the CIA as the US is not currently "at war" with Pakistan. They will just do something similar with the drone pilot any time the CIA need a drone to kill someone.
Pentagon assets are assigned to the CIA or other agencies all the time so they can take skilled operators with experience of similar situations but use them as a one off somewhere (or against someone) the US military is not allowed to.
The real villain here is the victim's IT department.
What simple minded crap from someone find any reason not to blame the obvious culprit.
There is this concept in law called "Mens Rea" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea). Basically it means criminal intent.
Was there any criminal intent from the people who should have changed his password but did not? Answer: No, they just screwed up. Was there any criminal intent from someone who deliberately gave away private information he was trusted with to someone he knew should not have it, especially if he also told them to vandalise stuff while they were in there? Answer, Yes as this is certainly dishonest. It might not actually be illegal but what you are trying to do is certainly malicious.
Should they have changed his password? Yes, of course they should have. Should he have set about to actively damage previous employer using confidential information? Certainly not.
Of course he has not been found guilty yet so he may be innocent of all this, if he is guilty though I couldn't care less how long he spends in prison as I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who tried to take revenge on a previous employer. What he did was not better then driving past his employers office one night and throwing a brick through the front window for fun.
I know that you were being trollish, but I actually have to agree. I didn't spend my time in the dorms except to sleep. My study time was spent down at I-Hop, or in the library. I did find it mildly annoying when somebody was yelling down the hallway, but you can get used to it.
This is actually a good idea for a number of reasons, the most important though is to prepare you for work when you leave uni. Every office I have ever worked in has people talking on phones, idle banter about whatever, builders doing work next door, and whatever else you can think of. For some reason IT companies are often open plan.
It is important to learn to focus through your distractions, even if you have something like ADHD of whatever, unless you are going to spend the rest of you life letting it restrict you. Learn to master it instead. I know it is hard (I also suffer from being very distracted by noise, especially conversations) but it is easier to learn to deal with this when you are young than when you are almost 40 like me. I still have to work through it though and still try not to make any mistakes when I have difficulty concentrating.
Unless you are going to let crap like this rule your life, you just have to find a way of dealing with it. Sometimes headphones will be an option, but sometimes you need to hear some noises (in my case, remote monitoring alarms for servers) so you have to just put up with all the noises that distract you and still get your work done anyway.
Sorry this is not a better answer, but few companies will offer you a completely silent working environment. Even if they try, sometimes an important deadline will just happen to coincide with the office next door demolishing a wall or something and getting builders to work weekends does not happen unless you pay them off the books in cash or double time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also in favor of a $100K/year USD salary floor for H-1B visas. If there's really a need, then the salary should be that hi... we're talking trained, technical employees.. if you're offering that much, and can't find local workers, so be it... hire foreign.
As a british software developer with 3 years experience as a technical lead doing MVC (in Zend Framework) PHP Web Development and 5 or 6 years similar full time experience before that exactly how much is $100/year? To get some perspective can someone tell me what an equivalent role in the US to mine would pay?
Please don't just posta link to one of these salary calculator sites as I think they always come out slightly high as they generally produced by recruitment companies who want you to switch jobs.
"I can write a game of my own design for an audience of me" isn't terribly impressive experience. You'll have to show you've worked with and for other people, and that what you've created is useful for someone other than yourself.
This is the most important task for any junior developer (they guy is not a team lead as he clearly has no experience leading a development team): Doing what other people tell them to do.
It is all very useful to have someone on the team who makes suggestions as to whether a project can be improved, but is far more important that if the suggestion is rejected that they do not argue and just get on with the task as it was given as sometimes the the person telling you not to do something a particular way really does know better and doesn't have time, or can't for other commercial reasons to explain exactly why they need it done that way.
i first read about global warming sometime around 1990. have any of the original predictions come true?
so far i have noticed that the water at the beach in NYC is colder compared to the 80's
Yes, sea levels have risen due to there being less ice covering the poles of the planet.
Also, a local temperature of water in one place going down does not actually preclude the planets average temperature having gone up as it is quite big.
