What is the difference between firing somebody and asking them to resign?
An employee who is fired doesn't get a severance package. An employee who resigns, does.
Asking executives to resign is essentially giving them the golden parachute. They make some bogus statement ("I want to spend time with my family" or "It's time to move on") and they get to keep their loot.
There isn't even agreement on whether earbuds decrease or increase your radiation exposure! It's possible that the wire could act like an antenna and channel the radiation to your head.
My guess is that a Bluetooth earbud could help, since it works through a low-power wireless link.
I like my Harmony Remote. It's easy to configure but also versatile. And it has real buttons, not like the fingerprint-smudged touch-screen that lacks tactile feedback (such as the Philips Pronto.)
FC2 included Tomcat and a bunch of other Apache-Jakarta packages, natively compiled with gcj. They have been omitted from FC3 -- perhaps moved into Fedora Extras?
Obviously, the professor waives the requirement for students who aren't eligible to vote. But to qualify for the exemption, wouldn't the student have to tell the professor that he is not an American citizen or is a convicted felon? And if the student got a bad grade later on, couldn't the student allege discrimination?
We bash the Gates Foundation for the same reason that Marge Simpson refused Tobacco-industry money for her children's group PPASSCCATAG. Sure, the money would have been for a good cause, but it's still tainted money because of its source.
Well, it's a bit of an exaggeration to compare Microsoft to the tobacco industry, as the latter is far more evil and has done much more harm. But for the Slashdot crowd, most of us feel that Gates earned his money unfairly in the first place by killing competition and stifling innovation -- issues that are dear to our hearts. I've heard it quoted that 1% of every dollar spent in the economy goes to Microsoft. And for that situation to have arisen, Gates screwed over many of our heroes.
Whether it's his intention or not, it feels like Gates is trying to buy redemption for his sins. I think the Slashdot crowd would be happier if he renounced his nefarious methods by breaking up Microsoft or by getting his company to stop acting like a bully.
Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
Are you kidding? With all the anti-Microsoft statements that McNealy spews, 90% of Sun employees hate Microsoft's guts, and 85% would quit if Microsoft bought Sun. Microsoft would get more expertise by buying SCO than by buying Sun!
To all of you DOSers out there -- in case it's not already obvious...
Denial of Service attacks earn you no respect, it demonstrates no skills.
It's like child molestation: it's so easy, anyone could do it. But why would you want to?
CeCILL: First French Free Software License
Produced by the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA
Paris, 5 July 2004
The CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA have just produced the first license that defines the principles of use and distribution of Free software in accordance with French law. This license called CeCILL (Ce: CEA (Atomic Energy Comission), C: CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), I: INRIA (National Institute of Computing and Automation Research), LL: Free Software) is meant to be adopted by French research organizations and more generally by any entity or individual that wishes to distribute its work under a Free software license, with complete legal assurance. This project, welcomed by the Agency for the Development of Electronic Administration (ADAE), enters into the debate on collaborative development of Free software components prescribed by the ADELE (Electronic Administration 2004-2007) government program.
Distributing Free software does not mean giving up all rights to the product: the author and the user each have rights, requirements, and responsibilities that are defined by the license attached to the software. Currently, the majority of French Free software is distributed under Anglo-Saxon licenses, notably the General Public License (GPL), as Free software was first developed in the United States. The project of the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA was to produce a license adapted to French law and compatible with the GPL, from which its principles are derived. Its two guiding criteria were:
The respect of the principles of Free software distribution. This consists of a computer program widely distributed, at no cost or sometimes for a fee, under the terms of a license that authorizes its use, copying, and modification, for its adaptation, improvement, and evolution, benefitting of its author and the whole community. The user's exercising of these freedoms is subject to certain requirements in order to preserve the Free character of the software during subsequent redistribution.
Its conformity to French law in two respects, civil liability on one hand and intellectual property on the other. Regarding civil liability law, access to the source code and the right to copy, modify, and redistribute coming from such a license is balanced by the fact that only a limited guarantee is provided to users by the author and his successors / beneficiaries. As for French intellectual property rights, the license offers better protection for the authors and copyright holders of the software.
