I did my first "big" programming on an Atari 400 crammed out to 48K. The Atari BASIC only stored the first (I think) two characters of variable names; the rest was just wasted space. So when I was coding along, I would keep a table on a sheet of paper with all my variable declarations on it, along with some notes on the decimal representation of certain machine instructions (input as DATA instructions for the joystick driver). The main program got lines 1--9999 and subroutines started on 1K lines, again, kept in a table. Atari BASIC had nice renumbering, where you could renumber only certain sections of the code.
REM statements were nice and terse, or nonexistant, again to save memory.
All that notwithstanding, the very worst thing about BASIC was global variables. Even at the age of twelve, I knew that there was something wrong with being able to scribble any variable from anywhere in the program. So I learned to use the variables S0--S9 for "S"ubroutines and A0--A9 for "A"nywhere, "G" variables for graphics, that sort of thing.
So here's what I learned: When I was first exposed to a "real" language (at 18 or so), I was thrilled to have local variables, and "named subroutines" (as I thought of functions at the time). No longer could one part of a program smash another part (at least, not until I started using C). No longer would I have to keep a big table of variable names and line numbers to keep my program organized. No longer would I have to renumber everytime I inserted a line of code. No longer would I have to keep careful track which variable was unused at a given moment---if I couldn't use it, it wasn't in scope.
Oh, what a happy boy I was. I learned how to be pathalogically organized in my code. I learned, well, the BASICs. Nothing like a few years on a Schwinn Pixie to make a boy appreciate a new five speed---I learned the basics of riding, but now I could really fly. Structured programming (and later, OOP) rocked. And a few years ago when I had to do some assembly language programming for a project, the careful habits I picked up in BASIC served me well. So that's what I learned from BASIC: to appreciate the power and organizational abilities of a real language. I still hate C++, but that's another story.
I would certainly ask them to explicitly spell out exactly what severance you will receive. Then negotiate. Start by asking how much it will cost them to (a) train your replacement their damned selves, or (b) have an untrained replacement running around messing things up and causing deadlines to slip. Double that amount and ask for it as your severance, on top of what they've already offered. The worst than can happen is you get to start your job search earlier than expected, but realistically that's not going to happen: They wouldn't have asked you to train your replacement unless they needed him trained.
Even propose this alternative: Let them lay you off, then bring you in as a consultant to train your replacement. You'll get paid better, and you'll have actual consulting for an actual client to put on your resume already.
Geocaching has been a blast so far (6 found, almost a thousand within 100 miles of me). My wife and the dog and I all pile in the car and find one down some trail somewhere and turn it into a hike with a purpose. Or we have an hour to kill, so we find an urban one near here. It's a global treasure hunt, and you get to call non-cachers "muggles."
Let me get this straight---you want it so that the government can arrest you and arrange things so that nobody knows it happened? And that your trial should be held in secret? Hoo, boy.
No, but it does come with a box of sledgehammers and a digital video recorder AOL confiscated from another spammer. It's a package deal, and you will be posting the mpeg, right? Right???
I think accents are getting increasingly homologized as time passes and broad-audience sound-enabled media increases its hold on damned near everybody. Regional dialects and accens are disappearing as a result.
My father grew up about twenty miles from where Strom Thurmond was born, and I about twenty miles from there. But after I've been in deep conversation with non-Southerners, you would never know I was from the South unless you caught a particular turn of phrase. My father has a gentle lowland drawl (more Charleston than highcountry), and I once heard the century-old Thurmond speak, and to me he was damned near incomprehensible.
A good point, but for the most part, there will not be very much impact. For the most part, it's underwater brush that fish take advantage of: Fish like bass and brim build egg beds on the bottom, and the hatchlings stay close to the bottom and use the old undergrowth as hiding places from predators. Harvesting submerged old-growth trees won't have an impact for two reasons: First, the fry usually stay within a foot or two of the lake bottom, but the foliage of these trees is several feet up---away from where they would ever go. Second, these species build their laying beds in shallow waters, where there are no submerged old-growth trees.
I should also point out that hydroelectric reservoirs are, by definition, artificial habitats, and any fish adapting to them are, also by definition, an introduced species.
My brother and collected Christmas trees one year to dump in a pond we occasionally fished in. We had brim out the yazoo that summer.
Clark's Hill Reservoir, near where I grew up, has lots of submerged trees in it. When water levels fluctuate in the summer, boats collide with treetops where there shouldn't be treetops. Hopefully, this sort of work could make for safer lakes in the process.