The real thing to remember about climate change though is that there is only really one certainty and that is that the already extreme weather events you experience will become far more extreme due to there being more energy in the atmosphere (even cold weather events as increased wind chill causes temperatures to feel colder even if the are actually slightly warmer)
But It's appropriate for it to be in CSS, It's a style of display that has to syntax. I wish they'd remove bold and italic too.
They already have. They have replaced the bold with strong and italic with em as the replacements are also relevant to if the text is being read allowed by a screen reader too by changing the tone or inflection.
On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL
If you have a 15 year old machine it belongs in the bin anyway.
You can go out and buy a Raspberry Pi for £30 and replace that old machine with something far better. There is simply no reason for wasting any time on crap that old anymore. Ok, this does mean you will have to use a different distribution without support but this is only for hobbyist stuff your doing at home anyway as nobody sane would use a 15 year old PC in any kind of production or professional scenario.
Old machines are great for routers or VPN servers, and they can't be used for much else. If the machine is installed at a remote office, the long-term CentOS support is really useful, since I don't have to upgrade the machine (requiring on-site service) every 18 months, or so, if I want to keep getting kernel updates.
So you are actually suggesting using a machine from 1998 in office where it is actually required to work reliably? Oh dear.
Seriously, there are tons of better solutions for what you want which do not cost the earth and are less than the cost of a redhat licence. Try looking at a little atom based nettop pc to do the same thing. It will have the added benefit of using far less power and not making any noise, even if you don't ever need the extra oomph. The best thing though is that it will be reliable, unlike relying on something thats warranty probably ended a decade ago.
The problem is the site was already very bitrotten and was running into regular issues with security. It's probably better to build something new using the data in the database than to use the old code.
Also, he may not actually own the copyright on the old code. He may have got someone else to write it for him and they did not release him the copyright. Since the guy who wrote the code did it in 1999 chances are he is no longer in touch to get confirmation regarding copyright even if he wanted to.
To be honest though, the fact that it was written in 1999 should mean any sensible person would not use it anyway. Throw that crap away and start again like he suggests. The only thing I would do is ask him for an extension on the current site for a month or so while someone figured out how to get the old data into a new site.
To be honest though it seems like the community should have seen this coming as he mentions things like the forums becoming clogged with spam and such. So he probably is utterly burnt out by this site and is sceptical about anyone actually taking this on. I am sure many people say they might but when it comes to actually putting in a month or so of full time work to make it happen that is very different.
The moment your computer becomes public (however limited that "public" is), it is a goner. It is like asking how to secure your computer after it was compromised.
Exactly.
When I was a more sociable chap a few years ago I had an easy solution to this. I put an old PC in my living room that anyone could use. It ran windows so anybody could use it, and I never used it for anything important. I only used it for playing movies as it was connected to my TV and they were all streamed of a web site on my main Linux PC in my bedroom.
If it got infected with malware (which it did, many times) I never really cared since most of the people who used it were too cheap to buy their own PC. I would try and keep it clear of malware and would remove anything when I noticed it was infected but I generally took the opinion that the people using the PC knew it was public so should be very careful about it anyway (this was in the day when people used internet cafes so were used to this).
Why not just make the choice of rendering engine user configurable?
I have just been digging around and think I can answer this question. It seems that the reason for this is to do with the upcoming webkit2 Apple project taking a very different approach to how multiprocess stuff should work. They have some pretty diagrams here showing the differences: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
Google have long taken the approach it seems to just have entirely separate processes for each page talk to a webkit subprocess via api calls.The webkit2 project are taking a different approach by trying to put multiprocess stuff actually into the webkit2 api itself.
Since Apple will probably throw webkit out the window anyway when webkit2 is ready it seems that everyone moaning about Google here may be a bit backward. It seems that when Webkit2 is ready then everyone except Chromium will use it. Chromium won't need to use webkit2 because it is already designed to do what webkit2 does anyway.
I have to admit, I have a gut feeling here that wrapping the multiprocess stuff around webkit ala chromium is actually a better idea than trying to do what WebKit2 is trying so I think the chromium devs might be making a better choice from a technical perspective even though it probably is a bit more resource hungry.
Of course much of this about Apple adopting webkit2 for Safari all pure speculation, but then it has to be when you are talking about a closed source product like Safari and don't work for Apple.