This license is the first of a family based on the same principles as those of other frequently used licenses.
For the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA, which play a major role in French and European research, the development of Free software is essential. This license, which conforms to French law, is both a tool for the initial publication and distribution of research in a competitive global context and a tool of transfer to organizations and end users, who are becoming more and more interested in this economic model.
Software is said to be "Free" if its source code is available and freely modifiable and it can be redistributed to third parties, unlike proprietary software. Access to source code allows a community of developers, users, and even commercial partners to collaborate on the software. Thus, they share the high cost of software production and maintenance (customizations and services, for example). Due to this, Free software is constantly improved by the community of developers and users. This is what is frequently called "Free" or "Open Source" software, which is not necessarily zero-cost.
The Solaris hostname command is also different from the GNU version. On Solaris, hostname -f sets the hostname to -f instead of returning the fully qualified domain name. How useful!
In high school, a bunch of us nerds were going around helping teachers set up their computers. My friend got a request to help one teacher hook up an HP inkjet to a Mac. Easy -- take the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, connect the parallel cable, and it's done, right? Well, as soon as he plugged in the parallel cable, there was a final whirr from the computer, and it shut off. The motherboard was fried.
Looking more closely, he saw that the school had ordered a PC printer. And he had shoved the DB25 connector on the parallel cable into the only matching connector on the back of the Mac: the SCSI port! (In those days, all Macs had DB25 SCSI ports and mini-DIN parallel ports.)
Years after graduation, I happened to run into that friend again. This time, he was a salesman at CompUSA, and he was chatting with a customer who was thinking about buying a computer. The customer expressed concerns that he might not be able to figure out how to plug everything together. "It's foolproof," my salesman friend assured him, "there's only one way that all these connectors will fit together." I could have reminded him of the SCSI printer incident from a few years ago, but I was nice and didn't want to ruin his sale.
I did a search for cheesecake and got 0 entries. I tried a couple of minutes later and got loads. Evidently not very stable yet, but it is only in beta, so not too surprising. My guess would be incorrect use of a static/global variable.
No, no! What happened is that they have a Windows server farm, and the machine holding the results for "cheesecake" had crashed just as you were doing your first search. You just had to wait a few minutes for that machine to come back online.
It actually makes a lot of sense to use biometrics to automate immigration checks, because it's entirely a question of verifying the passengers' identity. Once the gonvernment has made the determination that a citizen/resident is eligible to enter the country, that person will be likewise eligible to enter every time henceforth (until the passport or residence permit expires).
On the other hand, in pre-boarding security checks, identity verification is not the question at hand. The objective there is screen passengers for weapons. A seemingly well behaved citizen could be weapon-free 99 times, then sneak a weapon through on his 100th flight. It might even be unintentional -- a terrorist would try to plant knives in the luggage of these trusted fast-track individuals.
The TSA's Registered Traveler program is analogous to automating the customs check instead of the immigration check. The fast-track passengers may be statistically more trustworthy, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. The TSA could get more or less the same results by adding express lanes requiring a minimum of 50000 miles on your frequent-flyer card.
A lot of us brits, even those taught the metric system at work, still talk in feet and inches. Our road signs (like US ones) are all in Miles, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Actually, Britain may be worse off than the US when it comes to converting from miles to km. British signs use "m" as an abbreviation for miles, which is hilarious because it looks like the abbrevation for metres. And the speed limit signs (European style -- black number in a red circle) aren't labeled with units, so you somehow have to know that the same sign means means miles per hour in Britain and km per hour on the continent.
At least in the states, we have the sense to use "mi" as the abbreviation for miles. And the speed limit signs don't look anything like the European ones.
Here in the UK you can't put a pump on automatic fill. You need to hold the trigger whilst all the time.
Interestingly, the situation in California is just the opposite.