It's just that invading another country so we can take all their trees seems so damned silly. Canada's got lots of trees, but we like Canadians---they dress like we do.
After dropping out from college in 1990, I wound up with a computer job, then a better computer job, then an even better computer job, then, in 2000, a computer job with a startup that was so market-responsive that they realized that keeping programmers on staff was diverting money from their marketing budget, so they laid most of us off in mid-2001. By late 2001, nobody was hiring. In early 2002 I fled to Denver, took a job selling motorcycles, and got married. My spouse has convinced me that I should quit work and go to school full time; after all, you can't get hired anymore without a CS degree.
Now it looks like the job's not going to be there anymore, degree or no. And you know what? I don't want the job anymore. I can't see myself being sixty years old and still trying to wrangle code into submission in the face of a customer's false requirements and artificial deadline. Oh, I wouldn't mind settling down as a system or database admin, but if I never wrote another line of C++, I'd be happy.
So I want a job I can still do when I'm old, one where an analytical mind, good writing and oral presentation skills, and halfway-decent social skills are in demand. And since I'm sick and tired of typing IANAL on Slashdot, once I graduate, I'm taking my BS in CS and applying to law school. I'm already an anal-retentive twit; why not get paid for it?
Working with computers has taught me how to design and manipulate complex systems of rules. What is the law but a complex set of rules to be navigated? What is a contract but a specification document?
When you're in court, the scariest thing you can see at the opposition table is a calm old lawyer who looks like he's been sleeping well lately. I'm not twenty years old anymore, too stupid to value a good night's sleep. I'd rather be seventy and looking forward to half a day at the office than fifty and wondering how the hell I can get out of a career that burned me out two decades ago.
I hope for your sake you didn't bother reading this. I respect programming, I really do. I can remember a day when I got a big woody at the chance to code something. Not anymore. Tastes change; passions change. And sometimes the way you find meaning in your work, well, that's got to change, too.
I badly misparsed that: "Oprah Promises Voice-Over Web Browser". It's bad enough she tells my wife what books to read, now she's gonna give running commentary on my surfing habits?
My legislator has actually drafted a bill here in Georgia on my behalf---SB597, to exempt motorcycles from paying tolls in Georgia. It turns out that legislators generally don't run off half-cocked passing everything that seems, superficially, to make sense. See, as innocuous as it seems, the DOT and the toll authority have a bond issued to maintain the toll roads, and if you require them to exempt certain vehicles from the toll, you may be using one law to force them to violate another. So there's a fair amount of due dilligence (sp) going on. According to the FA, the California city in question had tried to do due dilligance, but had hired a fuckup to do it. Fortunately, they caught it in time.
In other words, debugging does go on, as does component testing, prior to final release. And BTW courts get to QA the hell out of lots and lots of laws to ensure full-system consistency.
So the ten out of eleven machines belonging to friends and relatives that I've installed Ad-aware on over the last couple of months imply the existance of 190 well-maintained, popup-free, efficient machines that aren't presenting somebody's grandmother the chance to enlarge her penis? One-in-twenty says to me that nineteen out of twenty aren't nitwits. Hell, my commute shows that one out of maybe six should be allowed to use a car, let alone something requiring thought.
Coding, where typos result in failed builds, trains techs to spell everything exactly right. We tend to be similarly rigid with grammar and document organization. We also tend to take what we see on a computer screen very seriously.
For suits, if it's serious, it's on paper. If it's not on paper, it's not serious. E-mail is for communicating quickly and efficiently, so editing it into perfection is a waste of time. Suits also know whom to impress and whom to rush to the point with. This e-mail being so sloppy is a sure sign that the sender and recipient have nothing to prove to one another; they're just exchanging information.
There's such a thing as good faith: if you claim I have infringed on your copyright by doing X (and you specify X), and I remove X and replace it with Y (which you have no claim to), then I have made a good faith effort to avoid violating your copyright. In the court's view, this is not an admission of guilt; it is a positive action.
Under no circumstances should SCO allow this to happen.
Hmmm. A German company with tremendous holdings in the US, getting sued in US courts. I wonder if this was done as a taunt to the German courts' STFU order?
Indeed. I voted around 5pm and while the flowthrough was pretty good, the layout in certain parts was nasty. Letters were mushed together. On the confirmation page, blocks of text overlaid each other.