My grandfather has spent years in prison during Stalin times without any reason, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, tortured, repressed...
Shame he didn't imprison him sooner, like maybe before he had a chance to reproduce.
Slashdot mods this up? Very representative.
Nope, wasn't modded up at all. It might just be that it starts at 2 in your view of things because I am a logged in user with high Karma and all my posts start like that (Slashdot also notifies me if any of my posts are modded up or down).
My grandfather has spent years in prison during Stalin times without any reason, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, tortured, repressed...
Shame he didn't imprison him sooner, like maybe before he had a chance to reproduce.
Ironically, the fact that PostgreSQL is a better DB makes it easier to convert from PostgreSQL to MySQL than the reverse. MySQL attempts to error correct your SQL queries while PostgreSQL is much more strict. The upshot of this is that queries that works and are tested in MySQL have a good chance of not working and need to be checked (doubly so if the original programmer tried to be clever).
This doesn't really fit in with the concept of being perfect with what you supply but flexible with what you accept though does it?
I can understand that Postgres is probably more standards compliant and it is very admirable that it helps you write better SQL by refusing to run badly optimised drivel. The problem with this approach though it is assumes that all developers want to write better SQL.
Many developers in the world of work don't give too hoots about the quality of the work they produce, they just want go work 9-5 then go home and do other stuff. We might not like it, but there are tons of them, I bet all the people who are working know at least 1 or 2 in their office (If your still at university then they are the guys study CS that hate you for being a geek, unfortunately they don't fail and crawl under a rock). These developers will complain loudly about things "not working" under Postgres and just blame the DB.
You can argue that Postgres is more standards compliant to management until you are blue in the face, but unless you can demonstrate real world benefits your manager is going to go with MySQL. Sometimes the efficiency of the better queries is a real world benefit, but often that is outweighed by the increased costs of training developers to use postgres (there are fewer postgres devs out there than mysql) since in many situations it is cheap to just throw hardware at a problem. Also the majority of the time efficiency is not really needed since very few people will use the system anyway.
Technical decision makers will often prefer the tool that is easier to use as the complicated one is probably beyond them. That is why the became managers.
(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)
After having watched the full video of its capabilities I am pretty amazed and certainly some of it will be useful.
I particularly liked things like the ability to use ls to a get a list of files but with small thumbnails next each. You were then able to select the thumbail and see a bigger preview for images and movies. I also like the ability to do things like hover over a file in a "ls" output then just click and drag it but getting a full path to the file.
Let me get this straight.... If this patent is upheld, it will become illegal to pass along BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes to offspring.
We've found it - the cure to cancer!
Actually no. It just means that when you get cancer you are double screwed. You are probably going to die, and all your estate will go to whoever owns these patents in damages. If you are lucky enough to get a survivable form of cancer, then you are just made destitute by the medical bills and the patent damages.
I don't see how. I remember when I was younger there was a local bar that you could pick up a loaded stolen gun for $20. I think you could pay a little more for one with the serial numbers already filed off too. I'm sure places like that are still around, but the prices may have gone up since then. Still, how much does a 3D printer cost? It's going to be a long time before it's cheaper to print a gun than to steal or buy a stolen one.
Yup. It's only countries like where I live in the UK (with strict gun laws) where a 3D printer would be useful to make a gun. Even after I had printed my own firearm though I would still have to get hold of some ammo (which is also restricted) or make my own out of black powder (hey guess what, also restricted).
Printing you own firearm is always going to be easier than printing your own ammo :)
I suppose I could mix up my own gunpowder but that is a bit too much like hard work. It's probably still easier here to go hang around the odd dodgy bar or ask some inner city kids to get me a loaded gun instead.
Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.
For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed.
Exactly.
I used to work from 2002 to 2005 as a web developer for a company who mostly contracted to graphic designers. At the time they expected to things to work on IE5 (the Mac version of course). They did not really care about Firefox (although it did exist then, but with zero non-techy users).
I threw together god knows how many sites in the 2-3 years I worked at that company. All we did was offer the client a choice: If they wanted firefox support, they paid extra. Almost nobody bothered. We were a budget development house so our margins would not support the extra work of supporting all the IE hacks needed and the more W3C firefox unless the client paid extra. They all required the sites to work perfectly in IE though obviously.