California's Health and Safety Code Sec 41960.6requires that all gasoline nozzles be equipped with a hold-open latch. The law was added 12 years ago so that motorists wouldn't have to stand there and breathe all the fumes while refueling.
Which option do you think people would rather take -- a) turn off the cell phone, stand there squeezing the nozzle for minutes, turn cell phone back on, OR b) start the pump, walk away (far enough so that the cell phone is not a danger), and come back to a filled tank?
In California, the risk of igniting vapors is mitigated by the fact that the pumps are also required to have vapor-recovery systems to reduce air pollution. Whenever you pump gasoline into the tank, an equal volume of air (containing fumes) has to be displaced. With vapor recovery systems, the gas station captures those fumes instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. So, what is good for the environment is also good for safety.
Yes, but if you consider that he says in his profile that he is a "26 year old Indian programmer and technical columnist operating out of Mumbai", his story about making a special order with Staples doesn't seem so plausible anymore.
To manage your BibTeX database, use Pybliographer. It has a simple GUI, and it even integrates well with LyX. If both applications are running, just hit the Cite button in Pybliographer, and the cross-reference is inserted into your LyX document!
My only criticism of Pybliographer is that it can be a little cumbersome to install, depending on what distro you are running, because it requires Python and a particular version of the GNU Recode library.
My wife, who isn't much of a computer expert, wanted to write her thesis in LaTeX because she thinks the results look good and because she heard horror stories about MS Word eating large documents. She had no prior knowledge of LaTeX, and wouldn't be interested in learning it. I set her up with LyX and Pybliographer, and she was quite happy with the whole thing. For the rare occasions requiring layout tweaking, we used Kopka & Daly's A Guide to LaTeX 2e as a reference.
There's an error in your tutorial. In the "Dynamic Types" section, the main.m has misleading comments. The three [sq isKindOfClass:...] checks all return YES, but the code comments claim that they are true, false, and false.
Thanks for the overview; I enjoyed it. I don't understand how the autorelease pools work, though. You create and destroy the pool like this:
NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; // Allocate some stuff... NSString *str2 = [NSString stringWithString: @"string managed by the pool"]; [pool release];
But you never explicitly say that the objects you create belong to the pool. My question is, how does pool know that it owns str2? Or, how does str2 know that it belongs to pool and not to some other autorelease pool that might exist?
If the customs officer has a sharp eye, he would notice that the newish looking laptop has a US keyboard rather than the UK layout. That would be enough to raise suspicions. And customs inspectors for countries with high tax rates tend to keep a close eye on their residents on the way home.
Slashdot Mirror
An employee who is fired doesn't get a severance package. An employee who resigns, does.
Asking executives to resign is essentially giving them the golden parachute. They make some bogus statement ("I want to spend time with my family" or "It's time to move on") and they get to keep their loot.
There isn't even agreement on whether earbuds decrease or increase your radiation exposure! It's possible that the wire could act like an antenna and channel the radiation to your head.
My guess is that a Bluetooth earbud could help, since it works through a low-power wireless link.
Yes, it should be possible to set up the Harmony Remote to handle your requirements.
I like my Harmony Remote. It's easy to configure but also versatile. And it has real buttons, not like the fingerprint-smudged touch-screen that lacks tactile feedback (such as the Philips Pronto.)
FC2 included Tomcat and a bunch of other Apache-Jakarta packages, natively compiled with gcj. They have been omitted from FC3 -- perhaps moved into Fedora Extras?
Obviously, the professor waives the requirement for students who aren't eligible to vote. But to qualify for the exemption, wouldn't the student have to tell the professor that he is not an American citizen or is a convicted felon? And if the student got a bad grade later on, couldn't the student allege discrimination?
We bash the Gates Foundation for the same reason that Marge Simpson refused Tobacco-industry money for her children's group PPASSCCATAG. Sure, the money would have been for a good cause, but it's still tainted money because of its source.