The most interesting part was voting on Georgia's next flag. We were given a choice between the current flag and the one adopted in 2001. The '01 flag's graphic looked like 1993's concept of "multimedia": it was blurred and obscured and the anti-aliasing was out of control. The '03 flag has trounced the '01 flag---mostly on STFU grounds, but I have to wonder how much the bad graphical representation turned off people who would otherwise have voted for the '01 flag.
It's the first time I've ever voted for a picture of a thing. I have to wonder when we'll start seeing pictures of candidates on the ballots, and the most photogenic candidate starts winning by a landslide, and lawsuits about unflattering ballot pictures replace hanging chad as the bullshit of the month.
This may be the one time that CowboyNeal is a seriouly viable option: If SCO filed suit against OSDN, or against ibiblio (Groklaw's host), they could tack on a gag order preventing either site from hosting further discussion of the suit. We'd be in disarray. Pissed as hell, but in disarray.
Slashdot Mirror
REM statements were nice and terse, or nonexistant, again to save memory.
All that notwithstanding, the very worst thing about BASIC was global variables. Even at the age of twelve, I knew that there was something wrong with being able to scribble any variable from anywhere in the program. So I learned to use the variables S0--S9 for "S"ubroutines and A0--A9 for "A"nywhere, "G" variables for graphics, that sort of thing.
So here's what I learned: When I was first exposed to a "real" language (at 18 or so), I was thrilled to have local variables, and "named subroutines" (as I thought of functions at the time). No longer could one part of a program smash another part (at least, not until I started using C). No longer would I have to keep a big table of variable names and line numbers to keep my program organized. No longer would I have to renumber everytime I inserted a line of code. No longer would I have to keep careful track which variable was unused at a given moment---if I couldn't use it, it wasn't in scope.
Oh, what a happy boy I was. I learned how to be pathalogically organized in my code. I learned, well, the BASICs. Nothing like a few years on a Schwinn Pixie to make a boy appreciate a new five speed---I learned the basics of riding, but now I could really fly. Structured programming (and later, OOP) rocked. And a few years ago when I had to do some assembly language programming for a project, the careful habits I picked up in BASIC served me well. So that's what I learned from BASIC: to appreciate the power and organizational abilities of a real language. I still hate C++, but that's another story.
No, but you'll be able to tell if somebody's sneaking into the refrigerator to steal your beer. 190dB in there---sheesh!
Where did you throw your first asteroid, Redmond or Lindon?
I would certainly ask them to explicitly spell out exactly what severance you will receive. Then negotiate. Start by asking how much it will cost them to (a) train your replacement their damned selves, or (b) have an untrained replacement running around messing things up and causing deadlines to slip. Double that amount and ask for it as your severance, on top of what they've already offered. The worst than can happen is you get to start your job search earlier than expected, but realistically that's not going to happen: They wouldn't have asked you to train your replacement unless they needed him trained.
Even propose this alternative: Let them lay you off, then bring you in as a consultant to train your replacement. You'll get paid better, and you'll have actual consulting for an actual client to put on your resume already.
Geocaching has been a blast so far (6 found, almost a thousand within 100 miles of me). My wife and the dog and I all pile in the car and find one down some trail somewhere and turn it into a hike with a purpose. Or we have an hour to kill, so we find an urban one near here. It's a global treasure hunt, and you get to call non-cachers "muggles."
Let me get this straight---you want it so that the government can arrest you and arrange things so that nobody knows it happened? And that your trial should be held in secret? Hoo, boy.
No, but it does come with a box of sledgehammers and a digital video recorder AOL confiscated from another spammer. It's a package deal, and you will be posting the mpeg, right? Right???
My father grew up about twenty miles from where Strom Thurmond was born, and I about twenty miles from there. But after I've been in deep conversation with non-Southerners, you would never know I was from the South unless you caught a particular turn of phrase. My father has a gentle lowland drawl (more Charleston than highcountry), and I once heard the century-old Thurmond speak, and to me he was damned near incomprehensible.
I should also point out that hydroelectric reservoirs are, by definition, artificial habitats, and any fish adapting to them are, also by definition, an introduced species.
My brother and collected Christmas trees one year to dump in a pond we occasionally fished in. We had brim out the yazoo that summer.
Clark's Hill Reservoir, near where I grew up, has lots of submerged trees in it. When water levels fluctuate in the summer, boats collide with treetops where there shouldn't be treetops. Hopefully, this sort of work could make for safer lakes in the process.
It's just that invading another country so we can take all their trees seems so damned silly. Canada's got lots of trees, but we like Canadians---they dress like we do.