I tried to make sites work in Firefox just out of a sense of professionalism on a few occasions but the problem is that then you appeared to have a far slower work rate than the rest of the team who took the IE only short cut they were told to by the technical manager. He was also a developer, director of the company and joint owner so he made an informed decision not to support anything other than IE from technical perspective and was able to see if you were ignoring it. If you ignored it that was fine, but you still had to keep up with the other devs simply by putting in overtime.
It only took other browser to get a market share above 5% - 10% for things other than IE5 / IE6 under Windows and suddenly clients were interested in supporting other browsers. In 2002 - 2004 though IE was so dominant that nobody cared about anything else in the real world as only geeks bothered to change their browser. Making things IE only remained common place in commercial web development right up to 2005 - 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
I remember having to spoof using IE under Linux in order to access my online banking (from HSBC) as they considered all other browser to be too insecure :)
I can see my GP almost as much as I want when I have an appointment, certainly more than eight minutes and I know they are not tied to any ridiculous arbritrary timetable.
We can do that too if we want to pay for medical care like you have to. He was talking about seeing a GP on the NHS, if you go private you can spend as much time your GP as you can afford.
When you guys in the US talk about our health service you always miss the point about us being able to get treatment in the same way as you when ever we like just by paying in the same way you do. It is a fall back system, you can't opt out of it but you can choose to use something else instead.
In England, if you argue with the Doctor too much they can actually suspend your medical coverage. Sad but true.
Do you have a reputable source for this or did you just make this up?
When it comes to chests, take the antibiotics. You really, really, really, do not want a series bacterial chest infection to develop. That's the sort of thing that lead to stuff like sepsis or having bits of your lung surgically removed.
Wrong, most chest infections get better on their own with no need for antibiotics: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Chest-infection-adult/Pages/Introduction.aspx
You should only look for things like antibiotics if you have pneumonia (ie: a real bacterial chest infection), most chest infections though are only viral and your body will deal with this on its own in a few days if you give it the chance.
No qualified doctor should be prescribing medication just because a patient "demands" it.
Well in this case their not, their shutting them up and getting them out of their surgery by prescribing them something which is not actually medication.
antibiotic treatments used as placebos for vial infections
I'm sorry but a medical professional should flat out know better.
Why?
Much of the time people are prescribed antibiotics they do not really need them anyway as their own immune system will do the job in the end anyway.
Plenty of people go to the doctor demanding antibiotics just because they have a cold and thinking they will help. If the doctor gave all of these retards antibiotics the few effective ones we have remaining would be depleted in no time, especially as the patient would stop taking them as soon as they felt better instead of finishing the course they were prescribed (which is absolutely essential when prescribed antibiotics).
These people then keep moaning at the GP and refusing to accept the truth: cold and flu very rarely kill you so you should just stay in bed until you feel better. Let your immune system do some work, dose yourself up with vitamin C and stay in bed. Instead they demand an instant remedy that lets them go straight back to work or whatever and keep shouting more and more loudly, going back to see the doctor every other day, and blaming it on the skinflint NHS trying to save money.
In this case why shouldn't the doctor just send them home with something that is far cheaper than his time and makes them feel better (see the multitude of studies that show that placebos actually work: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577128873886471982.html, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101222173033.htm)
If a cold / flu is likely to kill you because you are in a high risk group then chances are you have already been given a flu jab anyway for free, thanks to the NHS. Obviously people in these groups should not be given placebos just to shut them up.
If you have a short term, temporary condition then the best approach is almost always just to let your body deal with it. The problem is that we are put under considerable pressure by our employers to try and go in even when were are sick. In my case I just flat out refuse, but since I probably only average 3 or 4 sick days per year I never get complaints in this regard.
Well, the VGA cable or the audio output is always there to capture. This is a battle against windmills.
No, its not.
Modern computers do not necessarily have a VGA output, they have a HDMI or DVI output. These both implement HDCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection). This basically means that the computer knows if it is connected to a device that supports capture or an output only device like a monitor or TV.
I know you often use a converter to convert DVI to a VGA connector, but the computer knows when you do this (via the closed source part of the display driver or closed source OS) and can report that to software like Windows Media Player so it refuses to play protected content. I am not sure if anything does this but it has been this way for years. In a few years the VGA Connector will cease to exist.