Well, it's a bit of an exaggeration to compare Microsoft to the tobacco industry, as the latter is far more evil and has done much more harm. But for the Slashdot crowd, most of us feel that Gates earned his money unfairly in the first place by killing competition and stifling innovation -- issues that are dear to our hearts. I've heard it quoted that 1% of every dollar spent in the economy goes to Microsoft. And for that situation to have arisen, Gates screwed over many of our heroes.
Whether it's his intention or not, it feels like Gates is trying to buy redemption for his sins. I think the Slashdot crowd would be happier if he renounced his nefarious methods by breaking up Microsoft or by getting his company to stop acting like a bully.
Are you kidding? With all the anti-Microsoft statements that McNealy spews, 90% of Sun employees hate Microsoft's guts, and 85% would quit if Microsoft bought Sun. Microsoft would get more expertise by buying SCO than by buying Sun!
To all of you DOSers out there -- in case it's not already obvious... Denial of Service attacks earn you no respect, it demonstrates no skills. It's like child molestation: it's so easy, anyone could do it. But why would you want to?
CeCILL: First French Free Software License
Produced by the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA
Paris, 5 July 2004
The CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA have just produced the first license that defines the principles of use and distribution of Free software in accordance with French law. This license called CeCILL (Ce: CEA (Atomic Energy Comission), C: CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), I: INRIA (National Institute of Computing and Automation Research), LL: Free Software) is meant to be adopted by French research organizations and more generally by any entity or individual that wishes to distribute its work under a Free software license, with complete legal assurance. This project, welcomed by the Agency for the Development of Electronic Administration (ADAE), enters into the debate on collaborative development of Free software components prescribed by the ADELE (Electronic Administration 2004-2007) government program.
Distributing Free software does not mean giving up all rights to the product: the author and the user each have rights, requirements, and responsibilities that are defined by the license attached to the software. Currently, the majority of French Free software is distributed under Anglo-Saxon licenses, notably the General Public License (GPL), as Free software was first developed in the United States. The project of the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA was to produce a license adapted to French law and compatible with the GPL, from which its principles are derived. Its two guiding criteria were:
This license is the first of a family based on the same principles as those of other frequently used licenses.
For the CEA, the CNRS, and the INRIA, which play a major role in French and European research, the development of Free software is essential. This license, which conforms to French law, is both a tool for the initial publication and distribution of research in a competitive global context and a tool of transfer to organizations and end users, who are becoming more and more interested in this economic model.
As far as I can tell, the manual is real, but the is_computer_on_fire() function has to be a joke.
The Solaris hostname command is also different from the GNU version. On Solaris, hostname -f sets the hostname to -f instead of returning the fully qualified domain name. How useful!
If you had been using a real operating system, it would have been able to detect the fact that your computer was on fire.
In high school, a bunch of us nerds were going around helping teachers set up their computers. My friend got a request to help one teacher hook up an HP inkjet to a Mac. Easy -- take the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, connect the parallel cable, and it's done, right? Well, as soon as he plugged in the parallel cable, there was a final whirr from the computer, and it shut off. The motherboard was fried.
Looking more closely, he saw that the school had ordered a PC printer. And he had shoved the DB25 connector on the parallel cable into the only matching connector on the back of the Mac: the SCSI port! (In those days, all Macs had DB25 SCSI ports and mini-DIN parallel ports.)
Years after graduation, I happened to run into that friend again. This time, he was a salesman at CompUSA, and he was chatting with a customer who was thinking about buying a computer. The customer expressed concerns that he might not be able to figure out how to plug everything together. "It's foolproof," my salesman friend assured him, "there's only one way that all these connectors will fit together." I could have reminded him of the SCSI printer incident from a few years ago, but I was nice and didn't want to ruin his sale.
No, no! What happened is that they have a Windows server farm, and the machine holding the results for "cheesecake" had crashed just as you were doing your first search. You just had to wait a few minutes for that machine to come back online.