After dropping out from college in 1990, I wound up with a computer job, then a better computer job, then an even better computer job, then, in 2000, a computer job with a startup that was so market-responsive that they realized that keeping programmers on staff was diverting money from their marketing budget, so they laid most of us off in mid-2001. By late 2001, nobody was hiring. In early 2002 I fled to Denver, took a job selling motorcycles, and got married. My spouse has convinced me that I should quit work and go to school full time; after all, you can't get hired anymore without a CS degree.
Now it looks like the job's not going to be there anymore, degree or no. And you know what? I don't want the job anymore. I can't see myself being sixty years old and still trying to wrangle code into submission in the face of a customer's false requirements and artificial deadline. Oh, I wouldn't mind settling down as a system or database admin, but if I never wrote another line of C++, I'd be happy.
So I want a job I can still do when I'm old, one where an analytical mind, good writing and oral presentation skills, and halfway-decent social skills are in demand. And since I'm sick and tired of typing IANAL on Slashdot, once I graduate, I'm taking my BS in CS and applying to law school. I'm already an anal-retentive twit; why not get paid for it?
Working with computers has taught me how to design and manipulate complex systems of rules. What is the law but a complex set of rules to be navigated? What is a contract but a specification document?
When you're in court, the scariest thing you can see at the opposition table is a calm old lawyer who looks like he's been sleeping well lately. I'm not twenty years old anymore, too stupid to value a good night's sleep. I'd rather be seventy and looking forward to half a day at the office than fifty and wondering how the hell I can get out of a career that burned me out two decades ago.
I hope for your sake you didn't bother reading this. I respect programming, I really do. I can remember a day when I got a big woody at the chance to code something. Not anymore. Tastes change; passions change. And sometimes the way you find meaning in your work, well, that's got to change, too.
I badly misparsed that: "Oprah Promises Voice-Over Web Browser". It's bad enough she tells my wife what books to read, now she's gonna give running commentary on my surfing habits?
In other words, debugging does go on, as does component testing, prior to final release. And BTW courts get to QA the hell out of lots and lots of laws to ensure full-system consistency.
Oh, nevermind.
You should try living with programmers sometime.
So the ten out of eleven machines belonging to friends and relatives that I've installed Ad-aware on over the last couple of months imply the existance of 190 well-maintained, popup-free, efficient machines that aren't presenting somebody's grandmother the chance to enlarge her penis? One-in-twenty says to me that nineteen out of twenty aren't nitwits. Hell, my commute shows that one out of maybe six should be allowed to use a car, let alone something requiring thought.
For suits, if it's serious, it's on paper. If it's not on paper, it's not serious. E-mail is for communicating quickly and efficiently, so editing it into perfection is a waste of time. Suits also know whom to impress and whom to rush to the point with. This e-mail being so sloppy is a sure sign that the sender and recipient have nothing to prove to one another; they're just exchanging information.
There's such a thing as good faith: if you claim I have infringed on your copyright by doing X (and you specify X), and I remove X and replace it with Y (which you have no claim to), then I have made a good faith effort to avoid violating your copyright. In the court's view, this is not an admission of guilt; it is a positive action.
Under no circumstances should SCO allow this to happen.
IANAL, which has that ever stopped me before.
Hmmm. A German company with tremendous holdings in the US, getting sued in US courts. I wonder if this was done as a taunt to the German courts' STFU order?
Perhaps this is why the suit was filed in Nevada.
As of noon EST, SCOX is down over ten percent.
No, but a big Red Hat sticker might stir things up a bit.
The most interesting part was voting on Georgia's next flag. We were given a choice between the current flag and the one adopted in 2001. The '01 flag's graphic looked like 1993's concept of "multimedia": it was blurred and obscured and the anti-aliasing was out of control. The '03 flag has trounced the '01 flag---mostly on STFU grounds, but I have to wonder how much the bad graphical representation turned off people who would otherwise have voted for the '01 flag.
It's the first time I've ever voted for a picture of a thing. I have to wonder when we'll start seeing pictures of candidates on the ballots, and the most photogenic candidate starts winning by a landslide, and lawsuits about unflattering ballot pictures replace hanging chad as the bullshit of the month.
This may be the one time that CowboyNeal is a seriouly viable option: If SCO filed suit against OSDN, or against ibiblio (Groklaw's host), they could tack on a gag order preventing either site from hosting further discussion of the suit. We'd be in disarray. Pissed as hell, but in disarray.