No-one really wants DRM except for some of the bigger and nastier corporations. And as TFS mentioned, it does nothing to make sure the artists get paid for their work.
The best way to ensure that is for them to either distribute it themselves or to sell it through one of the less-evil marketplaces (for instance Magnatune comes to mind). I personally prefer the former, since I like the warm fuzzy I get from the feeling that I am paying the artist directly, but I completely understand if they can't be bothered with the learning curve involved.
I know that is the overwelming perspective you see on slashdot, but believe me there are plenty of people who want DRM who are not just big nasty corporations. Some people (myself included) see no problem with a technology that prevents unauthorised viewing, use or copying of something provided it does not interfere with legitimate users in any way.
If the DRM on DVD's let me watch a movie I had purchased in any country but simply stopped me creating copies for other people I would have no issues with it. Unfortunately they try and use DRM to restrict legitimate uses like playback in another country.
I actually resent when other people get something for free illegally when I had to pay for it to obtain it legally, if someone invented a perfect method of DRM that only stopped freeloading little jerks watching movies without paying for them but did not effect me (as a paying customer) at all I would be all for it.
During the transition period, the Pentagon will murder whoever the CIA asks them to, and vice versa, and it will be impossible to pin blame on either of them.
After the transition, the CIA will probably keep using drones the same way as before, just keeping it slightly more secret, and pulling out different legal nonsense when they get caught.
Exactly.
Go and look up how they organised the Osama Bin Laden kill / capture mission for an excellent example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden) They had to assign the troops going in to be under the control of the CIA as the US is not currently "at war" with Pakistan. They will just do something similar with the drone pilot any time the CIA need a drone to kill someone.
Pentagon assets are assigned to the CIA or other agencies all the time so they can take skilled operators with experience of similar situations but use them as a one off somewhere (or against someone) the US military is not allowed to.
The real villain here is the victim's IT department.
What simple minded crap from someone find any reason not to blame the obvious culprit.
There is this concept in law called "Mens Rea" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea). Basically it means criminal intent.
Was there any criminal intent from the people who should have changed his password but did not? Answer: No, they just screwed up.
Was there any criminal intent from someone who deliberately gave away private information he was trusted with to someone he knew should not have it, especially if he also told them to vandalise stuff while they were in there? Answer, Yes as this is certainly dishonest. It might not actually be illegal but what you are trying to do is certainly malicious.
Should they have changed his password? Yes, of course they should have. Should he have set about to actively damage previous employer using confidential information? Certainly not.
Of course he has not been found guilty yet so he may be innocent of all this, if he is guilty though I couldn't care less how long he spends in prison as I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who tried to take revenge on a previous employer. What he did was not better then driving past his employers office one night and throwing a brick through the front window for fun.
I know that you were being trollish, but I actually have to agree. I didn't spend my time in the dorms except to sleep. My study time was spent down at I-Hop, or in the library. I did find it mildly annoying when somebody was yelling down the hallway, but you can get used to it.
This is actually a good idea for a number of reasons, the most important though is to prepare you for work when you leave uni. Every office I have ever worked in has people talking on phones, idle banter about whatever, builders doing work next door, and whatever else you can think of. For some reason IT companies are often open plan.
It is important to learn to focus through your distractions, even if you have something like ADHD of whatever, unless you are going to spend the rest of you life letting it restrict you. Learn to master it instead. I know it is hard (I also suffer from being very distracted by noise, especially conversations) but it is easier to learn to deal with this when you are young than when you are almost 40 like me. I still have to work through it though and still try not to make any mistakes when I have difficulty concentrating.
Unless you are going to let crap like this rule your life, you just have to find a way of dealing with it. Sometimes headphones will be an option, but sometimes you need to hear some noises (in my case, remote monitoring alarms for servers) so you have to just put up with all the noises that distract you and still get your work done anyway.
Sorry this is not a better answer, but few companies will offer you a completely silent working environment. Even if they try, sometimes an important deadline will just happen to coincide with the office next door demolishing a wall or something and getting builders to work weekends does not happen unless you pay them off the books in cash or double time.