You need to work on your debugging skills. =P
It actually makes a lot of sense to use biometrics to automate immigration checks, because it's entirely a question of verifying the passengers' identity. Once the gonvernment has made the determination that a citizen/resident is eligible to enter the country, that person will be likewise eligible to enter every time henceforth (until the passport or residence permit expires).
On the other hand, in pre-boarding security checks, identity verification is not the question at hand. The objective there is screen passengers for weapons. A seemingly well behaved citizen could be weapon-free 99 times, then sneak a weapon through on his 100th flight. It might even be unintentional -- a terrorist would try to plant knives in the luggage of these trusted fast-track individuals.
The TSA's Registered Traveler program is analogous to automating the customs check instead of the immigration check. The fast-track passengers may be statistically more trustworthy, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. The TSA could get more or less the same results by adding express lanes requiring a minimum of 50000 miles on your frequent-flyer card.
Actually, Britain may be worse off than the US when it comes to converting from miles to km. British signs use "m" as an abbreviation for miles, which is hilarious because it looks like the abbrevation for metres. And the speed limit signs (European style -- black number in a red circle) aren't labeled with units, so you somehow have to know that the same sign means means miles per hour in Britain and km per hour on the continent.
At least in the states, we have the sense to use "mi" as the abbreviation for miles. And the speed limit signs don't look anything like the European ones.
What's with the backslash in GNU\Linux? You look suspicious to me, Microsoft boy.
Interestingly, the situation in California is just the opposite. California's Health and Safety Code Sec 41960.6 requires that all gasoline nozzles be equipped with a hold-open latch. The law was added 12 years ago so that motorists wouldn't have to stand there and breathe all the fumes while refueling.
Which option do you think people would rather take -- a) turn off the cell phone, stand there squeezing the nozzle for minutes, turn cell phone back on, OR b) start the pump, walk away (far enough so that the cell phone is not a danger), and come back to a filled tank?
In California, the risk of igniting vapors is mitigated by the fact that the pumps are also required to have vapor-recovery systems to reduce air pollution. Whenever you pump gasoline into the tank, an equal volume of air (containing fumes) has to be displaced. With vapor recovery systems, the gas station captures those fumes instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. So, what is good for the environment is also good for safety.
Yes, but if you consider that he says in his profile that he is a "26 year old Indian programmer and technical columnist operating out of Mumbai", his story about making a special order with Staples doesn't seem so plausible anymore.
To manage your BibTeX database, use Pybliographer. It has a simple GUI, and it even integrates well with LyX. If both applications are running, just hit the Cite button in Pybliographer, and the cross-reference is inserted into your LyX document!
My only criticism of Pybliographer is that it can be a little cumbersome to install, depending on what distro you are running, because it requires Python and a particular version of the GNU Recode library.
My wife, who isn't much of a computer expert, wanted to write her thesis in LaTeX because she thinks the results look good and because she heard horror stories about MS Word eating large documents. She had no prior knowledge of LaTeX, and wouldn't be interested in learning it. I set her up with LyX and Pybliographer, and she was quite happy with the whole thing. For the rare occasions requiring layout tweaking, we used Kopka & Daly's A Guide to LaTeX 2e as a reference.
You have obviously never run any Java applications. Here's how to use up the first 128 MB:
}There's an error in your tutorial. In the "Dynamic Types" section, the main.m has misleading comments. The three [sq isKindOfClass: ...] checks all return YES, but the code comments claim that they are true, false, and false.
Thanks for the overview; I enjoyed it. I don't understand how the autorelease pools work, though. You create and destroy the pool like this:
But you never explicitly say that the objects you create belong to the pool. My question is, how does pool know that it owns str2? Or, how does str2 know that it belongs to pool and not to some other autorelease pool that might exist?If the customs officer has a sharp eye, he would notice that the newish looking laptop has a US keyboard rather than the UK layout. That would be enough to raise suspicions. And customs inspectors for countries with high tax rates tend to keep a close eye on their residents on the way home.
Who wants to write for Java or .NET when you could do it in .SEX instead?